Why just call for biomedical research? It's interesting the Fluge's trial showed no benefit for the biomedical treatment being tested, yet resulted in 38% long term remission.

The first trial on Rituximab was a small study using the Fukuda criteria, which are broader than what we consider ME today. The larger study didn't show such significant remission rates in the placebo group afaik, so it's hard to say what that first study means... A fluke?

Response rate was 35.1% in the placebo controlled trial, which was similar to the open-label trial, and had a similar definition (> 4.5 fatigue score). Interestingly, though, the placebo trial showed no improvement in fatigue over the trial, so were 35% classed as responders at baseline? There was

an improvement in fatigue in the open-label trial.

Unfortunately I didn't have access to the full article for the 2019 one so I was only going by the abstract of that one. What you point out does sound strange..

It's on scihub.