PLAGUE

Few people had heard of Dr Judy Mikovits six months ago, though she is no stranger to scientific controversy, as this revealing book explains in sometimes harrowing detail. Her various interviews have been viewed by millions of people but many have been taken down on the basis that they contain 'misinformation', which in this context means that they question the mainstream narrative about causes of and potential treatments for Covid-19. In the meantime, so-called facts checkers work to reinforce the perception that Mikovits' work has been thoroughly discredited by follow-up studies. As the full version of 'Plandemic' documents, the emergence of the prevailing medical industrial complex can be dated back to the Flexner Report commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. This resulted in a radical reorganisation of US medical education and the exclusion of natural and nonpharmaceutical methods from the curriculum. 100 years on, the pharmaceutical industry politically and economically dominates every aspect of medicine – government institutions and committees, political lobbying, research, publications and journals, conference sponsorship, education, advertising, media and even Wikipedia, with its systematic denigration of other approaches to health as pseudoscience. Threats to its economic and political influence are not taken lightly, and Mikovits is not the only person to feel the heat – Professor Peter Gotzsche, whose books I have reviewed in these pages, was sacked from the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration in 2018 after publishing a critical study on the HPV vaccine.

Plague has been followed up by a new book entitled Plague of Corruption, which I have not yet had time to read. It took some weeks to arrive as the stock had sold out due to the author's recent high profile. My impression from interviews I have watched is that Mikovits is a very articulate scientist of real ethical integrity interested in discovering the truth, whatever its implications. The book shows how it was this very quality of honesty and integrity and that landed her in so much scientific, political, legal and economic trouble. It is written in narrative form, although the interspersing of the story with her time in jail is somewhat confusing. Her early work was on HIV-AIDS, where her data suggested that antiretroviral therapies should be employed, contrary to the then received opinion.

Mikovits' scientific quest was to get to the bottom of CFS/ME with a view to relieving the suffering that afflicts around 20 million people worldwide, many of whom she met personally at conferences. Her major discovery was that 67% of these patients and 4% of healthy controls were infected with the XMRV mouse retrovirus, an association also found in cases of autism and prostate cancer. As she says in the introduction, 'my real crime was saying that if this retrovirus was causing CFS/ME in adults, it might well be causing autism in children' in a similar way to children of HIV-infected mothers. Her theory is a nuanced one: that retroviruses hide out in the B and T cells of the immune system, which are the very cells that vaccinations are designed to stimulate. Hence the vaccination may unwittingly act as a signal that activates the dormant XMRV retrovirus in susceptible children (in one study, 14 of 17 autistic children were positive for XMRV – p. 271). So the XMRV is the underlying cause, and the vaccination a selective activator. The public health implications are explosive as a follow-up to the positive 4% of controls (this represents millions of people) found that blood supplies were also contaminated with these retroviruses – the authorities then spent tens of millions of dollars secretly decontaminating these with the Cerus Intercept system.

In all these cases of XMRV retroviruses present in CFS/ME, blood supplies and children with autism (now 1 in 50), the financial implications in terms of potential compensation are off the chart, hence the expediency and even necessity to overturn these findings (the US granted immunity against damage from vaccinations in 1986, and cases amounting to billions of dollars in compensation have been settled in the Vaccine Court with minimal publicity). Fascinatingly, the story goes back to 1934 and the development of the polio vaccine, where the virus was passaged multiple times through mice, and in the trials, 198 nurses and physicians who had taken the vaccine were struck down by a condition that we would now identify as CFS/ME. The issue concerns vaccines developed by the passage of human virus through animal tissues, where it might pick up a virus from a mouse that turned out to be highly toxic to humans and produce a disproportionate cytokine storm (pp. 63 ff). There is also circumstantial evidence (p. 77) that these 200 staff members received an out of court settlement with no blame assigned.

Mikovits' paper was published in Science in October 2009, but in July, the National Cancer Institute had convened an invitation-only meeting to discuss the implications of the findings for public health. It was noted that 65 of the 109 new human disease-causing pathogens were animal viruses, and at the time (this would change later) leading specialists like Dr John Coffin concluded that the XMRV results could not be explained by lab contamination. The confidential summary reveals the sensitivity of linking XMRV with CFS and the need to manage the process carefully. It seems that Coffin turned against her when she began to talk about the politically and economically charged question of autism in relation to vaccination: 'when you give a vaccine you send your B and T cells into overdrive' but this can break the existing delicate balance between the immune response and the virus, allowing it to replicate and create an immune deficiency (p. 173).

Various follow-up studies were performed, but these CDC moved the goalposts by switching to more stringent PCR conditions and only accepting a particular sequence of XMRV as infectious – this later turned out to be a laboratory recombination with no natural history of infection (p. 235). Any sequence variation was then deemed to be contamination, hence the study design was not a replication, and, not surprisingly, led to negative results even though another published paper by Lo and Alter confirmed Mikovits' findings. In addition, a study proposed by Dr Ian Lipkin would not include any of her original patients. Ironically, new studies from 2013, also commented on by Lipkin, found retroviruses in 85% of the sample pools but without saying whether or not this might be clinically significant.

Meanwhile, Mikovits was research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute, largely funded by attorney Harvey Whittemore. In September 2011, she gave her view that a lucrative blood test developed by the Institute could no longer be recommended, and two days later she was fired and arrested without a proper charge and all her notebooks removed, although it seems that they were later planted in her house in order to frame her in terms of the a fraudulent contract stating that these belonged to the laboratory, and where her signature had been appended from another document (p. 160). That same week, her photo appeared in Science as an indication of her disgrace. She then had to appear in court, where the judge issued a default judgement not allowing her to present a defence. Moreover, Whittemore had sued her for $15 million, so she had to declare bankruptcy. Later, it turned out that the same judge had received money from Whittemore, and in 2014 Whittemore himself was indicted and imprisoned on multiple cases of fraud. Meanwhile, her scientific reputation had been destroyed while other associates continued to receive Federal grants.

In November 2011, Mikovits received an email from Ian Lipkin saying that she would be the principal investigator of a new study in his lab, but just two days later she was condemned in unofficial internal review of the XMRV affair, and received an email from none other than Dr Anthony Fauci that she would be arrested if she set foot in the NIH. Of course, this meant that the subsequent study could not be a full replication, and Mikovits came under pressure to retract her original paper entirely (it did contain data provided by Andrew Silverman subsequently found to be unreliable) and put her name to the new study that ostensibly falsified her findings but which was not a proper replication – she refused to do this.

This shocking story is one of scientific, political, economic and legal travesty and injustice where an ethical scientist interested in the truth regardless of its economic consequences has her reputation destroyed, and is falsely imprisoned on a trumped-up charge in front of a corrupt judge by an attorney subsequently convicted for fraud. As Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier remarks on the cover of the new book: 'this rampant corruption hides from the public scientific truths which might go against corporate economic interests.' The very integrity of the scientific process is at stake, as we can also see in the current crisis with respect the handling of evidence for the clinical efficacy of HCQ, so truly impartial and independent science has never been more important.