Dangerous and inaccurate

By Alex P. Vidal

“God as my witness, may He strike me down if this allegation is true.”

—Paul Crouch

I HAVE been besieged by queries from friends, mostly based in the Philippines, about the viral conspiracy video recently removed by the Youtube and Facebook because of inaccuracies and apparent lack of credible material and testimonial support.

I told them not to easily believe it hook, line, and sinker and they should make their own independent research and gather more facts about the serious allegations made by the controversial virologist and the people around her, including their motives now that the world is being bombarded by #COVID-19.

Of all the articles written in response to the shocking “revelation” of the discredited lady virologist linking the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates to the spread of virus, the one in Science was the more telling, direct to the point, and enlightening.

The article, “Fact-checking Judy Mikovits, the controversial virologist attacking Anthony Fauci in a viral conspiracy video,” was written by

Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen on May. 8, 2020.

Dr. Judy Mikovits, the virologist who was once jailed for a felony offense, insisted in the video that has exploded on social media in the past few days, the new coronavirus was “being wrongly blamed for many deaths”

Mikovits, 62, known for her anti-vaccination activism made head-scratching assertions about the virus—for instance, that it is “activated” by face masks.

She claimed that Fauci, also a prominent member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, was responsible for the deaths of millions during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

 

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Mikovits was part of the team that discovered HIV, revolutionized HIV treatment, and was jailed without charges for her scientific positions, the video claimed.

According to Science’s fact-checked of the video, “None of these claims are true.”

The video is reportedly an excerpt from a forthcoming movie Plandemic, which promises to “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system.” YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms have taken down the video because of inaccuracies. It keeps resurfacing, including on the Plandemic website, which, in “an effort to bypass the gatekeepers of free speech,” invites people to download the video and repost it.

Science said Mikovits started her career as a lab technician at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1988. She became a scientist and obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from George Washington University in 1991.

By 2009, she was research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), a private research center in Reno, Nevada, but she remained largely unknown to the scientific community. That year, however, she co-authored a paper in Science that suggested an obscure agent named xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) caused chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

“The cause of CFS, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis, had long remained elusive, and the disease had been neglected by science. The study created hope that CFS might become treatable with antivirals. Some patients even began to take antiretroviral drugs used by HIV-infected people. But the paper also created worries that XMRV might spread via the blood supply,” reported Science.

Science added: “Other researchers soon questioned the findings, and over the next 2 years, the paper’s claims fell apart. Researchers showed that XMRV was created accidentally in the lab during mouse experiments; it may never have infected any humans. The authors first retracted two figures and a table from the paper in October 2011.

 

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Around the same time, a study by several labs, including WPI itself, showed the findings couldn’t be replicated.”

Two months later, the entire Science paper was retracted. Mikovits refused to sign the retraction notice, but she took part in another major replication effort.

That $2.3 million study, led by Ian Lipkin of Columbia University and funded by the National Institutes of Health, was “the definitive answer,” Mikovits said at a September 2012 press conference where the results were announced. The rigorous study looked for XMRV in blinded blood samples from nearly 300 people, half of whom had the disease, and none had the virus. “There is no evidence that XMRV is a human pathogen,” Mikovits conceded.

Science’s news department, which works independently from its editorial side, followed the saga closely and published a detailed reconstruction of the fiasco in September 2011. (The story won a Communications Award from the American Society for Microbiology.)

Around the same time, Mikovits had an explosive breakup with WPI. The institute filed suit against her in November 2011 for allegedly removing laboratory notebooks and keeping other proprietary information on her laptop, on flash drives, and in a personal email account.

She was arrested in California on felony charges that she was a fugitive from justice and jailed for several days. Prosecutors in Washoe county, Nevada, eventually dropped criminal charges against her in June 2012.

Science said Mikovits has not published anything in the scientific literature since 2012. But she soon began to promote the XMRV hypothesis again, and attack the Lipkin study that she agreed had put the issue to rest.

She has weighed in on the autism debate with controversial theories about causes and treatments. Her discredited work and her legal travails have made her a martyr in the eyes of some.

Now comes a new book she co-authored, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science—billed as “a behind the scenes look at the issues and egos which will determine the future health of humanity”—and the viral video, which is an extended interview with Mikovits.

When Science asked Mikovits for an interview, she reportedly responded by sending an empty email with, as attachments, a copy of her new book and a PowerPoint of a 2019 presentation titled “Persecution and Coverup.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)