Originally published on: May 30th 2020
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- The video, Plandemic, with Judy Mikovits, PhD, received over 8 million views before all major social media and video websites censored her and this video.
- Although there were some errors of fact in the video that various fact-checking websites have confirmed, no other scientist or individual has been censored so completely without being given an opportunity to respond to claims against her assertions.Â
- One of the 50 studies that Dr. Mikovits conducted suggested that vaccines were contaminated with a retrovirus from mouse brains. This study was published in Science magazine, but then retracted due to a replication study that did not confirm the initial results.
- Strong evidence from Stanford professor John Ioannidis, MD, analyzed the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three of the most respected medical journals in America. He found that replication studies discovered that 41% of these studies had either been directly contradicted, or their benefits of the treatment were extremely minimal rather than significant.Â
- Dr. Ioannidis’ several reviews of medical research have led him to conclude that “most medical research findings are false.”
- Conventional medical research and vaccine safety studies are not held to the same high level of scientific assessment that Dr. Mikovits’ work has been evaluated.Â
“The only means to fight the plague is honesty.” Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
In the past couple of weeks, a 26-minute video, called “Plandemic,” has seemingly become more viral than the pandemic itself. The video is primarily an interview with Judy Mikovits, PhD and her controversial ideas about the modern-day pandemic, its sources, and effective ways to prevent and treat it. There were over 8 million views of this video in just a couple of weeks, and it would be a lot more but YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and Google chose to censor it completely (its transcript is here and a source of the video is here).
Ultimately, as smart and as accomplished Dr. Mikovits may be, there are a number of facts and figures she gives in this short video that clearly are not accurate, and yet, one of the real problems with censorship is that literally no mainstream media has interviewed Dr. Mikovits to enable her to admit to these errors or to respond to them. The fact that the leading social media websites, search engines, and mainstream media sources have fully censored her, one must wonder if she is stepping on some big and vulnerable economic interests.
If these same media outlets were going to censor every physician, scientist, politician, or corporate leader for providing selective misinformation, the media and the internet might be a lot quieter. But this isn’t happening. What is it about Dr. Mikovits’ ideas that are so offensive beyond reasonable discourse?
The fact is that Mikovits’ new book, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promised of Science (co-authored with attorney Kent Heckenlively), is now #5 on the New York Times list of best-sellers (for the week ending May 30, 2020), which suggests that she and her message has struck a nerve, a deep nerve.
The Foreword to this book was written by environmental and health lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who places Mikovits in the pantheon of scientific rebels whose discoveries were extremely threatening to orthodox science as well as to institutional or corporate giants of the day. Ultimately proven to be right, these rebels include Galileo (who suggested that the Earth was not in the center of the solar system), Ignaz Semmelweis (who held the radical notion that antiseptic solutions should be used prior to surgery), Herbert Needleman (who claimed that lead in gasoline and paint was poisoning people), and Dr. Bernice Eddy (who discovered that a cancer-causing monkey virus, SV40, had contaminated 98 million Salk polio vaccines).Â
These whistleblowing scientists were finally vindicated (sometimes after their deaths), but people today seem to forget that each of them experienced profound attacks against their professional careers. Their work was censored, their mental health questioned, their grants withdrawn or laboratories destroyed, and even spent time in prison. The women in this group were called “hysterical” or were simply demeaned as “spinsters.”
Mikovits is an esteemed but presently discredited scientist who had over 50 other studies in prestigious scientific journals. In 2009 she published an article in the esteemed journal, Science, claiming that vaccines may be contaminated with a retrovirus from mouse brains and may be a cofactor or cause to an increasingly common disease known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Several other scientists later sought to replicate this work but were not able to do so. The journal Science initially “partially retracted” the study in September, 2011, and then completely retracted in December, 2011.
From 2006 to 2011 Mikovits was the head of research of a respected laboratory associated with the University of Nevada, but she was fired in September, 2011, and later arrested for stealing some files and a computer from the laboratory. Ultimately, she was released within five days and was not charged with any crime.
Big Pharma has a history of literally going ballistic whenever scientists claim that there may be potential problems or dangers arising from vaccines. The full force of the medical and legal establishment came down hard on Dr. Mikovits. As a result of this new documentary, the scientific and mainstream media have been virtually venomous in their attacks on her. Several websites list point-by-point errors of fact from the documentary Plandemic (here, here, here, and here).
To date, Dr. Mikovits has not responded to the many assertions that show these errors of fact in her statements in Plandemic, and ultimately, she will need to do so if she is expected to attain the credibility to which she aspires.
Of special concern is the fact that Dr. Mikovits participated in an effort to replicate her initial research on the possibility of contamination of vaccine with a retrovirus. After this study, she regretfully acknowledged that the retrovirus she thought was involved in chronic fatigue syndrome wasn’t there, and yet, today, she insists it or some other yet to be discovered retrovirus may be there now. Although she has yet to publish any paper since 2012 to confirm this assertion, her new book claims that her mentor, the highly prestigious scientist Frank Ruscetti, reisolated the mouse retrovirus and obtained its full sequencing (page 208). Although Ruscetti was instructed by his higher-ups to destroy all data and evidence of the retrovirus, he didn’t do so claiming that it is against federal law to do so. This body of evidence was given to the FBI and kept by Mikovits and Ruscetti.Â
It should also be noted that each of the leading critiques of her and her work took creative liberties in trying to make her seem more unhinged, more fringe, and more extreme than she is. For instance, when Mikovits said that people benefit from exposure to “sequences in the soil, in the sand,” Science magazine chose to play dumb and ask what she means by “sequences” when, in fact, it is widely known that exposure to bacterial sequences in soil provide great immune benefits. Science magazine also over-simplified her perspective claiming that there is no evidence that exposure to dirt will “heal Covid-19,” but she never made that assertion, only that such exposure would benefit the immune system. The New York Times and Washington Post both sought to associate her inappropriately and inaccurately with right-wing extremists or conspiracy theorists even though interest in her ideas is way beyond such fringe groups.
Virtually every form of media who have reported on Dr. Mikovits and her new book has dubbed her “anti-vaccine,” even though she strongly asserts that she isn’t and claims that her work in immunotherapy is a type of vaccine. It should be noted that just because she or anyone is concerned about vaccine safety does not make that person anti-vaccine. Typically, the term, “anti-vaxxer,” has become an extremely derogatory term today, even though it is often used inappropriately and inaccurately. Still, this accusation is a clever way to demean a person without providing a substantive and accurate critique.
Just one example of the extreme level of attacks on Dr. Mikovits stems from her questioning the value of masks in certain circumstances in preventing spread of this viral disease and she expressed concern that the use of masks may instead increase the spread of the virus, even though the World Health Organization has also made such statements without a similar degree of pushback and attack.
Whether one agrees with Dr. Mikovits or not and whether one thinks she is a heretic or a hero, we have to assume that there is something extremely fishy going on with the extreme level of censorship she and her ideas are experiencing. Despite having a book near the top of the New York Times bestseller list, she has not been interviewed by a single major media in the print, radio, TV, or internet medias, and every article written about her to date has not even sought to get her response to any of the charges For the record, no story in recent history has so obviously attacked a serious scientist and have so carefully and completely avoided giving this scientist a voice.
It is almost as though science was a religion and that we should not even hear about other points of view. One would think that allowing discussion on what mainstream science “knows” to be false would be an effective way to combat this ignorance. Instead, one must wonder if this censorship is avoiding dialog about critical topics.
Although the video Plandemic exaggerates Dr. Mikovits’ status as a scientist by saying she is “one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation,” she does have elite scientific pedigree. Her science mentor and partner in research for several decades has been Frank Ruscetti, PhD, who was the scientist to have first discovered retroviruses. Together, they published 30 studies in major scientific journals. Mikovits was even the Director of a laboratory at the National Cancer Institute from 1999 to 2001.Â
Prior to her getting her PhD at the George Washington University in molecular biology, she worked as a lab tech at Upjohn where her research uncovered the fact that the company’s formula for Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) could cause precancerous changes in human cell cultures. Ultimately, her work led Canada and all of Europe to prohibit this product. If we want to have Dr. Judy Mikovits be held to high levels of accuracy, truth, and science, then we also must expect this from modern medical science and to vaccine science, especially as they relate to this pandemic.
Ultimately, modern medicine needs to look into a mirror itself to evaluate how scientific and “scientifically proven” modern medicine actually is today. If a study is “retracted” from a major scientific journal because other researchers have not been able to verify its accuracy, then, large, even extremely large numbers of studies published in medical journals over the past several decades also should be retracted.
Are retractions happening when research is not replicated that are described below, and if not, why not? Are those scientists whose studies are retracted vilified, jailed, censored by the media, and made scientist non grata for having one study out of 50 found to be incorrect? Are there certain economic interests from Big Pharma at play that are fostering such extreme vilification, while protecting others who are not so threatening?Â
Almost Half of the BEST Studies in Medicine Can’t Be Replicated
The elephant in the room here is that, according to the most respected reviewers of clinical research, we cannot and should not trust the vast majority of medical research today. Although this is indeed a very bold assertion, this analysis comes from John Ioannidis, MD, an esteemed Stanford professor of medicine who is widely considered one of the best and most respected evaluators of clinical research in the world.Â
In 2005 Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that analyzed the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals. Forty-five of these studies reported positive results, suggesting that the intervention being tested was effective. However, the data Ioannidis found was disturbing: of the 34 claims that had been subject to replication, 41% had either been directly contradicted, or their benefits of the treatment were extremely minimal rather than significant …and this review only analyzed the most cited clinical trials in modern medicine. Imagine if this analysis reviewed the average medical study.
A compelling summary of the growing body of evidence that has questioned the legitimacy of modern medicine science is an article I wrote for the HuffingtonPost in June 2010, entitled “Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Research.” Then, The Atlantic borrowed from this article and published a magnificent cover story entitled, “Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Science” (November 2010).
In another article by Ioannidis, his evidence was so strong that the very name of the article was “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” In this article, Ioannidis makes a remarkably strong assertion: “It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.”Â
Ioannidis also asserted in this article: “The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true.”
Updating this work in 2016, Ioannidis doubled down, writing an article entitled, “Why Most Clinical Research Is Not Useful.”
So, let’s not simply question the accuracy of research by Dr. Judy Mikovits. Let’s also question ALL medical research today because, despite the massive propaganda by Big Pharma and by Big Media (whose most common advertisers are Big Pharma), there is actually a much smaller body of good scientific evidence showing efficacy and reasonable amounts of safety than people realize.
And predictably, doctors today over-emphasize the effectiveness of drugs and under-emphasize the real dangers of them, not enabling patients to make important health decisions.
Sadly and strangely, we never learned from the 1918 influenza epidemic where 50 million people died. A well-established but little known fact is that millions of people with the 1918 flu were prescribed 25 aspirin tablets a day because this was the recommendation of the AMA and the Surgeon General of that era. It is no wonder that this flu had the unique symptom syndrome of bleeding in the lungs, a condition that aspirin is uniquely known to cause. The AMA has never apologized for this medical malpractice, the media has conveniently ignored it, and even the New England Journal of Medicine‘s 100-year review on this pandemic totally ignored this clear explanation for a huge number of deaths, not just children and the elderly but in seemingly healthy middle-aged people.
Although doctors are not prescribing aspirin often these days to suppress fevers in Covid patients, one of the untold scandals of the Covid-19 pandemic is that many physicians and their patients are using too liberal doses of other fever suppressants, ibuprofen and acetaminophen. It is well-established in medicine that fever is one of the vital components of the body’s immune system in its efforts to fight viral infection. Even America’s leading proponent of vaccine, Paul Offit, MD of the University of Pennsylvania, insists that we should let fevers run their course or pay dire consequences.
If the media is censoring Dr. Mikovits due to “dangerous” information during a pandemic, how or why is it not censoring doctors who are over-prescribing fever-suppressing drugs, antibiotics, immunosuppressive drugs or innumerable other common medical practices that have not been proven to be effective for Covid patients and, in fact, may be highly dangerous to them.
It is interesting that Judy Mikovits’ research was retracted by the journal in which it was published, but such retractions primarily seem to occur when they question something that threatens Big Pharma in a significant way…while none of the trials that Ioannidis noted as disproven were ever retracted or their authors censored.Â
The Covid-19 Vaccine: A False Hope?
Before the international medical community and the general public puts all of its hope into a vaccine against Covid-19, perhaps we need to hear some words of warning that two of America’s leading proponents of vaccines, Paul Offit, MD and Peter Hotez, MD, have for the type of virus that Covid-19 is.Â
Offit, Hotez and even Anthony Fauci have acknowledged that any new coronavirus vaccine could trigger lethal immune reactions if and when vaccinated people come in contact with the wild virus. However, rather than proceeding with caution, Fauci, with the encouragement of select governmental and medical authorities, has sought to fast track vaccines, even referring to this project as “Operation Warp Speed.”Â
With partial funding by Bill Gates, they are seeking to test this vaccine without adequate animal studies that could provide important safety information and experience and could alert us to an early warning of runaway immune response. Gates is so concerned about this real danger that he says his organizations and vaccine manufacturers won’t distribute vaccines until governments agree to indemnify them against lawsuits.
One cannot help but see the contradiction here when we are told that the vaccine will be “safe” but no company or individual wants to have any degree of liability for potential (and inevitable) serious vaccine damage.Â
It is shocking to note that even the MMR vaccine, which is arguably the most tested of all vaccines, has actually had very little safety testing on it, according to one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, The Cochrane Library. The MMR vaccine has clearly been shown to significantly reduce the incidence of mumps, measles, and rubella, however (!), the safety evidence of this extremely common vaccine is “largely inadequate.” The exact quote from the Conclusions summarized on page 2 of this review of research on the MMR vaccine is: “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”
It is further shocking that one of the newest vaccines to the human papillomavirus (HPV) was evaluated by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), and it was found that none (!) of the 27 studies used a real placebo to compare with the vaccine. Although using a real placebo is the only real and scientific way to test for safety, the researchers purposefully set-up each of these studies to avoid comparing it with an inactive medicinal agent. Instead, all of these studies used what is called “active comparators,” a mixture of potentially neurotoxic agents such as aluminum, that is normally placed in vaccines (they simply removed the pathogen in this “placebo”).
And thus, it was not a surprise when one of the world’s leading researchers on aluminum discovered excessive amounts of aluminum in brain tissue in people who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and, yes, even autism, as compared with humans who did not have neurological diseases. Of special importance, this study was published in Scientific Reports, a journal published by the most respected scientific publishing companies in the world, Nature.com.Â
The media have repeated ad nauseam the assertion that vaccines do not cause autism, despite the fact that two common neurotoxic ingredients in many vaccines today and over the past two decades has been mercury and aluminum, both of which have literally hundreds of studies that have been associated with various neurological diseases and syndromes, including autism.Â
More significantly, the media has conveniently kept out of the spotlight the fact that the senior scientist at the CDC who was a primary author of a major 2004 study on this subject has admitted to purposefully not disclosing certain data and was even encouraged to destroy documents. This senior scientist at the CDC asserts that their data showed a greater than 250% increase in autism rates amongst black children who were vaccinated as compared with those who weren’t vaccinated. This senior scientist, William Thompson, has obtained whistleblower status and has agreed to provide all relevant information if and when a Congressional hearing requested him to do so (he has been waiting eight years to testify).
However, the CDC has not allowed Thompson to speak to the press, and all efforts to have any Congressional hearing has been thwarted. Even shortly after President Trump was elected, he met with vaccine safety advocate attorney Robert Kennedy, Jr. to establish a vaccine safety commission. As Kennedy recently reported,
“I agreed to do it, but immediately after that, Pfizer wrote a $1 million check to his inauguration committee. He then appointed a Pfizer lobbyist, Alex Azar, to run the HHS, and he handpicked a Pfizer insider, Scott Gottlieb, to run the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As soon as they got in there, they shut down the Vaccine Safety Commission and any other questioning of vaccines,”
Although the Cochrane Library‘s review ultimately recommended this vaccine as safe and effective, Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, one of the co-founders of the Cochrane Collaboration (now, simply called, Cochrane), and the author of the above described critique of the HPV vaccine that was published in the BMJ was summarily fired from the Cochrane. Four additional board members resigned in protest and two others were asked to leave the board, meaning that six members of this 13-member board left this scientific organization, resulting in significant turmoil.
It should be noted that this serious drama at the Cochrane begin shortly after they received a large grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And since this time, the Cochrane has become less transparent, less independent, more agenda-driven, and more connected to Big Pharma.Â
By the way, just because the name Bill Gates is mentioned here does not mean that the author of this article thinks he is a part of any conspiracy. This above description is solely and only criticized for this action on this previously esteemed research institution.Â
Prior to all of this hyper-drama, Gøtzsche observed a very disturbing trend in medical research, and he wrote a book about these observations entitled Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime. Richard Smith, the very editor of the British Medical Journal wrote the Foreword to this book, which claims directly and powerfully that the pharmaceutical industry has become a modern-day mafia.
Houston, we have a problem.Â
Are There Solutions?
Due to the pandemic and to the need today for a true and legitimate scientific medicine, a real revolution in health and medical research and health and medical care is needed.Â
Our challenge here is that one of Big Media’s largest advertiser is Big Pharma who purposefully concentrate their advertising dollars on news programs as a convenient and effective way to “own” the news that people receive. As long as Big Media is funded primarily through Big Pharma advertising dollars, we have to question the potential bias involved in news reporting due to the avoidance of unfavorable or even criminally liable information about the advertisers.
This article was not written to provide an overall answer to all of the complex issues that have been raised here, but broadly speaking, here are some proposals to begin the process of reconciliation of the complex issues surrounding health, medicine, and scientific research. At first blush, some of these proposals may seem radical, but present dire crises urgently require and make imperative significant change from the established structures that have allowed the problems to develop and deepen.Â
- Due to the strong influence that advertising dollars have on how the media reports on health and medical issues, Big Pharma companies should not be allowed to receive unfettered access to advertising on media. Just as tobacco had to restrict their advertising, as did alcohol, Big Pharma should likewise be restricted. If our society wishes to place special value on impartiality of news and public information via the media, then transparency is vital, as is not allowing one industry to dominate influence of public information.
- Net neutrality needs to be a primary value. The internet needs to not discriminate based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication. With a clear exception for censoring hate speech of different sorts, there should be no censorship on the internet, especially of different points of view about health and medical topics.Â
- The Cochrane should invite back the six members of their Board of Directors who left, and the other seven members should be required to tender their resignation.Â
- Governmental health agencies, medical and health organizations, and the media need to issue warnings to the general public about using fever-suppressing drugs during viral infections. Because fever is an important, even vital, defense of the body to viral infection, suppressing a fever commonly leads to complications. Further, ibuprofen (Advil) and naproxen (Aleve) are commonly prescribed to reduce a fever and/or provide pain relief, but they are also known to lead to blood clots, a condition that is becoming increasingly common in Covid-19 patients.Â
- Until a safe vaccine is finally confirmed and verified, the health and medical community in conjunction with the media should explore and educate the public on ways that they can strengthen their immune system. Such practical information may make it less likely to have infection become the disease and reduce the rate of complications from this disease that lead to serious illness or death. First steps in this direction were discussed in a previous article I wrote (May, 2020), entitled “The Other Half of the Infectious Disease Equation: What about Our Immune System?“
Ultimately, whether one agrees or disagrees with what Dr. Judy Mikovits asserts in the film, Plandemic, we need to apply the same scientific analysis to her work as we do to other medical research.
And we need to apply the same high level of scrutiny to the emerging Covid-19 vaccines that are presently in development AND to all other vaccines that have been accepted, especially those that have been mandated.Â
Finally, we have to come to terms with the fact that, to date, the media has been consistently mis-informing the public on issues of safety of vaccines. Despite the massive amount of pro-vaccine propaganda that the media have expounded, the safety research on vaccines has cleverly been hidden, lied about, or simply not studied adequately. Finally, the demonizing and villainizing of people, parents, and scientists who insist upon more accuracy and transparency about vaccine safety evidence has to stop.
To those of us who want to honor modern medicine and modern science, we have to separate out the powerful economic interests that can infect the scientific method and the media so that whatever science discovers and confirms can and will help, not hurt, humankind.
Renowned scientist Richard Feynman referred to science as “the culture of doubt.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with the ideas of Dr. Judy Mikovits, she is posing some important questions of doubt on the emerging (but changing) view of this pandemic. Brazilian scientist and professor Marcos Nogueira Eberlin takes this a step further by asserting that “science is the culture of debate, of divergence of opinions.”
It is time for good science and good and healthy dialogue and debate to begin. This pandemic is too new to be anything but humble.
Dana Ullman, MPH, CCH, graduated from UC Berkeley School of Public Health (1978) and the greatest honors he ever received was to be interviewed by UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine here. He has written 10 books on homeopathic medicine, two of which contain a Foreword by the Physician to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (who is a MD and a homeopathic doctor). Dana Ullman has served on advisory boards or in teaching capacities of complementary and alternative medicine institutes at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Arizona. His website is www.homeopathic.com. Between 2010 and 2015, Dana Ullman wrote 40 articles for the HuffingtonPost, most of which had over 1,000 comments.
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Originally published on: May 30th 2020