books book reviews

books by maverick doctors and 'antivaxxers'

reviewed by T. Nelson

Score+2

Plague of Corruption: Restoring faith in the promise of science

by Kent Heckenlively and Judy Mikovits
Skyhorse, 2020, 338 pages (free online version) 272 pages (hardcover)
reviewed by T. Nelson

T he 25-page preface by prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sets the tone for this book. He calls Judy Mikovits one of the most skilled scientists of her generation and says “her reliable flashes of genius soon propelled her to the apex of the male-dominated world of scientific research.” “Jealous cancer power centers” suppressed evidence that threatened big pharmaceutical companies, and destroyed her career.

Mikovits's theory was that chronic fatigue syndrome, also called myalgic encephalo­myelitis or ME/CFS, is caused by a retrovirus, called XMRV, or xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus. She says it also causes autism, leukemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and maybe even Alzheimer's disease.

Hmm, as an Alzheimer researcher for many years, I must have missed her paper on that. Reverse transcriptase does not automatically mean a retrovirus. But no matter, no matter.

After obtaining a Ph.D., she published her XMRV findings in Science in 2009. It was soon discovered that XMRV was created accidentally by lab experiments. Other labs could not replicate her findings and Science magazine retracted her paper.

It happens, it's not a catastrophe. But then her employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), accused her of stealing her lab notebooks. She was jailed for 11 days and then released. I must admit this is strange: commer­cial organizations regard notebooks as their proprietary property, academic ones don't.

Mikovits says her troubles were caused because Big Pharma was afraid of lawsuits because of her claim that XMRV was in the vaccines they were making. She also accuses her colleague Robert Silverman of inaccu­rately recon­struc­ting the DNA sequence of the retrovirus that was in her 2009 paper.

Chronic fatigue syndrome was originally called post-viral fatigue syndrome and at one time it was thought to be caused by Epstein-Barr virus. Here's what an establishment neurology textbook, Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology, says about CFS:

At various times, even in our recent memory, colitis and other forms of bowel disease, spinal irritation, hypoglycemia, brucellosis, and chronic candidiasis, multiple chemical sensitivity, retroviral infection, environmental allergies and recently gluten sensitivity and minimally low testosterone among others, have been proposed without basis as causes of fatigue. At times, these spurious associations have only served to marginalize the disease and patients who suffer from it . . . no evidence of a virologic cause has so far held up. [p.529, emphasis added ]

The retrovirus theory wasn't crazy, just (it seems) apparently unsupported. Well, no matter. So far the reader can sympathize with another scientist whose career was harmed.

But then she starts talking about how vaccines supposedly cause autism, which is probably the most debunked theory in history, how vaccines are killing people, how AIDS isn't caused by HIV, how ebola is caused by vaccination, how the deuterium in heavy water is a growth factor for retroviruses and causes cancer, and how cannabis removes lead from the water. She suggests that Anthony Fauci of NIAID put a hit on virologist Kuan Teh-Jeang:

I strongly believe an impasse was reached between Fauci and his second in command, Teh-Jeang. What happened after that point? I can't tell you. Was Teh-Jeang shamed by what he'd done? . . . . Or did Fauci, after it was clear to him that Teh-Jeang could not be turned, place a call and give an order?

Yikes. We need mavericks to challenge dogmas. It shouldn't be a death sentence to make a mistake. But this kind of talk is way beyond heretical. It makes people think you're a nut. Science has an article fact-checking this book, but wasn't clear to me why there's such animosity between her and the Science editors. Perhaps this is one reason.

My problem with antivaxxers is not that their opinions may be dangerous. The idea that opinions can be dangerous is itself the most dangerous idea that there is. My problem is that they make unsubstantiated assertions that make it harder for the rest of us to agree with them and dangerous to discuss the safety of vaccines. Any discussion of vaccine safety nowadays is career-threatening. It's like the news media's obsession with race, which makes it unsafe to discuss possible solutions to race-specific health issues. We'll be called nasty names just for mentioning the existence of different races. That's how bad the repression has become.

The book is highly readable, but if I'd been advising Mikovits, my advice would have been: publish one step at a time and let somebody else drop the bombshells. Don't accuse people of murder without proof. Never speak to the press. Don't let a scientifically illiterate person write the preface in your book. And for God's sake, lay off the cannabis.

Update, May 14: The UK Guardian has weighed in on Mikovits, repeating the claim about facemasks that Science magazine made and calling her a conspiracy theorist. If the Guardian hates her, I might just have to jump to her side.

may 12, 2020. updated may 21 2020

Score+3

Dancing Naked In the Mind Field

by Kary Mullis
Vintage, 1998, 80 pages (e-book)
reviewed by T. Nelson

W hat if our lives were merely movies being lived by advanced computers trying to learn something about life? Maybe they'd pick Einstein or Churchill to experience brilliance and determination. Maybe they'd pick a Dust Bowl farmer to learn about despair. And for sure they'd pick Kary Mullis's life to see what it's like to be a scientist who gets stoned out of his gourd.

Mullis won the Nobel Prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It is not clear whether his death last year was from Covid or something else; in our age truth is a rare commodity. But Mullis fearlessly expressed skepticism over global warming, the ozone hole, and the value of PCR in diagnosing disease, so the press ignored his passing and many left-wingers cele­brated it. It is a sad commentary on today's world.

It was not always so nasty. In Mullis's time experimenting with chemicals was appreciated and outlandish ideas were accepted. He comes across as a stereotypical drugged-out 1960s-style San Francisco hippie, but he was also a free thinker with skeptical and inventive scientific mind.

He experimented with LSD and almost died from playing with nitrous oxide and diethyltryptamine (which he synthesized to compare to DMT). As the book goes on, Mullis's quirkiness becomes evident and he talks about his belief in astral projection and astrology and how he was kidnapped by extra­ter­res­trials, shooting randomly at them in the dark woods with his AR-15. His skepticism about whether AIDS is caused by HIV turned him into a scientific outcast.

I doubt Mullis would have cared what we think of his unconventional beliefs. I like to think that whoever is re-living our lives, a scholar somewhere in an future library perhaps, or someplace we can't possibly imagine, creates people like him as a lark to find out what it would be like to be a stoned hippie living in California before it turned its back on freedom, and who just happened to get the Nobel Prize back when it still meant something.

Score+2

The Real Anthony Fauci

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Skyhorse, 2021, 450 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

W hen I started reading this book, smoke started rising from it and I felt a burning sensation. Fortunately it was just a false alarm: I had the heater too close to me. It wasn't that hot of a book at all. Maybe a bit warm. And now a little singed.

Fauci's institute, the NIAID, shot to prominence back in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic struck. The AIDS activists who poured onto the Bethesda campus demanding a cure bypassed the building I was in and went straight to Building 37, where Bob Gallo was busy stealing the credit for HIV and HTLV. Gallo was famous on campus for his presentations that had one word per slide, starting with one that simply said “CD4” in giant letters.

Out of self-preservation, I have to remain mum about some other things, but Kennedy's portrayal of NIH as dominated by bigshots with gigantic egos and huge armies of postdocs is eerily accurate. Kennedy portrays Fauci as a power-mad administrator who owes his loyalty to Big Pharma and uses his power over funding to ruthlessly destroy the career of anyone who disagrees with him, most notably Peter Duesberg, a brilliant virologist who disputed Gallo's claim that HIV was the cause of AIDS. Duesberg's 1987 Cancer Research paper, “Retroviruses as carcinogens and pathogens: expectations and reality” said that the virus is merely what we now call a biomarker, and vaccination won't help. And so far he appears to have been right: there is still no vaccine.

Before 1987, Duesberg had never had a grant rejected. After challenging Fauci, Duesberg's grant was pulled. Since then, according to Kennedy, he has submitted over thirty more, and NIH rejected every one. Even today, for a scientist to question the hypothesis is career suicide.

Fauci's baby was azidothymidine (AZT), a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor that, after metabolism to its active form, acts as a chain terminator for DNA synthesis. Kennedy says that many scientists think AZT killed more people than AIDS.

Verification of this and many other public health claims made in this book is remarkably hard to find. Kennedy writes “The entire field of virology is Dr. Fauci's Janissary corps,” the implication being that they have a vested interest in keeping schtum to maintain their NIH funding.

The atmosphere so clearly portrayed in this book points to a deficiency in the culture at NIH that desperately needs to be fixed.

But this book won't do the job. Kennedy has a weak background in science and makes numerous misstatements. He incorrectly claims that the CDC admitted that PCR tests can't distinguish Covid from other diseases. He repeats the myth that HCQ's supposed therapeutic effect is to act as a zinc ionophore. He falsely states that molnupiravir is a protease inhibitor and uses an identical mechanism of action as ivermectin. He suggests that mercury (once used as a treatment for syphilis) is responsible for the CNS problems in tertiary syphilis and that AIDS could be caused by amyl nitrite, mycoplasma, or HHV6. He misrepresents the research on hydroxy­chloro­quine and ivermectin. He claims that virologist Thomas Verstraeten found that patients given Hep B vaccine containing thimerosal (aka thiomersal) had 1135% higher rate of autism. He provides incomplete numbers on the pentavalent vaccine (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus-hepatitis B-hemophilus influenza type B), saying that it killed 14 people here, five babies there, and 27 babies somewhere else.

These are certainly problems. Admittedly some of the research on HCQ was biased, and few would trust the WHO's claim that the pentavalent vaccine is “safe, effective, and of assured quality”, but in the context of 467 million doses the case looks a little different. There are many generations of vaccines; early polio and rotavirus vaccines were nasty. That's not to say vaccines today are all safe, either.

As for thiomersal, certainly it can be toxic at high enough doses. It's sometimes used in research to induce ASD-like features in rats, but I could find nothing to substantiate Kennedy's claim about the levels found in vaccines. On the contrary, Verstraeten's 2003 paper found no significant risks for autism or attention-deficit disorder. The reference Kennedy gives is a link to his own website.

There are also many contradictions in this book. At one point he criticizes Fauci (p.160–170) for insisting on placebo controlled trials. Then he criticizes him for not using them (p. 259). Then again on page 328 he criticizes Bill Gates, the inventor of the Blue Screen of Death, for using a ‘fauxebo’ instead of a real placebo. He criticizes pharma companies for testing their drugs in Africa while pricing them too high for Africans to purchase, calling it a form of colonialism. Then he criticizes the drugs for killing more people than they save. But if the drugs are as bad as he says, shouldn't the Africans be grateful they can't get them? They should be feeling sorry for us poor overmedicated bastards in the West.

Granted, public health officials have an agenda. Bill Gates likes money. NIH lab chiefs like glory. Big Pharma likes selling vaccines. Government and Big Tech like to censor essential debate. Officials and others like simple answers and attack and dismiss views that oppose medical orthodoxy. But this book was written by a trial lawyer who is not trying to educate you, but to generate outrage to convince you the defendant is guilty.

Last but not least, if I were related to Ted Kennedy, the last thing I'd do is brag about it. In fact I'd probably change my name to Bob Smith.

No index.

dec 22 2022

Score+2

The truth about COVID-19: Exposing the great reset, lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the New Normal

by Joseph Mercola, D.O. and Ronnie Cummins
Chelsea Green, 2021, 208 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

J oseph Mercola is the owner of www.mercola.com, which until recently featured articles about vitamins and beautiful pictures of herbs and spices said to have medicinal properties. Now he's being attacked and censored for claims of “misinformation.”

It's true that fringe opinions, like the claim that deuterium is toxic and glyphosate destroys resistance to Covid, have occasionally shown up on his site. But censorship is unacceptable. It's hard to understand the viciousness of the attacks by the press and science publications on fringe science. After all, much of what they say is derived from peer-reviewed journals, and practicing scientists like myself sometimes get new ideas from them and often find them highly entertaining.

The authors say that everyone must now decide whether liberty or security are more important. This is true, but it misses the bigger picture. There are people out there who are livid with rage toward the unvaxxed and not only demand all doubt be silenced but literally wish the unvaxxed dead, and will celebrate if it happens. Much of the news media lives by inciting this hatred and confabulating tales designed to intensify it. This hatred is all the more incomprehensible considering what we now know about the disease.

What we're seeing is not just a question of liberty vs security. It's the question of whether an individual has any rights at all in the face of a threat to the collective, whether the threat is real or not.

This question has restructured American politics. Many now believe that the response to Covid was an expansion of the power of public health officials to rule us with an iron fist. That makes it all the more important for anyone concerned about science to understand what the dissidents are saying. But it's not easy. Take this statement on Mercola's website:

In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.

That's a direct quote from an article in Science. But what Science is actually talking about is the well-documented fact that natural immunity from a previous infection protects better against re-infection than the vax. A close reading of Mercola shows that he too is saying it, but in a way that could confuse an inattentive reader. So what's happening is not misinformation, but a communication gap, either due to bad writing style or because of bias held by the reporter trying to generate outrage about this book.

Accordingly, we must disentangle Mercola's facts from the statements by his co-author Ronnie Cummins, who comes across as a health-food nut who complains about GMOs and advocates banning junk food. Cummins misunderstands antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE (which Mercola describes accurately on page 133) and is not very knowledgeable about science, making many incorrect statements like claiming the 1918 Spanish Flu virus was a coronavirus (it wasn't). Given the stakes, one would think the authors would have had the book reviewed by an expert before publication.

By contrast, Mercola has a solid understanding of modern medicine, though as one might expect he favors ‘natural’ remedies. Even so, a few questionable claims show up, such as the still-unresolved claim about hydroxy­chloroquine's efficacy and the persistent myth that it acts therapeut­ically as a zinc ionophore. Interestingly, a recent paper by Tummino et al., while trying to dismiss HCQ, accidentally found that a synergistic effect between HCQ and azithromycin might account for Raoult's original finding.

Then there's my pet peeve: complaining when pharma companies report relative rather than absolute risk reduction. The comparison I always give is to auto accidents. There were about 3,500,000 vehicle accidents in the USA in 2020, resulting in 38,680 deaths. If the deaths were somehow reduced by 50%, it would be a miraculous achievement, but it would only be a 0.55% absolute risk reduction. So complaining about absolute risk reduction by a vax being only 1% is misleading. We need to know both numbers.

About half the book is focused on the so-called Great Reset. Nobody seems to know what that is because discussion of it on the Internet is being censored, but the general idea seems to be something like this (page 72):

... the pandemic is being exaggerated for a reason, and it's not because there's concern for life. Quite the contrary. It's a ploy to quite literally enslave the global population within a digital surveillance system—a system so unnatural and inhumane that no rational population would ever voluntarily go down that road.

Perhaps the most important section is the chapter on vaccine safety. We don't yet know how bad the long-term adverse effects will be. Claims made elsewhere that the mRNA vaccine will cause genetic damage are easy enough to dismiss, but ADE is not, and there have been many cases of systemic inflammatory syndrome, autoimmune reactions, and deaths from the vaccines. The authors say that some experts think Covid vaccines could turn out to be the worst public health disaster in history.

Mercola makes a good case that the average person need not be afraid of the virus. Some research suggests that up to 80% of us are already partially immune by virtue of pre-exposure to coronaviruses in the common cold.

Unfortunately, the virus has become so politicized that it's no longer safe, even for Mercola, to cite scientific studies. We need leadership to help in keeping the dialogue civil. Unfortunately, we're not getting it.

oct 16, 2021