Ending Plague

by Francis W. Ruscetti

  The first substantive slide for The Truth About Cancer presentation was about the two books I’d co-written with Kent, Plague: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth About Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) and Other Diseases (November 2014) and Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science (originally scheduled to be published on November 5, 2019, but eventually published on April 14, 2020, just about a month into the nationwide COVID lockdown).

  I showed a picture of both books, as well as a short quote from each book to hit the main points. From Plague, there was the quote, “That is the inconvenient truth. Retroviruses and environmental toxins led to this explosion of chronic diseases.”

  From Plague of Corruption the opening quote came from the 1953 movie, Martin Luther. It read: “To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Therefore, I cannot and will not recant. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me, amen.”

  I guess you could say this is a story of science and faith. I’m trained as a scientist, having worked in some of the most terrifying places on Earth, such as the Biosafety Level 4 lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland on behalf of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, investigating such diseases such as HIV and Ebola. And yet, I’m also a person of deep religious faith. I do not store my riches in this world.

  Frank used to joke with my husband David about my spending on cannabis for my friends in need. He’d say, “David, if I won the lottery tomorrow, how long would it take your wife to give it away?”

  Not missing a beat, David would say, “You don’t understand, Frank. She already has.”

  I strongly believe what I do in my time on Earth is of eternal consequence.

  Many times, people have asked me, “Judy, can’t you just tell a little lie and make things easier on yourself?” The simple fact is I can’t because the Ten Commandments are not suggestions; they are commands of the Lord God. And I fear only the Lord.

  The second slide was from a senior member of the Phoenix Rising website (a site dedicated to chronic fatigue syndrome/ME/CFS), named CBS, commenting on February 23, 2011, about how threatening the XMRV story was to the public health agencies:

  “Agency heads are scared to death of how the patient population will react if XMRV works out.” – Suzanne Vernon, September 11th. Lobby of the Salt Lake City Downtown Hilton – During a break at the 2010 Offer Utah Patient Education Conference.

  I’ve been struggling with what I ought to do with this for almost six months. Suzanne Vernon said this during a conversation she was having with me and Cort [Johnson]. She just sort of interjected it. No real need, nor was there much of a segue. She said that it should not be repeated. Yet I wondered why on Earth she would say something like that to someone she had just met.1

  Now, who is Dr. Suzanne Vernon? At the time she was the scientific director of the ME/CFS Initiative (formerly the CFIDS Association of America), and from 1990 to 2007 she’d worked at the CDC, leading the Chronic Fatigue Research for ten years.2 If there was anybody who would know the thinking of agencies regarding chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis and the patient community, it would be Suzanne Vernon. Perhaps her conscience got the better of her for a moment and she was briefly honest about the danger of my work to institutions that had apparently been asleep at the switch for decades.

  But I doubt it.

  Note the date of her alleged comment. September 11, 2011 was only a few days after I’d presented my talk showing high levels of XMRV in a cohort from London and 4 percent in the controls my collaborator obtained from the blood supply in London. It was that talk which, in my opinion, prompted Francis Collins, head of the NIH, to direct Anthony Fauci’s NIAID to fund a large multi-center study of the prevalence of XMRV in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome in the United States, to be headed up by Dr. W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University.

  And there’s additional support for the idea that my work was a danger to the public health institutions as detailed in a 2013 article in Discover magazine, written by Hilary Johnson. She detailed how on July 22, 2009 I’d been part of an emergency one-day conference at the NIH, several months before our paper would be published in the journal Science in October 2009.

  At the center of the speculation about the new retrovirus that day in July was an immunologist and AIDS researcher named Judy Anne Mikovits (pronounced My-ko-vitz), a diminutive 51-year-old in a sleek black suit and a crisp white shirt. Mikovits was a 20-year veteran of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) who had coauthored more than forty scientific papers. During her final two years at the agency, she had directed the lab of Antiviral Drug Mechanisms, where she studied therapies for AIDS as well as one of its associated cancers, Kaposi’s sarcoma …

  Given such far-reaching implications, it was not surprising that when Mikovits stopped talking, nearly a minute passed before someone spoke, and then it was to say, “Oh my God.”

  That simple expression of dread was the preliminary gasp in what would become, in the three years that followed, the most clamorous scramble in recent medical history to prove or disprove what seemed to be a viable hypothesis, one so dire it was facetiously dubbed the ‘Doomsday Scenario,’ by one skeptic.3

  There it is in black and white in one of the most prestigious publications of science for the public.

  I was putting forth a “doomsday scenario” which had gone unnoticed by the experts in public health for decades.

  The third slide posed the question of what the agency heads would do in light of this information which strongly suggested they’d been negligent, if not worse, in the previous decades. They would, in succession, get the authors to destroy the data, force the authors to withdraw the data, then when Frank and I wouldn’t comply with their directive, they force retracted the paper, without our approval. This was in spite of the fact that our research was confirmed by future 2020 Nobel Prize winner, Harvey Alter, his coauthor, Shyh-Ching Lo, and others in September 2010. This is from their publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

  Our laboratory detected MLV-related virus gag gene sequences in DNA from PBMC [peripheral blood mononuclear cells] and whole blood samples from 32 of 37 (86.5%) CFS patients compared with 3 of 44 (6.8%) volunteer blood donors, using a two-round nested PCR. Following only one round of PCR amplification, 21 of the 41 CFS patients’ samples were found positive compared with only 1 of 44 donor samples. In every instance throughout these studies, the “positive” results by PCR (an amplificon of the predicted size) was confirmed by sequencing.

  In four CFS patients from who two samples were obtained two years apart, the gag gene sequences were detected on both occasions. Further, gag gene sequences were still detectable in seven of eight CFS patients from whom fresh samples were obtained, fifteen years after they were initially found to be MLV gag gene positive.4

  Lo and Alter’s study found a greater diversity of mouse (murine) leukemia viruses in chronic fatigue syndrome patients, but their results were even more robust than our findings. They found evidence of the virus in 86.5 percent of the patients, and 6.8 percent of the controls. Extrapolated to our current US population of about 328 million people, that meant more than twenty-two million of our fellow citizens were carrying this virus around like a ticking time bomb, just waiting for some immune system challenge to detonate it.

  And of course, they were forced to issue a modified retraction of the paper. In essence, the retraction was: “We know this blood was from the late 1980s and late 1990s, but since we don’t have a time machine to go back and get more blood from these same patients, the results are questionable.”

  Really, I encourage you to read the supposed “retraction” and see if you come away with a different explanation.

  ***

  The fifth slide was titled “Who and Why?” and showed a picture taken in 2011 in front of the NIH Clinical Center. In the center of the picture was Hillary Clinton, flanked on one side by Anthony Fauci and Fr
ancis Collins, while on the other side was Harold Varmus, along with two other scientists.

  Next to their picture I had the program from the July 22, 2009 workshop entitled “Public Health Implications of XMRV Infection.” Are you scratching your head, saying, “Judy, I thought your XMRV paper was released in October 2009? That’s two and a half months before you released your findings.”

  You would be right.

  Our research didn’t take the government by surprise. They were already working on an answer. My biggest mistake? Trusting the government to do the right thing.

  The organizers were Stuart Le Grice (HIV Drug Resistance Program and head of the Center of Excellence in HIV/AIDS & Cancer Virology) and John Coffin (Tufts University and office of the Director, Center for Cancer Research).

  In addition to me, the participants were: Carlos Gordon-Cardo (Columbia University), Stephen Goff (Columbia University), Eric Klein (Cleveland Clinic), Robert Silverman (Cleveland Clinic), A. Dusty Miller (Fred Hutcheson Cancer Research Center, University of Utah), Stephen Hughes (HIV Drug Resistance Program, NCI), Vineet Kewal-Ramani (HIV Drug Resistance, NCI), Douglas Lowy (Laboratory of Cellular Oncology, NCI), John Schiller (Laboratory of Cellular Oncology, NCI), Chris Buck (Laboratory of Cellular Oncology, NCI), William Dahut (Medical Oncology Branch, NCI), James Gulley (Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology, NCI), Jeffrey Schlom (Laboratory of Cellular Oncology, NCI), W. Marston Linehan (Urologic Oncology Branch, NCI), and Charles Rabkin (Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI).

  Besides me, there were eighteen other participants at that meeting, representing Columbia University, Tufts University, the Cleveland Clinic, and nine representatives of the National Cancer Institute.

  Our publication on October 2009 didn’t catch any of them by surprise.

  In fact, they delayed the publication as long as they could. I believe this because our samples and data had been shared with all who were at the July 22, 2009 meeting and had requested them. All had confirmed our results by September. We began to hear rumors of the pending publication and became concerned because a breach of confidentiality is grounds for Science NOT to publish a paper.

  Those were times of many sleepless nights.

  The sixth slide was entitled “21st Century Acquired Endocannabinoid Immune Dysfunction: Unintended? Consequences of Unsafe Vaccinations and CDC Schedule.” I listed many types of cancers as being associated with an endocannabinoid deficiency, as well as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Gulf War Syndrome, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and several psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Critically, I put an asterisk next to every disease where at least one peer-reviewed publication of a retroviral association was suggested for the disease.

  The seventh slide was entitled “How Did Mouse Retroviruses Get into Humans?” I’d struggled to explain the concept of using animal tissues to grow viruses for vaccines and how that might transfer an animal virus directly into the human bloodstream, when my good friend, the radio host, Ernie Hancock, said, “So, basically it’s like one of the Vego-Matics, where instead of chopping up vegetables, they’re chopping up animal parts, processing them, then injecting them into people?”

  (This is certainly not the only way these viruses can get into people. Our work at that time was completely focused on the blood supply because of our experience with HIV and the many biological therapies derived from blood products.)

  I replied, “Exactly, that’s how polio, MMR, chicken pox, and the shingles vaccines are made.”

  Then a cartoonist friend turned it into a visual, with a conveyor belt of mice leading them into a “Mouse-O-Matic,” which chops them up, then a hose siphons the red fluid into another tank labeled “Vaccines,” where it’s processed, and from there a nurse draws out some of the material in a syringe to inject into a baby.

  The cartoon was a crude simplification, but even others picked up on the likelihood that this mouse virus had been transferred to humans in the common practice of using animal cell lines to grow viruses for vaccines. An article in the January 2011 issue of Frontiers in Microbiology described it this way:

  One of the most widely distributed biological products that frequently involved mice or mouse tissue, at least up until recent years, are vaccines, especially vaccines against viruses … It is possible that XMRV particles were present in virus stocks cultured in mice or mouse cells for vaccine production and transferred to the human population by vaccination.5

  It’s easy to understand how the first researchers developing vaccines wouldn’t have had any inkling about the various viruses residing in these animals. But as the technology developed over the years, did anybody stop to check old assumptions? I’m sure it must have occurred to somebody to use the latest technology to see if our current vaccines were contaminated with other viruses.

  But who wanted to be the first to step over that line and challenge one of the main pillars of public health, in addition to a pharmaceutical industry which makes billions of dollars selling that very same product?

  ***

  People always ask me, “Judy, why were you arrested, held in jail for five days without bail, your notebooks stolen from you, prevented from posting on social media for five years, then when you tried to bring a civil action against those who had persecuted you, the case was held under seal for five years by the state of Nevada, and apparently, the federal government, as well?”

  Slides six, seven, eight, and nine showed answers with evidence for each of those questions.

  Slide six showed an email I sent to Simone Glynn at the NIH on August 31, 2011, at 8:24 p.m. PST, regarding the rush to publish the results of an investigation into XMRVs in the blood supply.

  But let’s be accurate here.

  The study was NOT designed to determine whether the blood supply was contaminated, but whether we could develop a quick diagnostic test. I believe it was that email which precipitated the final decision to try and destroy me, both professionally and personally. Here are some excerpts from that email:

  … Given the complexities and limitations of this study, many of which were not recognized at the time, the (flawed) experimental design was agreed upon, to have one day to agree on a manuscript, a holiday at that, is totally unacceptable. This is NOT good science or the appropriate process. What is the rush?

  Afraid [of] the truth? How many of these viruses were introduced into the human population and are now threatening a lot more than the blood supply??! Because a few declared it “impossible” 40 years ago and JC [John Coffin] himself was the most vociferous!

  How many XMRVs?

  I am sending this only to Simone and Frank because I will make this entire rush a public relations nightmare for the entire US govt. (bold and italics added.)

  I have integration data and variants of many new strains!! Did those arrogant SOBs introduce these into humans and are now trying to cover it up?

  And then pedigree the negatives with a test with a cutoff so high it would not find a willing Roman in a whorehouse?

  Wonder if anyone will listen to a press conference from me?? Asking how many new recombinants from vaccines? From lab workers? Doctors? The first ever contagious human retrovirus???? Spread like mycoplasma?? Are you kidding me???

  It happened once!!! How many xenograft lines were created?? How many vaccines contained mouse tissue??

  These sick people lost their entire lives and this travesty of justice will not be carried out at their expense. Not again …

  Nothing about these data say anything about Lombardi et al [our paper] or Lo et al [the confirmation by 2020 Nobel Prize winner Harvey Alter and his team]. Except that there are likely to be many strains of XMRVs and only God knows the impact on chronic disease. But nothing about this study says anything about our original discoveries.

  And if this is rushed to print without a fair and balanced discussion of its limitations, I will spend every minute of my life exposing the fraud
that has been perpetrated against this patient population.

  —Judy Mikovits6

  Yeah, I’ve been known to get a little heated when it comes to the health of people and scientists not telling the truth. In retrospect, I’m sure I sounded like the Gerard Butler character in Law Abiding Citizen (2009), who declares at one point, “I’m gonna pull the whole thing down. I’m gonna bring the whole fuckin’ diseased corrupt temple down on your head. It’s gonna be biblical.”

  But just as there was a problem, there was a solution to the blood supply issue on the horizon. It was a blood decontamination technology called INTERCEPT, created by the Cerus Company of Concord, California.

  Slide seven talked about the problem with the blood supply, as well as the solution. On March 29, 2011, I gave a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences, noting that all the various studies had detected anywhere from 4–8 percent of the healthy population had antibodies to XMRV, and were thus at risk. In that talk I listed my five conclusions:

  1. Data suggest there are different strains of Gamma Retroviruses that can infect humans.

  2. Assays that capture the variation of these viruses in the blood supply are the best, i.e Serology and transmission.

  3. Cerus Technologies can inactivate infectious strains of XMRV/HGRVs in blood components.

  4. New disease associations include leukemia, lymphoma, and the platelet/megakaryocyte disorder, ITP.

  5. We need more full-length sequencing.7

  On the slide, I noted that the FDA had approved the INTERCEPT system on December 1, 2014, as well as an article in Scientific American on June 16, 2015 with the title, “The INTERCEPT Blood System Rids Donations of All Pathogens.”8

  You see, I’m in agreement with Scientific American that the Cerus INTERCEPT system works. But my position is logical.

  The blood supply is contaminated and needs to be decontaminated.

  The public health authorities are saying the blood supply is fine but still needs to be decontaminated. In July 2020, Wikipedia was reporting the blood supply was being tested for XMRV? Why, if they cleaned it up in 2012 with the Cerus INTERCEPT system?