I was defending a principle.
When I previously told this story, I’d said that Bruce Chabner, then head of the NCI, was on the phone as well. Frank remembers it differently, with me telling him it was just Gallo and Fauci. However, when Frank returned from Europe, Chabner did pressure Frank to give a copy of his paper and the important viral isolates to Gallo. Frank refused to do so. They held up Frank’s paper until Gallo published his own isolations.
That paper won Gallo a second Lasker Prize in 1986.
Although it was in accord with the rules of the time, I believe Frank Ruscetti and Bernie Poiesz should have shared credit with Gallo in the Lasker Prize of 1982, for the isolation of the HTLV-1 virus, the first identified disease-causing human retrovirus. As Candace Pert and others found out later, the prizes go to laboratory heads, no matter how uninvolved they were. Almost all laboratory heads support this system because they want their prizes.
In my opinion, the awarding of the 1986 Lasker Prize to Gallo (for which was originally claimed to be the “discovery of HIV,” but later amended to be a “confirmation” of Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi’s work) was a complete travesty. Gallo and Fauci pulled off a heist of Frank’s paper, held it hostage for months, then Gallo published his own paper, using our methods.
The 1986 Lasker Prize should have gone to Frank Ruscetti and Bernie Poiesz.
***
By contrast, Luc Montagnier is a man of integrity.
That is why my coauthor, Kent, continually hounded me to send Montagnier a copy of our book, Plague of Corruption, prior to publication, to see if he would give us an endorsement. We edited his endorsement slightly (his English was a little fractured), but it is on all the hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide and reads, “The rampant corruption … hides from the public scientific truths which might go against corporate economic interests.” I don’t think you could get a more ringing endorsement.
And after the book was published, Kent exchanged several emails with Montagnier’s personal secretary, Suzanne McDonnell, who expressed what I believe was Montagnier’s personal excitement over the tremendous public response to the book.
Dear Kent:
We applaud your great, deserved success for you and Judy for PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION.
Perhaps Professeur’s complimentary copy got lost in transit, but he has never received it. We would be so pleased to have the book resent.
Mme Suzanne McDonnel.
Bad Kent! Bad Kent! Next time you must remember to send a copy of our book to the Nobel Prize winner who endorsed it. Yeah, as if it wasn’t a crazy time with everything going on with COVID-19 and the relentless media attacks. But Kent quickly recovered, writing:
Suzanne:
Thank you so much for the address. I tried to find it in my emails when the book came out and could not. I will be sending you two copies, one for you and one for Dr. Montagnier.
All the best,
Kent Heckenlively
Suzanne wrote back:
Thank you so much!
What you are doing, you, Judith, Robert, Mary, Lyn, Professeur, is God’s work. May you, your efforts, your families be blessed.
xox Suzanne
Now when Kent showed that email to the documentary filmmakers and said, “Hey, we’ve got a Nobel Prize winner saying we’re doing God’s work,” they were cautious.
“Maybe it’s just his assistant who’s telling you you’re doing God’s work,” they replied.
Even at the age of eighty-eight, Montagnier continues to contribute to science, most notably with his recent thoughts on the origin of COVID-19, which mirror some of my own conclusions.
This is an article from The Week on April 19, 2020, just as some of the genetic information about the coronavirus was being published in scientific journals:
French virologist and medicine Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier has made explosive revelations regarding the origin of the coronavirus, saying that the deadly virus was manufactured in a laboratory in China’s Wuhan.
Montagnier’s claims come at a time when the US has alleged the possibility of the virus originating in a lab in China. The theory that COVID-19 was created in a Chinese lab and “leaked” out to the world has been making the rounds since its outbreak in December 2019. President Donald Trump also fired a fresh salvo when he warned China of consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the virus. China has refuted these allegations.7
Even though Fauci, the CDC, and the public health system have maintained for eighteen months that this was not the case, Fauci has recently turned around on this question and said the possibility should be investigated. The fact that China has denied these allegations and stonewalled any investigation makes me wonder.
Montagnier was a smart man, Frank always respected him, and every time I’ve interacted with him, he’s been nothing but intelligent and warm. Before I was eviscerated over XMRV, I gave a talk at one meeting on March 3, 2011 right after Luc. Before I started to speak, he gave me the thumbs up!
His opinion about the coronavirus and COVID-19 mirrors my own thoughts from early in the outbreak. The earliest red flag to me was when the media gave us only two options, first, that it was a naturally occurring virus, or second, it was a “Chinese bioweapon!”
Wasn’t there a third, logical possibility?
Escape of a highly pathogenic organism from a lab? That seems reasonable, and in my mind, the most likely possibility.
It’s supported by publications in which the Chinese thank Anthony Fauci’s NIAID and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) for the Vero E6 monkey kidney cell line. That’s why I say SARS-CoV-2 is most likely a monkey virus and NOT a bat virus. I worked in that USAMRIID facility in the 1990s using the Vero E6 monkey kidney cell line to grow different strains of Ebola, while a staff scientist in Frank’s lab.
On April 8, 2020, I was featured in a video put out by the Epoch Times with reporter Joshua Philips commenting on this issue. I am convinced there are many parts of the SARS-CoV-2 story which still remain hidden. For example, the Vero E6 monkey kidney cell line that USAMRIID gave to the Chinese was NOT the only source of that cell line in the world. The Chinese could easily have purchased the Vero E6 monkey kidney cell line from the American Type Culture Collection without the involvement of the American government.
I strongly believe that our government gave the Chinese the Vero E6 monkey kidney cell line from Fort Detrick where I worked, that was also contaminated with Ebola virus and many other viruses. It is difficult for me to believe this was accidental. This suggests to me that some nefarious plan between our intelligence agencies and the communist party of China is behind this plandemic. These people are not stupid. They are smart and they are likely evil, in that they know how to distract the public from looking at what may be lurking behind the curtain.
But why didn’t the mainstream media want us to consider even the possibility that this was a lab leak? It only got more interesting when the genetic code of the virus was revealed. It didn’t look natural. It looked assembled. Montagnier and I saw the same clues:
Montagnier alleged the presence of elements of HIV and germ of malaria in the genome of coronavirus is “highly suspect” and it “could not have arisen naturally”. The French researcher also alleged an “industrial accident” to have taken place in the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, which specializes in coronaviruses since the 2000s.8
I remind you that the precursor to HIV came from primates. What are sequences from a monkey virus doing in a bat virus? Did some bat from China have a torrid affair with an African monkey? I think not.
Why are we not allowed to ask the most basic questions about this virus and its origins? China doesn’t want us to know, and I think there are elements of the US government which do not want us to know as well.
***
Let’s talk about another misogynistic gatekeeper in science, Dr. John Coffin, an initial supporter, who became my most fervent critic and
nemesis.
What caused the change?
On October 8, 2009, Coffin and his fellow collaborator, Jonathon Stoye, wrote an accompanying opinion piece to our Science article entitled, “A New Virus for Old Diseases?”9 Coffin clearly reviewed our manuscript and got the NCI to allocate somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand dollars to develop reagents to test for the virus BEFORE our October 2009 publication in Science.
Now, prior to the XMRV issue I’d never met John Coffin. Both Coffin and Frank received their doctorates in 1972, but Coffin always seemed to act toward Frank like a know-it-all older brother. When Frank had told Coffin early in his career that he was trying to isolate a disease-causing human retrovirus, Coffin told him, “Don’t bother. They don’t exist.”
Frank then isolated the first identified disease-causing human retrovirus, HTLV-1, and then a few years later HIV burst on the scene, killing millions, and proving to everyone on the planet that retroviruses could cause disease.
Dr. Coffin wasn’t setting himself up to have a good track record with predictions.
Although I suspected it at the time, but couldn’t prove it, I believed John Coffin was one of the three anonymous reviewers of our 2009 XMRV paper in the journal, Science, which kicked off everything.
When Coffin was interviewed by documentary film director, Michael Mazzola, he admitted he was one of the three anonymous reviewers of the 2009 Science paper. Scientific ethics requires that if you are an anonymous reviewer on a paper, you refrain from public comment.
Bad move for Coffin, because that means his subsequent work, stage-managing the XMRV issue in the scientific community, broke the rules of scientific ethics.
Not that I expect him to ever be prosecuted.
The good ole’ boys of science protect their own, and Coffin is one of them.
I just thought it’s something I should mention for the record.
In addition to his position at Tufts University, Coffin in 2009 held a curious title, “Special Advisor to Director,” for HIV drug resistance at the NCI.10 This was an unusual arrangement because in 1995 Coffin had been hired by an Inter-Personal Agreement (IPA) from Tufts University to run the HIV drug resistance program. An IPA is only supposed to run for three years, but Coffin had remained with the HIV drug resistance program for ten years.
This was done by simply creating a new title for him.
When you’re part of the group that makes the rules, it’s easy to find a way to break them.
Along with Dr. Stuart Le Grice, Coffin organized the July 22, 2009 “Public Health Implications of XMRV” meeting at the Center for Cancer Research Division of the National Cancer Institute to discuss my findings, as well as those of others on the health implications of XMRV.
This was the confidential summary of the meeting and we covered it at length in chapter eight of our first book, Plague:
In 2006, the human retrovirus XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) was identified and reported to be associated with certain cases of prostate cancer. Although the public health limitations of this finding were not immediately clear, a series of presentations at the most recent Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory meeting on Retroviruses provided additional support for this linkage and suggested that the number of individuals infected with XMRV is significant to be a cause for public concern. In view of these developments, it was deemed appropriate for NCI [National Cancer Institute] to convene a small group of intramural and extramural scientists and clinicians with expertise in this area to provide the NCI leadership with recommendations on future directions.11
Frank was again taking the lead in a critical investigation regarding public health. Coffin probably didn’t want to be caught flat-footed again, the way he had with HTLV-1 and HIV.
For better or worse, Coffin was going to control XMRV.
A couple critical things stood out from this summary.
First, XMRV had first been found in association with prostate cancer in 2006 by a PCR-based technology, spearheaded by Dr. Joseph DeRisi of the University of California, San Francisco. Never had it been isolated and associated with ANY disease until my team isolated it from patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and mantle cell lymphoma in 2009. ME/CFS occurs mainly in women. Anthony Fauci and others dismissed the disease thirty years earlier by declaring the patients were simply crazy or suffering from conversion disorder. In others words, they were mainly career women who just couldn’t handle the stress of the male-dominated corporate world. One day these women woke up and simply didn’t have the stamina to survive in a man’s world. It’s incredible to me, even though I lived through it, that these misogynistic gatekeepers of science have been allowed to keep their positions over the last three decades.
Further, others were finding troubling results like we did in association with various conditions. We did not present at the 2009 Cold Springs Harbor conference, because our manuscript was submitted May 4, 2009, and was confidential. But John Coffin certainly knew about it.
Finally, this meeting took place at the end of July 2009, while our results wouldn’t be published in Science until October 2009. The only explanation that makes sense to me is the public health to have a good battle plan in hand when this was revealed to the public.
They didn’t want to start a “panic.”
This is a summary of Coffin’s talk at the invitation-only July 22, 2009 meeting to discuss XMRV:
Dr. Coffin discussed the properties of XMRV and its relationship to xenotropic murine leukemia virus (XMLV). He pointed out that different XMRV isolates are very closely related to, yet distinct from, endogenous proviruses found in the sequenced genome of an inbred mouse.
These observations alleviate concerns of laboratory contamination with virus or DNA from laboratory mice but are consistent with very recent, perhaps ongoing transmission from a wild-mouse reservoir into the human population. However, it is also possible that another animal species has been the vector for zoonotic infection.12
Let’s break it down. There is a well-known mouse virus, XMLV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus), but while XMRV is very similar, it is “distinct” from XMLV. The genetic evidence was “consistent with very recent, perhaps ongoing transmission from a wild-mouse reservoir into the human population.”
My coauthor, Kent, probably in about 2010, had asked me, “Judy, where was the first outbreak of chronic fatigue syndrome?” I told him I didn’t know.
He did some research and came back with an answer.
It took place in 1934–1935 among 198 doctors and nurses at Los Angeles County Hospital, who were working during a polio epidemic.
But curiously, the disease did not appear among any of the patients.
What was different about the medical staff?
It turns out they’d been given an experimental polio vaccine that was grown in mouse brain tissue, along with an immune system booster preserved in thimerosal, a recently developed mercury derivative.
The vaccine was developed by Dr. Maurice Brodie, a young Canadian physician who worked at both the New York City Health Department and New York University.13 Money for the vaccine came from the Warm Springs Foundation, created by President Franklin Roosevelt, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation.14
You can call me a cynic, but it seems if you want to start a cover-up, it would be good to have on your side an academic institution, the president of the United States, and a tremendously rich health foundation. And if it was covered up in the 1930s, others who followed would be expected to conceal the information from further generations.
In the early days, before everything went terribly wrong with the 198 doctors and nurses at Los Angeles County Hospital, here’s what Dr. Maurice Brodie wrote:
From these experiments, it appears that of all the ordinary laboratory animals, the mouse should be the best in attempting to produce poliomyelitis, for the virus survives in its brain for a longer time than in that of the guinea pig, rabbit, or rat.15
What most people don’t realize about the viruses that are used in vaccines is you’ve got to first grow the virus and it’s often very difficult to find a tissue in which the virus will grow to the extent needed. Brodie went on in the article to describe how he used the mouse brain tissue.
The passage material was a mixture of 1 part of active virus and 4 parts of a suspension of mouse brain and brain stem. The material from the 24th and 45th passage injected into a series of mice in multiple inoculations, produced no effect in the mice nor did the virus in either of these passages survive for a longer time than in the preliminary experiment, when it was demonstrated in the mouse brain, 3 days but not 5 days after intracerebral injection.16
This vaccine was given to “300 nurses and physicians” from the Los Angeles County Hospital, as detailed in an article by Maurice Brodie and William Park.17
But when later researchers looked at the question of whether the mouse biological material was a good medium in which to grow polio virus, then inject into the bloodstream of a human being, they had concerns. The yellow fever vaccine also used mouse brain tissue, which was then injected into monkeys prior to injecting it into human beings. (As an aside, Dr. Amy Yasko, a leading autism doctor, has noted that some of the very earliest cases of autism were among the children of tropical disease researchers, the very families who would be expected to receive a yellow fever vaccination.)
A presentation made by the World Health Organization in 1953 specifically addressed the question of whether the mouse brain tissue used in the yellow fever vaccine presented unexpected dangers:
[T]wo main objections to this vaccine have been voiced, because of the possibility that: (i) the mouse brains employed in its preparation may be contaminated with a virus pathogenic for man although latent in mice … or may be the cause of demyelinating encephalomyelitis: (ii) the use, as an antigen, of a virus with enhanced neurotropic properties may be followed by serious reactions involving the central nervous systems.18
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