Dr. Paul Cheney, one of the leading experts on ME/CFS, was particularly concerned about the Lipkin study’s exclusion of those with abnormal thyroid function tests:
Thyroiditis is fairly common in this illness. And there was a recent report, I believe out of the UK, which said that 82% of people complaining of chronic fatigue had evidence of thyroiditis. Another paper showed that one of the tissue foci for HHV-6A [a herpes virus suspected in chronic fatigue syndrome] is the thyroid. Jim Jones, way back when [1980s] in describing the first cases of CFS, said 85% of them had auto-antibodies against the thyroid. So, by definition, 85 percent of ME/CFS patients have thyroiditis.35
Cheney went on to say that the exclusion of patients with “medical or psychiatric illness that might be associated with fatigue,” was a “giant head-scratcher.”36 In summation he said, “This is a medical condition associated with fatigue. So, they’re trying to exclude the very condition they’re supposed to be looking for.”37
You may ask why did I stay, and if I had so much importance, why wasn’t the study done correctly? We told much of this story in our first two books, Plague and Plague of Corruption, but I’ll summarize it here.
In addition, the timeline of events was not clear to us as much of what occurred happened after I was jailed and while I was locked out of the literature and under a virtual gag order as an NIH-designated “fugitive from justice” for five years, unable to set foot on NIH property in Frederick, Maryland, or at Fort Detrick.
It’s difficult to prove who authored this series of outrages, but I believe it had to come from the very top, which means Anthony Fauci.
First, the study was highly unusual in that when the study was unblinded it was done so first in a highly secret government conference call, led by Anthony Fauci, Harold Varmus, and Francis Collins. I know this because the security on the call was voice recognition technology which identified all the participants. I was in my car, somewhere on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.
When I heard the verdict of no association, I cried.
Once again, this population would have no voice or treatment.
But then Lipkin said there was evidence that 6 percent of the controls had evidence of XMRV infection and my spirits instantly lifted. I thought Thank you Jesus as I said out loud, “That’s still twenty-five million Americans.” These were people who could be prevented from ever developing ME/CFS, autism, autoimmune disease, and cancer.
Next, if you go to the list of study authors, you’ll see there are twenty-five listed authors, with John Coffin being one of them. If it’s true that he was one of the anonymous reviewers of the Science paper, that’s another ethical violation on his part. So, I was one of twenty-five authors, which meant my input counted for about 4 percent. Do you think the deck was stacked against me?
And what if I’d refused to lend my name to the paper? The story would have been that I wasn’t willing to submit my work to rigorous analysis. And all the while, both Lipkin and Coffin were privately telling me, “Judy, we know there are retroviruses involved in this disease, but we just need to solve the VP-62 issue and get this behind us. We’re going to do more research with you on those other viruses.”
To my shame, I believed them. But as soon as the study was over, Lipkin, despite his promises to include us in future studies, never called or returned the calls we made to him.
***
In my opinion, the Lipkin study was nothing more than commissioned fraud, and Lipkin was rewarded to the tune of thirty-one million dollars by his good friend, Anthony Fauci, with the establishment in March 2014 of a Center for Research in Diagnostics and Discovery (CRDD), under the auspices of a new NAIAD program titled Centers of Excellence for Translational Research.
They claimed:
The CRDD brings together leading investigators in microbial and human genetics, engineering, microbial ecology and public health to develop insights into mechanisms of disease and methods for detecting infectious agents, characterizing microflora and identifying biomarkers that can be used to guide clinical management.38
And who else was part of this new institution? None other than Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. You may have heard that name recently. He was one of the top American researchers studying “gain of function” research in coronaviruses in collaboration with the so-called “bat lady of Wuhan,” Dr. Shi Zhengili. From the New York Times on June 14, 2021:
Ralph Baric, a prominent University of North Carolina expert in coronaviruses who signed the open letter in Science, said that although a natural origin of the virus was likely, he supported a review of what level of biosafety precautions were taken in studying bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute. Dr. Baric conducted N.I.H.-approved gain-of-function research at his lab at the University of North Carolina using information on viral genetic sequences provided by Dr. Shi.39
Getting the spin? Yes, Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin’s collaborator, was conducting dangerous “gain of function” research on bat coronaviruses, but it was “N.I.H. approved.”
Are you feeling better, now?
And if you think I’ve been beating a dead horse in going after Robert Gallo, well, the New York Times uses him as a character witness in defense of Dr. Shi Zhengili.
“She’s a stellar scientist – extremely careful, with a rigorous work ethic,” said Dr. Robert C. Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology employs nearly 300 people and is home to one of only two Chinese labs that have been given the highest security designation, Biosafety Level 4. Dr. Shi leads the institute’s work on emerging infectious diseases and over the years, her group has collected over 10,000 bat samples from around China.
Under China’s centralized approach to scientific research, the institute answers to the Communist Party, which wants scientists to serve national goals. “Science has no borders, but scientists have a motherland,” Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, said in a speech to scientists last year.40
The disgraced Robert Gallo is now a character witness for a communist Chinese scientist who likely unleashed our greatest modern plague. Kind of makes everything we’ve been writing about Gallo pale in comparison, right?
Another one of Ian Lipkin’s seven collaborators in his new institute, Dr. David Relman of Stanford University, seems to tacitly acknowledge that Dr. Shi and her colleagues may have killed more than half a million Americans, and many more worldwide, but doesn’t want us to be unpleasant with the potential author of all this suffering and death:
“This has nothing to do with fault or guilt,” said David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University and coauthor of a recent letter in the journal Science, signed by 18 scientists, that called for a transparent investigation into all viable scenarios, including a lab leak. The letter urged labs and health agencies to open their records to the public.41
Isn’t it refreshing to know that a Stanford professor is encouraging us to not be harsh with a scientist who may be responsible for the death of more than half a million Americans? Do you ever get the feeling that many of these people in so-called “public health” aren’t really interested in hearing the public’s questions about their health?
But I want to be fair and give the last word to Dr. Shi Zhengili. From the New York Times article:
In an interview with Science magazine last July, she said that Mr. Trump owed her an apology for claiming the virus came her lab. On social media, she said people who raised similar questions should “shut your stinky mouths.”42
So much for Gallo’s claim she was a “stellar scientist” who was “extremely careful with a rigorous work ethic.”
Still, I was looking for the silver lining in these dark clouds of working with Ian Lipkin and company and continued to believe it was there.
It’s just that the scientific community and press wanted to ignore them.
For example, the paper noted they’d found
evidence of XMRV in 6 percent of the control population and 6 percent of the patient population.43
By their exclusions, they’d made both populations essentially the same, or at the very least, they’d chosen the relatively healthy chronic fatigue syndrome patients whose immune systems were somewhat keeping the virus dormant.
With a current population of 320 million people, that means a little over nineteen million people (not the twenty-five million I’d initially thought) are currently infected with these viruses, and the expression of just the gamma-retroviral envelope alone is strongly associated with disease development.
But the leaders of our public health establishment won’t tell you that.
***
But you might say, well, you’re just a Lipkin critic.
I’m sure the people who know and love and have worked more intimately with Ian Lipkin paint a much brighter picture of the man. Probably no one has been closer to Ian Lipkin than his longtime collaborator, Dr. Mady Hornig, with whom he also had a long-term romantic relationship, a fact which was widely known.
In May 2017, Hornig, whom I hold equally responsible for the destruction of my and Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s scientific reputations, sued Dr. Ian Lipkin and included details of their romantic relationship. As reported in Science magazine:
In the lawsuit, filed on 15 May in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Hornig alleges that Lipkin for years has discriminated against her on the basis of her sex and created a hostile work environment, violating U.S. and New York civil rights laws. In particular, it alleges that Lipkin took credit for Hornig’s work; diverted or misused funds, thus delaying publication of Hornig’s research results; and improperly added himself as principal investigator to grants.44
Lipkin is alleged to have engaged in abusive behavior with his longtime collaborator, as well as engaging in some unethical and illegal acts. The Science article went into further detail regarding the allegations:
The lawsuit alleged that since 2013, Lipkin has refused to allow Hornig to post about her own work on the center’s website unless the posting included him; required her to get his permission before giving invited talks; routinely presented Hornig’s work as his own in meetings with collaborators; blocked her from meetings with potential donors; and silenced her at meetings, “sometimes kicking Plaintiff on the shins under the table … or saying ‘shut up, Mady’ or ‘shut the f**k up, Mady’ at meetings attended by both Columbia and non-Columbia colleagues. He also, she alleges, has repeatedly refused to support her for full promotion to full professor, even while supporting a male colleague.45
What Mady describes is a situation I’ve seen far too often with powerful men in science. They hold the establishment line and any woman who threatens that, or their fragile male egos, should be on notice. You have no idea what the wrath of an enraged and powerful male scientist can do to your life. And what should be most concerning to everybody interested in science, or how research money for crippling conditions is spent, are these allegations by Hornig:
Among the claims of misuse of funds, Hornig alleges Lipkin paid the salary of a researcher studying CFS/ME [chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis] with money from the Simmons Autism Research Initiative, which was supposed to be dedicated to an autism study. The suit also claims Columbia had to return more than $53,000 to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) because Hornig refused to sign off on improper use of autism grants.46
These are serious allegations, and if they were not true, I’d expect Mady Hornig to be fired for bringing them.
However, if they were true, I’d expect Ian Lipkin to be fired.
And yet, both continue to work at Columbia University, so what can I conclude?
The system protects itself once again?
And there are even more recent allegations that Ian Lipkin may be either a witting or unwitting agent of influence for the communist party of China.
In an article published by Fox News on July 1, 2021 with the title, “Columbia Professor Who Thanked Fauci for Wuhan Lab Messaging Has Links to Chinese Communist Party Members,” it was detailed how not only has Lipkin praised Fauci for discounting the Wuhan “lab leak” theory, but also his close association with the Chinese communists:
In 2016, the Chinese government presented Lipkin with the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award, the country’s highest honor to foreign scientists. The ceremony was presided by President Xinping.
“I am deeply honored by this award,” Lipkin said at the time. “It solidifies my relationship with dear friends and colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health, and with the people of China.”
In early January of this year [2021), Lipkin was presented with a medal at the Chinese Consulate of New York. China’s central government, central Military Commission, and State Council provided the award.
Lipkin also praised China’s response and transparency early on in the coronavirus pandemic, despite indications that the Chinese government engaged in a cover-up.47
It might be one thing to be given an award by the Chinese in 2016. Maybe a certain naiveté was involved and we might excuse it.
But to accept an award from the Chinese communist government in January 2021, after a Chinese virus, which likely escaped from their lab, killed hundreds of thousands of American citizens as well as millions around the globe?
Something just doesn’t seem right with this picture.
Just for the record, Frank and I have never received an award from the communist party of China.
***
The misogynistic gatekeepers in science wouldn’t be complete without their “cleaner,” the fix-it guy who cleans up evidence from the crime scene, arranges for disposal of the dead body, and gives everybody their alibis.
In our current situation, that person is none other than Harold Varmus. Here’s how Varmus describes himself in his biography:
I have also worked in significant leadership positions: as Director of the NIH [National Institutes of Health] from 1993 to 1999, as president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center from 2000 to 2010, and as Director of the National Cancer Institute from 2010 until April 2015, when I became the Lewis Thomas University Professor at Weil Cornell Medicine. I am also a Senior Associate Member of the New York Genome Center and teach a course in “Science and Society” at the CUNY honors college.48
People have talked about downward mobility, but Varmus must win the prize for that, just as he won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for the discovery of retroviral oncogenes.
In plain English, that means retroviruses insert some of their genes into your genes, and those genes in turn cause cancer.
If you’re not worried by now about retroviruses because of chronic fatigue syndrome or autism, you should probably add cancer to the mix.
Might that have anything to do with our sky-high rates of cancer?
Let’s go through Harold’s career as he describes it. From 1993 to 1999 he was director of the NIH, which is the most powerful health agency in the entire government. Dr. Anthony Fauci, as head NIAID, was under Harold Varmus in the chain of command. According to its website, the NIH:
The NIH invests about $41.7* billion annually in medical research for the American people. More than 80 percent of NIH’s funding is awarded for extramural research, largely through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state.49
The NIH is an enormous funder of medical research and Harold Varmus, as the head, oversaw all that for six years. The yearly salary for the director can be as high as $230,000 a year, depending on your political connections. My guess? With a Nobel Prize under his belt, he got top dollar. As described by the NIH website:
The Office of the Director is the central office at NIH for its 27 Institutes and Centers. The OD is responsible for setting policy for NIH and for planni
ng, managing, and coordinating the programs and activities of all the NIH components. OD program offices include the Office of AIDS Research and the Office of Research on Women’s Health, among others.50
What are some of those “27 Institutes and Centers?” Well, the NCI is one. So is Anthony Fauci’s NIAID, which he’s run since 1984. The National Institute of Aging is another one.
Varmus spent six years at the top of the medical research funding pyramid. From there he went on to run the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 2000 to 2010. It was reported that the 2016 salary for the then director of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Craig Thompson, was $6.7 million.51 I think we can safely assume Varmus’s salary was somewhere in that range.
But then the XMRV problem came up, and there was the issue of Frank Ruscetti at the NCI. How could that problem be resolved?
Call in Harold Varmus to shut things down.
The current director of the NCI, Norman Sharpless, earns $375,000, just under the $384,625 earned by Anthony Fauci.52 We’re supposed to believe that the man who had been in charge of the government’s twenty-seven medical institutes and centers, then headed up a wealthy cancer charity where he made several million dollars a year, was only too happy to go to a job at one of those institutes, and he’d only made a couple hundred thousand a year?
Prior to 2010, the NCI was run by a fine man named John Niederhuber, who supported Frank’s work.
But with Varmus in the henhouse, that was about to change.
With Harold Varmus at the helm, he brought in a group usually consisting of John Coffin and Steve Hughes.
Frank recalled to me that at one point, Hughes said to him, “This isn’t an inquisition.”
“Sure looks like one,” Frank grumbled back.
I believe it was Varmus who ordered Frank’s premature retirement in 2013 and also gave the order that all XMRV samples and materials were to be destroyed.
Ending Plague Page 24