Ending Plague

by Francis W. Ruscetti

  Does the attack on our work make a little more sense now? We were telling the big boys of science that they were playing with very dangerous toys and needed to shut down their labs immediately. Recall in response to data showing seroconversion of lab workers, John Coffin stated on July 22, 2009, “We cannot afford to retrofit our labs to biosafety level three (BSL3) facilities,” to prevent escape of recombinant mouse viruses.

  You don’t need the WHOLE infectious virus to cause harm. It’s enough to simply have a partial genetic sequence from a virus to cause harm. In scientific terms, these are often referred to as “defective viruses,” meaning they do not cause harm. If a researcher finds a partial genetic sequence from a virus, he will simply ignore it.

  Yet, claiming that a partial genetic sequence from a virus cannot cause harm may be the single biggest body of data overlooked in the history of virology, especially retrovirology.

  The other main part of my talk was that when the immune system falters, it also allows for infection by other viruses, as well as the expression of endogenous viruses like HERV-W, a family of viruses integrated into our DNA since the dawn of man. It has only recently been appreciated that endogenous viruses make up 8 percent of our genome, have a low level of expression, and are critical in the regulation of our innate immune responses, primarily the interferons.

  We have known since HIV/AIDS that these patients have high levels of expression of endogenous viruses and other dormant viruses, like herpes viruses.

  On the next slide, I listed the dangers which might be unleashed by these unsafe practices of scientific laboratories.

  First, you might generate a new, replication-competent retrovirus never encountered by humans (which happens in every two-week production of attenuated viral vaccines).

  Second, in an immune-compromised individual, it might allow for the expression of a previously silenced virus (an endogenous virus), which will cause a similar cytokine storm. We appreciated this back in 2004 when the expression of the HERV-W envelope in the brain and spinal cord was shown to cause a cytokine signature like multiple sclerosis (MS). This was like the signature of XMRV infection that we published in 2011 for ME/CFS, another disease characterized by inflammation of the brain and spinal cord.

  Third, you might have a “defective” XMRV, which expressed only viral proteins, but those proteins, if expressed, could still cause disease.

  And last, these defective viruses might affect regulatory expression of small inhibitory or siRNA, micro or miRNA, or long chain noncoding lcncRNA, a hypothesis Richie Shoemaker had discussed with us that he saw in ME/CFS and Lyme disease patients with extremely high levels of TGF-beta. Aberrant expression of all of these can cause imbalances in the functioning of the immune system.

  The challenge then becomes how do we get all the prisoners back in their cells and fix the immune system damage unleashed by the retrovirus? In one of the slides, I listed my hypothesis as:

  A family of human gamma retroviruses that selectively infects individuals with loss of function polymorphisms/mutations of the cancer (disease) susceptibility gene RNASEL, and that infection increases abnormal properties such as growth and/or the metastatic properties of the tumor, stomal cells, and immune cells.7

  What I believe is that these pathogens are essentially causing “damage at a distance,” meaning they trigger an inflammatory cytokine storm which leads to oxidative stress and disease. This inflammatory storm also impacts mitochondrial function. I listed four important concepts in the wrap-up of my presentation:

  1. Recombination events in animal and human cells can generate families of infectious related gamma retroviruses.

  2. Greatest concern is that they may acquire the ability to infect humans. (Though I knew they had. John Coffin and the misogynist gatekeepers of science had silenced my voice.)

  3. Are XMRV sequences and proteins important in human disease pathogenesis?

  4. Therapies to counteract environmentally induced aberrant gene RCR expression, inflammation, and immune dysregulation urgently need to be addressed.8

  I felt in 2013 I’d done an excellent job of laying out the previous research on XMRV, what Frank and I had contributed by associating it with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), our work isolating the virus and showing it was infectious, and what other researchers had discovered, such as Gary Owens with XMRV-2 (B4RV), and Adi Gazdar, showing how this virus could float through the air.

  That’s the way science is supposed to work, right? We acknowledge the work of those who came before us, tell the truth about our own contributions, and then praise those researchers who went further with our findings.

  None of that remotely describes what Robert Gallo tried to do to this body of work in 2016.

  ***

  In June 2016, Gallo and others published an opinion paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) with the curious title, “Extracellular Vesicles and Viruses: Are They Close Relatives?”9

  Are you thinking to yourself, oh great, “extracellular vesicles,” another scientific term I don’t understand? All retroviruses bud off the host cell membranes. The membranes package the RNA protecting it from degradation by a healthy immune system. Back in the 1980s, Bruce Lipton was the first to describe exosomes, shuttling regulatory RNA from cell to cell in a normal immune response.

  Here’s the opening paragraph of Gallo’s article:

  Cell in vivo and ex vivo release membrane vesicles. These extracellular vesicles (EVs) are 50-100-nm-sized lipid bilayer-enclosed entities containing proteins and RNA. Not long ago, EVs were considered to be “cellular dust” or garbage and did not attract much attention. However, it has recently been found that EVs can have important biological functions and that in both structural and functional aspects they resemble viruses. This resemblance becomes even more evident with EVs produced by cells productively infected with viruses. Such EVs contain viral proteins and parts of viral genetic material. In this article, we emphasize the similarity between EVs and viruses, in particular retroviruses. Moreover, we emphasize that in the specific case of virus-infected cells, it’s almost impossible to distinguish EVs from (noninfectious) viruses and to separate them.10

  The final sentence of the paragraph is the real kicker, the place where the dishonesty of the man should be clear to any person who pays attention: “Moreover, we emphasize that in the specific case of virus-infected cells, it is almost impossible to distinguish EVs from (noninfectious) viruses and separate them.”

  That statement is simply not true.

  Is Gallo going to rewrite the history of retrovirology and explain away the crimes of the past four decades? It is NOT impossible to distinguish extracellular vesicles and retroviruses.

  That is why one would use an electron micrograph.

  It is the gold standard to distinguish between families of retroviruses.

  Electron micrographs absolutely and unequivocally distinguish viruses from exosomes and extracellular vesicles. Retroviruses and coronaviruses have envelope or spike proteins poking through the host lipid bilayer. And the core of the virus has a characteristic pattern not seen in exosomes or extracellular vesicles packaging mRNA or defective viral genomes.

  Please don’t fall for this latest Gallo lie.

  ***

  As I mentioned before, the result of our New York Times bestselling book Plague of Corruption and the video “Plandemic” is that scholars were waking up, seeing the connections, and the possible existing solutions to the problems. After nearly a decade in exile, I was being invited again to give scientific talks at medical conferences.

  And in March 2021, I was invited to give a talk to the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs (MAPS) and the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (AOMT). These were back-to-back conferences in Florida and they’d even booked me a first-class ticket. Not only would I be educating doctors, but I would be receiving an award for courage in medicine. On March 10, 2021, I had a flight booked from the Santa Barba
ra, California airport to Florida on Skywest Airlines (American Eagle), part of American Airlines.

  I arrived at the airport an hour before my flight and wore the triple layer heavyweight silver mesh pleated mask prescribed by my doctor because I have a precancerous esophageal condition known as Barrett’s esophagus. (This was probably exacerbated by XMRV infection, because like many of the lab workers, I was a control who acquired XMRV via a lab infection expressing not only antibodies but high levels of envelope protein.)

  I went through security with my silver mask and boarded the plane second in line, past two gate agents.

  It was odd when the flight attendant said to me, “Welcome aboard, Ms. Mikovits.”

  It had been a long time since I’d flown first-class, and I’d forgotten that perk. They welcome you by name.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  “Would you like a hand sanitizer?” the flight attendant offered.

  “No, thank you,” I replied. Have you ever read the list of ingredients in the typical hand sanitizer? Give me the good old-fashioned soap and water every time. Someday soon, a good products liability lawyer is going to get those products banned.

  I proceeded to my seat, 2D, and began loading my luggage in the overhead bin.

  The flight attendant followed behind me and said, “You cannot wear that mask.”

  I turned to her and replied, “Pardon me? It is an appropriate mask. It’s a triple layered mesh and silver mask, prescribed to me by my doctor because I have a lung disease.”

  The flight attendant thrust one of those blue, chemically treated, paper masks that violate California’s Prop 65 laws at me and threatened, “You must agree to wear this mask for the entire flight, or you will be removed.”

  “I cannot say or do that,” I replied, knowing this was unlikely to go well for me. “You’re not a medical professional, and there are no masks ‘approved’ by the FDA, CDC, or any other authority. Additionally, airlines and airports are places of public accommodation and people are guaranteed equal access, regardless of medical condition or religious belief, as well as other rights guaranteed under state and federal laws.” I had a copy of our book, The Case Against Masks: Ten Reasons Why Mask Use Should be Limited, published in the summer of 2020, and electron micrographs of the nanofiber and microbial particulates on the slides I was to present at the conference.

  Amazon had carried the book for a few weeks and then banned it, so I brought the only two copies I had with me, which I had autographed for the organizers of the meeting as a thank you gift.

  By coincidence, our publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, has another book, The Case for Masks, which is sold on Amazon. Got it? Amazon allows the sale of a book in favor of masks but doesn’t allow you to read a book suggesting there should be limits on mask use.

  That’s why, when that flight attendant confronted me about my mask, I knew my rights. I’d done my homework, like I always do.

  I sat down in seat 2D as I continued to talk to the flight attendant, challenging her to show me any evidence that my mask wasn’t acceptable. She did not produce any evidence.

  The police were called by the flight attendant and the pilot.

  Now, think about this situation. I am a sixty-two-year-old woman, and I was complying with what I believed to be illegal mandates by wearing a safe mask for my medical condition, which was exacerbated when I acquired a contagious cancer and ME/CFS-associated retrovirus infection doing critical research for humanity. I later came to believe this flight attendant must have known who I was, no doubt believing the lies spread by the mainstream media about me, and decided it was her day to knock down an enemy of the people.

  I refused to leave, saying I had violated no laws or rules and demanded they call the sheriff, who had vowed to protect the constitutional rights of his constituents.

  The police officer became excessively violent with me (I was also trying to film with my cellphone at the time) as I finally agreed to stand up and unbuckled my seat belt.

  The officer them grabbed my left arm, violently twisted it behind my back, and so brutally pushed me up against the window that I screamed and saw stars. I was handcuffed in that position, and they took my cellphone. They left my mask in my handcuffed hands and marched me down the jet-way, thereby implying I refused to wear a mask. I heard other passengers yelling obscenities and statements like “Throw away the key!”

  I was then walked to the street where there were two waiting SUVs. They demanded I sign the citation of criminal trespass, or I’d be taken away to jail. I repeatedly refused to sign and asked them to call the sheriff so I could plead my case directly to him.

  My left arm was in great pain from being brutally thrown against the window, and not wanting to spend any more time in jail than I already had in my life, I signed the citation and was released.

  I gave my presentation the next day over Zoom, from my five-hundred-square-foot apartment in Ventura, California, and got generous applause when I finished.

  I soon got legal representation and will take legal action against all involved in this unnecessary and violent assault of me.

  This madness has got to stop.

  ***

  That’s my life.

  I get physically assaulted in airports even while wearing a mask, denounced in the mainstream media, and attacked in print in scientific journals. And, of course, they won’t allow me to publish a response. In July 2020, the journal, AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, published an article with the title, “Fake Science: XMRV, COVID-19, and the Toxic Legacy of Dr. Judy Mikovits.” Here’s the abstract:

  One cannot spend more than five minutes on social media at the moment without finding a link to some conspiracy theory or other regarding the origin of SARS-CoV2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. From the virus being deliberately released as a bioweapon to pharmaceutical companies blocking the trials of natural remedies to boost their dangerous drugs and vaccines, the Internet is rife with far-fetched rumors. And predictably, now that the first immunization trials have started, the antivaccine lobby has latched onto most of them. In the last week, the trailer for a new “bombshell documentary” Plandemic has been doing the rounds, gaining notoriety for being repeatedly removed from YouTube and Facebook. We usually would not pay much heed to such things, but for retrovirologists like us, the name associated with these claims is unfortunately too familiar: Dr. Judy Mikovits.11

  How would you feel if you woke up one day and read that about yourself as you were having your morning coffee?

  Let’s talk for a moment about the claims I started making in 2020 as the insanity of the COVID-19 crisis was kicking into high gear. Probably the thing that made my colleagues in public health the angriest was that I was claiming SARS-CoV-2 was most likely a release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And why did I say that? Because others in the scientific community had been talking about the risk of “gain of function” research for several years.

  This is from an article published in the journal, Nature, on November 12, 2015, by Declan Butler with the title, “Engineered Bat Virus Stirs Debate Over Risky Research.”

  An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus – one related to the virus that created SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) – has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

  In an article published in Nature Medicine on November 9, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells – proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them.12

  I genuinely don’t understand the criticism of the scientific community when I’m simply pointing out what they’ve said i
n their own journals. I had nothing to do with this publication. I’m simply drawing people’s attention to it. And how is it that something that scientists were actually debating in 2015 suddenly became the ultimate act of scientific heresy in 2020, when I, along with others, commented on it? The article continued:

  But other virologists question whether information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If this virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.

  The argument is essentially a rerun of the debate over whether to allow lab research that increases the virulence, ease of spread or host range of dangerous pathogens – what is known as ‘gain of function’ research. In October 2014, the US government imposed a moratorium on federal funding of such research on the viruses that cause SARS, influenza, and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, a deadly disease caused by a virus that sporadically jumps from camels to people.)

  The latest study was already under way before the US moratorium began, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) [actually the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci] allowed it to proceed while it was under review by the agency, says Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a coauthor of the study. The NIH eventually concluded that the work was not so risky as to fall under the moratorium, he says.13

  I don’t know about you, but the conclusion that such work was “not so risky” might be the biggest miscalculation in history since the US Navy decided their fleet at Pearl Harbor wasn’t at any risk from a Japanese attack.

  Remember that all through 2020 I was attacked for saying that the virus likely escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

  On March 26, 2021, the former director of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield, finally caught up to my opinion in an interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and covered in an article titled, “Former CDC Director Surprises CNN’s Sanjay Gupta by Revealing He Believes COVID-19 Originated in a Wuhan Lab.” From the opening of the article: