The Plandemic Video, and the Casualty of Truth: The Questionable Science on Both Sides of This Issue (1)
The video Plandemic, with Judy Mikovits, PhD, received over 8 million views before all major social media and video websites censored her and this video. Although there were some errors of fact in the video that various fact-checking websites have confirmed, no other scientist or individual has been censored so completely without being given an opportunity to respond to claims against her assertions.
One of the 50 studies that Dr. Mikovits conducted suggested that vaccines were contaminated with a retrovirus from mouse brains. This study was published in Science magazine, but then retracted due to a replication study that did not confirm the initial results.
Every year, hundreds of studies are replicated and found to not work, and yet, hardly any of these studies are retracted, and virtually no scientist is censored to the degree that Dr. Mikovits has been.
Strong evidence from Stanford professor John Ioannidis, MD, analyzed the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three of the most respected medical journals in America. He found that replication studies discovered that 41% of these studies had either been directly contradicted, or their benefits of the treatment were extremely minimal rather than significant.
Dr. Ioannidis’s several reviews of medical research have led him to conclude that “most medical research findings are false.” Conventional medical research and vaccine safety studies are not held to the same high level of scientific assessment that Dr. Mikovits’ work has been evaluated.
“The only means to fight the plague is honesty.” Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
In the Spring of this year, a 26-minute video, called Plandemic, has seemingly become more viral than the pandemic itself. The video is primarily an interview with Judy Mikovits, PhD and her controversial ideas about the modern-day pandemic, its sources, and effective ways to prevent and treat it. There were over 8 million views of this video in just a couple of weeks, and it would have been a lot more but YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and Google chose to censor it completely (its transcript is here).
Ultimately, as smart and as accomplished Dr. Mikovits may be, there are a number of facts and figures she gives in this short video that clearly are not accurate, and yet, one of the real problems with censorship is that literally no mainstream media has interviewed Dr. Mikovits to enable her to admit to these errors or to respond to them. The fact that the leading social media websites, search engines, and mainstream media sources have fully censored her, one must wonder if she is stepping on some big and vulnerable economic interests.
If these same media outlets were going to censor every physician, scientist, politician, or corporate leader for providing selective misinformation, the media and the internet might be a lot quieter. But this isn’t happening. What is it about Dr. Mikovits’ ideas that are so offensive beyond reasonable discourse?
The fact is that Mikovits’ new book, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promised of Science (co-authored with attorney Kent Heckenlively), was #5 on the New York Times list of best-sellers (for the week ending May 30, 2020) suggests that she and her message has struck a nerve, a deep nerve.
The Foreword to this book was written by environmental and health lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who places Mikovits in the pantheon of scientific rebels whose discoveries were extremely threatening to orthodox science as well as to institutional or corporate giants of the day. Ultimately proven to be right, these rebels include Galileo (who suggested that the Earth was not in the center of the solar system), Ignaz Semmelweis (who held the radical notion that antiseptic solutions should be used prior to surgery), Herbert Needleman (who claimed that lead in gasoline and paint was poisoning people), and Dr. Bernice Eddy (who discovered that a cancer-causing monkey virus, SV40, had contaminated 98 million Salk polio vaccines).
These whistleblowing scientists were finally vindicated (sometimes after their deaths), but people today seem to forget that each of them experienced profound attacks against their professional careers. Their work was censored, their mental health questioned, their grants withdrawn or laboratories destroyed, and even spent time in prison. The women in this group were called ‘hysterical’ or were simply demeaned as ‘spinsters.’
Mikovits is an esteemed but presently discredited scientist who had over 50 other studies in prestigious scientific journals. In 2009 she published an article in the esteemed journal, Science, claiming that vaccines may be contaminated with a retrovirus from mouse brains and may be a cofactor or cause to an increasingly common disease known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Several other scientists later sought to replicate this work but were not able to do so. The journal Science initially ‘partially retracted’ the study in September 2011, and then completely retracted in December, 2011.
From 2006 to 2011 Mikovits was the head of research of a respected laboratory associated with the University of Nevada, but she was fired in September 2011, and later arrested for stealing some files and a computer from the laboratory. Ultimately, she was released within five days and was not charged with any crime.
Big Pharma has a history of literally going ballistic whenever scientists claim that there may be potential problems or dangers arising from vaccines. The full force of the medical and legal establishment came down hard on Dr. Mikovits. As a result of this new documentary, the scientific and mainstream media have been virtually venomous in their attacks on her. Several websites list point-by-point errors of fact from the documentary Plandemic (here, here, here, and here).
Of special concern is the fact that Dr. Mikovits participated in an effort to replicate her initial research on the possibility of contamination of vaccine with a retrovirus. After this study, she regretfully acknowledged that the retrovirus she thought was involved in chronic fatigue syndrome wasn’t there, and yet, today, she insists it or some other yet to be discovered retrovirus may be there now. Although she has yet to publish any paper since 2012 to confirm this assertion, her new book claims that her mentor, the highly prestigious scientist Frank Ruscetti, reisolated the mouse retrovirus and obtained its full sequencing (page 208). Although Ruscetti was instructed by his higher-ups to destroy all data and evidence of the retrovirus, he didn’t do so claiming that it is against federal law to do so. This body of evidence was given to the FBI and kept by Mikovits and Ruscetti.
It should also be noted that each of the leading critiques of her and her work took creative liberties in trying to make her seem more unhinged, more fringe, and more extreme than she is. For instance, when Mikovits said that people benefit from exposure to “sequences in the soil, in the sand,” Science magazine chose to play dumb and ask what she means by “sequences” when, in fact, it is widely known that exposure to bacterial sequences in soil provide great immune benefits.
Science magazine also over-simplified her perspective claiming that there is no evidence that exposure to dirt will “heal Covid-19,” but she never made that assertion, only that such exposure would benefit the immune system. The New York Times and Washington Post both sought to associate her inappropriately and inaccurately with right-wing extremists or conspiracy theorists even though interest in her ideas is way beyond such fringe groups.
Virtually every form of media who have reported on Dr. Mikovits and her new book has dubbed her anti-vaccine, even though she strongly asserts that she isn’t and claims that her work in immunotherapy is a type of vaccine. It should be noted that just because she or anyone is concerned about vaccine safety does not make that person anti-vaccine. Typically, the term, anti-vaxxer, has become an extremely derogatory term today, even though it is often used inappropriately and inaccurately. Still, this accusation is a clever way to demean a person without providing a substantive and accurate critique.
Just one example of the extreme level of attacks on Dr. Mikovits stems from her questioning the value of masks in certain circumstances in preventing spread of this viral disease and she expressed concern that the use of masks may instead increase the spread of the virus, even though the World Health Organization has also made such statements without a similar degree of pushback and attack.
A decidedly less frivolous critique of this film is that its very title, Plandemic, makes the extreme assumption that this pandemic was somehow planned.
Whether one agrees with Dr. Mikovits or not and whether one thinks she is a heretic or a hero, we have to assume that there is something extremely fishy going on with the extreme level of censorship she and her ideas are experiencing. Despite having a book near the top of the New York Times bestseller list, she has not been interviewed by a single major media in the print, radio, TV, or internet medias, and every article written about her to date has not even sought to get her response to any of the charges. For the record, no story in recent history has so obviously attacked a serious scientist and have so carefully and completely avoided giving this scientist a voice.
It is almost as though science was a religion and that we should even heard about other points of view. One would think that allowing discussion on what mainstream science knows to be false would be an effective way to combat this ignorance. Instead, one must wonder if this censorship is avoiding dialog about critical topics.
Although the video Plandemic exaggerates Dr. Mikovits’ status as a scientist by saying she is “one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation,” she does have elite scientific pedigree. Her science mentor and partner in research for several decades has been Frank Ruscetti, PhD, who was the scientist to have first discovered retroviruses. Together, they published 30 studies in major scientific journals. Mikovits was even the Director of a laboratory at the National Cancer Institute from 1999 to 2001.
Prior to her getting her PhD at the George Washington University in molecular biology, she worked as a lab tech at Upjohn where her research uncovered the fact that the company’s formula for Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) could cause precancerous changes in human cell cultures. Ultimately, her work led the Canada and all of Europe to prohibit this product. If we want to have Dr. Judy Mikovits be held to high levels of accuracy, truth, and science, then we also must expect this from modern medical science and to vaccine science, especially as they relate to this pandemic.
Ultimately, modern medicine needs to look into a mirror itself to evaluate how scientific and scientifically proven modern medicine actually is today. If a study is retracted from a major scientific journal because other researchers have not been able to verify its accuracy, then, large, even extremely large numbers of studies published in medical journals over the past several decades also should be retracted.
Are retractions happening when research is not replicated that are described below, and if not, why not? Are those scientists whose studies are retracted vilified, jailed, censored by the media, and made scientist non grata for having one study out of 50 found to be incorrect? Are there certain economic interests from Big Pharma at play that are fostering such extreme vilification, while protecting others who are not so threatening?
Almost Half of the BEST Studies in Medicine Can’t Be Replicated
The elephant in the room here is that, according to the most respected reviewers of clinical research, we cannot and should not trust the vast majority of medical research today. Although this is indeed a very bold assertion, this analysis comes from John Ioannidis, MD, an esteemed Stanford professor of medicine who is widely considered one of the best and most respected evaluators of clinical research in the world.
In 2005 Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that analyzed the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals. Forty-five of these studies reported positive results, suggesting that the intervention being tested was effective. However, the data Ioannidis found was disturbing: of the 34 claims that had been subject to replication, 41% had either been directly contradicted, or their benefits of the treatment were extremely minimal rather than significant… and this review only analyzed the most cited clinical trials in modern medicine. Imagine if this analysis reviewed the average medical study.
A compelling summary of the growing body of evidence that has questioned the legitimacy of modern medicine science is an article in the Huffington Post in June 2010, entitled “Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Research.” Then, The Atlantic borrowed from this article and published a magnificent cover story entitled, “Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Science” (November 2010).
In another article by Ioannidis, his evidence was so strong that the very name of the article was “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” In this article, Ioannidis makes a remarkably strong assertion: “It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.”
Ioannidis also asserted in this article: “The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true.”
Updating this work in 2016, Ioannidis doubled down, writing an article entitled, “Why Most Clinical Research Is Not Useful.”
So, let’s not simply question the accuracy of research by Dr. Judy Mikovits. Let’s also question ALL medical research today because, despite the massive propaganda by Big Pharma and by Big Media (whose most common advertisers are Big Pharma), there is actually a much smaller body of good scientific evidence showing efficacy and reasonable amounts of safety than people realize.
And predictably, doctors today over-emphasize the effectiveness of drugs and under-emphasize the real dangers of them, not enabling patients to make important health decisions.
Sadly and strangely, we never learned from the 1918 influenza epidemic where 50 million people died. A well-established but little known fact is that millions of people with the 1918 flu were prescribed 25 aspirin tablets a day because this was the recommendation of the AMA and the Surgeon General of that era. It is no wonder that this flu had the unique symptom syndrome of bleeding in the lungs, a condition that aspirin is uniquely known to cause. The AMA has never apologized for this medical malpractice, the media has conveniently ignored it, and even the New England Journal of Medicine’s 100-year review on this pandemic totally ignored this clear explanation for a huge number of deaths, not just children and the elderly but in seemingly healthy middle-aged people.
Although doctors are not prescribing aspirin often these days to suppress fevers in Covid patients, one of the untold scandals of the Covid-19 pandemic is that many physicians and their patients are using too liberal doses of other fever suppressants, ibuprofen and acetaminophen. It is well-established in medicine that fever is one of the vital components of the body’s immune system in its efforts to fight viral infection. Even America’s leading proponent of vaccine, Paul Offit, MD of the University of Pennsylvania, insists that we should let fevers run their course or pay dire consequences.
If the media is censoring Dr. Mikovits due to dangerous information during a pandemic, how or why is it not censoring doctors who are over-prescribing fever-suppressing drugs, antibiotics, immunosuppressive drugs or innumerable other common medical practices that have not been proven to be effective for Covid patients and, in fact, may be highly dangerous to them.
It is interesting that Judy Mikovits’ research was retracted by the journal in which it was published, but such retractions primarily seem to occur when they question something that threatens Big Pharma in a significant way… while none of the trials that Ioannidis noted as disproven were ever retracted or their authors censored.
Read the second part of the article
yogaesoteric
July 28, 2020