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Judy Mikovits (right), seen here in her laboratory in Reno, Nevada, in 2011 with a graduate student, has made many unfounded claims about the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
David Calvert for AP Images
By Martin Enserink, Jon Cohen
In a video that has exploded on social media in recent days, virologist Judy Mikovits claims that the new coronavirus is mistakenly being blamed for many deaths. She makes claims of scratching her head about the virus, for example, that it is “activated” by facial masks.
Mikovits also accuses Anthony Fauci, head of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a prominent member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, of being responsible for the deaths of millions in the early years. of the HIV / AIDS pandemic. The video claims that Mikovits was part of the team that discovered HIV, revolutionized HIV treatment, and was jailed without charge on her scientific charges.
Science He checked the video. Neither of these statements is true. The video is an excerpt from an upcoming movie Plandemic, which promises “to expose the scientific and political elite that runs the scam that is our global health system.” YouTube, Facebook and other platforms have removed the video due to inaccuracies. It keeps reappearing, even in the Plandemic website, which, in an “effort to avoid the guardians of freedom of expression,” invites people to download the video and republish it.
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But first, who is Judy Mikovits?
Mikovits began her career as a laboratory technician at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1988. She became a scientist and earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from George Washington University in 1991. By 2009, she was director of research at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), a private research center in Reno, Nevada, but was largely unknown to the scientific community. That year, however, she co-authored an article in Science That suggested that a dark agent called xenotropic murine leukemia virus (XMRV) virus caused chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).
The cause of CFS, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis, had long eluded and science had neglected the disease. The study created hope that CFS can be treated with antivirals. Some patients even started taking antiretroviral drugs used by people infected with HIV. But the document also raised concerns that XMRV could spread through the blood supply.
Other researchers soon questioned the findings, and in the next 2 years, the document’s claims fell apart. The researchers showed that XMRV was accidentally created in the laboratory during experiments with mice; It is possible that it has never infected any human being. The authors first removed two figures and a table from the document in October 2011. Around the same time, a study by multiple laboratories, including the WPI itself, showed that the findings could not be replicated.
Two months later, everything Science The paper was retracted. Mikovits declined to sign the retraction notice, but she participated in another major replication effort. That $ 2.3 million study, led by Ian Lipkin of Columbia University and funded by the National Institutes of Health, was “the definitive answer,” Mikovits said at a September 2012 news conference where the results were announced. The rigorous study looked for XMRV in blinded blood samples from nearly 300 people, half of whom had the disease and none had the virus. “There is no evidence that XMRV is a human pathogen,” Mikovits acknowledged.
ScienceThe news department, which works independently from its editorial side, closely followed the saga and released a detailed reconstruction of the fiasco in September 2011. (The story won a Communications Award from the American Society for Microbiology.)
At around the same time, Mikovits had an explosive breakup with WPI. The institute filed a lawsuit against her in November 2011 for allegedly removing lab notebooks and keeping other proprietary information on her laptop, flash drives and in a personal email account. She was arrested in California for serious crimes of flight from justice and imprisoned for several days. Prosecutors in Washoe County, Nevada finally dropped criminal charges against her in June 2012.
Mikovits has not published anything in the scientific literature since 2012. But she soon began promoting the XMRV hypothesis again, and attacked Lipkin’s study, which she said had ended the matter. She has weighed in on the autism debate with controversial theories about causes and treatments. Her discredited work and legal tribulations have made her a martyr in the eyes of some.
Now comes a new book that she wrote, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science—Billed as “a behind-the-scenes look at the problems and egos that will determine humanity’s future health” —and the viral video, which is an extended interview with Mikovits.
Science He asked Mikovits for an interview for this article. She responded by sending an empty email with, as attachments, a copy of her new book and a PowerPoint of a 2019 presentation titled “Pursuit and Cover-up.”
Below are some of the video’s main claims and allegations, along with the facts.
Interviewer: Dr. Judy Mikovits has been called one of the most successful scientists of her generation.
Mikovits had written 40 scientific articles and was not widely known in the scientific community before publishing in 2009. Science document claiming a link between a new retrovirus and CFS. The document was later shown to be erroneous and retracted.
Interviewer: Her 1991 doctoral thesis revolutionized the treatment of HIV / AIDS.
The Mikovits PhD. The thesis, “Negative regulation of HIV expression in monocytes”, had no perceptible impact on the treatment of HIV / AIDS.
Interviewer: At the height of her career, Dr. Mikovits published a highly successful article in the magazine Science. The controversial article sent shock waves through the scientific community, as it revealed that the common use of human and animal fetal tissues was unleashing devastating pests of chronic disease.
The newspaper did not reveal anything of the kind; it only claimed that it showed a link between a condition, CFS, and a mouse retrovirus.
Mikovits: I was detained in prison, without charge.
The district attorney in Washoe County, Nevada, filed a criminal complaint against Mikovits who accused her of illegally taking computer data and related assets from WPI. The charges were dropped, in part due to legal problems faced by her former employer.
Mikovits: Heads of all our HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] colluded and destroyed my reputation and the Department of Justice and the [Federal Bureau of Investigation] sat on it and kept the case under seal.
Mikovits has presented no direct evidence that the HHS heads have conspired against her.
Mikovits: [Fauci] directed the cover-up. And in fact, everyone else was paid, and paid in a big way, millions of dollars in funds from Tony Fauci and … the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. These investigators who committed the fraud continue to this day to be paid in large amounts by NIAID.
It is unclear what fraud and what cover-up Mikovits is talking about exactly. There is no evidence that Fauci was involved in a cover-up or that anyone was paid with his or his institute’s funds. No one has been charged with fraud in connection with the Mikovits allegations.
Mikovits: It really started when I was 25 years old and I was part of the team that isolated HIV from the saliva and blood of patients from France where [virologist Luc] Montagnier had originally isolated the virus. … Fauci retains publication of the document for several months while Robert Gallo writes his own document and takes full credit, and of course patents are involved. This delay in confirmation literally led to the spread of the virus, killing millions.
At the time of the discovery of HIV, Mikovits was a laboratory technician in Francis Ruscetti’s laboratory at NCI and had not yet received his Ph.D. There is no evidence that she was part of the team that first isolated the virus. His first published article, co-authored with Ruscetti, was on HIV and was published in May 1986, 2 years later. Science published four historical documents linking HIV (then called HTLV-III by Gallo’s laboratory) to AIDS. Ruscetti’s first article on HIV appeared in August 1985. There is no evidence that Fauci has withheld either document or that this has resulted in the deaths of millions.
Interviewer: If we activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people could earn hundreds of billions of dollars from owning the vaccines.
Mikovits: And they will kill millions, as they have already done with their vaccines. There is currently no vaccine in the program for any working RNA virus.
Vaccines have not killed millions; They have saved millions of lives. Many vaccines that work against RNA viruses are on the market, including against the flu, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, yellow fever, and Ebola.
Interviewer: So I have to ask you, are you anti-vaccines?
Mikovits: Oh absolutely not. In fact, the vaccine is immunotherapy, just like interferon alpha is immunotherapy, so I am not anti-vaccines. My job is to develop immune therapies. That is what vaccines are.
In another recent video, Mikovits wears a hat that says VAXXED II, which is a sequel to a movie linking mumps, measles, and rubella vaccines to autism, a discredited theory. It also repeats several claims made by people who lead the anti-vaccine movement. In the PowerPoint presentation you sent to ScienceShe calls for an “immediate moratorium” on all vaccines.
Interviewer: Do you think this virus [SARS-CoV-2] was created in the laboratory?
Mikovits: I would not use the created word. But it can’t be said to happen naturally if it was from the lab. So it is very clear that this virus was manipulated. This family of viruses was manipulated and studied in a laboratory where the animals were brought to the laboratory, and this is what was released, either deliberately or not. That cannot be natural. Someone did not go to a market, received a bat, the virus did not jump directly into humans. This is not how it works. That’s the accelerated viral evolution. If it were a natural occurrence, it would take up to 800 years to occur.
Scientific estimates suggest that the virus closest to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is a bat coronavirus identified by the Wuhan Virology Institute (WIV). Its evolutionary time “distance” to SARS-CoV-2 is approximately 20 to 80 years. There is no evidence that this bat virus has been tampered with.
Interviewer: And do you have any idea where this happened?
Mikovits: Oh yes, I’m sure it happened between the North Carolina Labs, Fort Detrick, the US Army Institute of Infectious Disease Medical Research. USA And Wuhan’s laboratory.
There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from WIV. NIAID funding from a US group working with the Wuhan laboratory was halted, outraging many scientists.
Mikovits: Italy has a very old population. They are very ill with inflammatory disorders. They received in early 2019 a new, unproven form of the influenza vaccine that had four different strains of influenza, including the highly pathogenic H1N1. That vaccine was grown in a cell line, a dog cell line. Dogs have many coronaviruses.
There is no evidence linking any influenza vaccine, or a dog coronavirus, to the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy.
Mikovits: Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You get sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions, and if it turns out to be SARS-CoV-2, then you have a big problem.
It is not clear what Mikovits means by “coronavirus expressions.” There is no evidence that wearing a mask can activate viruses and make people sick.
Mikovits: Why would you close the beach? You have sequences on the ground, in the sand. You have healing microbes in the ocean in salt water. That’s crazy.
It is not clear what Mikovits means by “sequences” of sand or earth. There is no evidence that microbes in the ocean can cure patients with COVID-19.
