- This topic has 513 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 4 years, 4 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Clark
I am very reluctant to talk about personal matters openly in such a public forum. I have in the past written about some of my personal experiences with regards to the drug thalidomide and a big scandal where a certain drug company profiteered by getting a drug that was manufactured in the 50s licensed for the use of treating myeloma in such a way that with the acquiescence of licensing authorities, they manage to be able to be the sole provider of drug to the NHS even though it was available widely from other sources, at 6 times the price on flimsy basis and the NHS had to fork up the difference. The original research on myeloma and thalidomide was done by many in the field using generic thalidomide manufactured in many labs around the world for very small cost. The bad days of pharma entertaining doctors lavishly are gone but through collusion with the system, they still manage to bribe through providing ‘Educational support’ for the conference circuits, and that helps governments pretend that this is pure education and continuing professional education, which is mandated to continue with your profession, by not providing adequate funding for this activity through official channels. A few years ago government funding for research has also been slowly privatised in such a way that basic scientific research was discouraged, at the expense of what is called ‘translational research’ often in collaboration with industry, targeting research in areas that is suitable for quick realisation of the commercial potential for such research.
But my attitude is that this is unfortunately the world we live in. There is often no need for conspiracies from big Pharma. They can do what they like and often can produce good medicines and occasionally produce major flops and cock ups. But to target one aspect of the whole world we live in, and to tar professions such as medicine and science with the conspiracy brush is not constructive. Many people have to work within the constraints of the system.
I of course admire Ben Goldacre’s work and his two books, but why I said what I did is that it does not begin and end there. In fact if you look at his recent tweets on covid-19, they are a bit restrained to put it mildly.
This may also give you a flavour of what happened with thalidomide.– “to tar professions such as medicine and science with the conspiracy brush is not constructive.”
I agree. It both causes, and is itself, polarisation of what should be a discussion. That’s why I’m trying to draw the sides together; I’m going after the the root cause, not the symptom. But…
– “I am very reluctant to talk about personal matters openly in such a public forum.”
Isn’t everyone? That seems to me a big part of the problem. We get all sorts of comments, generally from one ‘side’ or the other, but never with any perspective of the experiences that lead to the motivations behind them. The centre is missing. Instead we stand like massed armies opposed across a battlefield, when we should be sat in the middle, in a circle, raising one finger when we have a point we wish to contribute. As I said before, dividing us is Mammon’s primary technique. With us all fighting each other, Mammon needs no weapons, Mammon just harvests the casualties with a laugh.
All the technical details in your comment ring true; they seem much like the material in Goldacre’s books. I have been looking at Goldacre’s Twitter stream recently; he was lamenting “lockdown” boredom, but celebrating Opensafely, his and his team’s secure medical data analytics project, which looks like an excellent piece of work.
Paul, I take it that’s a yes, then? I’d much rather you came and sat in the circle. We will all have to eventually, or perish at each other’s hands.
@ Clark May 25, 2020 at 15:49
I’ll happily join in, but let’s keep it civil.
We are all entitled to our opinion; censorship should not come into this.
The NWO is hardly a conspiracy nowadays – it seems everyone from the local dog-catcher to the Pope has openly endorsed it.
And this ‘Pandemic’ fits right in with their agendas, control, RFID (whether by injected chip, or mandatory carrying of a ‘smart-phone’ with an ID app), mandatory (or hard to avoid) vaccinations, push towards cashless society, tracer technology. No wonder Gates and Fauci always have a big smirk on their mugs.Paul, sorry, I realise now. I wasn’t accusing you of bullshitting. There is other people’s bullshit in what you posted; I’m trying to alert you that you’ve been bullshitted. That’s why I asked whether you object to bullshit. Not everyone does. Some people seem to think that bullshit’s OK so long as it points in their preferred direction, or even if it just points away from what they oppose. Personally I’m for truth, even when it isn’t what I’d prefer. I figure that when we have a problem to solve we have to face it for what it is; we have to solve the actual problem rather than what we’d prefer it to be, or our solution is likely to be irrelevant.
So I’d like to check where you stand. Do you have a principle against bullshitting as I do, or do you think it can be useful sometimes?
@ Clark
Obviously I won’t post something I know is not true, I may on occasion fall for some BS post, and re-post it, but I certainly don’t do it intentionally.
As a Christian (not a very good one, but a dedicated one) truth is extremely important – ‘The truth shall set you free’.Paul
In which case why did you not answer my posts when I found out that Dr Mikovits had published results that could not be verified.
We may all sometimes get a bit off track but as Clark says, if we want to fight the PTB as you put it we must be focussed and rational as otherwise we get marginalised.
I am sorry if you feel I have appeared to defend big pharma, I don’t but we have to accept that we can’t fight them by trivialising some very important issues by following quacks.@ SA May 25, 2020 at 22:57
Re Dr. Mikovits, I used her own words in her defence against the Italian version of Goldacre.
I am not aware he responded to her response, or if the correspondence stopped at that point.
I don’t believe having a paper withdrawn because the results could not be duplicated amounts to ‘discreditation’. Demonising or discreditation occurs to perfectly good people (like Assange, for example) when they have upset governments or big industries, and the MSM happily join the melee. Dr. Mikovits certainly upset Fauci, because she accused him of passing copies of her and another scientist’s work to his colleague Gallo, and then stalling on publishing till Gallo had duplicated their work; Gallo then published, and got the patents. That’s her story, and I for one believe her. Perhaps if you watched ‘Plandemic’ you would see her side of the story (apparently she now has a top-selling book out, despite all the censorship and demonisation).
I am in my late 70’s, so would be included in the ‘at risk’ group for the Covid – 19; but I certainly won’t be lining up for it. I regularly refuse the flu, pneumonia and shingles shots, and I’ll be after refusing Gate’s cocktail (or anyone else’s) ‘Pandemic’ shots.
When you previously almost ‘ordered’ me to go back and check on the 4 vaccines I mentioned to Clark, you entirely missed the point. I had already given the information in a previous comment, and was too busy to trawl through to find it again. If Clark had been interested, he could have trawled back, but like me he doesn’t have time to waste.I’ve been looking into this. Mikovits at WPI deliberately sent faked samples in 2009. That’s why the work couldn’t be replicated, which led to Silverman retracting his whole lab’s contribution and the paper being withdrawn in 2011. Her fraud was eventually discovered by a blogger called Abbie Smith, a graduate student in virology at the University of Oklahoma:
– “But thats not what Silverman found. He didnt find mouse ERVs. He didnt find the same exogenous viral sequence over and over. He didnt find the same XMRV provirus in every sample because of contaminating cell line DNA.
He unquestionably found VP62 plasmid in the samples he got from the WPI… and only in the CFS patient samples.
Meanwhile, at the WPI, they say they get FANTASTIC results with their assays. The 67% positive rate flew up to, what, 100% after the Science publication…
And yet, when WPI/Mikovits are given samples where they do not know beforehand who is ‘supposed’ to be positive and who is ‘supposed’ to be negative, they cannot differentiate between CFS/Healthy/Positive controls. 50:50, implying that half of the people they say are positive are really negative, and half of the people they say or negative are positive, or in other words, they have no idea what they are doing.
When samples are collected from ‘XMRV positive’ patients without any ‘processing’ at the WPI, the samples come up negative.
And yet the CFS samples shipped to Bob Silverman in 2009 were contaminated with XMRV PLASMID before his lab touched them, after WPI touched them, after Silverman gave them the VP62 plasmid.”
– “But to all you frauds out there– remember this: Individually, scientists are smart folks. And even smart folks get screwed over now and then. But together, we are always smarter than you.”
Paul
You seem to deliberately miss the point. Mikovits was discredited because she falsified data and as both and Clark demonstrated. She made a piece of CT fiction called plandemic and accused various people of other misdemeanours which may or may not be true. Writing a top seller does not justify what she says.
Also remember none of us have time to waste, it is not unique to you.
I , like Clark, do admire your painstaking efforts but it helps to be discriminating in order to aim your punches well. It is of course your choice whether you have a vaccine or not. I get the yearly flu jab but have turned down the shingles vaccine.
Many of us also dislike the fact that one individual like Gates, can have so much sway on health issues, but that is the system that allows this and the system has to be fought intelligently and pointedly.Otherwise we all get discredited and we don’t want that.
@ Clark May 26, 2020 at 04:47
Thanks for the two links to the Blogs. It seems the allegations or implied fraud is initially contained in an anonymous blog. I tried to work my way through the two links, but was hopelessly lost in the scientific jargon.
Has Dr. Judy Mikovits been charged with fraud? If so, what was the outcome?
I refuse to condemn her without hearing her response to this.
It certainly looks bad, but it is not beyond possibility, or even probability, that if the PTB want to discredit a person badly enough, they can make a pretty convincing job of it.
We have Julian Assange, and even Craig himself, as examples of false allegations, although both those cases are full of holes.Clark, I’ve now got the hang of putting ‘Links’ in without the url, but often the ‘Link’ ability is missing from above the dialog box. Why is that, and how does one get around it?
– “Has Dr. Judy Mikovits been charged with fraud?”
The institute sacked her. I don’t think it’s a criminal offence to fake data or supply fake samples; it isn’t money or property, which is all Mammon’s legal system really cares about. Doctors can get struck off the register of doctors like Wakefield was, but that isn’t a criminal procedure either.
Silverman probably worked out what she’d done, and that’s why he took his name and everyone in his lab off the paper. If a scientist had made a mistake they’d withdraw or retract, but Mikovits refused to do that which is why the journal did it instead.
Scientists don’t accuse each other of scientific fraud; it isn’t the done thing. Almost everyone who becomes a scientist does so because they are curious about the laws of nature, they want to discover things, so faking data is unthinkable. So instead scientists say things like “Dr Smiths results are untenable”, and leave it to Dr Smith to retract. It’s scientific honour, if you will. Dr Smith has presumably made a mistake, and Dr Brown having posted in the literature that the results are untenable, it is then up to Dr Smith to account for that. If Smith can’t or doesn’t, he’s discredited, but not a criminal. But no one reputable will ever cite his papers again.
It’s quite quaint really; you can see this in action on this thread. I think SA must be a scientist. SA never called Mikovits a fraud. SA said that Mikovits is “discredited”, Mikovits’s results “couldn’t be replicated”, Mikovits “published results that could not be verified”, everything but actually calling her a fraud.
The blog posts aren’t too difficult to understand; I’ll talk you through them tomorrow or as soon as I get the time.
I am aware what SA and Clark think about Dr. Judy Mikovits, but to help balance the discussion here is the lady herself: others may also be reading this thread, whilst not commenting for whatever reason: ‘Plandemic’ Documentary (26 minutes). Dr. Judy Mikovits also has a best-selling book out, ‘Plague of Corruption’.
“Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.” — Albert Einstein
The same quote applies to of those who in a knee-jerk reaction holler ‘conspiracy theory’ to every disagreement with the government or MSM ‘narratives’.Whilst some people think it is preposterous that covid – 19 might be a bio-warfare product, perhaps they will question why America is dragging it’s feet about allowing inspections of it’s bio-labs.
‘China, Russia can initiate probe of US bio-labs‘.
‘…Lavrov said at a news conference following an online meeting of foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on Wednesday that “These [US] laboratories are densely formed along the perimeter of the borders of the Russian Federation, and, accordingly, next to the borders of the People’s Republic of China,” the Xinhua News Agency reported…’
‘…In response to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s previous groundless accusation of the Wuhan lab, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said at a press conference on May 8 that “According to open records we have access to, China has only two P4 labs, the highest bio-safety level lab, while the US has 13 that are either in operation, under expansion or in planning, according to a February report by the Federation of American Scientists.”
“The US also has 1,495 P3 labs, not including many other labs it built in territories of the former Soviet Union, like in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and in many other places around the world… the US has been the only country that has blocked the resumption of negotiations on a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention,” she remarked….’
Does anyone reading this really believe the US has all these labs around the world because they want to save people’s lives? Have they really built hundreds of bases all around the world only to ‘stop wars’?
As Dr. Judy Mikovits says in the above video, she worked at Fort Detrick, and Ebola could not infect humans till they (the scientists, including herself) ‘showed them how’.Paul
You have done it again. You start with one subject which is very political and which is mostly factual. We all know that the US indulges in shady research and even now have become more openly opposed to any treaties concerning WMD that tie US hands but are very keen to get others , like Syria and Iran to comply, even by bombing and killing. This unites most of those writing in this blog, with some exceptions. That the US is indulging in bioweapons and that they have established labs in Georgia and Ukraine, which they have converted into near rogue states for their purposes and under the protection of the hegemon is in no doubt.
But then you slip into science, not your forte, if I may say so and continue to quote Dr Mikovits. In previous posts, both Clark and I have explained to you why Dr Mikovits is not an authority to be trusted, despite her own claims. I shall not repeat all of this evidence again because you know them but I shall add the following two facts that are easily verifiable.
For a scientist to become authoritative enough to be credible and to have sway on an argument, they have to have a track record in work in an area and to consistently published in that field and with high quality research that endures, is replicated and advances science. To take one example you quote from Plandemic:As Dr. Judy Mikovits says in the above video, she worked at Fort Detrick, and Ebola could not infect humans till they (the scientists, including herself) ‘showed them how’.
This is not just a totally unverifiable statement, because it is not backed by any research, but is also totally misleading and has no basis in reality. Ebola was not discovered in fort Detrick and has been a disease with local outbreaks in Africa, even before 1999 when Dr Mikovits claims that she taught Ebola to infect humans. So forgive me for not taking this ex scientist seriously if she can make such a naïve statement that you can be taken with.
The second point is that what Dr Mikovits has published in peer reviewed journals is known. Her most renowned work is the paper in 2009 published by Science where she and others showed the presence in many samples of a virus called Xenotropic Murine Leukemia related Virus, (which is really a provirus in mice that can then develop properties of a virus which happens in tissue cultures and can therefore contaminate reagents made through these processes or through therapeutic products made through processes using mouse tissue or cells, which may include some vaccines. It can also be a laboratory contaminant if rigorous procedures are not followed) in a substantial number of samples of patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. This is a syndrome which, like autism, a cause has been sought extensively but not found. Notably Dr Mikovits and others at the time also thought that this virus was also linked to all sort of other things, including incidentally autism! But as discussed earlier, this work has never been confirmed and the original paper was withdrawn by Science magazine. So If you look at Pub Med, the reference point to look at what any researcher has done and put in Mikovits, you will have her list of publications and these are limited to 18 publications, mostly on XMRV as shown here, and nothing since 2011. There is no mention of Ebola and no mention of any active scientific research recently. So please understand Dr Mikovits is not an authority on these matters. I hope we do not have to discuss her again.Sorry ‘Science’ is a scientific journal, not a magazine.
– “I am aware what SA and Clark think about Dr. Judy Mikovits, but to help balance the discussion…”
Science is about evidence, not opinion. Mine and SA’s opinion about Mikovits isn’t relevant; she acted in such a way that she is can no longer be regarded as a scientist, by other scientists. She either faked data (basically certain), or failed to cooperate in working out why her data didn’t fit with that of other scientists (she did cooperate at first, or rather her institute did, but the results looked just like they would if previously, she’d faked her data). Anyone who does this doesn’t get a second chance to be respected by other scientists – they faked their data, they simply can’t be trusted. Nature is complicated enough as it is without time-wasters who distort the evidence. And Mikovits wasted years of people’s research time, investigating her claim that wasn’t wrong, it was made up.
At that point she stopped doing science and effectively started claiming that everyone else was faking data, and collaborating to make their faked data look real; “corruption at the highest level” etc. That’s why it’s called “conspiracy theory” in this case, because the only way Mikovits data could be right would be if all the other scientists who worked on this subject were collaborating in secret to make their false data match each other’s before they published in the scientific journals, even new teams who’d never looked at it before.
There could never be any new discoveries under those conditions.
Once you get used to it it’s quite easy to spot this sort of behaviour masquerading as science. Think of all the “free energy” claims; they always have some excuse, like “men in black wrecked the lab and destroyed all the notes; everyone else is lying to protect energy companies’ profits”. There are loads of them. Quite often they manage to attract investment and then make off with the dosh.
@ Clark May 27, 2020 at 10:03
Apparently there aren’t any actual charges of fraud against Dr. Mikovits, just allegations from a blog. Hardly amounts to ‘discreditation’, though you may think so. I believe Fauci funded the lab, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to get her sacked, I should imagine.
When someone has earned the ire of someone like Fauci, that someone can be framed, money is no object.
Anyhow her video is available, only 26 minutes. It’s always wise to get both sides of the story.
Thanks for offering to ‘talk me through’ the blog; please don’t bother. Though lost in the jargon, I think I got the gist of it. I am more interested in Dr, Mikovits’ response, if she has made one.
Whilst unscientific, there is another factor that influences me – intuition, or gut feeling. My intuition tells me she is telling the truth, and though I may be wrong, I have to take it
into account.
Where Mikovits says they ‘showed the Ebola virus’ how to infect humans, I presume she was talking about ‘gain of function’; I believe SA is right about previous human infection.
Re links, do you know why the links etc ability is shown above the dialog box sometimes (it’s there now), yet on other occasions isn’t there? And how does one attach the link if that ability is missing, without adding the url to the comment?Paul, I don’t know why the link button comes and goes for you. On my system, the button is absent when I have Javascript blocked, and it is present when Javascript is enabled. This behaviour has been consistent for months, but I’ll let you know if it changes.
No, like I said before, there won’t be criminal fraud charges for faked data; it’s not a crime.
Nonetheless, the evidence of fakery is right there in Mikovits’ two submissions; the blog post just points it out. The bottom panel of item C in figure 2 from Mikovits’ paper to Science in 2009, and slide 13 from her presentation in Ottawa in 2011. I think these are chromatography traces, but what they are doesn’t matter. The point is that they’re identical.
Say you were accused of a burglary. The evidence presented is your thumbprint. So in court, the prosecution shows your thumbprint as lifted from a stolen telly, and your thumbprint taken at a police station. The two match; the whorls go in the same directions, and have equal numbers of ridges.
But each impression of a thumbprint is unique; you never put your thumb against an object at quite the same angle and pressure, and objects have their own surface irregularities too…
So now your defence lawyer takes the two thumbprints and superimposes them – the whorls and ridges don’t just match, they’re identical. These aren’t two separate prints from the same thumb at all; they’re two copies of a single thumbprint. Your defence lawyer has just proven that you’ve been stitched up; somehow the thumbprint you gave at the cop shop has been recycled as if it had been found on the stolen telly.
Mikovits submitted the same chromatography trace as evidence for two completely different things; one or the other has to be fake evidence. The other blog post proves another data fraud; when set a test by an independent lab:
– “when WPI/Mikovits are given samples where they do not know beforehand who is ‘supposed’ to be positive and who is ‘supposed’ to be negative, they cannot differentiate between CFS/Healthy/Positive controls”
But previously:
– “Silverman […] unquestionably found VP62 plasmid in the samples he got from the WPI… and only in the CFS patient samples.
So Mikovits had been putting the VP62 plasmid into the CFS samples but not the control samples; she was selectively adulterating the samples she sent to Silverman.
This isn’t a matter of balance or opinion, or someone else’s side of the story. She cheated, she got caught at it and the evidence exists. Her scientific career was in tatters, so now she does anti-vax, a lot like Wakefield.
Paul
“Where Mikovits says they ‘showed the Ebola virus’ how to infect humans, I presume she was talking about ‘gain of function’; I believe SA is right about previous human infection.”
What gain of function? You are talking about a highly lethal virus for which there is no known treatment. OK you may want it to infect say only Asians or only Africans but then why does she use such unscientific jargon? This is nonsense Paul, Dr Mikovits is not worth the 26 minutes you want me to spend listening to this unscientific gibberish.
@ SA May 27, 2020 at 18:49
I think we agree that the US (and indeed others) are capable of, and have, ‘weaponised’ extremely dangerous pathogens such as viruses (forgive me if viruses aren’t pathogens, but you get the picture. Stuff like Anthrax, which was known to have been weaponised in US labs (it was actually used, fatally, after 9/11 in a rather pathetic bid to blame it on Muslims).
Anthrax was already extremely deadly, but it was still ‘weaponised’ to be able to spread more effectively. I should imagine Ebola also could be made more spreadable and thus more exploitable as a weapon, as Coronavirus seems to have been.
Is it too much of a stretch to assume they would also weaponise Ebola? Or Coronaviruses?
The fraud which the blog accuses Dr. Mikovits of doesn’t seem to make sense – after all, even I understand that given some weird result like that, scientists would not just accept it, but would test the vaccines or specimens themselves. She would know that if she had faked the tests, the fakery would soon be apparent as soon as others couldn’t find the mouse retroviruses.
And these are mere allegations. The CDC, EPA, FDA and so forth have all been caught out in flagrant dangerous frauds and cover-ups, yet you don’t seem to dismiss everything they say or do because of it. And there is no way people, especially children, haven’t been seriously injured or killed because of their frauds and/or cover-ups.
Yet your ire seems reserved for Dr. Judy Mikovits, and a few like-minded alternative doctors and scientists.
I don’t know if she has defended herself against these allegations, if so I would like to hear her side of the story.Paul, you don’t get it. There are serious objections, within the scientific community, about all sorts of stuff that goes on in science and the ways it is used, but the stuff you find on anti-vax sites isn’t it. It doesn’t contribute to the real arguments, in fact it distracts from them by discrediting good-hearted campaigners such as yourself. The anti-vaxxers claims sound scientific but they aren’t; it’s superficial stuff with words from science thrown in to make it sound like science to the inexperienced, and the corporate media do the groundwork of misrepresenting the scientific process itself, keeping the public ignorant and confused.
That’s why I wanted you to read Bad Science which more than anything is about how the corporate media confuse the public about the very nature of the scientific process, depriving the public of their ability to understand. You’ve read the first few chapters, but in those Goldacre goes after the quacks and nutritionists mainly, because their scams are easier to understand. He’s using them as a teaching tool, building up to the more complicated examples of media distortion of real science, and as a primer for his second book Bad Pharma.
The whole “MMR autism” scare was whipped up by the corporate media; it never had any substantial scientific basis. In 2002 the MSM published over 1200 stories about MMR and autism. Between 2001 and 2006 they published over 4000.
I have no idea why Mikovits did what she did, but she got away with it for several years, and she’s still getting work from the anti-vaxxers. Now she’s getting a load of attention by distributing disinformation about covid-19.
SARS-CoV-2 can’t be a bioweapon because it’s indiscriminate. The real issue is biolab security. Here’s an article about it, by real scientists:
Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat
Paul, you know what me and SA stand for, you know our values from the comments we each post at this site. SA seems to be a working scientist, and I have a lifelong interest in science. We’ve both been trying to tell you, you’re discrediting your political arguments by associating them with bunk. It’s not that we’re closed minded or too trusting of the authorities, it’s that the likes of Wakefield and Mikovits are charlatans; me and SA both have the background to be able to tell. Like if someone was blagging about how to repair a diesel engine you could tell if they knew what they were talking about or whether they were just using words like injector and glow-plugs to sound convincing, well that’s what me and SA can tell about Mikovits and Wakefield. And if you want to learn too, keep persevering with Bad Science.
I believe you are both wrong about Mikovits and Wakefield. I’m going to try to get a response from Dr. Mikovits, but it will probably take some time.
You both likely believe that the ‘Mark of the Beast’ is a load of BS, but here is a new angle for ID’s and ‘Vaxx Passports’:‘Bill Gates, MIT Develop New ‘Tattoo ID’ to Check For Vaccinations‘.
‘…Interestingly, the funding for this new vaccine tattoo technology has come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (who) funded the team’s research…’Clark has used the folksy ‘Gatesey’ on occasion: here is a four-episode ‘expose’ of the critter (in videos but also with transcripts, which I far prefer to video):
‘Bill Gates (parts 1-4)‘.
Bill Gates is the seventh cousin three times removed of Nelson Rockefeller (Gates often teams up with the Rockefeller Foundation in his ‘Philanthropies’). Oddly enough, these billionaire’s ‘philanthropies’ never seem to deplete their wealth, but miraculously increase it.
