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May 7, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

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Biomedical Research Gone Awry with Hillary Johnson

Hillary Johnson discusses biomedical research gone awry with RFK Jr. Investigative reporter, Hillary Johnson, wrote the book, Osler's Web.  For more info: https://www.oslersweb.com/

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	Hey everybody, my guest today is journalist Hillary Johnson.
	Ms.
	Johnson is a medical writer.
	She has written for three decades on many, many subjects that are right in the kind of wheelhouse of my interest, including the retroviral cocktails that went and became AIDS treatments like AZD.
	You've also written about the use of depleted uranium weapons by the United States in the Gulf Wars, about public health posed by ever mutating flu viruses, about viral causes of multiple sclerosis, about air pollution induced mortality, about viral causes of multiple sclerosis, about air pollution induced mortality, health effects from Love Canal, which is one of the places where I got my
	Her most in-depth reporting has been about the U.S. biomedical research on sour in the case of myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is also called chronic fatigue syndrome.
	Her science reporting has been published in Rolling Stone, where she was a contributing editor for a decade in Mirabella, in Life, in the South, the New York Times, Working Women, and many, many more.
	Welcome to the show, Hilary.
	Thank you.
	I'm happy to be here.
	Let's talk about chronic fatigue syndrome, because the reason I wanted to get you on here is I read your book, and you can see this is my dog-eared and happily, happily annotated copy, and you've really done an incredible service by writing this.
	Show us the copy of your book, because you have the same thing.
	Yes, here's my book.
	It seems to be just as...
	Well, it couldn't be more dog-haired than it is virtually every other page.
	Oh, I've had this book in my possession for about 20 years now.
	It was published in 1996.
	But everything in it, I mean, so little has changed since then.
	Both our books, for those of you who are listening on podcasts, have at least, I would say, 50 or 60 post-its that are hanging out in various configurations.
	So tell us about it, because obviously I've read your book.
	Well, I did want to say up top that I think I would be remiss not to say that the phrase chronic fatigue syndrome...
	It's a name that was really conjured up by the Centers for Disease Control in 1988.
	They came out with it.
	It was that long ago.
	But it was a name that was really conjured to cover up the severity of this disease, which actually for decades prior to 88 was known as myalgic encephalomyelitis.
	And let's call it ME to keep it simple.
	Let me interrupt you for a second.
	It was also popularly called yuppie flu.
	It was back in the 80s when people started first taking notice of it.
	It was seen mainly in women and it was often attributed to The incapacity of women to perform corporate-type jobs, and this was at the beginning of the Women's Liberation Movement,
	when women were beginning to step into Wall Street and other positions of business responsibility, and the psychiatric profession and the National Public Health Services blamed this on women.
	So, you know, that's part of the history.
	Yes, it was a very punishing, punishing name.
	And I'm kind of overwhelmed because everything you're saying, there's so much to respond to.
	But I think a general statement...
	That is true, is that one of the reasons this disease has been so ignored, covered up, lied about, funding has been withheld, etc., is that it is a disease of women.
	Now, there are going to be a few men who will be mad at me for saying that.
	Certainly, men do get this disease, but statistically, it's very well known and documented that women get this disease regularly.
	In a ratio of 3 to 1, 4 to 1, could be as many as 80% of people who suffer this disease are women.
	And to get back to the name, now Yuppie Flu was just a jokey name dreamt up by a Newsweek headline writer and It had nothing to do with the real disease, actually.
	But to get back to chronic fatigue syndrome, this was a disease that...
	This was a name that was dreamt up over a period of a year with...
	consultation of a couple of people at CDC and a few, maybe a handful of doctors around the country who either had never seen anybody with this disease or had maybe seen a few.
	In other words, the people who created chronic fatigue syndrome didn't really know anything about the disease.
	The point was, really, it was almost like corporate messaging or corporate branding to put the CDC's brand on this disease and to basically obfuscate the severity of the disease.
	I'll just, you know, shock you and say that this is very likely a transmissible infectious disease.
	And it can be lethal.
	People do die of it.
	The morbidity is simply unknown.
	You know, people do not, people have no concept whatsoever of how How terrible this disease is.
	It's a disease that destroys your brain, your heart.
	It's an immune deficiency.
	And it's just a really tragic event that has occurred.
	And I think one of the biggest misnomers about ME is that it's mysterious and very little is known about it.
	And in fact, it's not mysterious and a lot is known about it.
	You just would never know that because NIH and CDC have kept such a tight grip on information about ME. And it's very interesting to me that I've watched for literally decades now, the CDC and the NIH, especially the NIH, and it all leads to Fauci, I might add.
	They've exerted a tremendous desire to control the information about this disease and to basically sculpt it into something that it's not.
	You know, we can...
	Elaborate on that, if you wish.
	You know, one of the threats to the Public Health Service on this disease was that it appeared at the same time as HIV-AIDS and that there were a number of scientists out there Who said it's actually the same disease.
	When a gay person gets it, it's called HIV-AIDS. When a woman gets it, it's called chronic fatigue syndrome.
	And there are serious scientists then and today that still believe that that may be the case.
	Give us your take on that.
	Well, I do not believe they are the same disease.
	AIDS, essentially, but I will concede, and this is an incredibly important point, that they emerged concurrently as epidemics in the late 70s, early 1980s.
	And in fact, there was a very distinguished infectious disease specialist who gave a talk at CDC in 1983 or 84 that was very well attended in an auditorium filled with CDC scientists.
	Asking the question, you know, is ME, myalgic encephalomyelitis, a subset of AIDS, or is AIDS a subset of ME?
	Because they were, the cases of both diseases were exploding simultaneously.
	And this is yet to be resolved.
	But there are many theories about why this may have been.
	ME is an older disease than AIDS. I think the first reported disease Outbreak of ME occurred in possibly as long ago as 1906, but there was a huge outbreak of it in 1934 in Los Angeles in a hospital.
	Right up until the late 70s, early 80s, Most of what was known about ME were isolated reports coming from all over the world.
	Reykjavik, Iceland, New Zealand, etc.
	Outbreaks that were contained in hospital settings or hospitals.
	Convents, literally.
	In other words, there were discrete outbreaks that were self-contained.
	There weren't a lot of people coming and going.
	It never broke out into the general population, is what I'm trying to say here.
	And these reports were known about.
	There were a handful of doctors and scientists who were extremely interested in the disease.
	And they were like sort of a gentleman's butterfly society or something.
	They sort of all knew each other.
	They were just a small group of them.
	And that's not true of AIDS. AIDS was...
	Really new and emerged in the late 70s and kind of exploded in the 80s and Emmy did at the same time.
	One of the other suspects In the etiology of ME, another potential culprit was polio vaccines.
	Well, certainly I'm familiar with the hypothesis about the polio vaccine.
	But I think that when you start talking about epidemiology in this disease, you know, how did it spread?
	How did it get so huge?
	You always have to come back to What is the most rational explanation?
	Now, you know, the polio vaccine hypothesis has never really been proven.
	It's interesting to think about.
	But basically, something happened.
	The point is, is that not everybody, you have to think what, what affected everybody who got ME?
	You know, some people say, oh, it's a combination of toxins and environment and stress, you know, just make up anything you want because so many people have.
	But not everybody with ME has been exposed to chemicals, toxic chemicals.
	Not everybody with ME is under stress.
	These things don't really, in the end, they don't add up.
	The only thing that truly makes sense, and there's a lot of epidemiological evidence to support it.
	There's one infectious agent that causes ME, and just as there's one infectious agent that causes tuberculosis, one infectious agent that causes syphilis, There's not some big stew or some combination of things that produces this extremely discreet disease that's unlike any other disease.
	And so the big question becomes, what happened in the 1970s and really mostly in the 1980s?
	To cause this explosion.
	Now, I'll propose a hypothesis here that is going to make me extremely unpopular with a lot of people.
	Put it that way.
	So here's one hypothesis.
	Maybe AIDS patients who were so severely immune suppressed and were, you know, subject to these, you know, formerly obscure infections like pneumocystis scurrini pneumonia, a bird flu in effect.
	And there was a whole slew of infections that were considered AIDS-defining infections.
	And there was concern that AIDS patients might be sort of a population of That would actually spread diseases like tuberculosis into the general population because they were so vulnerable, because their immune systems were so depleted.
	And it could be that the ME virus Which had been floating around, but, you know, was a really rare, obscure virus.
	It needed certain conditions to thrive.
	It could be that AIDS patients picked up the ME virus too, along with all the other obscure and not so obscure viruses that they were infected with.
	And that in that way, they served as a vector of To spread the ME virus into the general population.
	And also, that would be an opportunity for many different variants of the ME virus.
	To spread.
	Now, again, having said that, I'm probably going to be shot dead in the streets tomorrow.
	But it's one theory.
	It's one theory.
	I've talked about this.
	Let me, you know, not to pick on vaccines.
	And for those of you who are listening to this and say, well, it couldn't have been a polio vaccine in 1934 because the Sabin and Salk vaccine did not exist before 1953.
	There was actually an experimental polio vaccine that was given for the first time in 1934, and it was the experimental test took place in this hospital in Los Angeles.
	And that was kind of the first major epidemic that people saw of what we now, of the symptoms of what we now call chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME. I'm just going to give you this anecdote.
	Just before the release of the first mass vaccination program with the Salk vaccine, Bernice Eddy, who was a NIH scientist, one of the top scientists most awarded, probably the top woman scientist at that time most awarded in United States history, discovered a Monkey virus in the vaccine.
	The vaccine was grown on a substrat of monkey kidney tissue, and they didn't know it then, but a lot of the African monkeys and Asian monkeys had viruses that couldn't be detected at that time.
	This one virus, which is called simian virus 40, it's called 40 because they found 39 before that.
	This virus causes cancer.
	In fact, it's used in laboratories today by scientists who want to induce cancer in guinea pigs.
	It literally causes them to shroud tumors.
	Bernice Eddy found this in the polio vaccine, reported it to her bosses at NIH. She was silenced, punished, her career was destroyed, and they went ahead and distributed it.
	This contaminated vaccine to 98 million people, including me.
	You know, my whole generation got it.
	But the SV40 virus was not just confined.
	So that virus, which was a monkey virus, was harmless to monkeys.
	It had reached stasis and equilibrium with them where it no longer harmed them.
	When given to humans or other animals, it causes cancer explosions.
	That virus is now throughout the entire human population because it was given two vaccines for a limited number of time, but it got into the blood supply.
	And I suppose it might be possible that some virus at that time in history, if this is a viral disease, That virus could have also become ubiquitous in the blood supply, and of course, we don't know about it.
	You know, I think there was an excellent book written on this topic, Simeon Forty, Many, many books.
	It's not controversial.
	Nobody denies people.
	And I think that there have been people who have proposed this as one explanation for the pandemic of ME. I don't think it's been pursued beyond just proposing it.
	But I think, again, you have to come back to what makes the most sense?
	What is the most rational explanation?
	And regarding that, you have to think about the timing.
	Again, this was a very obscure and rare disease.
	Prior to the middle 1980s, when I began reporting on this in early 1986, I called the director of, she was in charge of public health, actually, and infectious diseases at the LA County Health Department.
	Her name was Shirley Fannin.
	She was an excellent public health officer.
	And I called her up, and before I could even get, you know, 20 words out about this disease, she said, I know exactly what you're talking about.
	And she said, frankly, there is no other problem or disease about which we get more phone calls, more so than AIDS. And she said, I'm afraid we may have another tiger by the tail.
	In other words, another epidemic.
	And, you know, she said, we're inundated with phone calls from patients and doctors on this disease.
	We have no money to spend on it.
	All the money is going to AIDS. And I will also mention that there were other very famous outbreaks that were occurring around this period as well that I wrote about in my book, Oslo's Web, years ago.
	You still have to come back to what happened to set off this explosion of cases.
	And I'm not sure.
	I mean, I think the vaccine issue you're talking about with the Simeon vaccine is, you know, very, very interesting and needs more research.
	But I'm not sure that it explains what happened during this time period when this virus started.
	This disease, you know, went from virtually zero to 90 in the space of a few years.
	You know, now there's a scientist at the University of San Diego who has done a lot of research on this.
	He has indicated that, his name is Robert Navio, by the way, for anyone who's curious.
	He's indicated that cases of ME have increased 60-fold since 1985.
	And the conservative estimate right now is that 1% of the world's population has this disease.
	That is shocking and appalling to think that 1 out of every 100 people is suffering from this absolutely devastating, disabling disease.
	And if we want, we can get into the way the federal government Health agencies, and even the FDA, is working in concert with CDC and NIH, and has been for decades now,
	to suppress information about this disease, to suppress funding, so that so many very prominent epidemiologists, virologists, immunologists, biostatisticians,
	etc., who've wanted To work on this disease, who have been able to get grants from NIH for millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars over their career, but who were shot down on their attempts to get a grant to study ME, and they left the field.
	And this has left a very, you know, over the years, this has been so discouraging to scientists who have been interested, that, you know, nobody really wants to touch this.
	And because it's almost impossible to get funding, and the tiny amounts that are available to do the research, to fund research that come from the NIH, are They're in amounts that normally are called fairy dust funding at NIH. In other words,
	some years there's been $3 million to study IME. Currently, as of this year, they're proposing the next fall that they'll fund three centers, three scientists, To the tune of $7 million a year.
	And anything under like $10 million or $15 million at NIH is considered fairy dust.
	Literally, that's rounding up.
	Those are rounding up numbers.
	That's how small the money is.
	This is a chronic problem because NIH has a budget of $42 billion a year.
	This is money it gives to scientists.
	It involves the study, the origins, the etiology, sorry, of the diseases that are injurious to the American people.
	But they don't do that.
	What they do is they develop drugs in partnership with the pharmaceutical industry.
	And they do studies that are harmless and easy to publish.
	The problem with a disease like this is whatever's causing it is almost certainly emblematic of a failure of government regulation.
	So if it's being caused by a toxic chemical, it's going to be glyphosate, it's going to be neonicotinoid pesticides, it's going to be...
	Any of the other chemicals that became ubiquitous in the 1970s, PFOAs or PFASs, flame retardants, Teflon, these are all made by huge and very powerful chemical manufacturers who control congressional committees that write the budgets for NIH so they won't go near it.
	The even worse possibility is that this is vaccine related and the vaccines actually increased in the coterminant with this time period.
	So we went from three vaccines in the 1960s to by 1980.
	Today we have 72 vaccines that are mandated, 72 doses of 16 vaccines.
	And the big change happened in the 1980s.
	The DTP, the MMR vaccine, the hepatitis B, the Hib vaccines, all of these vaccines.
	And if any of them contain viruses, and many of them are grown on the tissue of monkeys or other animals that have viruses, that could jump to humans if they're injected into them.
	And it's a scary thing for NIH regulators to consider that they may be causing these chronic diseases.
	Gosh, there's so much you just said.
	Let me respond by saying first that, as a journalist at Life magazine, I covered Love Canal.
	And I probably spent three or four months in the Love Canal neighborhood.
	And I was just astonished at how poorly the State Health Department and the Centers for Disease Control responded to that problem.
	That was my inculcation, shall we say, into the world of toxic chemicals.
	And for a while, I also felt that virtually every problem, every medical problem in the world could be ascribed to toxic chemicals.
	However, Coming back to ME, I want to give you just a little pushback on what you're saying, all due respect, which is that, again, thinking rationally about this disease, which, as I've said, is very discreet, a lot is known about it, it's not like any other disease, and it's been written about since the turn of the last century.
	So to prove that, for instance, the chemicals you mentioned that were so prominent became prominent in the late 70s into the 80s, you'd have to prove that everyone with ME had been exposed to those chemicals.
	And that's not true.
	They weren't all exposed to those chemicals.
	Or pesticides that worked on the same biological pathways.
	Like, for example...
	The copper-based pesticides that they used in the 1900s, which were coterminants with the polio outbreaks, operate on the same biological pathways as DDT, which later replace them.
	And I'm making this argument, Hillary.
	I'm just saying there is, this is just a process that you go through where you have to say, okay, what are the exposures that fit the criteria where you have every demographic exposed suddenly showing this disease?
	In the 1970s, what could be the culprits?
	What became ubiquitous throughout the population during that period?
	And it doesn't mean that there weren't smaller levels of the same chemical or similar chemicals before.
	It means something caused that explosion.
	And, you know, we have to look for biological exposure because the genes don't cause epidemics.
	You need an environmental toxin or you need a microbe.
	Well, I think you mentioned genes and I'll just say, I'll just insert here the fact that there's been a lot of speculation and theories tossed out about genetic genes in relation to ME. And there's simply no evidence whatsoever that there's any kind of genetic link to having ME. In other words, But NIH, that's what NIH loves to do.
	They love to look for genetic cause to every disease.
	And it's oxymoronic because genes do not cause epidemics.
	If it's an epidemic, you know it has to be an environmental doc.
	That gene can provide the vulnerability, but it's not going to be the thing that makes you sick.
	It leads to a whole epidemic.
	But NIH loves to pump money, just throw money down that rat hole because they keep all these scientists employed and they know they're never going to come up with an answer.
	That's what they do with autism.
	They're constantly, you know, they've got billions and billions routed into studying the genetic cause of autism and zero into looking at vaccines.
	They don't want to find out.
	I couldn't agree more about the genetic search for the link to...
	What's the genetic search for autism?
	It's ridiculous.
	If you know how much money has been wasted looking at genetic issues and ME, I totally agree with you.
	The genetic links are, that's an avenue that needs to end.
	But I'm still going to give you a little pushback on toxic chemicals, even though for many years I was obsessed with toxic chemicals and I thought they were the answer to everything.
	But I've kind of moved over into a new area.
	Yeah, and by the way, you don't have to push back because I don't believe it's a toxic chemical either.
	I think it's viral.
	That's my core belief.
	I can't support it.
	And the question is, how do you amplify kind of a viral epidemic?
	How do you cause one?
	One of the ways you do that is by vaccinating an entire population with the virus.
	And that could be it too, but I'm not...
	I have no scientific basis for that.
	It's just a process of elimination.
	It has to be one of a certain category of causes that became ubiquitous in the 1970s.
	That's all I'm saying.
	I'm not naming a culprit.
	I'm saying there is a limited universe of what can be caused in this, and we should identify those 20 or 30 causes and then eliminate them with science one at a time.
	That's what NIH ought to be doing, and you and I know it will never do those studies.
	No, we'll never do those studies.
	But let me just say that there is so much evidence for infection in this disease.
	The immunology of ME absolutely screams infection.
	Every abnormality in the immune system that you look at in this disease suggests there's an antigen present And the response of the immune system is exactly what you would see when there's an infection.
	And yet, in every other infectious disease, scientists at the NIH say, oh my gosh, there's an infection.
	What we can see by the immune system?
	In ME, it's sort of like, oh, that's very interesting.
	I wonder how the psychology managed to change the immune system in this way.
	I mean, every single important finding immunologically and every other aspect of the disease, abnormal brain findings, etc., are just sloughed off as if they're nothing.
	I mean, you always have to come back.
	And regarding the vaccines, yes, I'm with you on the fact that there was a plethora of vaccines, and it's horrifying to think about the...
	Number of vaccines that infants get these days.
	But on the other hand, when you're talking about ME, you have to think, well, what was the common denominator?
	What are the risk factors?
	And the only risk factors that we know so far for ME is, you know, first of all, being human.
	Number two, being female.
	Number three, having contact with another person with ME. You know, there's a long history of cluster outbreaks of ME, by which I mean, well, epidemics.
	How do you define it?
	The definition is time-space clustering, in other words...
	Lots of people getting sick with the same thing at the same time.
	There's tremendous evidence of that, a long history of that.
	Hillary, we're going to have to sign off.
	I just wanted to mention one other subject, which you go into a lot, which we didn't get a chance to talk about today.
	It would be wrong for us to end this podcast without mentioning it, which is the way that the medical system tortures people.
	People who have this diagnosis of gaslighting them, of dismissing them, of running them, making them pariahs.
	And these people who are enduring, mainly women, this terrible, terrible suffering.
	And it just compounds it.
	We need to mention that.
	And I want to thank you very, very much for joining us today.
	Thank you.
	It's been a pleasure.
	Thanks.

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