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Aug. 30, 2024 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
42:44
WTW57: Judy Mikovits, the Most Unreliable Narrator
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Time Text
What's so scary about the woke mob?
How often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress Green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 57.
It's part two of the Things Fell Apart, Falling Apart, Jon Ronson series.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How are you doing?
I am doing great.
I'm excited to hear what more we have to learn today about this crazy story and this crazy person.
I am really excited for this part because this is such an interesting scientific mystery story kind of thing.
Yeah, totally.
And that's just like drugs for me.
I love those kinds of things.
And Janessa does such a great job of taking us through it.
So why don't we just...
Let's just do it.
Let's just put our listeners out of this misery of hearing us do an intro and let's just get over to part two with Janessa here of this series and we can find out this lab intrigue stuff that is this MSRP thing.
I don't know, I'm trying to do X-Files.
Oh, I thought you were trying to do this music.
No.
Anyway, after this break, patreon.com slash weatherswap.
So, Judy is detecting this virus in the CFS patients.
Basically, other labs aren't finding it as soon as this gets published in 2009.
Because I think you mentioned this is like a big, like if real, this was like super scary, right?
Yes, super scary because it would mean, you know, if 3% of healthy controls have this, well, okay, but there's 330 million people in the United States?
Like, 3% of that is a lot of people.
Yeah.
That concern, like, people are comparing it to, like, HIV and hepatitis.
Like, oh my god, is this infecting the blood supply?
Because they found it in blood samples.
And like, oh no, what is this?
Yeah, I want to clarify, what do you mean in blood samples?
So, like, what was this experiment?
It wasn't just like, oh, she collected some people's blood.
It's like she has samples from, like, some sort of blood bank?
I didn't understand that before.
Oh yeah, okay, let me clarify.
She has samples from patients.
People who have CFS and normal healthy controls show up for research.
They take blood samples in addition to, you know, all kinds of other things.
This person's doing this research, this person's doing that research.
This is an institute that is housed on the University of Reno campus.
They are, you know, they're doing this, they're doing that, and Judy's thing is looking for this virus, or looking for viruses, and sure enough the virologist finds a virus.
It's kind of like...
You know, hammers and nails, right?
That's the comparison a lot of people have made.
So she is doing a pretty much standard thing, is get blood samples from patients.
And one thing that'll become really important is running gels.
So if you've ever done this in like bio labs, they get the DNA out of there, basically use some enzymes to cut it up, and you have this like literally it's like a little square piece of Jelly.
And it's got these wells in the top.
You pipette your samples into the wells.
You run an electrical current through it.
DNA is negatively charged.
I hope I'm remembering that correctly.
And it pulls it through the gel matrix and basically like little small tiny pieces of DNA will fit through the matrix.
Easier.
And so they'll get down to the bottom faster.
Big pieces will have a harder time fitting through the gaps and they'll be up near the top.
And so you get these lovely little bands.
This isn't high school bio, right?
No, no, no.
You know in high school biology when you sequence the human genome, everybody?
You did that, right?
I didn't think my class was that bad, but apparently it is.
No, no, no, no.
Sorry.
Yeah, this would have been if you did if you pursued like A Nobel Prize in genetics, for example.
Not Bio 101 at college, but if you went a little past Bio 101 in college.
We'll take your word for all this.
Pre-med route or something, where you're having to take those higher level.
She's looking for DNA?
Yeah.
They end up finding the DNA of this retro virus.
It's a tiny little sequence.
This might be a dumb question.
What was the, did she have a hypothesis of, I think I will find this virus in blood?
It's not that she's just like, yeah, I'm just going to do blood stuff over here.
Just whatever, whatever we find, you know, you find like some old trash in there.
Like it's a riverbed, you know, there's like a TV.
Oh, I found a virus, you know, or is it like she had some reason to suspect this?
Oh boy, isn't that an excellent question.
You know, if we were doing like thorough excellent science, we would be having some a priori reason.
So there's one a priori reason to generally look at viruses, and that is it looks like Many people with CFS, it started with some sort of viral-like onset.
Okay.
So this is all in the name of people have this chronic fatigue syndrome.
And chronic fatigue syndrome, I don't know if it's still the case, but mysterious, right?
A real thing, but yeah.
So one hypothesis is maybe they've picked up something that has caused this.
And so I'm going to do, I'm going to just skim through their blood.
Just put my hands through their blood.
Just see if anything comes up.
Yeah.
So to be clear, like what is, Still, more of a fringe idea is that they have an active infection causing this.
Interesting, okay.
What seems to be the more mainstream belief, like, I am not a medical doctor, I'm not a virologist, but what I gleaned out of this was basically It may well be that any number of viruses, you know, while many people would get sick and recover, this could be like the trigger for somebody who, for whatever reason, is going to be prone to CFS.
The virus happens, they get, you know, viral-like symptoms, and then instead of recovering, They will continue to have these lingering symptoms that are really not cold symptoms.
Like, you know, the chronic fatigue part of it would be the leg.
Doing even a little bit of exercise is incredibly exhausting.
Like, they have to, you know, 24 hours later I might be able to do another activity.
And we're talking, like, Brushing your teeth, getting up, getting out of bed, brushing your teeth.
Exerting any energy.
Yes.
This is now exhausting and I'm so tired.
Yeah.
And that's like the kind of diathesis stress model, right?
Like that we would see in a lot of other like psychological illnesses and everything and, you know, and understandably in physiological manifestations too.
Yeah.
So like this is kind of one of those situations where They think there is a reason that that stress or that trigger impacts people in that way and so it's figuring out exactly what the diathesis part of it is.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's a great way to think of it is like something is, you know, some people have proposed and this is where a lot of the like anger and offense has come from of the like this is a hundred percent psychogenic and I mean, psychogenic illness is incredibly powerful.
People underestimate the extent to which you can have psychogenic blindness.
That seems like, how can that be?
Your brain is unbelievably powerful.
It can be really offensive to people when that's implied, but like, you know, Psychogenic illness is real illness.
Yeah, I feel like anyone who's had anxiety, I don't know why you would downplay that.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, hey, if anybody's experiencing that, you deserve to be treated like a human by your doctor.
Even if it turns out the thing you have is psychological, your doctor shouldn't be dismissing you.
It's still part of your body.
Yes, your brain is your body.
It's one thing to be like, well, it's all in your head.
Here's what we're, you know, we're going to try to do.
It's another thing to be like, it's all in your head.
Go home.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like if someone did that for anxiety, someone could tell me like, well, it's all in your head and be like, hey, fucking great, man.
That's awesome.
Anyway, can you fix my head then?
Yeah.
Because it's true.
If we know where it's happening.
I can't just get a new head.
Right, so I think that's where part of it comes from, is I think many people experience it's all in your head, like, get over it, as opposed to like, it's all in your head, let's treat your poor head.
Lots of stuff is in our heads, yeah.
Yeah, and also I think it seems clear also it's not all in your head.
It's also in your legs.
It seems like it's more... I'm sure there's at least one person who is in the CFS bucket where it is truly completely psychogenic and that person deserves treatment.
And then there's a lot of people in this bucket who seem to have something going wrong with their immune system, with their neurological system, with their musculature.
Do you think this is related to long COVID in any way?
Oh my god, yes.
I feel like it's got all the vibes, yes.
It feels very like that.
Well, let it suffice to say, that's what she's kind of working on.
There's so much.
Okay.
Yeah.
So on the one hand, a lot of people would accept the idea that maybe there was a viral onset.
That seems pretty common.
That it is a current active infection that you are dealing with for the last 40 years.
That's pretty fringe.
Especially the idea that 67% of patients, boom, we got it.
We figured it out, everybody.
We solved CFS.
It's one virus.
Yeah, one virus, exactly.
And you're all actively currently infected for decades.
Like, well, why haven't you fought it off?
That's pretty crazy.
There are viruses that hang out in your body, but they don't usually They hang out in very, like we know of one.
It's called HIV.
It's rough.
HPV, which can hang out in your nervous system for a long time.
But there's like a dormant phase with those viruses.
So even though it's part of your body for a significant period of time, perhaps the rest of your life, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's like actively working on your body.
But this is a virus that potentially would be acting in that way.
And that's kind of odd, right?
I mean, again, I'm not a virologist either, so I'm just spouting off here.
No, no, no.
No, you're totally right.
So, like, most people will clear HPV within about a year of catching it, but not everybody.
And chickenpox is a form of... Oh, is it a form of HPV or HSV?
But it hangs out... HSV, I think.
And it hangs out in your nervous system.
That's how you can get shingles.
It's the reactivation of that.
Yeah, it seems unlikely.
A lot of people are instantly skeptical because of this.
Like, geez, if this disease is so complicated and it turns out it's just explained by one current active infection, like really?
We didn't Okay.
Weird.
And, like, why didn't, you know, if it was just of current viral infection, like, you would think, like, lots of treatments that, whatever.
It's raising suspicions.
So she is doing, among other things, like the gel technique to find, oh, look at this little band of this tiny, tiny piece of DNA indicates a retrovirus.
Okay, so the virus would leave DNA, and you can pull that through that sewer grate, whatever the hell you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
And the virus, it is DNA.
A retrovirus.
It just is like a really aggressive piece of DNA, basically.
That's what they call me, too.
So basically, Judy is a virologist and finds a virus, and she's a retrovirologist and she finds a retrovirus.
She wears old clothes while she studies.
Exactly.
Groovy!
She likes steampunk equipment and stuff.
Oh god.
Okay so basically that's where we're at is nobody can really replicate her findings.
So she found a virus and it was in these blood whatevers and the ultimate wow thing of like holy shit is this would mean an awful lot of people just have like a dormant virus or like an active virus or what would it mean?
Yeah yeah so it would mean because it was like found in the blood it would mean like circulating in your blood The majority of people with CFS have it, which would mean, oh my god, we have a target for treatment.
These poor people who have had no target for treatment, oh my god, amazing.
And then on the other end, for the healthy controls who are showing it, oh my god, there's a virus circulating in their blood, they're just walking around.
And for people who, for whatever reason, are susceptible to CFS, if they go get a blood transfusion, Is this in our blood?
When I said the blood banks, that's what I'm getting at.
Somewhere at the Red Cross, is there a pile of 3% of it having XMRB?
Oh God.
Yeah, and I just didn't get like, that's what she was studying?
Was just some blood samples that would be from that?
No, no.
She's got patients coming to her, and the suspicion is... Oh, oh, oh, I see.
So she's just thinking if it's just population-wise, 3% of just everyone has it, it's going to be in there, and it's... Oh, okay, I got you.
It's everywhere.
I misunderstood.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you've got it now.
So it's 3% of the healthy controls who sign up to be in her study, she finds it, So if that's the case, what if 3% of people just have it, and 3% of them go, you know, if 3% of people who go donate their blood to the Red Cross have it, oh god, are we spreading it?
And if just 3% of you listening will donate on patreon.com sla- no, sorry.
Yeah, so it's creating a panic about our blood banks, It is creating absolute elation in the CFS community because it's like, oh my god, if it's this virus, if we know what the cause is, finding a cure or a treatment... It's an answer.
Yes, it's an answer.
It's an answer for people who have felt dismissed, who have felt like nobody believes me.
You know, a lot of the symptoms they experience are not objectively measurable.
That's really frustrating for people when they have a lot of symptoms.
A lot of times doctors talk about signs and symptoms.
Signs are things your doctor observes.
Symptoms are things you report to your doctor.
And if you have something where there are a lot of symptoms that you experience and there are little to no signs that your doctor can observe, that's so frustrating because you have to demand that medical professionals just trust you.
And there's a huge gender bias in it.
Oh yeah, I was just going to bring that up.
A lot of women?
And heaven forbid if you're a woman.
Well, am I crazy?
Even a headache is something you have to tell your doctor you have, right?
They can't see it.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Doctors are supposed to be trained on symptoms are real.
Just another reason why that doesn't mean that it's not real, is just all I'm saying.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Your symptoms can... Doctors are experts on what diseases are and how they work, and you, the patient, are an expert on what you are experiencing and how your own body feels and how it usually operates and how it's operating today.
You're the expert on that, and your doctor should be taking that seriously.
Part of me just feels like, how many of these people just have a disease that If they were a man, their doctor would listen to them and they would have a diagnosis, right?
Because it's probably a bit of a bucket diagnosis that there are some people who have this thing and there are some people who have that thing and maybe the causes are different and this is a syndrome that is an end state of multiple different problems.
And that could mean, despite different causes, This end state is very similar and the treatment would be very similar.
It's so poorly understood and it needs more research and not this research.
Nonsense!
Well, tell us why.
Why not this research?
What happened?
Yes.
Okay.
So basically nobody can replicate it.
And other labs are trying, like labs in different countries are trying, labs all over the US are trying.
It explodes.
And then there's this instant, one might call it a dog pile of just like, no, can't find it.
Not sure why you can find it because we can't find it.
So, there's a couple of things that start to happen, but I'll have you play the way this is portrayed in Things Fell Apart.
Some of the scientists who couldn't replicate Judy's findings were developing a theory.
Labs all over the world routinely acquire for their experiments lab-grown cells called cell lines.
Maybe the XMRV had contaminated the cell lines that Judy was using in her lab.
So the virus infected these cell lines and so many labs had XMRV sort of floating around in their research materials.
But it's questionable whether it ever infected a single human being.
So there's no suggestion of foul play here.
This seems to have been like a genuine mistake.
I think so.
I don't think it was foul play, no.
So the other man you hear speaking there in addition to Ronson is Martin Enserink.
He's a journalist who worked at Science Capital S Science is a scientific journal where a lot of research is published.
It's really big, famous.
Science and Nature are the two big ones where if you publish there, you got it made.
And that's where Judy's original study in 2009 was published.
Holy crap, the paper!
And Enserink worked there as a journalist writing for Science Insider, which is like their popular reporting for the average person kind of thing.
And he covered this extensively, and that's the other voice you hear there.
So to cut Ronson some slack, when he says, so there's no suggestion of foul play here, this seems to have been like a genuine mistake, N. Sarink does say, I think so, I don't think it was foul play, no.
That being said, N. Sarink is a journalist, not a scientist, and he wrote his biggest piece on what the heck is going on with Judy the exact same day that a bombshell piece of evidence dropped.
So I am a little confused why, you know, N. Sarink is saying, I think so, I don't think it was foul play.
Okay, so we're getting N. Sarink's opinion.
Well, also just right off the bat, tell me if this doesn't make sense.
I thought, okay, what is he talking about exactly?
Is he just talking about like why the initial results might've been something or could there be more involved in like later on or something?
And is he only talking about a specific part of it?
I don't know.
I haven't done this research, but that was just one thing that came to my mind.
Cause all we hear is him saying, I don't think there was foul play in this one thing.
We don't, we don't actually hear what he's talking about exactly.
Yeah, I agree.
I kind of thought that through the whole show, to be honest.
I'm just throwing out a number.
I didn't do analysis, okay?
But, like, 90% of this feels like Ronson talking and people cut in to just have a clip, as opposed to, like, normally you think of an interview as, like, mostly the other person and the journalist cuts in sometimes.
Yeah, I mean, that's whatever.
It's not an interview show per se, and so it makes sense, but that just means that obviously there's room for either error or misleading if you don't do that perfectly right.
There's been plenty of times where people were like, hey, that's not exactly what I meant.
But who knows?
I'm not saying that happened here.
It was just what came to mind.
Yeah, no, I thought the same thing.
Like, I wonder if answering, like, the set up here was, like, did it seem like a genuine mistake at that time, and then maybe later I changed my mind, or, like, what exactly did this seems to have been a genuine, like, which this, this being XYZ.
So yeah, I'm not quite sure.
I don't want to put words in Instinct's mouth, and he is ultimately just saying his own opinion about it.
It is a little strange, it feels like to me, that we've got a journalist asking another journalist who covered the thing, and I'm just like, where is Any of the actual scientists in all of this, but whatever.
Other than Judy, who, again, is going to give you her own narrative.
Okay, so on the one hand, to cut him some slack, he's got somebody who has knowledge of what went on at the time, but not personal, direct knowledge.
It's a journalist telling him, I don't think it was foul play.
But if you were to, I don't know, go on to Judy's Wikipedia page, you would see There are allegations that this was in fact intentional.
Under the section labeled foul play.
Yes, literally!
Oh my god, it's so frustrating.
If you google her, if you go on her Wikipedia, there have been allegations that this was not like a genuine mistake.
From the beginning.
So let's get into what the heck did happen here.
One thing that, it doesn't necessarily make it foul play or not, but to understand like why it was ridiculous to hold on to this idea.
It got sillier and sillier the longer this went on.
XMRV was eventually proven, ironically enough, to be a lab-created virus.
Oh wow.
It's never circulated in the wild.
Okay.
Yeah.
Wait, maybe I didn't understand this.
Was this a novel virus at the time of her discovery?
It had been discovered a few years earlier.
Oh, okay.
And what happened was they found it in prostate cancer cells.
And it had this, it has what's called a, genes have a promoter region, which is basically the thing where what's going to cause it to be... Social media.
Yeah, yeah.
What's going to cause it to be encoded.
Like and subscribe, like and subscribe.
It's what's going to get the attention of the things that encode the genes.
So like, every cell in my body has my entire genome, you know, every cell in my body has the genes to make an eyeball, but it's not doing it.
Like, thank God, right?
So it's got to get encoded like this piece or that piece.
So, basically, they find this XMRB virus in a promoter region that seems to be triggered by male hormones.
Oh my god, perfect!
It's in prostate cancer cells.
It's triggered by male hormones.
We may have a virus that gets triggered by male hormones.
It's called toxic masculinity.
Like, it fits, right?
Oh my God, maybe this is a thing.
And we know that some viruses do cause cancers.
Think about HPV for cervical cancer, right?
Wait, but already, isn't it weird?
I thought that fucking restless leg syndrome.
No, what is the fucking thing?
What is the thing we're talking about?
Chronic fatigue syndrome.
I thought chronic fatigue syndrome was like disproportionately women.
Yes.
So this is odd, isn't it?
Yeah, isn't it weird that the... Okay.
I don't know unless there's some biology reason why that doesn't matter.
It's gonna matter.
Oh, okay.
So how do we end up finding out this virus doesn't even exist, basically?
So somebody finds this in a prostate cancer cell and is like, Maybe this is a thing.
And that was in 2006, it was first discovered.
And they're like, hmm, what could this be?
And this is actually Silverman, who is one of the authors on the paper with Judy.
He discovers it and he's like, okay, okay, what am I looking at?
Cool, cool, cool.
One of the things he does, it's a really common lab technique, It's actually becoming a problem that the promoter region is triggered by male hormones.
Life is so much easier if the promoter region is a thing I can easily control.
So he does some little splicing to make the promoter region into a cytomegalovirus piece that is commonly used.
And he sticks it into a bacterial plasmid.
A bacterial plasmid is a circular piece of DNA that lives in your bacteria have these like floating around inside of them.
He also sticks an antibiotic resistance into it.
And the reason to do this is basically if you've got a piece of DNA that you want to hang on to and use for something, You have a promoter that you are able to be like, got it, I'm using this.
I know how to trigger that promoter.
And you've got your antibiotic resistance so that I could put this all over a plate full of that antibiotic and nothing will live but my thing.
So this will kill off all the other BS that, you know, I'm trying to keep my lab as clean as possible, but just in case.
So he makes a specific clone of the virus that has the promoter region that is different from the mouse cells that this was found in and the antibiotic resistance.
And he has that going in his lab.
But he's also found it in these, they call it a mouse virus, basically they had a mouse cell line going where what it turns out had been done.
They got these prostate cancer cells from a human.
Then they did a really common lab technique that people do to get a cancer cell to grow, because you can't just, like, throw it on the ground and be like, grow!
They put it into... It's more gross lab rats.
Sorry, everybody.
Grow it inside a mouse.
And so you kind of, like, grow a piece in this mouse and then move it and grow it in the next mouse.
It's nasty.
Sorry.
I know, it's horrible.
And basically, if this were a real retrovirus that was out there in the wild, retroviruses acquire mutations really, really fast.
And so they often, one of the things I read was like about for if somebody has like a strain of HIV, they often think of it like you have a storm of like, there's slight variations in the virus all throughout the individual's own body.
Oh, even within your own body?
Oh, okay.
Yes.
Wow.
Even within the individual, it will acquire little variations in its genetic code every time it replicates.
So, what suddenly raised eyebrows?
Because now people are looking really closely at this thing that wasn't getting a lot of attention before.
No, when you say now, sorry, just to make sure, are we still in like shortly after this virus was discovered or are we back to this experiment where she found it?
Yeah, this is shortly after Judy finds this in the blood.
Oh, it's after she finds the blood.
Okay.
But they still didn't know it was necessarily lab.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So basically somebody finds this in prostate cancer cells that had been Grown and grown and grown in a mouse, and then plated, and then created into a cell line, and then, oh my god, it's technically, you know, it's a mouse cell, but it was a human cancer cell, and blah, blah, blah.
It's a mouse virus, but, oh my god, you know, is it one of those cross-species viruses?
Like COVID, you know, we think cross-species.
That happens in 2006, and people are like, this is interesting.
I wonder if this maybe could have something to do with some prostate cancers.
And it's percolating, but it's not a big deal.
Yeah, the people who are working on that think it's an interesting thing.
Then Judy claims to find it circulating in the blood of living humans that she sampled and is like, whoa.
And now when everybody is looking at it, somebody goes, this seems a little suspicious.
Yeah.
And they look and they realize from one sample to the next, The genetic sequence of that is about like 99.923% identical.
I'm just making that number up, but it's always like 99.9 something.
Yeah, never 100%.
It's never 100%, but it's like 99.9 blank.
It's incredibly high.
So high, it can't possibly have replicated.
Because every time you replicate, it's going to have some amount of variance.
Yes, degrade kind of thing.
Exactly, exactly.
I don't think it is physically possible that any organism, let alone a human, had this, because there should be this variability, this difference in the virus, this storm-like appearance, and instead it's just like damn near identical.
And so what somebody did, brilliant scientific work, They went back to the original samples from 2006.
They're frozen in a freezer.
Here's this piece of prostate cancer, and it doesn't have the virus.
I was saving it for later.
Yeah, yeah.
That cancer doesn't have the virus.
Wow.
It never did.
And they trace it through and they find when that cancer cell was put into a mouse and tried to grow, that's when it jumped into the human tumor cell and then somebody made a mouse cell line out of it.
So it basically crossed once and got a little bit of variability there and then that was it.
Then it was asexually reproduced as a cell line in labs forever.
That's crazy.
Wow.
So on the one hand, that is like an incredible scientific discovery and like amazing detective work to go back and find.
And it's also a huge relief of like, oh, thank God, this could never have affected a mouse or a human.
This virus isn't real.
It's a lab made virus and it's not out there.
So therefore, you don't even really need to figure out exactly how her experiment went wrong.
You're just like, well, we know it's lab grown, so it's not like people are walking around with this.
Right.
Yes, and if only, if only, everyone could have gone, whoo, sorry guys, sorry for CFS patients, I'm sorry I got your hopes up, people who manage our national blood bank, I'm so sorry I wasted your time, and that is not what happened.
It was a continuing thing of like, well, what about this?
What about this?
What if it's this other thing?
What if it's slightly like this?
What if it's a, you know, it's not exactly XMRV, but it's a virus kind of like this.
It turns into a whole thing.
Just from who?
Just from what's-her-name or from lots of people?
She's doing that but she's one of 13 authors on this paper and some of those authors are, there's her and a couple of people at WPI are clinging to this and Rossetti is backing her kind of in a more quiet sort of way is still like, well, you know, it could still be this.
And really, I think there was honestly a lot of what people end up talking about is that there were a lot of CFS patients who latched on to Judy as a savior, a hero.
Yeah.
And now they are convinced there is a government conspiracy, and they are sending death threats to people, allegedly, and there is, like, this huge harassment campaign going on.
Of course, this is not all patients, but there is a, like, religious-like group of people who are... have latched on to Judy as, like, the person who's gonna save them.
And now the attack on this paper is an attack on them personally, and...
This is people trying to, once again, tell them it's all psychological, it's not this virus.
And I think that is a huge part of what led to, like, we have to triple, quadruple prove this isn't really happening.
Like, Judy at one point starts saying, well, just because it did emerge in a lab, it doesn't mean it also didn't emerge in the wild.
Gotcha.
Somebody in one paper said that would be the equivalent of saying that I dropped a quarter out of a helicopter and it fell into the Grand Canyon and landed on top of another quarter.
Just no, man.
No.
Okay, that doesn't mean this was fraud.
That just means this definitely didn't happen the way, like, it's not, the finding isn't real.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay, so then why do we get suspicious here?
There's two major issues.
Silverman, who was on the paper, gets suspicious about, well, wait a minute, because here's the thing.
Is in 2007, the way that Silverman ends up working with Judy is he meets her at a conference and she says, I know you discovered this XMRV in cancers, and a lot of our CFS patients have rare cancers.
I'm wondering about that virus, if maybe they have it.
Could you give me a sample of your plasmid?
And he gives her a sample.
And it's not the mouse... I don't love that.
Yeah, it's not the mouse cell line that everybody else is using.
The mouse cell line is known to contaminate other people's stuff and so they'll test and find not just XMRB but like mouse DNA.
It's like glue in itself to the side of test tubes everywhere and causing problems.
He gave her that special plasmid, the one that is no longer part of a mouse cell.
It is a bacterial plasmid.
And so he says, I'm going to grab these samples Judy gave me that came from the CFS patients and that came from the normal controls.
And I'm not going to look for XMRV this time.
I'm going to look for that antibiotic resistance piece, and I'm going to look for the cytomegalovirus promoter, the thing I added, and he finds it.
And he finds it only in the CFS patients, not in the healthy controls.
Huh.
And that is, you know?
You put like a marker in there.
But why not the healthy controls?
Because I thought 3% of them had the virus or something.
Oh, so he grabbed a sample.
Oh, his own healthy controls.
No, no, no.
So he's part of this study.
He grabbed of their like, you know, hundreds of participants in the study.
He was like, I'm just going to test like, you know, 10 and 10 or whatever.
Oh, okay.
So he might have just landed on the 97% of controls that do not.
Yeah.
Okay.
Got it.
Yeah.
And so what's critical is if this is a lab contaminant, Yeah, I was going to say that.
That's why I was confused about this 3% the whole time.
Yeah, I was going to say that.
That's why I was confused about this 3% the whole time.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Yeah, you would either expect it got into one of the reagents I'm using, and it's in 100% of my samples.
Or it would be kind of randomly distributed, just like if it's floating around my lab as a cell line, like these little cells are just like all over the place.
There's no real reason it would only be in my CFS patients.
Silverman does this analysis and will issue what we'll find out is behind the scenes was begging the magazine Science to do a full retraction at this point.
Interesting.
He was like, get this out of here.
This is BS.
That makes sense.
I feel like that's what a responsible scientist would do at that point.
I agree.
He gets a partial retraction.
Basically he is taking himself and his lab off of this.
Who's in charge of that?
Like science or would you need to get all the authors or something?
Ah yes, so normally the way that this works ideally when people are being reasonable and not fighting is ideal world you get everyone to agree all the authors sign off on a full retraction or a partial retraction and uh the editor at the journal will ultimately publish that and like you know coordinate that basically what will end up happening here is
A lot of infighting and this, you know, these people can't agree, these people can't agree, and it sounds like what happened is really, Silverman is vehement about, he works in a lab in the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, he is like, I don't care what everybody else is doing, but my lab is not on this anymore.
Right.
The part I did, I now know to be bullshit, because I now know the XMRV is my plasmid, and it's not mouse cells, and it's not... It's definitely the thing I made, which is definitely a contamination.
Unequivocally.
Even if the virus did evolve out there in the wild a second time, which is bullshit, by the way, it didn't happen.
This one didn't.
This one is the bacterial plasmid that I gave Judy.
So no to all of this.
It's crazy that not all the scientists would join in on that, but okay.
One would think.
The other labs are WPI, the Whittemore Peterson Institute, where Judy and Lombardi work.
And the other one is Resetti's lab in Maryland at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, Resetti being her PhD advisor.
The one that was like anti-vax curious or whatever?
Yeah, we have reason to suspect that on both of those labs.
Suspicions, allegations, I'm not, I don't want to make confident statements on that.
So, but Silverman's like, we are out.
I at least demand a partial retraction of my piece of this.
I'm out.
But he was asking for a full retraction.
So this is the guy who discovered XMRV, is like, I now believe XMRV is not real.
Wow.
that the plasmid I created has been put in this.
And what you will find is, again, let's say you think Judy got this sample from Silverman and then accidentally, somehow accidentally contaminated CFS patients only, and like only 3% of her healthy controls.
Maybe you believe that.
It is still the case that if you go research this, you will find allegations that this is clear evidence she intentionally spiked it with the plasma.
Right, right.
Everybody else who has a contamination, it's the mouse cells that are contaminating it.
Right.
Not this plasmid.
That she specifically had.
That she asked him for in 2007.
That's crazy.
She had no evidence that her CFS patients had this.
No reason to suspect this.
And was like, hey, Silverman, I heard about this.
Can I have some?
And then she finds it.
Wow.
Only in the CFS page.
Like, why would your contaminant only get into one?
There's like a random sentence in one of Nstrength's articles that says, just out of nowhere, really, it says, some people argue that the patient samples would have been handled more.
And I'm like, this sounds a little defensive of maybe why you think that would get contaminated and not the healthy controls.
Like, the article feels defensively written in some ways.
But the point is, even if we can't be 100% sure or prove that this is foul play, at the very least, there's lots of suspicion about it.
So saying, no, no suspicion of foul play at all, not accurate, right?
Yeah, those three sentences to just go, no, no foul play, no foul play.
Like, okay, well, it's about to get worse.
All right.
Well, that's where we're going to leave it with that huge cliffhanger.
But man, I want to hear how it's going to get to work.
Do we have to poke in here, hun, and end this part or can we just keep playing it?
Cause I want to hear how it's going to get way worse.
You got to tune into the next episode.
You got to do it.
All right.
Well, I guess I got to do that, and I'm sure I could get that faster if I go to patreon.com slash where there's woke, I imagine.
Probably.
Most likely.
We're in charge of the page.
We're just guessing.
Hey, we're as in the dark as you all are.
I don't know what you want from us.
Oh no, this is, ah, I love this just unraveling of this scientific mystery that Janessa's done and it's, as she said, it's about to get worse.
Yeah.
So, on the next Where There's Woke, it's about to get worse.
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