Judy Mikovits

Yes, there were some examples of absurdly unreasonable patients confidently making ridiculous arguments (though it was about 10 of them), but I thought that this article conflated some exaggerated or weak points (a patient having 'In Judy we Trust' as a signature?) with patient criticism of work around CBT, where all substantive issues of concern were ignored and instead we were presented as idiots:
"Mainstream medical opinion was divided, but psychiatrists had found that some ME/CFS sufferers benefitted from cognitive behavioral therapy. These findings were hugely controversial with ME/CFS activists resistant to their (erroneous) interpretation that the disease was “all in their head.”"

Maybe I was being unfair myself, and I edited in a note on that above, but I thought that the article played into some unfairly negative tropes of patients.

 

Disgraced Plandemic star Judy Mikovits defended a bogus bleach product as a COVID-19 treatment

During the leadup to the interview, Genesis' Mark Grenon said that Mikovits “knows of chlorine dioxide and our fight for health freedom. This is why she agreed to come on the G2Voice.”

Mikovits also said: “I don't need you to tell me I can't use an energy healer, you know, to code me, which I do, all the days on string theory to code me for infections, like the rife machine that has the frequency of these bad viruses that part of our -- 8% of our viral -- turn it off. All we have to do is turn it off.” A rife machine is an instrument that emits low-level electromagnetic waves into the body. Proponents have falsely claimed that the machine can cure a variety of ailments, including cancer, Lyme disease, and now COVID-19, by entering certain frequencies into their machines.

Mikovits defended the use of chlorine dioxide even though she had previously indicated in the podcast that she knew of the potential dangers of using it as treatment, stating: “Chlorine dioxide used in the wrong way ... or in a person at the wrong time can be a very bad thing."

 

https://forbetterscience.com/2020/06/24/judy-mikovits-plandemic-covid-portunism/

 

John Oliver is mentioning her in his segment on conspiracy theories.

He's talking about her arrest, thankfully never mentions on what she was working on back then though.

 

I sometimes wish that people would have greater understanding and tolerance for Mikovits. For a number of years she has clearly had "difficulties", and displayed questionable judgment. Given what she was put through this is unsurprising. She was caught up in a series of events for which others were at least partly responsible. No-one can know how they would react in such circumstances.

 

I believed her xmrv findings and I still kind of do. I saw her at a conference in 2010 and found her to be very charismatic, down to earth and..just authentic.

She gave me a lot of hope, it was just my 2nd yr of illness. Of course that's just a subjective impression and not based on any scientific grounds.

I don't know what happened with/to her, I know about the long aftermath but I gave up on having an opinion about it.

But what she's doing now is dangerous to people with ME, too, and that's what's bothering me.

 

I struggle to judge some of the details of the research, but increasingly it seems like she was playing fast and loose with her science before other problems came along. One could say that she was surrounded by a deeply flawed scientific culture, but the same excuses could be made for the PACE researchers or any other quack. I think that it's most likely she was playing a cynical game from early on, and is best seen as a con-artist making increasingly desperate moves rather than a good researcher who was led to bad behaviour by bizarre external circumstances.

 

I'm not sure. Some have gained fame and fortune from alleged laboratory contamination. Circumstances may be kind or unkind.

 

I can think of no evidence to suggest, or reason to suppose, that being broken by a virus would have the same outcome as being broken by the legal system. The US has possibly the best justice money can buy.

There were quite recently reports of a court judgment against Mikovitz. There seemed to be a certain Schadenfreude that this was proof of, well, something. It looked to me to be a default judgment on a procedural, not substantive, issue and as such might merely have indicated a lack of resources to take on the matter.

In such circumstances people break, and may then hold all sorts of views of doubtful provenance and validity.

 

worth watching this documentary; I was unaware of the sequence of events or the roles of the other 'players' until I saw it.
https://www.s4me.info/threads/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-me-full-documentary-susan-douglas.15685/

eta:
just to add that I haven't actually read any of the stuff she has been coming out with recently apart from that it involves conspiracies about the current pandemic (enough to put me off finding out more).

 

I have real trouble with the XMRV conclusions.

To begin with, lots of mammalian species have a mouse leukaemia like virus, even koala bears so how have humans avoided it when we have lived so closely with mice for generations? (My grandparents routinely washed dishes before use as well as afterwards because the mice ran freely over them, not everyone was so fastidious)

Then they tested blood and concluded there was not XMRV in humans but when they inoculated gibbons the XMRV disappeared from their blood very quickly but their lymph glands were full of virus.

Then all the studies were negative, fair enough.

But all the positive studies, even the one by the discoverer of hepatitis C who was also involved in the identification of HIV were positive because all reagents are contaminated by XMRV. Then why were all the other studies negative?

The attitudes of the scientists involved were also appalling. One who came on the forum was asked why they did not replicate the method used by Mikovits. He said "Oh, so I am meant to stand on one leg whistling Dixie if that is what she did?" And, as is usual, the conclusions of papers did not match the results.

None of it was scientific. I felt that if it was involved in ME it gave us no advantage apart from proof Me was physical as it does not replicate often and that is where HIV is treated. I was more excited by the Workwell work which came out at the same time.

I suspected at the time that no one wanted a new retrovirus with no treatments to be implicated in disease in humans.

An old theory is that long term conditions such as diabetes (and ME) could be caused by an infection reactivating a retrovirus in some people. The question is still open.

 

Mikovits, the gift that just keeps giving.
https://twitter.com/user/status/1286867879938457603

 

It looks like she is in deep with the QAnon stuff. If you don't know what it is keep it that way, it's just mindless conspiracy theories.

It's such a weird thing to have this focused on the US, as if it was the center of the world. What sucks is that it's true that Fauci played a role in dismissing ME but not for the reasons she cites, which she seems to make personal.

Ugh.

 

Fauci and the other NIH swine were dismissing ME/CFS for decades before this grifter arrived on the scene.

 

Well, at least it's postponed. For now.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1287866879428538368