Dr_SLO
Well-known member
Conspiracy Bullshit
I was waiting for this to surface. This is a synopsis by a graduate student, Brooke Wolford, at the NIH that summarizes the situation nicely.
Ok friends, let's chat about the "Plandemic" video with Dr. Judy Mikovits which I've also seen with a header including "Dr. Tony Fauci's ex-employee." I have a few points I'd like to make as someone who has worked at the National Institutes of Health and is a current PhD candidate in biomedical research. Views are my own but those are my "credentials."
1) The 2009 Science paper (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/326/5952/585.abstract) mentioned in the first minute was retracted in 2011. Retraction means enough scientists raised concerns about the validity of the work and when given the chance to respond, the original authors were unable to reliably support their work. It is believed the original findings were due to lab contamination (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3426297/). The description in the video that her work found "the common use of animal and human fetal tissues were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases" is not even an accurate description of what the retracted paper described.
2) Dr. Judy Mikovits never worked for Dr. Tony Fauci. He has been the head of NIAID since 1984 and that institute is one of 27 institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health. Potentially the NIAID provided extramural grants that funded some parts of Mikovits' research at some point in her career, but that doesn't mean she was an employee of Dr. Fauci. Furthermore, the grant that funded the retracted Science paper was actually from National Cancer Institute.
3) I am not an expert in legal matters but she seems to be exaggerating her legal troubles. A private medical research institute, Whittemore Peterson Institute, fired her for not sharing a cell line with another researcher there. She was accused of taking computer data, equipment, etc from the institute. You can read more from the journal Science https://www.sciencemag.org/…/details-emerge-criminal-charge… and the journal Nature: http://blogs.nature.com/…/institute-claims-victory-in-civil….
4) Around 4:00 she states, "Everybody else was paid off and paid off big time, millions of dollars in funding from Tony Fauci and Tony Fauci's organization NIAID." Let me explain how NIH extramural funding works. Investigators don't get paid by the NIAID or Dr. Fauci. They are awarded funding based on grant applications they write, typically proposing detailed study aims. These grants are evaluated by a panel of established experts in a given field who convene from universities across the country to score the grant applications based on scientific merit. Funding is quite competitive! Program officers employed by NIH then check up that researchers are progressing in their scientific aims which they receive federal funding to pursue. You can read more about NIH peer review here: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/peerreview22713webv2.pdf
5) Around 6:00 she talks about her work with Dr. Ruscetti and accuses Dr. Fauci of holding up publication of a paper which led to the delay of confirmation of HIV as the virus causing AIDS, and therefore Dr. Fauci is at fault for the virus spreading and killing millions. The governmental responses to HIV/AIDS is an important topic with a rich history of debate, but to address her accusation, one scientist cannot just "hold up a paper for publication" in this manner. Scientific journals ask experts to peer review research before publication, and sometimes papers go through a slow peer review process to ensure the robustness of finding. But she does not even use this language when describing the situation. On Pubmed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) where you can search scientific papers, the papers from 1986 with Dr. Ruscetti and Dr. Mikovits as co-authors cite affiliations with the National Cancer Institute so again, not even under the same institute as Dr. Fauci.
6) Around 12:00 she says Ebola couldn't infect human cells until scientists taught the virus how in the laboratory. She is seeming to imply that her work in 1999 made Ebola infectious...but the first Ebola outbreaks were in 1976 in Africa: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/about.html
7) Around 14:00 they discuss an alleged artificial inflation of COVID-19 death tolls to make the pandemic appear worse than it is. Defining COVID-19 deaths for death certificates is a difficult challenge for sure! But if we just consider all-cause mortality and remain agnostic to whether deaths are due to COVID-19, we can compare deaths in April/March to what we historically see. It is obvious there is quite a tragic loss of life. The CDC allows visualization of these excess deaths (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm) and the NY Times looks state by state (https://www.nytimes.com/…/05/us/coronavirus-death-toll-us.h…). A caveat: "All of these numbers are likely to be a substantial undercount of the ultimate death toll, since death counting takes time and many states are weeks or months behind in reporting." (Edit Note: It was brought to my attention it isn't clear this quote is from the NY Times article linked before it)
8) Around 15:00 Dr. Mikovits states that hospitals get a lot more money from Medicare with a diagnosis of COVID-19 and if you use a ventilator for treatment. The CARES act does provide for this higher allocation of funds to treat COVID-19 patients, who on average have 11 day hospital stays which is double that of the flu (https://www.npr.org/…/how-the-novel-coronavirus-and-the-flu…). But there is no evidence that hospitals are creating fraudulent diagnoses or putting patients on ventilators that shouldn't be placed on ventilators just for the money. You can read about this here: https://www.usatoday.com/…/fact-check-medicare-…/3000638001/
I could go on and on finding evidence to prove Dr. Mikovits is just spouting every conspiracy theory and piece of misinformation floating around the internet. But to be honest, I have actual research to do. So let me give you some tools to gauge authenticity in the future. Any PhD trained scientist with credibility would be showing citations for past papers they are discussing or present data and figures to back up their claims. Good scientists rarely speak in absolutes, but usually explain caveats and nuances of their conclusions. In the video she moves from tangent to tangent with no real thesis, consistent narrative, or evidence. If the production team were real journalists there would be interviews with other sources to corroborate her stories, not just clips lacking context or names/affiliations/citations. Also, this wouldn't come from some sketchy account on YouTube. PLEASE think before you share content. Do some googling and look for articles by reputable sources that seem to converge on the same facts. I know we may disagree about what constitutes a reputable source, but .edu, .org., .gov are usually solid. Finally, we are all prone to bias and you may do well to learn about confirmation bias: https://catalogofbias.org/biases/confirmation-bias/.
Listen, I'm not saying people in power should be explicitly trusted, but Dr. Tony Fauci has a demonstrated track record of public service that spans administrations of both parties and multiple public health crises. To latch on to conspiracy theories instead of uniting to work on the COVID-19 crisis at hand is an awful waste of passion and energy.
I was waiting for this to surface. This is a synopsis by a graduate student, Brooke Wolford, at the NIH that summarizes the situation nicely.
Ok friends, let's chat about the "Plandemic" video with Dr. Judy Mikovits which I've also seen with a header including "Dr. Tony Fauci's ex-employee." I have a few points I'd like to make as someone who has worked at the National Institutes of Health and is a current PhD candidate in biomedical research. Views are my own but those are my "credentials."
1) The 2009 Science paper (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/326/5952/585.abstract) mentioned in the first minute was retracted in 2011. Retraction means enough scientists raised concerns about the validity of the work and when given the chance to respond, the original authors were unable to reliably support their work. It is believed the original findings were due to lab contamination (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3426297/). The description in the video that her work found "the common use of animal and human fetal tissues were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases" is not even an accurate description of what the retracted paper described.
2) Dr. Judy Mikovits never worked for Dr. Tony Fauci. He has been the head of NIAID since 1984 and that institute is one of 27 institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health. Potentially the NIAID provided extramural grants that funded some parts of Mikovits' research at some point in her career, but that doesn't mean she was an employee of Dr. Fauci. Furthermore, the grant that funded the retracted Science paper was actually from National Cancer Institute.
3) I am not an expert in legal matters but she seems to be exaggerating her legal troubles. A private medical research institute, Whittemore Peterson Institute, fired her for not sharing a cell line with another researcher there. She was accused of taking computer data, equipment, etc from the institute. You can read more from the journal Science https://www.sciencemag.org/…/details-emerge-criminal-charge… and the journal Nature: http://blogs.nature.com/…/institute-claims-victory-in-civil….
4) Around 4:00 she states, "Everybody else was paid off and paid off big time, millions of dollars in funding from Tony Fauci and Tony Fauci's organization NIAID." Let me explain how NIH extramural funding works. Investigators don't get paid by the NIAID or Dr. Fauci. They are awarded funding based on grant applications they write, typically proposing detailed study aims. These grants are evaluated by a panel of established experts in a given field who convene from universities across the country to score the grant applications based on scientific merit. Funding is quite competitive! Program officers employed by NIH then check up that researchers are progressing in their scientific aims which they receive federal funding to pursue. You can read more about NIH peer review here: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/peerreview22713webv2.pdf
5) Around 6:00 she talks about her work with Dr. Ruscetti and accuses Dr. Fauci of holding up publication of a paper which led to the delay of confirmation of HIV as the virus causing AIDS, and therefore Dr. Fauci is at fault for the virus spreading and killing millions. The governmental responses to HIV/AIDS is an important topic with a rich history of debate, but to address her accusation, one scientist cannot just "hold up a paper for publication" in this manner. Scientific journals ask experts to peer review research before publication, and sometimes papers go through a slow peer review process to ensure the robustness of finding. But she does not even use this language when describing the situation. On Pubmed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) where you can search scientific papers, the papers from 1986 with Dr. Ruscetti and Dr. Mikovits as co-authors cite affiliations with the National Cancer Institute so again, not even under the same institute as Dr. Fauci.
6) Around 12:00 she says Ebola couldn't infect human cells until scientists taught the virus how in the laboratory. She is seeming to imply that her work in 1999 made Ebola infectious...but the first Ebola outbreaks were in 1976 in Africa: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/about.html
7) Around 14:00 they discuss an alleged artificial inflation of COVID-19 death tolls to make the pandemic appear worse than it is. Defining COVID-19 deaths for death certificates is a difficult challenge for sure! But if we just consider all-cause mortality and remain agnostic to whether deaths are due to COVID-19, we can compare deaths in April/March to what we historically see. It is obvious there is quite a tragic loss of life. The CDC allows visualization of these excess deaths (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm) and the NY Times looks state by state (https://www.nytimes.com/…/05/us/coronavirus-death-toll-us.h…). A caveat: "All of these numbers are likely to be a substantial undercount of the ultimate death toll, since death counting takes time and many states are weeks or months behind in reporting." (Edit Note: It was brought to my attention it isn't clear this quote is from the NY Times article linked before it)
8) Around 15:00 Dr. Mikovits states that hospitals get a lot more money from Medicare with a diagnosis of COVID-19 and if you use a ventilator for treatment. The CARES act does provide for this higher allocation of funds to treat COVID-19 patients, who on average have 11 day hospital stays which is double that of the flu (https://www.npr.org/…/how-the-novel-coronavirus-and-the-flu…). But there is no evidence that hospitals are creating fraudulent diagnoses or putting patients on ventilators that shouldn't be placed on ventilators just for the money. You can read about this here: https://www.usatoday.com/…/fact-check-medicare-…/3000638001/
I could go on and on finding evidence to prove Dr. Mikovits is just spouting every conspiracy theory and piece of misinformation floating around the internet. But to be honest, I have actual research to do. So let me give you some tools to gauge authenticity in the future. Any PhD trained scientist with credibility would be showing citations for past papers they are discussing or present data and figures to back up their claims. Good scientists rarely speak in absolutes, but usually explain caveats and nuances of their conclusions. In the video she moves from tangent to tangent with no real thesis, consistent narrative, or evidence. If the production team were real journalists there would be interviews with other sources to corroborate her stories, not just clips lacking context or names/affiliations/citations. Also, this wouldn't come from some sketchy account on YouTube. PLEASE think before you share content. Do some googling and look for articles by reputable sources that seem to converge on the same facts. I know we may disagree about what constitutes a reputable source, but .edu, .org., .gov are usually solid. Finally, we are all prone to bias and you may do well to learn about confirmation bias: https://catalogofbias.org/biases/confirmation-bias/.
Listen, I'm not saying people in power should be explicitly trusted, but Dr. Tony Fauci has a demonstrated track record of public service that spans administrations of both parties and multiple public health crises. To latch on to conspiracy theories instead of uniting to work on the COVID-19 crisis at hand is an awful waste of passion and energy.
