Judy Mikovits is starring in a new video that has grabbed a lot of attention in the past few hours. The main thing I can find about Mikovits is that she has published a scientific study that was retracted due to suspected falsification of data, and was later arrested and detained on a warrant for theft of property related to a dispute with a former employer. She was later released and charges dropped. It is a long way from there to “sent to prison for her views”. For those wondering how the US justice system works, if a court issues a warrant and you don’t respond, and you are later stopped in another state, you get detained and extradited to the jurisdiction that issued the warrant. Or you/your lawyer clear it up in a hurry and they release you. Now the alternative view is that she stumbled across some vital information that would change everything so the system had to silence her, and she was successfully framed on trumped up charges.
Looking a bit deeper, Mikovits was researching CFS when she thought she had identified a novel retrovirus, named XMRV. This got a whole lot of people excited, since CFS has bedeviled medicine for decades. So the topic was researched in depth by multiple labs. Conclusion: “Subsequent research established that XMRV was in fact a laboratory contaminant, rather than a novel pathogen.” These findings caused the journal Science to retract her paper. It appears that where Mikovits got in trouble was when she at some point became convinced her findings were nonetheless correct and refused to share her raw data with anyone. This was a problem because she was working for a non-profit foundation under an agreement whereby her research wasn’t actually hers. The foundation, it seems, wanted the truth more than they wanted her to be right. After all, it was set up to find out what causes CFS. Her withholding of what was technically the foundation’s data from scientific scrutiny (she apparently took all her notes and lab equipment from Nevada to California) slowed down the process of figuring out what was really happening with XMRV. And also lead to the situation where she got arrested. The foundation reported the equipment stolen.
Or the short version: XMRV does not exist in humans. The lab tests that previously seemed to indicate that it did were the result of a contaminated reagent. The tests were correct to show XMRV, but it didn’t come from the person, it came from the liquids added to run the test.
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