WTW57: Judy Mikovits, the Most Unreliable Narrator

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:03 Clip: What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming.

0:00:11 Clip: Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism, and you see woke principles being pushed.

0:00:19 Clip: Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down. The woke monster is here, and it's coming for everything, everything, everything, and everything. Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke. This is episode 57, part two of the Things Fell Apart, Falling Apart, John Ronson series. I'm Thomas. That's Lydia. How are you doing?

0:00:50 Lydia: I I am doing great. I'm excited to hear what more we have to learn today about this crazy story and this crazy person.

0:01:00 Thomas: I am really excited for this part because this is such an interesting scientific mystery story kind of thing. And that's like, that's just like drugs for me. I love, I love those kinds of things. And Jenessa does such a great job at taking us through it. So why don't we just get to it?

0:01:16 Lydia: Let's just do it.

0:01:17 Thomas: 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 Jenessa here of the series. And we can find out this lab intrigue stuff that is this msrp thing oh I thought you were trying to do this music uh no anyway after this break patreon .com where there's woke

0:01:40 Lydia: Else all right

0:01:52 Jenessa: Is uh this virus in the cfs patients basically other labs aren't finding it as soon as this gets published in 2009 and

0:02:03 Thomas: I think you mentioned this is, like, a big deal. Like, if real, this was, like. Super scary, right?

0:02:08 Jenessa: Super scary because it would mean you know if three percent of healthy controls have this well okay but there's 330 million people in the united states like three percent of that is a lot of people um 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 oh

0:02:24 Thomas: Mm-huh. Yeah, I want to clarify. I, I, do you mean in blood? 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 a, some sort of blood bank. I didn't understand that before.

0:02:43 Jenessa: Okay let me clarify she has samples from patients patients who 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 and this person's doing this research this person is doing that research this is an institute that is housed on the 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 um 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 pretty pretty much a standard thing is get 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 you 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 you pipette your samples in 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. 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 of like

0:04:24 Jenessa: No

0:04:24 Lydia: Isn't high school bio, right. I didn't learn any of of this I

0:04:27 Jenessa: Sorry

0:04:27 Thomas: You know, in high school biology, when you sequence the human genome, everybody, you did that, right?

0:04:32 Lydia: Was sitting here like I didn't think my class was that bad but apparently geez like

0:04:38 Jenessa: This would have been um if you did uh if you pursued like

0:04:39 Thomas: A Nobel prize in genetics, for example.

0:04:46 Jenessa: Yeah so not not bio 101 at college but if you went like a little past bio 101 in college you or like uh

0:04:54 Thomas: We'll take your word for all this.

0:04:55 Lydia: Pre pre -med route or something right where you're having to take those higher level yeah okay okay got

0:04:58 Thomas: But looking for DNA or

0:05:02 Jenessa: Yeah so So they end up finding the DNA of this retrovirus. It's a tiny little sequence that

0:05:10 Thomas: Might be a dumb question. What was the, the, how 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, just doing 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 there's I found a virus, you Know, or is it like she had some reason to suspect this?

0:05:32 Jenessa: Boy, isn't that an excellent question. If we were doing like thorough, excellent science, we would be having some a priori reason. So there's one a prior reason to generally look at viruses. Viruses um and that is it looks like many people with cfs it started with some sort of viral like onset so

0:06:00 Thomas: So this is all in the name of people have this chronic fatigue syndrome and that's and chronic fatigue syndrome somewhat I don't know if it's still the case but mysterious right like yeah still so mysterious so okay that makes sense so like yeah so one one hypothesis is maybe they've picked up something that has caused this and so I'm gonna do I'm gonna just skim through their blood just put put my hands through their blood just see if anything comes up yeah

0:06:09 Jenessa: Still yes very yeah

0:06:12 Lydia: A real thing but yeah yeah yeah interesting

0:06:23 Jenessa: Yeah so to be clear like what is still a more of a fringe idea is that they have an active infection causing this what seems to be the more mainstream belief and like I am not a medical doctor I don't 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 the you know the chronic fatigue part of it would be the like 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 you your teeth is up getting out of bed brushing your tooth

0:06:35 Lydia: Okay exerting

0:07:37 Jenessa: Yes this is now exhausting and I'm so tired yeah

0:07:37 Lydia: Any energy yeah yeah and that's like the kind of diathesis stress model right like that we would see we in a lot of other like psychological illnesses and everything and you know and understandably in physiological manifestations too and 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 what diathesis part of it is

0:08:09 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great way to think of it is like something is, you know, some people have proposed and, uh, this is where a lot of the like anger and offense has come from of the, like, this is 100% psychogenic. Um, I mean, a illness is incredibly powerful. Um. Know, people underestimate the extent to which you can have like psychogenic like blindness like that seems like how can that be your brain is unbelievably powerful um can be really offensive to people when when that's implied but like you know psychogenic illness is real illness and yes yeah exactly like hey um if anybody's experiencing that like you deserve to be treated like a human by your doctor like it's even if it turns out the thing you have is psychological like your doctor shouldn't be dismissing you yes

0:08:48 Thomas: I feel like anyone who's had anxiety I don't know why you would downplay that like it's awful yeah yeah

0:09:01 Lydia: It's still part of your body yeah

0:09:09 Jenessa: Your brain is your body

0:09:09 Thomas: The bottom line is you it's one thing to be like well it's all in your head here's what we're you know we're gonna try to do it's another thing to be like it's all in your head, go home like if someone did that for anxiety someone could tell me like well it's all on your heed and be like hey fucking great man that's awesome anyway can you fix my head then because it's yeah I can't just get a new head head yeah exactly

0:09:25 Lydia: Then let's treat it if we know where it's happening yeah yeah

0:09:30 Jenessa: So I think that's where part of it comes from is like 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 yeah

0:09:38 Thomas: Lots of stuff is in our heads yeah right

0:09:45 Jenessa: And also I think that seems clear also it's not all in Your Head it's also in your legs I think it's 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 like something going wrong with their immune system with their neurological system with Their musculature.

0:10:13 Thomas: Man do you think this could be related to like long coveted anyway like

0:10:17 Jenessa: My god. Yes, I feel like it's got all the vibes. Yes. It feels very like that.

0:10:20 Thomas: Interesting well let it suffice to say that's

0:10:24 Jenessa: There's so much.

0:10:25 Thomas: What she's kind of working on okay you

0:10:27 Jenessa: 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 did we figured it out everybody we solved CFS it's one virus and and you're all actively currently infected for decades like well why haven't you fought it off that's crazy there are viruses that hang out in your body but they don't usually they hang out and very like we know of one it's called hiv it's rough so uh uh hang out in your your system for a long time so like it's

0:10:57 Lydia: Virus exactly there's like a dormant phase with those 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 you 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.

0:11:43 Jenessa: 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 um but it hangs out hsd I think um and it hangs up in your nervous system that's how you can get shingles um it's the reactivation of that so like yeah it seems unlikely a lot of people are instantly skeptical because of this like geez if this disease is so complicated and And it turns out it's just explained by one current active infection. Like, really? We didn't? Okay.

0:12:25 Jenessa: 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, you 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.

0:12:23 Thomas: Can check yeah okay so the virus would leave DNA and you can pull that through that sewer grate whatever the hell you're talking about it

0:12:53 Jenessa: Yeah, the virus, yeah, yeah, and the virus it is DNA. A retroviverse, it just is like a really aggressive piece of dna basically.

0:12:58 Thomas: Is DNA yeah right that's what they call me too okay

0:13:09 Jenessa: So basically Judy is a virologist and finds a virus and uh she's a retrovirologist and she finds a retrovirus

0:13:18 Thomas: Wears old clothes while she studies yeah okay she can like steampunk equipment and stuff like laughing

0:13:21 Lydia: Curvy

0:13:31 Jenessa: God okay so basically that's where we're at is um can really replicate her finding

0:13:38 Thomas: So she found a virus and it was in these blood whatever's and the ultimate wow thing of like holy shit is this would mean a awful lot of people just have like a dormant virus or like an active virus or what would it mean

0:13:53 Jenessa: Yeah so it would mean because it was like found in the blood it would 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 treat. 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 that when I said the blood banks that's what I'm getting at somewhere at the red cross is there a pile of three percent of it having XMRV oh god no

0:14:37 Thomas: And I just didn't get like that's what she was studying was just some blood samples that would be from that oh

0:14:43 Jenessa: No she's got patients coming to her and the suspicion is yes

0:14:47 Thomas: Oh oh I see so she's just thinking if if it's just population wise, 3 % of just everyone has it, it's going to be in there and it's okay. I gotcha. I misunderstood. Sorry.

0:14:55 Jenessa: Everywhere it's yes yeah yeah yeah you've got it now so it's three percent 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?

0:15:20 Thomas: And if just 3% of you listening will donate on patreon.com. So no, sorry.

0:15:27 Jenessa: 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 is, yes, it's an answer. It's an answered for people who felt dismissed, who have felt like nobody believes me, you know, a lot of the symptoms they experience are not objectively measurable. And 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 lotof symptoms that you experience and there are no signs that your doctor can observe, that's so frustrating because

0:15:41 Lydia: It's an answer yeah yeah but

0:16:16 Jenessa: You have to demand that medical professionals just trust you and you know a huge gender bias in it that it's a lot of women yes

0:16:23 Lydia: I was just gonna bring that up and heaven forbid if you're a woman right

0:16:28 Thomas: Well, am I crazy? Like even a headache is like something you have to tell your doctor you have, right? They can't see it. Can I?

0:16:29 Jenessa: Yeah absolutely like doctors are supposed to be trained on like symptoms are real like

0:16:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Another reason why that doesn't mean that it's not real is just all I'm saying. Like, yeah.

0:16:44 Jenessa: Absolutely your symptoms can can it, 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. The expert on that. And your doctor should be taking that seriously. And 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 you know because it's it's probably a bit of a bucket diagnosis that there are some people who have this thing and there are some people who that thing and like maybe the causes are different and this is a syndrome that is a end state of multiple different problems and that that could mean despite different causes this end state is very similar and the treatment would be very similar um so poorly understood and it needs more research and not this research that's nonsense so so

0:17:11 Thomas: For sure. Yeah. Well, tell us why. Why not this research? What happened?

0:17:47 Jenessa: She's okay so basically nobody can replicate it and other labs are trying like labs in different countries are trying labs all over the U.S. are trying it explodes and then there's this instant one might call it a dog pile of just like nope 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 um but I'll have you play the way this is portrayed in things fell apart so

0:18:25 Clip: Of the scientists who couldn't replicate Judy's findings were developing 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 cell lines and so many labs have XMR -V sort of floating around in their research materials. But it's questionable whether it ever affected 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's foul play at all. The

0:19:04 Jenessa: The other man you hear speaking there in addition to ronson is martin ensorink um he's a journalist who worked at Science -- capital S Science is a scientific journal where a lot of research is published. It's like 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. Like, holy crap, the paper. And Ensor Inc. 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 and Ensorink does say I think so I don't think it was foul play no that being said and Ensorink is a journalist not a scientist and he wrote his biggest piece on what the the heck is going on with Judy the same day that a bombshell piece of evidence dropped so I am a little confused why you know Ensorink is saying I think so I don't think it was foul play okay so we're getting Ensorink's opinion yeah

0:20:26 Thomas: 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.

0:20:46 Thomas: 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.

0:20:54 Jenessa: I agree I was I kind of thought that through the whole show to be honest like 90% I'm just throwing out a number I didn't do analysis okay but like 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.

0:21:15 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, that's whatever. That's, it's not an interview show per se. And so it's like, it makes sense. But that just means that like, obviously there's room for either error or misleading if you don't do that perfectly right like there's been plenty of times where people are like hey that's not exactly what I meant like but who knows I'm not saying that happened here it was just what came to mind right

0:21:34 Jenessa: No, I thought the same thing. Like, I wonder if, 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 um so yeah I'm not quite sure I don't want to put words in Ensorink'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 and all of this but whatever other than judy who again is going to give you her own narrative so okay so on the one hand to cut him some slack he's got somebody who is you knowledge of what went on at the time but not personal direct knowledge it's a journalist uh telling him I don't think it was foul play um 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

0:22:43 Jenessa: Fraud.

0:22:38 Thomas: Under the the section labeled foul play oh

0:22:46 Jenessa: 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 xmrb was eventually proven ironically enough to be a lab created virus it's never ever circulated in the wild um it

0:23:27 Thomas: Wait maybe I didn't understand this was this a novel virus at the time of her her discovery.

0:23:33 Jenessa: Had been discovered a few years earlier and what happened was they found it in prostate cancer cells and it had this um 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 yeah yeah yeah what's going to cause it to be encoded so like

0:23:52 Thomas: Social media. Yeah. Like, and subscribe, like, and subscribe to my gin genome.

0:24:00 Jenessa: Basically

0:24:00 Lydia: Patreon .com slash where there's work.

0:24:03 Jenessa: It's what's gonna get the attention of the things that encode the gene so like every cell in my body has my entire genome you know every cell in my buddy 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 virus in a promoter region that seems be triggered by male hormones.

0:24:35 Jenessa: Oh my god, perfect. It's in prostate cancer cells. It's triggered by male hormone. We may have a virus that gets triggered by male hormones and and would 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 chronic

0:24:47 Thomas: It's called toxic masculinity. No,

0:24:51 Lydia: Boom. Boom.

0:25:00 Thomas: Wait, but already, isn't it weird? I thought that fucking restless legs in it. No. What is the fucking, what is the thing we're talking about? Yeah. Chronic fatigue. I thought chronic fatigue syndrome was like disproportionately women and so

0:25:06 Jenessa: Fatigue syndrome chronic fatigue yes so this is odd is it not so

0:25:14 Thomas: Isn't it weird that the okay I don't know unless there's some biology reason why that doesn't matter it seems

0:25:18 Jenessa: Gonna matter matter so um so how do we end up finding out this virus doesn't even like exist basically so somebody finds this in a prostate cancer cell and is like whoa maybe this is a thing and that was in 2006 it was first discovered and they're like what could this be um 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 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. So much easier if the promotor region is a thing I can easily control. He does some little splicing to make the promoters region into a cytomegalovirus piece that is it's commonly used and he sticks it into a bacterial plasmid bacterial plasmin is a circular piece of DNA that lives in your bacteria have these like floating around inside of them and 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 that you are able to be like, got it, I'm using this. I know how to trigger that promoter. 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 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. They did a really 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 um 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 it's nasty sorry

0:27:48 Jenessa: I know it's horrible and basically uh 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.

0:28:16 Thomas: Even within your own body oh okay wow now

0:28:19 Jenessa: Even within the individual it will acquire little variations in its genetic code every time it replicates um what suddenly raised eyebrows people because now people are looking really closely at this thing that wasn't getting a lot of attention before yes

0:28:37 Thomas: When you say now sorry just make sure are we still in like shortly after this virus was discovered or are we back to this experiment where she found it in blood

0:28:44 Jenessa: This is shortly after judy finds this in the blood yes

0:28:48 Thomas: It's after she finds the blood okay and but they still didn't know it was necessarily lab grown okay quite

0:28:54 Jenessa: 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 it's technically you know it's a mouse cell but it was a human cancer cell and blah blah blah um mouse virus but oh my God you know is it one of those cross species 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 yet.

0:29:30 Jenessa: 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. 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 it's it's never 100% but it is like 99 point nine blank it's incredibly high so high it can't possibly have replicated yes

0:30:09 Lydia: Never 100%. Yeah.

0:30:14 Thomas: High because every time you replicate it's gonna have some amount of variance I

0:30:25 Lydia: Degrade kind of thing. Interesting.

0:30:28 Jenessa: They were like I don't think it is physically possible that any organism let alone a human human had this because there should be this variability this 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 yeah yeah yeah that cancer doesn't it doesn' have the virus 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 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.

0:31:05 Thomas: Was saving it for later yeah wow

0:31:40 Lydia: That's crazy.

0:31:42 Jenessa: 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 it's not out there yes

0:32:03 Thomas: So therefore you don't even really need to figure out exactly how her experiment went wrong you're You're just like, well, we know it's lab grown, so it's not like people are walking around with this.

0:32:15 Jenessa: And if only if only everyone could have gone 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 um was a continuing thing of like well what about this what about this what if it's this other thing what if its slightly like this what it's a you know its not exactly xmrv but its a virus kind of like this it turns into a whole thing so

0:32:21 Thomas: Whoops. Yeah. From who? Just from what's her name or from lots of people?

0:32:47 Jenessa: Doing that but she's one of 13 authors on this paper and 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 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, 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 going to 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 it 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

0:34:10 Jenessa: In the wild and uh 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 like just no man no okay that doesn't mean this was fraud that just means this definitely didn't happen the way that like it's not the finding isn't real it's yes okay so then why do we get suspicious here um 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

0:34:11 Thomas: Gotcha. Contamination. Yeah. Wow.

0:35:15 Jenessa: It's not the mouse yeah it's not the mouth 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 gluing 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 plasmide. And so he says, I'm going to grab these samples Judy gave me that came from the CFS patients and that came for 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'll look for the cytomegalovirus promoter, the thing I added and he finds it. He finds it only in the CFS patients, not in the healthy controls.

0:35:17 Lydia: Don't love that. Put like a marker in there and then, oh,

0:36:19 Thomas: But why not the healthy controls? Because I thought 3 % of them had the virus or something. Thing oh

0:36:23 Jenessa: That is... so he grabbed a sample of their sample. 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 gonna test like you now 10 and 10 or whatever yeah

0:36:26 Thomas: His own healthy controls no sorry

0:36:39 Lydia: Okay. So he might've just not, have landed on the 97% of controls that do not. Yeah.

0:36:43 Jenessa: Yeah you wouldn't you yeah

0:36:45 Lydia: Okay. I got it.

0:36:46 Jenessa: And so what's critical is if this is a lab contaminant an accidental contamination what you expect is either 100% of your samples because it got into a

0:36:55 Thomas: I was gonna say that that's why I was confused about this three percent the whole time sorry go ahead

0:36:59 Jenessa: 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 he was like get this out of here this

0:37:04 Thomas: Interesting

0:37:35 Jenessa: Is bs I

0:37:37 Thomas: Wow that makes sense I that's feel like like that's What a responsible scientist would do at that point what

0:37:41 Jenessa: Agree he gets a partial retraction basically he is taking himself and his lab off of this uh

0:37:48 Thomas: Who's in charge of that like science or would you need to get all the authors or something

0:37:53 Jenessa: Yeah 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 in fighting and this, you know, these people can't agree, these people can 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.

0:38:39 Jenessa: 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 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. No to all of this.

0:39:11 Thomas: So it's crazy that not all the scientists would join in on that but okay the

0:39:16 Jenessa: One would think. The other labs are WPI, the Whittemore Peterson Institute, where Judy and Lombardi work, and the other one is Rossetti's lab in Maryland at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, Rossetti being her PhD advisor.

0:39:34 Thomas: One that was like anti-vax curious or whatever okay very

0:39:37 Jenessa: 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. Um he was asking for a full retraction um this is the guy who discovered xmrv is like I now believe xmv is not real I now believe 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 an accidentally, somehow accidentally contaminated CFS patients only, and like only 3%

0:39:41 Thomas: Weird yeah yikes right

0:40:25 Jenessa: 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 plasmid. Everybody else who has a contamination, it's the mouse cells that are contaminating it, not this plasmid that she asked him for in 2007 when no evidence that her cfs patients had this no reason to suspect this was like hey silverman I heard about this can I have some and then she finds it only in the cfs page like why would your contaminant only get into one there's like a random sentence in one of mikovits's articles that says just out of nowhere where really it says some people argue that uh 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 it article feels defensively written

0:40:47 Lydia: That she specifically had that. Yeah, that's crazy. Wow. Wow.

0:41:30 Jenessa: In some ways yeah

0:41:31 Thomas: But the point is even if we can't be 100% sure prove that like 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 so

0:41:43 Jenessa: Those three sentences to just go no no foul play no foul played like okay well well, it's about to get worse. So

0:41:54 Thomas: Right, well that's where we're gonna leave it with that huge cliffhanger, but man I want to hear how it's gonna get to work. Do we have to poke in here, hun, and end this part, or we just keep playing it? Because I want hear how its gonna get way worse.

0:42:06 Lydia: You got to tune in to the next episode. You got to do it.

0:42:10 Thomas: Oh! 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/wherethereswoke, I imagine.

0:42:17 Lydia: Probably.

0:42:18 Thomas: Most likely. There's no way to know for sure. Yeah.

0:42:20 Lydia: We're in charge of the page, so.

0:42:21 Thomas: Yeah. So we just we're just guessing. Hey, we're as in the dark as you are. I don't know what you want from us.

0:42:30 Thomas: Oh, no. This is I love this just unraveling of the scientific mystery that Jenessa has done. And it's as she said, it's about to get worse. So tune the next where there's woke. It's about to get worse. We'll see you then.