Bulletin #109 from the Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
Myron Essex's FOCMA, the Harvard Dress
Rehearsal for HIV
FOCMA happened in the decade before the
beginning of what could be called "Holocaust II" and the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe, but it was a
scientific omen of things to come. One could say that the decline and fall of
American biomedical science had a dry run in the FOCMA episode at Harvard.
FOCMA stands for “feline orcornavirus-associated
cell-membrane antigen,” and it was supposedly discovered in 1977 and named by
Myron T. “Max” Essex, a Harvard School of Public Health researcher. According
to Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson, Essex, when he was a post
doc, came up with the idea that ‘white blood cells from cats infected with the
feline leukemia virus also exhibited a unique protein on their surface, “ and
Essex “dubbed that protein “FOCMA.’” (Science Fictions p. 40)
In Crewdson’s book on the questionable
AIDS research of Robert Gallo, he notes that the importance of Essex’s putative
discovery was that “If FOCMA were a by-product of the cell’s infection with
feline leukemia virus, it might represent confirmation of a cellular defense
against cancer, at least in cats. . .” (SF p. 40) This would have been a
major scientific breakthrough, if true.
Unfortunately for a junior researcher who
decided to devote the early part of his career to the study of FOCMA, it turned
out not to be what Essex thought it was. The researcher, Wolf Prensky,
discovered—to the great detriment of his budding career—that FOCMA “was just a
viral protein and not a cellular antigen.” (SF p.41) According to
Crewdson, Prensky, with two other scientists, published a paper “that was a
definitive demonstration that the FOCMA protein was encoded by the feline
leukemia virus itself, not a cellular by-product of infection.” (SF
p.41) Crewdson notes that “The idea that cat blood cells had some built-in
defense against cancer evaporated overnight.” (SF p.41)
What happened next was a foreshadowing of
the totalitarian culture of abnormal science that would happen throughout the
three decades of the scientific shenanigans known as HIV/AIDS. And it would
involve some of the same characters. The head of the National Cancer Institute,
Vincent DeVita, “selected [Robert] Gallo, despite his co-authorship of a FOCMA
article with Essex two years before, to head an investigation of Prensky’s
claims.” (SF p.41) This is the kind of little game that would be known
throughout "Holocaust II" as “Henhouse, meet Fox.”
While the committee came to the conclusion
that neither undermined Essex or vindicated him, because, according to
Crewdson, Gallo claimed he didn’t understand FOCMA—something he had
co-authored a paper about, a pattern was set of old boys performing due
diligence on their own old boy networks. If this was the musical overture for
three decades of AIDS science, one could call the melody “sham peer review” and
“egregious conflict of interest.”
Prensky’s career was viciously sidetracked
for many years for daring to challenge Essex, and perhaps most importantly, for
getting anywhere near what some people eventually considered one of the most dangerous
black holes in science: Robert Gallo.
Crewdson, who paradoxically supported the
Gallo HIV theory of AIDS despite writing an epic expose of Gallo that makes
Gallo look like the greatest pathological liar in the history of science,
doesn’t dwell on the FOCMA matter much or with any great outrage, perhaps
because Essex’s subsequent career would eventually have what Crewdson
considered a happy scientific ending due to his peripheral early involvement
with HTLV-III, the virus that was officially declared by the government and the
AIDS establishment to be the real cause of AIDS in 1984. Crewdson writes that
“rather than withdrawing or correcting his FOCMA articles, Essex simply stopped
referring to them in his subsequent publications.” (SF p. 41) He
disappeared the episode. Crewdson doesn’t write a single word about the
tremendous damage done to Prensky’s career which was the price he paid for
telling the truth about one of Essex’s discoveries. Prensky’s fate foreshadowed
the fate of Peter Duesberg, the scientist who would eventually be severely
punished for basically saying that HIV was about as much the cause of AIDS as
FOCMA was a cellular protection against cancer.
Insofar as Essex just left his “discovery”
floating like the undead in the scientific literature without ever retracting
it, this little incident of uncorrected science was akin to the broken window
theory of crime, it that it may have led to bigger evasions of the truth with
far greater implications for mankind. And it also foreshadowed the degree to which
both Essex and Gallo would have amazing political and “scientific’ power that
would allow them to survive and even thrive during Holocaust II. FOCMA was the
grain of sand in which one could see the whole universe of HIV/AIDS fraud.
Journalist Barry Werth wrote about FOCMA
in an article called “The AIDS Windfall” in New England Monthly in June,
1988. He writes that “Dozens of scientists went off in pursuit of FOCMA. But no
one could prove that FOCMA existed. Essex abandoned the subject, and he refused
to pursue the criticism of those following it up, or to retract it. He simply
let FOCMA hang, and other scientists were understandably incensed. ‘We’d have
figured it out ten years earlier if Essex had only done his homework,’
complains one researcher.”
Essex was able to move on without ever
having to admit he had made a mistake. Werth notes that Essex was able to
conveniently change the subject from FOCMA to HTLV: “Essex’s work connecting
HTLV with AIDS was published in the spring of 1983.” The actual so-called AIDS
retrovirus, HTLV-III, was a year away from being declared the official cause of
AIDS, but Essex had helped pave the way to, depending on your point of view,
the Nobel-worthy notion or “Big Mistake” that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus.
Werth writes that “the AIDS virus was a retrovirus, just as Essex had said.
He’s been wrong in all the particulars, but right in general, and being half
right secured him the undisputed mantle as the prophet of AIDS.” Or as the
perpetually witty HIV critic Peter Duesberg might say, the prophet of the Hope
Diamond. Fortunately for Essex, his reward would not just come in heaven but he
would also profit financially in this world for the disastrous retroviral
theory of AIDS.
Given Essex’s financial and career
interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the notion that a retrovirus was the
cause of AIDS, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he played an intense
enforcement role during the next three decades by helping to elbow out anyone
or any that threatened the hegemony of the AIDS retrovirus. His willingness to
play power politics would be dramatically in evidence at the 1992 International
AIDS Conference in Amsterdam at which several scientists announced that they
had discovered cases of AIDS in which there was no evidence of HIV. It
didn’t take long for the HIV establishment to realize that such cases could
turn their retroviral empire into a falling house of cards overnight. In what
could be called one of the greatest games of scientific three-card monte, and
in the true spirit of abnormal, totalitarian science, the Centers for
Disease Control and the powerful HIV establishment effectively swept the
paradigm-challenging anomalies under the rug by giving the HIV-negative AIDS
cases a new category and a brand new complicated name, idiopathic CD4
T-lymphocytopenia (ICL).
Because the very embarrassing HIV-negative
cases were found outside the
so-called risk groups, they just couldn’t be AIDS. It was a classic instance of
circular homodemiological groupthink. If it wasn’t gay, it wasn’t AIDS.
Case closed. When researcher Subhir Gupta reported at the 1992 conference that
he had found evidence of a retrovirus other than HIV in a sixty-six year old
woman who had AIDS-like symptoms, but was negative for HIV, Essex stepped right
up to the plate. Gupta had published his findings in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science. The findings should have inspired an emergency
rethinking of AIDS epidemiology and virology. In Osler’s Web, Hillary
Johnson described the whole incident: “Max Essex, a Harvard AIDS researcher,
expressed skepticism bordering on ennui. ‘I’m not overwhelmed by it,’ he
commented after reading the paper. ‘I’d place the odds at five to ten percent
that this might lead to something.’” (OW p.601) (The odds, of course,
were nearly 100 percent that Essex would do what he could so that such an
outcome was achieved.) According to Johnson, “Both [David] Ho and Essex raised
the specter of laboratory contamination in the matter of Gupta’s findings.
Microbes such as Gupta described, they said, were notorious laboratory
contaminants and could easily have come from an animal cell line.” (OW.
p.601) The AIDS establishment’s findings always tended to be scientifically
unquestionable (and miraculously contaminant-free) and any findings that
challenged the HIV paradigm tended to be contaminants, artifacts, irrelevant
correlations. Only the inner circle’s labs were pristine and above suspicion.
The very threatened CDC stepped in and
quickly reassured the shocked world that there was not a new virus
causing another AIDS epidemic. (This was also at the same time they
were—by ignoring it—indirectly assuring the public that there wasn’t a
contagious immune-system compromising chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic in the
general population. In retrospect, and full of the irony that "Holocaust II" is
replete with, they were right. It wasn’t a new AIDS epidemic, it was part and
parcel of the old one, the one they had gotten the epidemiology and virology
wrong on.) When the CDC’s director of AIDS Research, James Curran, told the
press that the cases of HIV-negative AIDS like illness were not “AIDS caused by
something else,” he was just whistling in the dark while HHV-6 spectrum
pandemic was having its insidious way with the world and creating a disaster
that could not be seen by the abnormal science that was generated by the CDC’s
homodemiological vision of the epidemic.
From his position on the Mt. Olympus of
AIDS, Essex had done his part at that Amsterdam AIDS Conference to help the HIV
establishment avoid a crisis of confidence and keep a lid on the horrifying
truth about the real epidemic. He saved his reputation as the prophet who knew
what kind of virus caused AIDS. The coming decades would be a professional
dream come true for the man who discovered the nonexistent FOCMA. "Holocaust II" and The Age of Totalitarian, Abnormal Science could not have existed without Harvard's Myron Essex.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about the International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard November 9-11, 2015
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Art, Cartoons, and Posters for the International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
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Bulletins from The Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in At Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
The Harvard Declaration of the HHV-6 Rights of Man
1. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in AIDS.
2. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
3. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Autism.
4.The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Multiple Sclerosis.
5. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Brain Cancer.
6. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Heart Disease.
7. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalitis.
8. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cognitive Dysfunction.
9. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Drug Hypersensitivity Syndrome.
10. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Bone Marrow Suppression.
11. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Lymphadenopathy.
12. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Colitis.
13. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Endocrine Disorders.
14. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Liver Disease.
15. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
16. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Glioma.
17. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cervical Cancer.
18. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hypogammaglobulinemia.
19. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Optic Neuritis.
20. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Microangiopathy.
21. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Mononucleosis.
22. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Uveitis.
23. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.
24. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Rhomboencephalitis.
25. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Limbic Encephalitis.
26. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalomyelitis
27. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pneumonitis.
28. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in GVHD.
29. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Ideopathic Pneumonia.
30. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pediatric Adrenocortical Tumors
31. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in the reactivation of endogenous retroviruses.
32. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on T-Cells.
33. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on B-Cells
34. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on Epithelial Cells.
35. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Natural Killer Cells.
36. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Dendritic Cells.
37. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the brain.
38. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the liver.
39. The right not to lied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect cytokine production.
40. The right not to be lied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect Aortic and Heart Microvascular Endothelial cells.
41.
The right not to be lied to about the role of an HHV-6 cover-up in a
massive HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme that in a number of ways resembles the
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and Nazi medicine.
