So, I'm going to lay some shit down that's adjacent to this debate, but germane -- and, MY rigorous intuition is telling me that it's the reason why *any* talk of vaccines is being met with outsized animosity. Bear with me...it's a story worth knowing.
I have a "fatiguing syndrome" that's a pain in the ass, and that I medicate the best way I can going around doctors (the best way I can) in order to function. In the 15 years that I've been battling this bullshit, I've found a few things that help, none of which are "doctor recommended," except for short periods of time. I'm basically hacking my body in order to have a few years lived not in bed, and we'll see if that kills me 10, 20 or 30 sooner than expected. It's a chance I'm willing to take b/c one can stare at the ceiling fan for only so long. I've got work to do.
In the time that I spent in bed figuring things out I also read EVERYTHING I can get my eyes on that intersects with "fatiguing syndromes," which includes myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue, lyme disease, lupus (all the autoimmune diseases, really), and fibromyalgia. Also a little here and there on systemic diseases that cause fatigue, but those seem to be dead ends for me. What I have is most certainly one of these "wacko" illnesses that you really DON'T want to walk into an ER with, especially if you're a women. SPOILER ALERT: they label you a drug-seeker, charge your insurance and send you home.
The thing about these fatiguing illnesses is that the CDC, NIH and FDA basically don't recognize them as existing. So the docs at the ERs are "only doing their jobs as best they can," when they label you a drug-seeker and send you home. A LONG time ago, the boys at the top of the food chain at the CDC proclaimed that indeed, we are a bunch of crazy ladies who need get laid or something. If you want to read a sad history of how the CDC suppressed research into fatiguing illness read Osler's Web -- it's only available in print, but you can used copies real cheap b/c it's super old. Here's a link -->
http://www.amazon.com/Oslers-Web-Labyrinth-Syndrome-Epidemic/dp/051770353X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424018205&sr=8-1&keywords=hillary+johnson+osler%27s+webThis is all set-up...you have to understand that fatiguing illness has been a big f'n deal for the deal for the CDC/NIH/FDA since the late 80s, and that they've done nothing but try to suppress research into it. Are your bullshit detectors up yet? Good.
So, despite the fact that it's nearly impossible to get funded to research me/cfs, and despite the fact that even if you DO get funded, you'll likely not get published, there have been some scientists and investors who have taken on the chore either b/c the problem fit with something else they were working on, OR b/c they have a family member suffering from the illness.
Enter Judy Mikovits. Dr. Mikovits has been cellular and molecular biologist for more than 30 years, directed programs on HIV, cancer, epigenetics, and neuroimmune disease, focusing on novel drug and diagnostic technologies. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from George Washington University. H
er dissertation was on HIV latency and mechanisms of immune activation in monocytes.
Mikovits became interested in fatiguing illness b/c she had a hypothesis that what's going with me/cfs is similar to what happens in HIV -- and that she could apply her HIV research to me/cfs and voila! we'd make some headway on the disease. Simple enough.
But, in the course of her experience in this field (which basically ended her career) she discovered something that IF TRUE could be earth shattering. Like 12 Monkeys earth shattering. We've been using retroviruses to write and re-write viruses in recombinant DNA research. She found that every single time a virus is passed through a mouse in the recombinant process, there's the potential to produce a novel retrovirus.
In other words, the STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE for recombinant retroviral research could be having a huge unintended effect of creating mega iterations of franken-viruses. So, that's one possible reason that the CDC/NIH might want to keep a lid on her research and any me/cfs/retroviral research that strafes this territory.
The other thing she found is that
for people harboring retroviruses, vaccines have the potential to shut your immune down entirely. In her own words: "This might explain why vaccines lead to autism in some children because these viruses live and divide and grow in the lymphocytes, the immune response cells, the B and T cells. So when you give a vaccine you send your B and T cells into overdrive. That’s its job…Well, if you’re harboring one virus, and you replicate it a whole bunch, you’ve now broken the balance between the immune response and the virus. So you could have had the underlying virus and then amplified it with the vaccine and then set off the disease, such that your immune system could no longer control the infections and create an immune deficiency."
I'm trying to make this as simple as possible, which isn't fair b/c it's super complicated. But essentially you have a one-two punch. There's the hypothesis that recombinant retroviral research has unleashed all kinds of novel retroviruses, AND a second hypothesis about vaccines that (if and only if) you're harboring one of those viruses, AND you get a vaccine that activates it, THEN there's the POTENTIAL that this could bring down your immune system.
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Her book
Plague: One Scientist's Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases came out late last year, and she'd been gaining some traction with promoting her ideas right about the time the recent vaccine freak out happened. I'm not saying the two are causative -- just associated.
http://www.amazon.com/Plague-Scientists-Intrepid-Retroviruses-Syndrome-ebook/dp/B00EBO2DNI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1424019963&sr=1-1&keywords=mikovits