Francis W. Ruscetti - Ending Plague: A Scholars Obligation in an Age of Corruption (Children’s Health Defense)

Copyright 2021 by Dr. Francis W. Ruscetti, Dr. Judy A. Mikovits, and Kent Heckenlively, JD

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-6468-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-6471-2

Printed in the United States of America

Its the action, not the fruit of the action, thats important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that therell be any fruit.

But that doesnt mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

Mahatma Gandhi

Contents

PART ONE

Franks Perspective

PROLOGUE

Why Now?

The real safeguard of democracy is education.

Franklin Roosevelt

Dealing with those vulgar souls whose narrow optics can see little but the little circle of their own selfish concerns.

Robert Morris to Alexander Hamilton

The forced ending of my scientific career in 2013 was both personally and professionally disturbing to me.

However, it allowed me to join my wife Sandy, who was ready to retire after an excellent career in science, in our favorite place in the world, Carlsbad, California, a magical location next to the Pacific Ocean, just north of San Diego. To my pleasant surprise, the move also proved to be liberating. Most people reach a point in their careers where all the institutional politics and backstabbing hinder the creativity which first drew them to the profession. My absence from the National Cancer Institute (partly located on the grounds of the former United States Biological Warfare Weapons Laboratories at Fort Detrick) in Frederick, Maryland, my home for thirty-eight years, allowed me to reevaluate all the events in my career that rushed by in a blur.

Ive grown to appreciate the truth of Allen Saunderss statement that Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans. My understanding of what has happened to medical research in its application to public health in the overall context of American history during my lifetime has become dramatically clearer.

My career choice was to join what I considered to be an ancient and honorable society of scholars, which I joined in May 1972, upon earning my PhD. In this contemporary climate of increasing contempt for intellectual honesty, along with the delegitimizing of expertise, one may reasonably ask, why bother?

I believe we should bother because, as Gandhis statement at the opening of this book said, the single most important obligation of a scholar is the production of knowledge. Knowledge in most fields, but most notably in science, has a long incubation period and has to be laboriously developed. Then, in a more difficult exercise, it must be communicated to a rightfully skeptical conservative audience, bound to the status quo. Skepticism is one thing, but I have found acceptance of paradigm-changing work by many medical researchers, more interested in protecting their own place in the hierarchy than in advancing knowledge, typically goes through a three-step process.

The first step is no, youre wrong.

The second is no, youre dead wrong.

The third is I knew it all the time. This acceptance can take decades.

One of the more disturbing modern trends in science is the new cottage industry of completely twisting the truth for ones political agenda. Many of the results in scientific papers cannot be reproduced in the short term, mostly because of technical differences between the labs. The use of these facts by politically motivated citizens and scientists alike to deny science they do not like is often misused to discredit paradigm-changing science. This behavior is not only intellectually dishonest, but displays a complete misunderstanding of the scientific process. The rush to discredit these publications and even force retractions does a foolhardy disservice to scientific scholarship. In paraphrasing scientists from Darwin to Planck, a scientist should not fret over convincing ones peers. But instead, make certain the work appears in the next generations textbooks. New knowledge that stands the test of time makes life sweeter in the succeeding generations.

The misuse of the scientific process by these individuals has the power to corrupt and cheat many brilliant and honest scientists of their rightful place in history. From the very beginnings of our history, Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton, whose economic brilliance saved the American cause in the revolution and the new country, knew shallow, moneyed self-interests were the biggest threat to the republic. To whitewash their crimes and self-aggrandize their own personal achievements, the powerful elite have the ability to impugn and expunge the work of my collaborators, especially Judy Mikovits. While I am content in the knowledge that, we have made life sweeter for people, regardless of what my peers and their enablers may say, I am not comfortable that the mendacities and misdeeds of these unethical contemporaries go unrecognized.

Given the ability of objective facts to be twisted and turned into untruths, its almost certain this will happen to most of what I say here, including my right to be called a scholar. The hardest thing to do is to know the value of ones own achievements, regardless of the opinions of others. Success in this world is often a mirage, the result of being praised by others or lavished with awards and money, regardless of whether the work has merit or not. Strive for achievement, not the praise of the world.

While struggling to develop a science career in the 1970s, it did not dawn on me that during the next fifty years an increasingly corrupt corporate apparatus was placing most people into economic slavery, where the important decisions concerning every aspect of our lives would be made by the rich elite, who are protected from any political or social consequences.

How did this happen? Corporate America is killing democracy.

The lions share of the fault lies with the government whose duty it is to protect its citizens and instead allowed the development of crony capitalism, which is based on a close relationship between rich businessmen and the state. Instead of success being determined by a free market, it is determined by state favoritism in terms of tax breaks, little regulation, and grants.

Think about how different our world is now from 1970. Every aspect of our lives is controlled by the monopolization of corporate America, which makes it easier for foul people to control and undermine our freedoms. Banks are too big to fail, which is socialism for the rich. This has allowed corruption on a worldwide scale. This has led to our increasingly concentrated and corrupt medical system, which is literally killing us, led by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Since the 1870s, the Republican Party has been a pro-business organization that corrupted the public trough and has given us J. P. Morgan, the monopolist banker, then Andrew Mellon, the robber baron/treasurer who caused the Great Depression, and Michael Milken, the greed is good junk bond king