Certainly, his attack dog response to the 1992 Annals of Internal Medicine paper on the disease stands out as perhaps Reeves’ first foray into the politics of destruction, especially considering the way this major research paper might have advanced the science of the disease down the court had it been allowed to stand unmolested by the CDC. One could say Reeves’ reaction to it was a point of demarcation and the beginning of the “Reeves era” in Atlanta. For anyone who was paying attention, it signaled that, rather than improve, the agency’s handling of the “cfs” epidemic was going to get worse.
The paper by Komaroff, Cheney, Peterson, et. al. was perhaps the best clinical research paper ever published about “cfs.” (Nancy Klimas’ June 1990 study of NK cell aberrations in “cfs” in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, in which she posited that the array of immune defects she observed in patients “suggest CFS is a form of acquired immunodeficiency,” was perhaps the second most important. Unlike the Annals paper, however, Kilmas' study was ignored by the lay press, and maybe that's why Reeves ignored it, too.) The Annals authors, many of whom had worked to collect and analyze the data for more than five years, famously described the disease in 259 patients, still the largest cohort ever studied scientifically, as a “ chronic, immunologically mediated inflammatory process of the central nervous system.” They also wrote: “Enough cases occurred among family members, co-workers, and other close contacts to suggest the possibility of an infectious agent transmissible by casual contact.” [Buchwald et.al., “A Chronic Illness Characterized by Fatigue, Neurologic and Immunologic Disorders, And Active Human Herpesvirus Type 6 Infection,” Annals of Internal Medicine 116 (Jan. 15, 1992): 103-13. And: Klimas et. al., "Immunologic Abnormalities in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," Journal of Clinical Microbiology (June 1990): 1403-10.]