I'd strongly recommend that posters on this thread read the whole of Weiss' article carefully, if only to ensure that they understand where the scepticism is coming from. I did actually find it highly readable, and the most intelligent and informative "negative" viewpoint that I've read yet, by quite some margin. There are a lot of points in there that are well worth understanding.
I want to caution also that Weiss is a senior and well-respected retrovirologist, with considerable history of relevant 'rumours', including one that he 'discovered' himself - and shrill dismissal of his point of view will not come across as credible to those who know who he is. And I'd also note that this piece is actually reasonably balanced, even though he makes his opinion clear: he leaves the door open for the XMRV findings to be valid after all.
That said, he does seem to have a heavily biased view - a bias born out of the sense of "deja vu" mentioned. The same goes for many or even most of the sceptics. Their reaction appears to be basically "oh no! here we go again!". This is obviously a field where there have been many 'false starts' in the past - as he notes, so far only two of the suspected human retroviruses have actually turned out to be solidly confirmed.
And yet...even some of these old 'false rumours' seem to still be in a somewhat inconclusive state. What I don't see in the article is a clear explanation of why the 'false rumours' definitely had nothing to them. The following passage was particularly interesting:
If virus detection resulted from laboratory contamination, why was our virus detected more frequently in clinical disease samples than in the healthy controls? We have no good answer to this question, but I suspect it may simply be that the vials containing clinical specimens tend to be handled more often than a job-lot of healthy blood samples.
So: many years on, a mystery remains as to how the virus came to be detected more frequently in disease samples. This, of course, is a key plank of the argument that XMRV can't just be contamination. It would seem that the same mystery applies to all these earlier "rumour viruses" - and has never been adequately explained. It's very honest of Weiss to admit that his suggestion about more frequent handling of the vials containing the clinical specimens is not really a satisfactory explanation. It wouldn't seem to be a very satisfactory explanation when the tubes are sealed until tested, as I believe was the case with the recent studies.
And I look forward to the explanation of why Dr Singh found the more detailed correlation between
severity of prostate cancer prognosis and likelihood of XMRV detection. Were the tubes of the most seriously ill prostate cancer patients handled proportionately more frequently prior to testing? Hmm...
Even in the case of SV40, as Weiss notes himself:
"The Institute of Medicine later produced a report stating that no conclusive evidence of SV40 transmission to humans from poliovirus vaccines was evident".
So Weiss himself may regard that report as a cop-out, and a compromise wording, but the truth is that even after thorough investigation of that "rumour", the report went no further than to say that there was "no
conclusive evidence".
Weiss describes how SV40 was discovered, found to be present in vaccines that had been used on millions of people, prompting vaccine manufacturers to switch to alternative cell substrates which themselves were then found, 20 years later, to be infected with another immunodeficiency virus. And then...
In 1992, however, SV40 was reported in pediatric cases of neurological tumors, patients whose parents, or more likely grandparents, might have been exposed to the tainted vaccine. Positive sightings of SV40 were soon reported in other human tumors too, especially mesothelioma and osteosarcoma. If these reports could be confirmed, it would imply that SV40 is now circulating as a transmissible virus in humans and that it is oncogenic. Several other investigators, however, could not find evidence of SV40 in tumor biopsies...
Reading all this makes it very clear what the history says, and why some scientists have made up their minds at an early stage. Their minds don't seem to be very open, because they've seen it all before. And yet...all those previous examples of retroviruses contaminating vaccines and then being detected in association with human disease...those all "came to nothing"...but the results remain unexplained...some people found them, others couldn't replicate the results, and really, in some cases at least, still nobody knows why...
It all explains an awful lot about the context for the debate, and makes an apparently ridiculous sceptical position seem at least understandable...but at the end of the day, it all does seem to still hinge on the requirement that "absence of evidence" be considered to be "evidence of absence". Those old rumours, it would seem, were never actually debunked as such, but rather, they were not universally confirmed...
And I would assume therefore that scientists have already taken sides on what all of this means, long ago, and independently of anything to do with CFS or XMRV. It would seem that the careers of those who have decided it all means nothing have tended to flourish - the venom directed at those who think it might all mean something makes it clear what a bad career move that viewpoint is.
Where does all that leave us?
Well for a start it's all a salutory lesson from history, which does tend to repeat itself, especially for those who don't know it, so the saying goes. We can predict, then, that the comparative study will claim to debunk the WPI findings and the WPI et al will cry 'foul', and that all this could potentially go on for another 20 years with no definitive answer.
But as for me...well, along the way I have learned that (a) lots of freshly-discovered viruses, retroviruses, and immune deficiency viruses have turned up in vaccines over the years, (b) when this has happened it has prompted grave concern, (c) those same viruses have later been associated with various neurological and immunological diseases and cancers, (d) those associations never seem to stick, but (e) many of them have never been satisfactorily explained.
And as for me, stuck here with a mysterious immune abnormality, a novel phenomenon apparently unknown to medical science, which nobody seems to be the least bit interested in investigating, despite symptom patterns which turn out to be shared with many other people round the world, even though the medical authorities seem to know nothing of this...and being aware that levels of immune dysfunction, allergies, neurological conditions and cancers are rising dramatically throughout the 'western' world in particular, and that there is still no explanation for those medical mysteries...and now coming across a theory that explains pretty well why the mainstream medical world seems hell-bent on denying our existence, preventing the investigation of our illnesses, and persecuting our physicians...Well, what can I conclude?
Mainly, I'm left with the following firm facts: that multiple unknown retroviruses are known to have infected vaccines, that these are well capable of causing immune dysfunction, and that we have a modern epidemic of immune dysfunction with no explanation offered. Plus the observation that people who suggest that the epidemic might be caused by vaccines tend to be persecuted, discredited, and hounded out of their job.
It would seem pretty lucky if
all these retrovirus-infected vaccines turned out to be harmless. Including the ones we still haven't discovered. It seems pretty interesting that ME/CFS is a bizarre condition, defying medical explanation, with so many confusing contradictions, and yet when you learn what a retrovirus is and what it does, and how the retrovirus-infected vaccine theory would work out if it
were true, it turns out that it can easily explain all the mysteries of the condition. Like why the first outbreak at Royal Free Hospital 1955 only affected the doctors and nurses, not the patients, for example - which of these sounds the better theory now: that they had something weird and unknown infecting the staff common room, or that being health workers they all got a hefty dose of early vaccines?
So I'm extremely tempted to put 2 and 2 together here. I can kind of see why the sceptics would think: "It can't all be XMRV, surely - there must be lots of other vaccine-mediated retroviruses involved too". So I'm not going to conclude that XMRV is the cause of my own ruined life. But I
am going to conclude that
some kind of retrovirus or retroviruses, quite possibly vaccine-mediated, probably also transmitted in other ways as well, is by far and away the most likely explanation I've ever heard for the cause of ME/CFS. It certainly sounds a lot better to me than "repressed memories of childhood trauma...the mind's a funny thing you know...."
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