Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives (Daily Kos article)

[Pyrrhus]

And let's not forget what happened to Benjamin tenOever recently when he proposed a simple experiment to test for viral persistence in Long Covid:

tenOever publicly stated that they would run a parallel experiment to confirm or refute the possibility of viral persistence.

When the NIH found out about this parallel experiment, they pulled tenOever's funding because the NIH program officer said that it was absurd to look for viral persistence after two weeks.

Benjamin tenOever was clear: the NIH agreed to fund the experiment and then later retracted the funding once they found out that the experiment was designed to look for viral persistence.

As quoted in the Atlantic's article from May 22 —

Benjamin tenOever, a virologist at NYU, told me that he recently had NIH funding pulled from a project that would have investigated whether antivirals could combat long-COVID symptoms in a hamster model. His contact at the agency said the study had “no merit,” tenOever told me. “They were like, This doesn’t make sense, because why would Paxlovid ever help long COVID? The virus is long gone.”

 

[BrightCandle]

You would have thought after MS was determined to be caused by EBV by the army of all people that the NIH and CDC might have finally been humbled enough to realise that the DOD being the head of medical research wasn't good. But here we are the DOD is funding Ron Davis presumably due to Gulf War syndrome and the exposure being the DODs fault. At this point you would be better off taking all the funding from the CDC and NIH and assigning it to a new DOD medical research wing, it seems they are less likely to resort to systemic prejudice in their judgements on the causes of disease.

Its not just the USA either. The UK NHS has been the big researcher of ME/CFS and other conditions that it has declared are treated with psychology and time and again there is no replication and no real recovery. The cabal of psychologists and physiotherapists have effectively expelled the virologists, neurologists and such that had alternate views. Even now most of the NHS funding for long covid is ending up in the same pockets it did for ME/CFS to repeatedly publish papers about how exercise cures it.

 

[SNT Gatchaman]

First comment by Dr Karen Ashe.

I have consistently expressed concerns that drugs targeting plaques were likely to be ineffective. Based on my published work (Liu et al., 2015; Ashe, 2020), it is clear that there are two general forms of Aβ, type 1 and type 2. One particular form of type 1 (referred to in our papers as Aβ*56 and in the Science article as “toxic oligomers”) was shown by my lab and others to impair memory function in mice. The type 2 form of Aβ is the one found in amyloid plaques. It is this latter form that drug developers have repeatedly but unsuccessfully targeted. There have been no clinical trials targeting the type 1 form of Aβ, the form which my research has suggested is more relevant to dementia. Mr. Piller erroneously conflated the two forms of Aβ.

 

[Marylib]

It's infuriating. All of it. My brother-in-law developed an infection after his heart valve replacement and before long there was his early Alzheimer's. Government bureaucrats - phooey. Academia - phooey. Be really careful who you give money to and know what the purpose of that donation actually is - follow it every step of the way. God forbid anyone would have offered him antiviral therapy or investigated it. And why anyone with any suspicion of a lingering viral infection is not given immediate appropriate treatment is criminal. It's easier for the majority of people to watch other people become homeless and die than it is to get the approval of a bureaucrat or an academic institution. End of rant.

 

[Pyrrhus]

From a Phoenix Rising post from 2011:

Eli Lilly developed a drug to get rid of beta-amyloid plaque yet people got worse rather than better. Dr. Ruth Itzhaki and Mark Wozniak found that the beta-amyloid plaque contained the herpes simplex virus. It's thought that the body produces this plaque in order to protect the brain from the virus. They want to see if anti-virals will be a good treatment for AD.

http://coconutketones.blogspot.com/2010/08/bad-news-for-eli-lilly-drug-trial-more.html
http://coconutketones.blogspot.com/2010/12/more-on-herpes-simplex-virus-and.html

And from a post ten years later:

Here's a new paper relevant to this podcast, by the tireless Ruth Itzhaki:

Does antiherpetic antiviral therapy reduce the risk of dementia? (Itzhaki, 2021)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41582-021-00596-4

 

[Pyrrhus]

Related discussion, regarding work by Rudy Tanzi:

Infection Defense May Spur Alzheimers
https://forums.phoenixrising.me/threads/infection-defense-may-spur-alzheimers.2788/

 

[Consul]

https://www.theguardian.com/society...ease-progression-slowed-by-new-drug-lecanemab