I know that there can indeed be political motivations involved, but the approaches we've seen yielding negative results are common ones in medical science. They rely on some simplistic assumptions about the organism involved and on the tests being used, but these are common assumptions for a "first cut" in new areas. They are the kind of thing that can be gotten out quickly after the publication of big study such as that in Science which runs counter to prevailing views.
Scientists who are familiar with, or who have developed themselves, sensitive PCR tests and used them in research, tend to assume that if the test is valid it will detect the signal of the organism if it's present, and a negative result says the organism is not present. This is a somewhat simplistic orientation from a kind of faith in the precision of the test Simplistic because: PCR tests are highly sensitive, but also highly specific, i.e. they pick up only the molecules of the specific primers being used; organisms put out different proteins during different life phases such that particular proteins may be in short supply for the primer being used; the tissue being tested may be a poor reservoir for the organism; and so on.
All this is separate from the differences in diagnostic criteria used-- and I agree with others that WPI was not clear enough in the original publication on this-- a difficult thing anyway for CFS/ME, especially country to country.
As far as I can tell, all of the studies scientists, including WPI, have tended to overstate the implications of their results either in the publications themselves or in interviews after publication. The most accurate statements from the European studies to date would be "Using our own methodology we failed to detect XMRV in ME patients selected by "x" criteria." Yet all have gone further in describing the implications of their results. WPI could have more greatly emphasized the importance of their findings being replicated especially given the extraordinary numbers they found. They also could have made it clearer in the Science study, as Mikovits has in subsequent lectures, they went to great lengths to insure that they obtained adequate levels of detectable proteins. These procedures and the reasons for them were not entirely clear to me in the original publication.
All of the hashing out of methodology and so on will take time. Clearly the kind of quick-and-simplistic studies that have been put together as the first response (the three European studies) are pretty much the norm in this kind of thing, and the studies using the more complex methodology WPI used in the original study will simply take longer to produce. The good news is that they are in process. It is not being swept under the rug. The bad news is that a lot of us with CFS/ME, have gotten taken up in the scale of the WPI findings as an indicator of the validity of their findings. Effect size does not make for validity, but it sure makes for hope.
I hate the waiting as much as anyone. I'm not worried about the build up of bad PR though, because there are too many people looking at this at this point, and there is so much going on behind the scenes that truth will out, one way or the other.
