I’ve been looking into this. Mikovits at WPI deliberately sent faked samples in 2009. That’s why the work couldn’t be replicated, which led to Silverman retracting his whole lab’s contribution and the paper being withdrawn in 2011. Her fraud was eventually discovered by a blogger called Abbie Smith, a graduate student in virology at the University of Oklahoma:
– “But thats not what Silverman found. He didnt find mouse ERVs. He didnt find the same exogenous viral sequence over and over. He didnt find the same XMRV provirus in every sample because of contaminating cell line DNA.
He unquestionably found VP62 plasmid in the samples he got from the WPI… and only in the CFS patient samples.
Meanwhile, at the WPI, they say they get FANTASTIC results with their assays. The 67% positive rate flew up to, what, 100% after the Science publication…
And yet, when WPI/Mikovits are given samples where they do not know beforehand who is ‘supposed’ to be positive and who is ‘supposed’ to be negative, they cannot differentiate between CFS/Healthy/Positive controls. 50:50, implying that half of the people they say are positive are really negative, and half of the people they say or negative are positive, or in other words, they have no idea what they are doing.
When samples are collected from ‘XMRV positive’ patients without any ‘processing’ at the WPI, the samples come up negative.
And yet the CFS samples shipped to Bob Silverman in 2009 were contaminated with XMRV PLASMID before his lab touched them, after WPI touched them, after Silverman gave them the VP62 plasmid.”
– “But to all you frauds out there– remember this: Individually, scientists are smart folks. And even smart folks get screwed over now and then. But together, we are always smarter than you.”
