– “Has Dr. Judy Mikovits been charged with fraud?”
The institute sacked her. I don’t think it’s a criminal offence to fake data or supply fake samples; it isn’t money or property, which is all Mammon’s legal system really cares about. Doctors can get struck off the register of doctors like Wakefield was, but that isn’t a criminal procedure either.
Silverman probably worked out what she’d done, and that’s why he took his name and everyone in his lab off the paper. If a scientist had made a mistake they’d withdraw or retract, but Mikovits refused to do that which is why the journal did it instead.
Scientists don’t accuse each other of scientific fraud; it isn’t the done thing. Almost everyone who becomes a scientist does so because they are curious about the laws of nature, they want to discover things, so faking data is unthinkable. So instead scientists say things like “Dr Smiths results are untenable”, and leave it to Dr Smith to retract. It’s scientific honour, if you will. Dr Smith has presumably made a mistake, and Dr Brown having posted in the literature that the results are untenable, it is then up to Dr Smith to account for that. If Smith can’t or doesn’t, he’s discredited, but not a criminal. But no one reputable will ever cite his papers again.
It’s quite quaint really; you can see this in action on this thread. I think SA must be a scientist. SA never called Mikovits a fraud. SA said that Mikovits is “discredited”, Mikovits’s results “couldn’t be replicated”, Mikovits “published results that could not be verified”, everything but actually calling her a fraud.
The blog posts aren’t too difficult to understand; I’ll talk you through them tomorrow or as soon as I get the time.