Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. – EXCLUSIVE!!! Excerpt from his Foreword to PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION

By Kent Heckenlively, JD

With the permission of Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., I’ve been authorized to allow you a sneak peek at his Foreword to my new book with Dr. Judy Mikovits, PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION.

I’d like to encourage all my readers to begin regularly using the expression, “plague of corruption,” to refer to the outright bribery by the pharmaceutical companies of our democracy, our media, and our scientific community.

Foreword
Moral Courage and Our Common Future
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“And yet, it moves!” Galileo whispered those defiant words in 1615 as he left the Roman Inquisition tribunal before which he repudiated his theory that the earth—the immovable center of the Universe according to contemporary orthodoxy—revolves around the sun. Had he not recanted; his life was forfeit.

We like to think of Galileo’s struggles as the quaint artifact of a dark, ignorant, and tyrannical era where individuals challenged government-anointed superstitions only at grave personal risk. Dr. Judy Mikovits’ story shows that stubborn orthodoxies anointed by Pharmaceutical companies and corrupt government regulators to protect power and profits remain a dominant force in science and politics.

By any standard, Dr. Judy Mikovits was among the most skilled scientists of her generation. She entered professional science from the University of Virginia with a B.A. degree in Chemistry on June 10, 1980 as a protein chemist for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) working on a life-saving project to purify interferon.

The quality of her work and her reliable flashes of genius soon propelled her to the apex of the male-dominated world of scientific research. At NCI, Mikovits began what would become a twenty-year collaboration with Dr. Frank Ruscetti, a pioneer in the field of human retrovirology. While heading up the lab of Robert Gallo in 1977, Rusectti made scientific history by co-discovering with Bernie Poiesz, the first human retrovirus, HTLV-1 (human T-cell leukemia virus).

A retrovirus is a “stealth virus” that, like HIV, enters the host without alerting the immune systems. It may then lay dormant for years without causing harm. Before killing a person, a retrovirus will usually destroy their immune system. As a result, many retroviruses cause cancer. With an escalating understanding of retrovirus behavior, the Ruscetti/ Mikovits collaboration and Mikovits award-winning PhD thesis from George Washington University in 1991, changed the paradigm of HIV-AIDS treatment, turning the disease from a death sentence into a manageable condition.

From the outset, the most daunting obstacle to Mikovits’ career-advancement was her scientific integrity. She always placed it ahead of personal ambition. The first in her blue-collar family to go to attend university, Judy Mikovits never meant to wade into a public health turmoil. She never considered herself a renegade or revolutionary. Judy’s relatives mainly worked in government or law enforcement. They believed in bedrock American principles of hard work, respect for authority, and above all, telling the truth. That backdrop made it impossible for her to abandon her high natal standards of honesty and integrity even when they became a hindrance.

After leaving NIH, she worked a stint for Upjohn—leading a project to prove the safety of the company’s blockbuster Bovine Growth Hormone. When Mikovits discovered the company’s formula could cause precancerous changes in human cell cultures, she refused direct orders from her boss to hide her discoveries. Mikovits’ revelation suggested that the ubiquitous presence of the hormone in milk could lead to breast cancer in women who drank it. Her refusal to back down precipitated her departure from Upjohn and her return to NIH and graduate school. Judy’s war on BGH eventually led to Upjohn abandoning the product.

In 2009, now in academia, Mikovits and Ruscetti, who was still at NCI, led a team that discovered a strong association between a previously unknown retrovirus and mylagic encephalomyelitis, commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Predictably, the retrovirus was also linked to certain blood cancers. Collaborators had named it Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Related Virus (XMRV), when they first detected in DNA sequences in prostate Cancer a few years earlier.

The medical community had dealt with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which strikes mostly women, in bad faith since its appearance in the mid-1980s. The medical establishment derided ME/CFS as “yuppie flu” and attributed it to the inherent psychological fragility of career women pursuing professions in high pressure corporate ecosystems. Mikovits found evidence for the retrovirus in approximately 67 percent of women afflicted with ME/CFS, and in a little less than 4 percent of the healthy population.

On October 8, 2009, Mikovits and Ruscetti published their explosive findings in the journal Science, describing the first isolation of the recently discovered retrovirus, XMRV, and its association to ME/CFS. Her revelation about ME/CFS immediately triggered angry reaction from jealous cancer power centers, stubborn; resistant to science that attributed cancer and neuro-immune diseases to viruses . . .

I’d like to encourage you to pre-order a copy of PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION, as that determines how much my publisher is likely to spend on the marketing campaign.

Also, every pre-order is counted on the day of the book’s release, meaning that if we get enough (hopefully around 7,000 pre-orders) it should end up on the New York Times best-seller list.  (If they don’t pull any tricks!)

Be sure to pre-order Kent Heckenlively’s new book with Dr. Judy Mikovits, PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION from Amazon which you can do RIGHT NOW!