Peggy Munson takes on Mike Adams’ latest article about XMRV and ME/CFS

Here is the latest from ME patient/activist Peggy Munson’s blog:

As Audre Lorde once wrote, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In a complicated world of fast-moving virology, shape-shifting illness branding, and vaccine controversies, it is not always easy to find the master or deconstruct his toolbox. With the recent discovery that 95 percent of ME/CFS patients have antibodies to the retrovirus XMRV, the first master is obvious: the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC, as Hillary Johnson recounted in Osler’s Web, swept aside (and distorted) the evidence of a retrovirus in ME/CFS patients that was discovered by Elaine DeFreitas in 1991. So ME/CFS patients are waiting for the CDC’s counter-attack on this new XMRV science, which has been all-but-prophesied by CDC’s CFS program director William Reeves’ statements to the press. As he stated in the New York Times on the XMRV discovery, “If we validate it, great. My expectation is that we will not.”

Personally, I’m also concerned with another tapeworm, the one that causes well-meaning Lyme patient-activists to call ME/CFS a “wastebasket diagnosis” when they have suffered from similar life-destroying vagueness, the one that causes people with chemical sensitivities to insist that viral propagation is always a byproduct of vaccines, mercury, pesticides, or bad diet, and the one that causes perfectly astute people to jot off blog entries claiming that “Big Pharma” is making up the connection between XMRV and ME/CFS just to sell vaccines.

What I see in that is a game of telephone in which generally astute people are doing the propagandists’ work, not aware of how they are actually serving Big Pharma, the chemical industry, and the CDC. After all, projected vagueness and diversionary tactics are old hat for the CDCs ME/CFS program. read the entire article