Acclaimed Author of Osler’s Web on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Podcast

What do Hillary Johnson and RFK Jr. agree on about ME/CFS? "It’s the virus, stupid.” *

Or at least some kind of infectious agent, as you’ll hear in the podcast during which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interviews author Hillary Johnson. While it isn’t brand new, it’s insightful, provocative, and probably hasn’t been heard by many of our new subscribers to The Real AIDS Epidemic. (1)

Hillary Johnson’s Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic is an epic expose of how government research into the Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) epidemic went astray—or has been sabotaged—by federal research agencies and their leaders. (2)

Johnson was interviewed by Kennedy shortly after the publication of her latest book, The Why: The Historic ME/CFS Call To Arms. (3)

In addition to her books, Johnson has written for Congressional Quarterly, Women’s Wear Daily, Life, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Town & Country, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and New York Magazine, among others.

The Why originated as a speech Johnson gave to the May 2009 Invest In ME conference in London. The book describes in harrowing detail how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control gave the syndrome the name “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” in 1988 and then abandoned the illness and its patients. Although we know the ending—so far—of the story, The Why reads like a suspense novel and is hard not to read in one setting.

Forty years after the outbreak in Incline Village, Nevada, very little research is funded to investigate the illness the U.S. government has recently decided to call ME/CFS, and very little progress has been made: there is no test to diagnose it, no cause has been determined, no treatments exist and there is still little-to-no education of medical practitioners.

In the May 2022 podcast, Johnson and Kennedy have a spirited discussion about ME/CFS and Johnson’s work to bring attention to the illness over several decades. Kennedy, a prolific author himself, discusses ME/CFS in detail in 2022 best seller, The Real Anthony Fauci. His most recent book, published December 6, 2023, is The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race.

“There’s one infectious agent that causes ME, just as there’s one infectious agent that causes tuberculosis [and] one infectious agent that causes syphilis,” Johnson asserted during the podcast. “... It’s not some ‘big stew’ or some combination of things that produces this extremely discrete disease.” (1)

Watch the podcast here:

The two discuss the simultaneous explosions of AIDS and ME/CFS in the U.S. population as well as potential causes of ME/CFS, including genetics and exposure to toxic chemicals, a difficult-to-prove cause of disease that Kennedy has investigated throughout his career. In the past, he has suggested exposure to toxic chemicals as a possible cause of ME/CFS. (2)

“I’m still going to give you a little push-back on toxic chemicals even though for many years I was obsessed with toxic chemicals and I thought they were the answer to everything,” Johnson told Kennedy. “But now I’ve kind of moved over into a new area...” (2)

“And by the way, you don’t have to push back because I don’t believe it’s a toxic chemical [causing ME/CFS] either,” Kennedy interrupted to add. “I think it’s viral. That’s my core belief. I can’t support it...I have no scientific basis for saying that, it’s just the process of elimination. It has to be one of a certain category of causes that became ubiquitous in the 1970s, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not naming a culprit; I’m saying there’s a limited universe of what can be causing this and we should be identifying those 20 or 30 causes and eliminate them one at a time. That’s what NIH [National Institutes of Health] should be doing, and you and I know it will never do those studies.” (2)

Johnson agreed, continuing, “Let me just say, there is so much evidence for infection in this disease. The immunology of ME absolutely screams infection. Every abnormality in the immune system that you look at in this disease—it suggests there’s an antigen present. The response of the immune system is exactly what you would see when there’s an infection. And yet, in every other infectious disease, scientists at the NIH say, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s an infection, look, we can see by the immune system.’ In ME, it’s sort of like, ‘Oh, that’s very interesting. I wonder how the psychology managed to change the immune system in this way.’ Every single important finding, immunologically and in every other aspect of the disease—abnormal brain findings, etc.—are just sloughed off as if they’re nothing.” (2)

At the end of the podcast, Kennedy said, “Hillary, we’re going to have to sign off, but I just wanted to mention one other subject—which you go into a lot—which we didn’t get a chance to talk about today. It would be wrong for us to end this podcast without mentioning it, which is the ways that the medical system tortures people who have this diagnosis—gaslighting them, dismissing them, making them pariahs, and these people are enduring this ailment and its terrible, terrible suffering, and [the medical system’s mistreatment] just compounds it.” (2)

In 2023 during his Presidential campaign, Kennedy said that, if elected, he would instruct the NIH to change their focus from investigating infectious diseases and concentrate more on chronic illnesses, according to a report by NBC News. (5)

“He then laid out his vision for a Kennedy presidency, which would include telling the National Institutes of Health to take ‘a break’ from studying infectious diseases, like Covid-19 and measles, and pivoting the agency to the study of chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity,” Brandy Zadrozny from NBC News reported. “Kennedy has suggested without evidence that researchers and pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit to neglect such chronic conditions and invest in ineffective and even harmful treatments; he includes vaccines among them. ‘I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,’ Kennedy said. ‘Thank you for your public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.’ ” (5)

I’d like to remind candidate Kennedy—as he knows—that some chronic illnesses are caused by infectious agents, and failing to identify those entities would seriously delay essential research that could lead to treatments and cures. And as the only presidential candidate who’s investigated and is concerned about ME/CFS, let’s all encourage him to keep it front-of-mind in this campaign and going forward.

Meanwhile, I encourage everyone to listen to the entire podcast, which is a fascinating and thought-provoking examination of ME/CFS.

*J. Cohen. “AIDS research. Keystone’s blunt message: ‘it’s the virus, stupid’.” Science, 1993 Apr 16;260(5106):292-3.  doi: 10.1126/science.8469983.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.     Susan C. Olmstead. “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome No Mystery, But NIH, CDC Keep Us in the Dark, Author Tells RFK Jr.” The Defender, May 18, 2022. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-rfk-jr-podcast/
2.     “Biomedical Research Gone Awry With Hillary Johnson.” RFK Jr. Podcast May 7, 2022. On podcasters.spotify.com
3.     Hillary Johnson. Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic. March 12, 1996.
4.     Hillary Johnson. The Why: The Historic ME/CFS Call To Arms. April 26, 2022.
5.     Brandy Zadrozny. “RFK Jr. comes ‘home’ to his anti-vaccine group, commits to ‘a break’ for U.S. infectious disease research. He has suggested without evidence that researchers and pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit to neglect chronic conditions.” NBC News, November 3, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/rfk-jr-comes-home-anti-vaccine-group-commits-break-us-infectious-disea-rcna123551