Welcome to Science Sold Out.

*This is a copy of the welcome email I sent. I am archiving it here for posterity but if you received this already, please disregard and move on!

Hello and welcome to Science Sold Out. Some of you probably know that is also the title of my (only) published book, back in the golden age of 2007. I gave a few seconds’ consideration to choosing a new title for this newsletter, only to reject that idea because Science Sold Out is such a perfect descriptor of what we see happening almost everywhere these days. (The credit for the title goes to my husband Nathan. You don't want to hear his initial suggestion.)

To provide background as to who I am, I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia and received my PhD in mathematical biology from Dalhousie University in 2002. I studied under Dr. Shigui Ruan, currently at University of Miami, and my dissertation was called “Immune Response Models of HIV Infection and Treatment”. Upon graduation I spent two years at Clarke College (now Clarke University) in Dubuque, Iowa as a visiting professor, followed by a move to The University of Texas at Tyler in 2004.

Through a series of machinations I don’t entirely recall, my growing discomfort with the HIV-is-the-necessary-and-sufficient-cause-of-AIDS led me to write (in a crisis of conscience late at night) a little article called “Why I Quit HIV”, which was published on Lew Rockwell’s website and quickly went, well, viral (how appropriate). The reactions were not all positive, but many were. This led to a contract with North Atlantic Books to publish a “polemic” (their words) about my experience, as well as to provide my own critique of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. We chose the title “Science Sold Out: Does HIV really cause AIDS?”

The fallout from the publication of this little book was swift and severe. Several — somewhere between one and two dozen — prominent researchers organized a letter writing campaign to the president of my university, asking that I be fired immediately, on the grounds that I was a deranged and dangerous crackpot, responsible for many deaths with my questions. Long story short, at my pre-tenure review the Dean of Arts and Science informed me that my contract would not be renewed, on the grounds that my publication rate had “dropped off”. At the time, I had the most published papers of any faculty member below the rank of full professor.

For personal reasons too boring to go into, my family and I decided that I would not pursue another academic career, but that I would focus on raising our little family. I haven’t felt the niggle to speak out professionally until, you guessed it, COVID hit. Everything about the pandemic seemed strangely familiar, and I wasn't the only HIV skeptic to notice it. From the rampant use of tests unauthorized for diagnosis to the shaming of those careless enough to test ‘positive’ to the bullying attitudes of high ranking scientific bureaucrats, I was seeing the same playbook over again and it alarmed me. My alarm has only increased over the past two years, but recently I have begun to feel something new: hope.

I believe science, and medical science in particular, is on the brink of a major paradigm shift. It goes beyond questioning COVID and HIV and even vaccines and the germ theory paradigm of infectious disease. I believe we are in the midst of a huge reframe of our entire body of knowledge about medicine and the politics thereof. It is my purpose and my hope to unpack some of these changes with you. The description of this newsletter includes the question “What is meta-science?” I was being flip and (I imagined) clever when I came up with that late at night, but a quick check of the definition of meta-science is “the use of scientific methodology to study science itself”. This is what I aim to do, so it stays.

Over the next while, I hope to discuss things like, of course, how COVID could never have happened without HIV, as well as attempting to lay bare some of the blatantly unscientific things that have been done in the name of science, including some you may not know. We’ll dive deep into some technical details, and we’ll look at the overarching universal issues within politics, science, the expertocracy, religion, and interpersonal relationships that have led us to this unique point in history. I hope to offer a perspective that questions everything, both the scientific mainstream and its alternatives, always remembering that scientific consensus is an oxymoron.