GET FAUCI

Stop hunting the puppets.

Hunt the puppet master.

“Nationwide—my God, they were frightened of Muskie and look who got destroyed.  They wanted to run against McGovern, and look who they're running against. They bugged, they followed people, false press leaks, fake letters, they canceled Democratic campaign rallies, they investigated Democratic private lives, they planted spies, stole documents, on and on.  Don't tell me you think this was all the work of little Don Segretti.”

  —Deep Throat to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodwood in All the President’s Men 

on why Nixon and his top aides were the Watergate masterminds, not lawyer Don Segretti, 

a foot soldier for the Committee to Re-Elect.

 

Frequently, I get emails from patients asking my advice on whom they should target in their protests, and I always say the same thing:  the higher up the better.  For instance, tremulous Dr. Beth Unger, who heads up “CFS” research at the Centers for Disease Control, has about as much power as the popcorn girl at my neighborhood movie theater.  In my view, pleading with Unger will have as much effect on ME/CFS policy as playing Barbies will have on instilling world peace.

To change anything, it's my view that you have to change the mindset of the people in charge and forget about the mid-level sump-pump bureaucrats with their cheap brown suits and Payless shoes who do as they're told.  And stop trying to make anybody in the government like you, like something out of Sally Field's "you like me" Oscar acceptance speech for Places in the Heart (watch it at the end of this post).

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would be number one on the list of targets. He's incredibly powerful.  If ME/CFS patients could cause him enough grief, maybe the 70-year-old Fauci will cry uncle or just drop dead.

Fauci has been firmly in the psychobabble CFS camp for more than 20 years.  As evidence, on July 28, 1988, New York Times health reporter Jane Brody interviewed Dr. Stephen Straus, who headed up psychological CFS research at the NIH until his death in 2007.  Brody wrote that Straus said he and "his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health had demonstrated that many patients were psychologically 'different' long before they developed the syndrome. He described some patients as having been anxious and depressed with various neurotic symptoms for years before becoming ill. In other cases, patients were motivated, dynamic, driven individuals who were functioning at peak levels when stricken. Some may be under an undue amount of stress trying to maintain busy lives."

What does this have to do with Fauci?  After the piece appeared, journalist Hillary Johnson reported in Osler's Web and later on her blog that a dentist stricken with ME/CFS wrote an irate letter to Fauci, demanding that Straus be fired from the NIH because of his false statements to the press.

According to Johnson, Fauci responded to the dentist with a cordial letter that invoked the name Dr. Peter Manu, who agreed with Straus that neuroses and stress caused the disease. Fauci’s letter delivered Manu’s stinging supposition that 50 percent of CFS patients had an underlying mental illness and, Johnson wrote, Fauci provided the journal citation for that statistic and signed his “best regards.”

***

So when people ask why British retrovirologist and Simon Wessely colleague Dr. Myra McClure was appointed to the Center for Scientific Review Special Emphasis Panel, which approves NIH grants for ME/CFS, there is, ultimately, one reason why:  Anthony Fauci. 

Force Fauci to change his mindset about ME/CFS, and like a flip of a switch, the energy changes.  That's when quavering Beth Unger—and the rest of them—will see ME/CFS for the serious and sometimes fatal neuroimmune disease that it really is.  And that's not because Unger will have had a change of heart. It'll be because like all good government foot soldiers, she'll do as she's told.