14 Feb 2012 

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Pharma/CDC on Brain damage from vaccines, Fauci, Phages, Bioweapons manufacture

HHS.gov is Incompetent; BMJ calls fraud "crime.")

Official: CFIDS and MS-Lyme are the same disease; Epstein-Barr 


CDC Greed (won't answer the FOIA)

ELISA = arbitrary cutoff.

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Overview
 

TUSKEGEE - By Jerry Leonard

1998, CIA Oilmen & Israelis plan to overthrow Saddam for the oil.

Bush/Gore  Oil/War-(Oct,2000)  

Bush's own explainer (Oct 2000): Iraq Oil

Iraq was an oil-theft war.

 

"The debate is complicated by a scientist at the National Institutes of
Health in Washington who has risked his career to discredit the Lyme
Disease Foundation. He says he is trying to protect the public from
misinformation."   See Edward McSweegan's shenanigans
 

From The Hartford Courant
CONNECTICUT NEWS

Conflict shadows couple's Lyme disease crusade 

By HILARY WALDMAN 
This story ran in the Courant July 13, 1997 

Karen Vanderhoof-Forschner politely greets a visitor to her Lyme Disease
Foundation offices and with barely another word rolls a video that she 
says tells her story. 

There on the screen is her husband, Tom, cradling the couple's firstborn 
- a ragdoll of a boy who in six years of life would never speak or 
smile, never run or climb, would never even eat strained food from a 
jar, destined instead to subsist on nutrients pumped into his stomach 
through a tube. 

The couple had battled infertility for 10 years before this baby, called 
Jamie, was born on July 7, 1985. His disabilities devastated them. 

The year Jamie was born, sickness surrounded Karen and Tom Forschner.
Their golden retrievers limped and had seizures. The three cats threw 
up, and had fevers and swelling around the eyes. 

While she was pregnant, Karen felt awful, too. Her joints ached. Her 
hearing seemed to dim. Nothing tasted right. 

She and Tom searched for a reason. 

Their quest led to another birth: the Lyme Disease Foundation, born in 
1988 in the Forschner's Tolland basement. 

In the next nine years, they would trade on sympathy, nerve, tenacity, 
business connections, political good fortune and an instinctive sort of 
savvy to amass an enormous amount of power in what has become the 
strange world of tick-borne disease research. 

But much of the same moxie that built the foundation has created a nest 
of political and financial intrigue that now has the organization 
fighting for its future. 

The Forschners are at the flash point of a scientific debate over the 
very nature of Connecticut's unofficial state disease, named for the 
towns of Lyme and Old Lyme where it was identified. 

The debate is complicated by a scientist at the National Institutes of 
Health in Washington who has risked his career to discredit the Lyme 
Disease Foundation. He says he is trying to protect the public from 
misinformation. 

It is a debate that boils down to this: Is Lyme disease a mild and 
easily diagnosed illness that can be cured in most cases by oral 
antibiotics? Or is it an elusive condition caused by an agent that can 
lurk for years in the body, evading antibiotics, and causing symptoms 
that mimic arthritis, multiple sclerosis and even mental illness? 

Further muddying the issue is the fact that there is still no foolproof 
test to confirm active Lyme disease. 

Revival meetings?

The Forschners are convinced that Lyme disease killed Jamie in 1991. And
while they claim their foundation aims only to provide a forum for any
legitimate research, they clearly believe that Lyme is elusive and 
potentially chronic. 

Each year, they host a national conference where leaders in Lyme 
research present their newest findings. 

Although scientists from both camps are invited, one researcher said the
conferences have taken on the flavor of religious revival meetings, with
patient-participants clapping and booing at the lectures. 

The atmosphere stifles free scientific debate, said Dr. Alan Barbour, 
because speakers from the easy-to-treat school are villified, while 
doctors from the chronic camp - known to patients as ``Lyme- friendly'' 
or ``Lyme-literate'' - are applauded. 

Barbour is a microbiologist and physician at the University of 
California at Irvine, who was the first to grow Lyme- causing bacteria 
in a laboratory. He recently quit as a medical adviser to the Lyme 
Disease Foundation's journal, saying a lot of its articles would have 
been rejected by other scientific publications because they lacked 
standard research controls. 

There are other accusations from scientists: that the Forschners 
organize noisy protests outside scientific conferences, that they are 
bankrolled by companies that make or administer intravenous antibiotics, 
one treatment for chronic Lyme. 

Tom Forschner denies any involvement in the protests. Although the
foundation gets some money from intravenous drug companies, he said, it 
also gets support from companies that make tick repellants, Lyme disease 
tests and vaccines. 

For all its detractors, the Lyme Disease Foundation continues to have 
support from the national Centers for Disease Control. The foundation 
has a $75,000 CDC grant to produce a handbook for physicians on how to 
diagnose and treat Lyme disease. 

The handbook, though, is also an example of how foundation critics have
taken kernels of truth and turned them into a broad indictment of the
Forschners. 

James Herrington, a CDC public health education specialist who has 
worked with the Forschners on the handbook, said a draft has taken two 
years to complete because of staff shortages at the foundation, not 
because of rumored disputes over its content. 

Granted, he said, there has been some haggling over the Forschner's 
draft, which he said included some information that the CDC did not 
accept as scientific fact. 

But unlike a similar situation, in which the National Institutes of 
Health scrapped a Lyme disease poster over a dispute with Karen, 
Herrington said the Forschners have been cooperative in the editing. 

He added that once complete, the 100- plus page handbook will be a
valuable guide to help doctors diagnose and treat Lyme disease. 

Mom and pop shop

In its heyday, the foundation had a staff including a medical director 
to edit its journal and provide other clinical advice. Although its 
budget hovers around $470,000, the organization has started to shrink 
back to the mom-and-pop shop that started it. 

Tom says they can no longer afford to pay a physician, but some of the
trappings remain. They keep a suite of offices on the 18th floor of the 
Gold Building in Hartford. Tom is paid $80,000 as executive director. 
Karen calls herself a 70-hour-a-week volunteer. They have two employees, 
but nobody with medical expertise. When money gets tight, Tom said, he 
foregos his paycheck. 

Karen and Tom blame a recent drop in contributions on Edward
McSweegan, a microbiologist and former Lyme disease program officer at 
the National Institutes of Health. He has used the Internet, his Ph.D. 
and his government title to tell anyone who will listen that the 
Forschners have used their political clout to intimidate the government 
into promoting bad science. 

McSweegan has been suspended for two weeks without pay for, among other 
offenses, sending e-mail messages from his home and work computers 
raising questions about the Lyme Disease Foundation. One message 
contained a skull-and-crossbones and referred to the foundation as 
``whacko.'' 

Karen and Tom asked the NIH to compensate them for McSweegan's
actions by giving them an award and allowing them to hold this year's
three-day Lyme conference on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md. They got
both. 

John R. LaMontagne, director of the division of microbiology and 
infectious diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious 
Disease, of the NIH, and McSweegan's boss, downplayed the significance 
of the award. ``It's just a stupid lucite plaque,'' LaMontagne told The 
Washington Post. ``It's not like we're giving her $250,000.'' 

But McSweegan and others said a seal of approval from the National
Institutes of Health is far more valuable than the plastic it's printed 
on. It gives the group credibility. The same thing happens when the 
Forschners drop the names of U.S. congressmen and senators in their 
conversations with agency bosses, McSweegan said. 

``Part of the reason they instill fear is they wave [U.S. Sen.] Joe 
Lieberman's name and picture around the NIH,'' McSweegan said. ``His 
name is a loaded gun at the NIH.'' 

Assertive

Karen believes she got Lyme disease when she was pregnant with Jamie. 
She was an insurance consultant, going to night school for the alphabet 
soup of academic and insurance titles - MBA, CLU, CPCU - that still 
follow her name on official literature and business cards. 

Tom, a certified public accountant, was on the fast track in the 
Hartford office of Peat Marwick, one of the nation's largest accounting 
firms. Around 1985, Tom was transferred to New York City to join a 
training program that might put him in line to be a partner. 

Karen was furious. The couple owned their Dutch-colonial style house in
Tolland and a move to the expensive New York suburbs would lower their
standard of living. 

``She came in to talk to me, which was fairly rare for me,'' said Joe 
Fisher, Tom's boss at the time and now a member of the Lyme Disease 
Foundation's board of directors. 

Fisher wouldn't budge, but if it were not for that kind of 
assertiveness, Karen said, she and Tom might never have met. 

They became a couple in 1972, when he was a senior at Muskingum College
in Ohio, and she was an underclassman. 

She was dating a football star, but dropped him so she'd be available 
when Tom Forschner finally noticed her. 

One night, Karen parked herself in Tom's roommate's science lab and 
refused to leave until the roommate delivered Tom. 

``I waited, flirted, everything I could possibly do,'' said Karen, 
blushing and laughing along with Tom at their dining room table, with 3-
year-old daughter, Christy, playing nearby. ``It was two weeks to 
graduation. There was nothing else I could do.'' 

Karen and Tom were married in 1974, and settled in Connecticut four 
years later, each wanting to return to the East Coast where they were 
raised. 

In 1985, not long after the Forschners rented a house in Stamford so Tom 
could start management training, Karen got pregnant and sick. 

The bacteria that causes Lyme disease had been isolated only four years
earlier, and few doctors knew enough about the disease to consider it in 
a diagnosis. 

There were occasional stories in the news, but Karen, by her own 
admission, does not pay much attention to news. 

For the next two years, Karen and Tom's lives were consumed by the task 
of caring for Jamie. By the time he turned 2, they could barely go on. 
The baby vomited every time he ate. Doctors said he was blind, deaf and 
mentally retarded, an assessment Karen still disagrees with. He had no 
muscle tone. The doctors could not say why. One suggested that Jamie's 
problems were caused by inept mothering. 

Karen and Tom set out to find their own answers. They checked the paint 
in their house, the water, the medicines Karen took during pregnancy. 
Then they bought a medical book. Some of the symptoms of Lyme disease 
matched Jamie's. 

The couple was back in Tolland now, the time spent caring for Jamie and
Karen forcing Tom to give up his career with Peat Marwick. He became an
officer of Northeast Savings Bank - a job he kept until going full-time 
for the foundation in 1990. 

Finally, they scoured the land around the Stamford house and found it 
was infested with deer ticks. 

Karen was tested. Jamie was tested. The tests showed that each had some
antibodies against the Lyme bacteria, indicating that they may have been
infected at some time. When the dogs and cats died, their bodies were 
sent to a lab at the University of Connecticut, where scientists found 
some evidence of infection. 

There is still no test to confirm active Lyme infection, the tests only 
show if the body has tried to fight Lyme infection in the past. And the 
medical literature still has no evidence that a fetus exposed to Lyme 
during pregnancy can be as damaged as Jamie. 

But Karen had her answer. She wanted help before it was too late. 

A plea in New York

In 1987, Karen went to New York, where she had heard a group of 
scientists were meeting to discuss Lyme disease. Around the Times Square 
conference center, Karen posted signs: ``Mother with Lyme, three cats, 
dog, baby dying of Lyme. Please help.'' 

Nobody was able to tell her how to save Jamie. But with encouragement 
from scientists at the conference, Karen and Tom formed the Lyme Disease
Foundation. 

To assemble a board of directors, Karen tapped anybody she knew. She
enlisted business associates and other Lyme activists. The scientists 
referred her to Willy Burgdorfer, the NIH researcher who in 1981 
discovered the organism that causes Lyme disease. He agreed to serve. 

``I asked for people with insight who could bring a name, expertise or 
money to the board,'' Karen recalled. 

She got the names. But for a long time, it was Karen's parents, Irwin 
and Ruth Vanderhoof, who were the chief benefactors. 

It would take another series of lucky breaks to build the clout and 
bring in the money. 

The first came in 1988, when the TV news magazine ``20/20'' broadcast a
story on Lyme and gave the foundation's new 800 phone number at the end 
of the report. The response, Tom says, jammed the phone lines in all of 
Tolland. 

One of the people who called was U.S. Rep. Berkley W. Bedell, D-Iowa, 
the fishing equipment magnate who thought he had Lyme. Bedell wanted to 
fly to Connecticut to meet Karen and Tom. 

But their house was no place for visitors, especially a millionaire 
congressman. There was antiseptic cleanser all over the rugs from 
Jamie's treatments. The pets were sick, the furniture was a mess. Bedell 
offered to fly Karen to Washington instead. 

Bedell had turned to the Lyme Disease Foundation for help, but the 
tables turned quickly. 

Bedell was leaving Congress, too weak from his illness to continue 
serving. But he was still able to open doors at the Capitol. Bedell took 
Karen to the Senate dining room, where his wife, Elinor, was having 
lunch with Sen. Paul Simon's wife, Jeanne. 

Mrs. Bedell spotted Connecticut's brand new U.S. senator across the 
dining room and rushed over to introduce Karen. 

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, said the brief meeting ``tore at my heart.'' 
Karen told him her son was dying of Lyme disease. Lieberman asked how he 
could help. 

With no experience around government, Karen had just learned that 
senators serve six-year terms, congressmen two years. ``I said, `I don't 
know what you do here,' '' Karen recalled. 

Lieberman submitted a bill designating a Lyme Disease Awareness Week. He
also urged the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the National 
Institutes of Health to earmark money for Lyme research. 

Karen learned fast. She learned to get a lawmaker's attention by sitting 
in the office waiting room until somebody would talk to her. 

She collected case histories of people who called the foundation for 
help. When a lawmaker said ``we don't have Lyme in my state,'' Karen 
said, ``yes, you do,'' and pulled out her file. 

Karen learned members of congress and high-ranking scientists will 
attend a rally when they're being thanked. She organized rallies where 
patients gathered with signs and banners thanking the government for its 
support. 

She took snapshots at the rallies. The photos gave the Forschners an 
aura of power. There are photos of them surrounded by Lieberman, Rep. 
George Hochbrueckner and Sen. Alphonse D'Amato, both of New York, Rep. 
Sam Gejdenson, D- Connecticut, and officials of the NIH. 

Karen appeared to have celebrities in her corner, too. Everytime Karen 
heard about a concert coming up in Hartford, she would write to the 
artist asking them to narrate a public service announcement. 

``It's chutzpah,'' Karen acknowledged. ``Some people would call it pushy 
in a woman.'' 

Nominated Lieberman

While money often buys political power, the Forschners have given very 
little to campaigns. 

Still, in 1994, they were given the honor of nominating Lieberman for a 
second term at the Democratic State Convention in Hartford. 

Their clout, or the appearance that they have some, has allowed them to 
pick up the phone and get the ear of the top government scientists. That 
has enabled them to influence research, win grant money, finagle an 
award, and produce videos and pamphlets to educate the nation about Lyme 
disease. 

It also has stirred controversy, although that is not surprising in an 
environment where patient groups now feel free to push the government 
for help curing diseases from AIDS to breast cancer, said LaMontagne, of 
the NIH. 

A color photo in the foundation office shows Jamie as a kindergartner, 
shortly before he died. 

And since then, the Forschners crusade to save their son has been a 
quest to honor his memory. 

They say their goal is to go out of business someday, but their end 
point seems a long way off. Two pharmaceutical companies are close to 
marketing a Lyme vaccine, but the Forschners do not believe it will 
protect everybody. And since Lyme was discovered, at least two other 
tick- borne illnesses with different symptoms and different treatment 
requirements have been isolated. 

Keeping the foundation going, say Karen and Tom, is a constant sacrifice 
for them and Christy. ``Before this happened, we were basically 
YUPPIES,'' said Tom, repeating one of his favorite lines. 

``What scares people is that people can be motivated not by money, but
because they want to do the right thing,'' Karen said. ``Sometimes in 
life, you have to do something that's a gift.'' 

Original article was published at:
[Note: Link not available as of 9 July 1999]
http://news.courant.com/news/archive/jul13%2Dctnews1.stm

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