Dr. William Reeves - Another Mark Whiteacre? Criminal Negligence Perhaps?

For those of you who don't know, Mark Whiteacre was a biochemist at Archer Daniels Midland, who is most famously remembered as one of the highest level corporate whistleblowers in the history of corporate America.  He got the inside scoop on a price fixing scandal on Lysine and other products, and got his bosses in trouble, while he himself had his own embezzlement scheme going on within the company.  A similar thing can be said about Dr. Reeves at the CDC - he blew the whistle on his bosses, and yet he continues to be hypocritical to the extreme by stating that the retroviral program at the CDC was taking the lead in an attempt to replicate the WPI XMRV results.

Reeves acted unethically by stating to the press that he did not expect the agency (CDC) to replicate the WPI findings of XMRV in ME/CFS patients.  He acted unethically in that he pre-judged someone else's findings, before doing any research of his own.  He put his credibility, and quite possibly his career on the line - and he will be watched very closely.  Falsifying data won't go over this time.

But why would the CDC engage in such sinister behavior?  Their mission is to protect the public from emerging infections, and in this case they've failed miserably.  The pharmaceutical companies rely on them to lay out their research roadmaps for the future - if they put out junk science, how is the pharmaceutical industry to develop new treatments?  And why would they want to intentionally try and deny scientific facts???

It's certainly not in the interest of the drug companies, CFS/ME/FM/Gulf War Syndrome patients.  It seems the CDC's motto is if it isn't a deadly disease, then feed them Thorazine, Zyprexa, and Amitriptylline, and keep them so sedated they can't think straight - something that's already difficult enough for these patients - now we'll turn them into living zombies!  For the drug companies this would only represent five or six dollars a day - so it wouldn't contribute much to their bottom lines - Amitryptilline and Thorazine are off patent and cheap.  But anti-retrovirals would be a potential goldmine for the pharmaceutical industry - rather than sell just to HIV patients, now they could quadruple their sales to CFS/ME/FM/Gulf War Syndrome patients.

So who would not want that?  The first that come to mind are HMO's PPO's, publicly funded health plans.  Having to pay $1000 or more for XMRV treatments for an indeterminate period of time is something they would not take sitting down.  The second that comes to mind is blood banks - now they've got to worry about tainted blood on an unprecedented scale - making HIV and Hep C look like child's play.  Then comes the issue of liablity and lawsuits - like in Canada after the Canadian Red Cross was found negligent.  If they can keep it as a neuropsychiatric illness, then they can keep putting off liability.  It's criminal negligence at it's finest - the CDC knew of a viral link for twenty years, and they failed to act on it, and thousands more people became ill!