Health & Fitness

In this interview, Dr. Peter McCullough discusses the importance of early treatment for COVID-19, and the potential motivations behind the suppression of safe and effective treatments.

McCullough has impeccable academic credentials. He's an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, a full professor of medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine in Dallas. He also has a master's degree in public health and is known for being one of the top five most-published medical researchers in the United States and is the editor of two medical journals.

Early Outpatient Treatment Is Key for Positive Outcomes

McCullough has been an outspoken advocate for early treatment for COVID. In August 2020, McCullough's landmark paper "Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 Infection"¹ was published online in the American Journal of Medicine.

The follow-up paper is titled "Multifaceted Highly Targeted Sequential Multidrug Treatment of Early Ambulatory High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Infection (COVID-19)"² and was published in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine in December 2020.

Perhaps one of the greatest crimes in this whole pandemic is the refusal by reigning heath authorities to issue early treatment guidance. Instead, they've done everything possible to suppress remedies shown to work, whether it be corticosteroids, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) with zinc, ivermectin, vitamin D or NAC.

Patients were simply told to stay home and do nothing. Once the infection had worsened to the point of near-death, patients were told to go to the hospital where most were routinely placed on mechanical ventilation — a practice that was quickly discovered to be lethal. Many doctors also seemingly panicked and refused to see patients with COVID symptoms.

"I'm glad that I personally always treated all my patients," he says. "I wasn't going to have the virus slaughter one of my senior citizens. And it is, I think, terrible that none of our major academic institutions innovated with a single protocol. To my knowledge, not a single major academic medical center, as an institution, attempted even to treat patients with COVID-19.

But I did use my publication power, and my editorial authority, and my position in internal medicine and some specialty medicine to publish the breakthrough paper called 'The Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Ambulatory Treatment of COVID-19' in the American Journal of Medicine.

It was an international effort, both community physicians and academic physicians. And to this day, that is the most frequently downloaded paper in the American Journal of Medicine."

Early Treatment Guidelines Have Saved Millions of Lives

In December 2020, McCullough published an updated protocol, co-written with 56 other authors who also had extensive experience with treating COVID-19 outpatients. The article, "Multifaceted Highly Targeted Sequential Multidrug Treatment of Early Ambulatory High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Infection,"³ was published in the journal Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, of which McCullough is the editor-in-chief.

"That paper, today … is the most frequently downloaded paper from BET Journal," McCullough says. "It also is the basis for the American Association of Physician and Surgeons COVID early treatment guide.⁴

We have evidence that the treatment guide has been downloaded and utilized millions of times. And it was part of the early huge kick that we had in ambulatory treatment at home towards the end of December into January, which basically crushed the U.S. curve.

We were on schedule to have 1.7 to 2.1 million fatalities in the United States, as estimated by the CDC and others. We cut it off at about 600,000. That still is a tragedy. I've testified that 85% of that 600,000 could have been saved if we would have had … the protocols in place from the start.

But suffice it to say, the early treatment heroes, and you're part of that team Dr. Mercola, has really made the biggest impact. We have saved millions of lives, spared millions and millions of hospitalizations, and in a sense, have brought the pandemic now to a winnowing close."

While the World Health Organization and national health agencies have all rejected treatments suggested by doctors for lack of large-scale randomized controlled studies, McCullough and other doctors working the frontlines took an empiric approach. They looked for signals of benefit in the literature.

"We didn't demand large randomized trials because we knew they weren't going to be available for years in the future," McCullough says. "We didn't wait for a guidelines body to tell us what to do or some medical society, because we know they work in slow motion. We knew we had to take care of patients now."

A Global Collusion to Harm Patients

When you look at how comprehensive and intense the censoring and suppression of early treatments were, it's hard to come to any other conclusion than this was a strategy aimed at securing emergency use authorization (EUA) for COVID gene therapies.

To get an EUA, there cannot be any safe and effective alternatives, and since the COVID shots are using a brand-new, never before used technology, making sure there were no effective treatments available was crucial for the success of the roll-out of these shots. Prestigious medical journals like The Lancet were even caught colluding with the drug industry, publishing a completely fabricated study on HCQ, showing it was dangerous. As noted by McCullough:

"What's so interesting is how airtight the collusion was. It was extraordinary. Look at The Lancet paper [on HCQ]. You had a doctor from Harvard, a company called Surgisphere that had data, you had the reviewers at Lancet, the associate editor and the editor at Lancet. How could they all collude together to publish a falsified paper?

When that paper came out, we looked at it. I was checking the literature very carefully. [As editor-in-chief of two medical journals] I've reviewed more papers and analyzed more data, I think, than anybody in the game. And I can tell you, I looked at that paper and in two seconds, I knew it was fake. I mean, I do this every day.

I'm also the senior associate editor for the American Journal of Cardiology. That's the most venerated journal in our entire field. And I can tell you that a paper like that would never get past my editorial desk because it was so obviously fake. It was a huge sample size that we knew was not possible at that time. And it was people in their 40s hospitalized with astronomical mortality rates.

It was just no way that was legit. And The Lancet let that hang up there for two weeks, scaring the entire world against hydroxychloroquine — which turns out to be one of the safest and most effective widely utilized in people with COVID-19. And when they took it down, it was unapologetic.

My interpretation of this is that was very intentional. What happened with ivermectin's use in the ICU was also very intentional and a collusion ... Dr. J.J Rashtak had used it in hundreds and hundreds of patients in Florida and published in CHEST, one of the best pulmonary journals, that ivermectin reduced mortality.

Yet to this day, hospitals across the United States flat out refuse to use ivermectin. Desperate patients and families have to get court orders to order these doctors to use ivermectin. So, there's a mass mentality of almost intentionally harming patients.

There's absolutely no grounds for doctors and administrators … to deny patients ivermectin. There is a global collusion, specifically in U.S. hospitals, to cause as much harm and death as conceivable. It's beyond belief … These cases where the families had to get court orders to force the doctors and administrators to administer a simple generic drug, these are going to be case studies in medical ethics for decades to come."

The Goal = Mass Vaccination

As for why patient harm was a desirable thing, McCullough believes the end goal was to secure the rollout of a mass vaccination campaign. All the propaganda we've been fed over this past year and a half points in that direction.

"Propaganda is the dissemination of false or misleading information by people of authority in a collusional manner. And that's exactly what's going on. We have a propagandized campaign for mass vaccination. There's no doubt about it. It's actually very overt … And believe me, there are hundreds of millions of people under the propagandized spell that the COVID-19 vaccine is going to deliver us from this crisis."

What we do not know for sure is why the World Health Organization and governments around the world want a needle in every arm. Why are they so eager, so relentless in their push to inject everyone with this novel gene therapy that turns your body into a toxic spike protein factory?

The intent to vaccinate everyone is such that health authorities are not even acknowledging the fact that staggering numbers of injuries and deaths are occurring shortly after these injections. They're even letting children die from these shots without any hint of slowing down the rate of injections. Why?

Our Next Task: Dispelling Vaccine Propaganda

While we've made great strides in circumventing censorship and getting the information out about early treatment, we still face a tremendous challenge, and that is dispelling the misinformation and confusion that surrounds the COVID shots.

Very clearly, there's massive collusion to suppress the truth about these gene therapies as well. Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccines, recently spoke out about his concerns, and not only did YouTube ban the interview, but Wikipedia also erased his name from the historical section of the mRNA vaccine.

They clearly want everyone to believe that these shots are similar to, and even superior to, conventional vaccines. They absolutely do not want you to think of them as gene therapy, which is what they are. Even Malone himself has made this distinction.

Malone is more than a little concerned about the coercion going on to get people to take these injections. He's also pointed out that there's no comprehensive system in place to prospectively capture side effects, despite the fact that the manufacturers bypassed at least 10 to 15 years' worth of safety studies, including toxicological studies. This too appears entirely intentional. Again, the question is why?

"They had no system to catch the complications, but even worse, they had no plans for safety. They had none of the traditional mechanisms for risk mitigation … [such as] critical event committees, Data and Safety Monitoring Boards, IRBs or Human Ethics Committees.

The public should know these are the structures that we have in place in biomedical research. I've led two dozen Data Safety Monitoring Boards. The co-sponsors of the U.S. vaccine program are the FDA and the CDC.

It's their obligation to have in place, from the very beginning, a Clinical Event Committee, Data Safety Monitoring Board, and a Human Ethics Committee [and provide] regular updates, because these committees are supposed to be identifying signals of harm, and then make recommendations to the sponsors about how to make the program safer.

This was the fiduciary responsibility of the FDA and the NIH. Again, this is going to go down in regulatory history as one of the most colossal blunders of all time. How can you do the largest clinical investigation in the history of medicine and have no safeguards? You have no mechanisms to protect Americans from what could happen with the vaccine program?"

Why Were Standardized Safety Protocols Omitted?

As for the motivation or reason for ignoring virtually all standardized safety measures, McCullough says:

"There has been such a suppression of early treatment … and a complete propagandized campaign for social distancing, wearing masks, promoting fear, suffering, hospitalization and death. And to prepare the population for mass vaccination, the last thing they wanted to do is have anything that could potentially restrict the population that would be taking the vaccine.

And so, I don't think they actually wanted any safety safeguards. I thought their goal, from the very beginning, was to try to railroad every single individual with two legs [into getting the shot]. The most important moniker was a needle in every arm.

When those billboards went up in every city in the United States, the stakeholders — which are the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, and then Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson outside the United States, and AstraZeneca — they meant business.

When they say needle in every arm, that's not a joke. It's not a needle in every arm for whom it's appropriate, or a needle in every arm for medically indicated. No, it's a needle in every arm of every human being. They mean it, and I think Americans should be frightened."

A Crime Against Humanity

What we're experiencing is really a crime against humanity, and hopefully the responsible individuals will ultimately be held accountable and found guilty of such a charge. As noted by McCullough:

"How could one possibly have a large clinical investigation, ask individuals to sign consent, and then provide no safety mechanisms, really provide nothing with respect to safety of individuals? Everything about the vaccine is about safety. The reports that have accrued are so voluminous that if the stakeholders wanted to make the case that the vaccines are safe, they should make it with data.

They don't, they simply say the vaccines are safe. And the medical societies are just as complicit. If you go to the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, they say the same thing, "The vaccine is safe." Within those organizations also, there's a large swathe of individuals who are going to have to answer [for their actions]."

The Spike Protein Is Not a Cure; It's a Disease Agent

As of June 18, 2021, we have 387,087 adverse event reports filed with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including 6,113 deaths, a large portion of which occurred within days of injection, and 6,435 life threatening reactions.⁵

We also have very good evidence to suggest this is a gross undercount, in part due to general underreporting, and in part due to VAERS refusing to accept reports — particularly those involving deaths — and scrubbing reports that have already been filed. So, these already alarming numbers likely only represent the tip of the iceberg.

"We have red hot problems, like children and young adults developing myocarditis, inflammation of the heart. I just saw such a patient yesterday," McCullough says. "These are proven cases. This is not make believe. This is for real.

So, you may ask the question, how in the world could this happen? Well, the first element of this happening is the vaccines as they exist today, either messenger RNA, or adenoviral DNA, the mechanism of action is not safe. The mechanism of action poses a biologic danger.

These vaccines all trick the body into making the spike protein of the virus. The spike protein itself is pathogenic. It's actually what makes the virus dangerous. It was the object of gain-of-function research. So, it has a dangerous mechanism of action. Why? Because the spike protein is produced in an uncontrolled fashion. It's not like a tetanus shot where there's only a certain amount of protein that's injected.

This is an uncontrolled quantity of spike protein. Probably each person is different, so may have [lower] production of it. They have very little symptoms after the vaccine, they're fine.

Hopefully that's the majority of individuals, but there are unfortunate individuals that must have massive amount of spike protein, and that spike protein ravages the body wherever the spike protein is locally made, and we do know the messenger RNA and the adenoviral DNA gets distributed in all the organs.

So if messenger RNA is up in the brain and we start producing spike protein in the brain, we cause local brain injury. There are now well-described neurologic injury cases with the vaccine. Many of them. In the heart, it causes myocarditis and cardiac injury. In the liver, it causes liver injury, in the lung, lung injury, in the kidney, kidney injury.

And very importantly, the spike protein damages endothelial cells and causes blood clotting. So, blood clotting, the dreaded complication of the infection itself, is now caused by the vaccine. Everything we've found out about the vaccine since its release has been bad."

What Can We Expect to Happen in the Future?

Beyond the acute injury phase, there's the very real possibility of long term health hazards. If you make it past the first couple of months without significant problems, you're still not out of the woods. My main concern is the possibility of paradoxical immune enhancement (PIE), also known as pathogenic priming, or antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which essentially results in a cascade of immunological overreactions that wind up killing you.

The autumn and winter of 2021 will be our first "trial by fire." We'll just have to wait and see how many fully "vaccinated" people end up succumbing to the seasonal flu and other infections. That'll give us a benchmark for how prevalent PIE might be. When asked what he predicts for the future, McCullough says:

"We're so busy with the acute toxicity to the vaccine. We're just absolutely overwhelmed, so, it's hard to imagine in three to six months where we will be … There are hints right now that the messenger RNA doesn't break down in a few days, that the natural disposal systems that we have for the messenger RNA doesn't work [for the synthetic mRNA].

Now, we don't know about the adenoviral DNA. I have a more favorable view of the adenoviral DNA products in the sense that maybe the body … can fight that off and dispose of it. The Johnson & Johnson, per number of injections, has the fewest complications. And most Americans think just the opposite because of that misdirection activity.

I think the vaccine stakeholders intentionally picked on Johnson & Johnson in order to distract attention away from the terrible safety events we've seen with Pfizer and Moderna. The vast majority of all the devastation we've seen is with Pfizer and Moderna …

When you generate a really strong antibody response, it's actually more pathogenic. The belief is it's more pathogenic than the natural infection, because we're seeing syndromes in vaccine victims that are way worse than getting COVID-19 itself. I mean, the syndromes are actually horrendous.

I have seen neurologic blindness, cervical myelitis, cerebellar syndrome. It's absolutely awful. It's depends where the messenger RNA goes … and everything I can put together biologically, and what I see clinically, is that vaccines aren't going to work but for a few months …

After the first shot of mRNA, one is actually more susceptible to COVID-19. This has been shown time and time again. My first rash of patients with post-vaccination COVID-19 in my practice was always after the first injection. The theory here is that the body has been hit with the messenger RNA, the spike protein is generated, it's damaging some endothelial cells, and there's an immature library of antibodies that are being formed.

And those antibodies, instead of protecting against the next exposure to COVID-19, they actually facilitate entry. That's called antibody-dependent enhancement, and I think there is evidence for that … As for what we can expect long-term, that's anyone's guess."

Long Term Risks Are Unknown

Before COVID came along, the FDA required vaccine makers to provide 24 months' worth of data before they'd allow it. This was truncated down to two months for the COVID shots. So, anyone who says the shots are safe long term is lying because no such data exists to prove this.

"The consent form says, 'We don't know if this is going to work, we don't know if it's going to last, and we don't know if it's going to be safe.' They say that. So, anybody who takes the vaccine is going to have to think about this and understand that we don't know anything beyond two months.

Given all the short-term risks, if there are any long-term risks, it is absolutely compounding this unknown. What I know based on the literature right now is there could be a risk given the narrow spectrum of immunologic coverage ... There could be such a narrow immunity that more virulent strain could overwhelm it …

The most recent variant is the Delta variant. That's the weakest of all the variants and the most easily treatable. But if someone, let's say a nefarious entity created a more virulent virus, it could easily be designed to scoot past a very narrow immunity that hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, will be keyed to with narrow immunity."

DNA Changes, Cancer and Chronic Illness Are Possible Effects

McCullough also discusses the risk that these mRNA injections might become permanently incorporated into your DNA by way of reverse transcriptase.

"There now have been enough studies to suggest there is some reverse transcription — that in fact the RNA creates DNA and then DNA gets permanently put into the human genome," he explains.

"We know this from the natural infection. The T-Detect test actually checks the T-cells when it tracks the DNA. This is a commercial test you can get if you had COVID-19, and it looks for minor chromosomal re-arrangements that code for cell surface receptors on T-cells."

The question is, if the synthetic mRNA or adenoviral DNAs in fact create permanent changes to the genome, what effects will that have? Could it promote cancer, for example? McCullough cites a recent paper indicating the spike protein might in fact affect two important cancer suppressor genes.

"This is disturbing because we're using novel genetic material and it's possible that they're oncogenic. We know some other viruses are oncogenic, including Epstein-Barr virus. So, when that paper hit, we said, 'Oh no, are we setting up people for cancer risk of solid organ cancers, like breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, et cetera.

It is a sick feeling what we've learned there. We do understand now that there must be cell damage that's occurring with this spike protein inside cells. And that if it's not turned off, that that spike protein generation could end up with some type of chronic disease.

There are elements of the spike protein that are similar to prions that occur in neurologic disease, for instance. There may be intracellular changes as the body keeps cranking the spike protein which you're not supposed to crank, that causes other problems in cells …

Future development of heart failure comes to mind, gastrointestinal illnesses, pulmonary fibrosis, neurodegenerative diseases. We could be on to the start of a whole new genre of chronic disease in America due to this mass experimentation of genetic products in the human body."

Impossible for Vaccination Program to Improve Disease Curve

In a sane and rational world not laboring under some hidden agenda to kill off a portion of the population, these shots would have only been rolled out to the highest-risk individuals. The rest of the population would have been excluded from the experiment.

Remember the COVID injection trials conflated absolute and relative risk. Pfizer claimed its mRNA shot was 95% effective, but that was the relative risk reduction — the absolute risk reduction was actually less than 1%.⁶ As noted by McCullough, healthy adults under 50, teens and children have a less than 1% chance of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, so they don't have a medical need for it.

"You can't make less than 1% smaller and have it be clinically meaningful. That's the reason why the vaccine program will never have an impact on the epidemiologic curves. Dr. [Ronald] Brown from Canada has done the analysis. It's impossible.

Someone sent me an email the other day [saying], 'Dr. McCullough, don't you think that the pandemic is being favorably impacted by the vaccination program?' The answer is no. We look at the clinical trials. There's less than 1% absolute risk reduction. It means that, mathematically, it's impossible for mass vaccination to have a favorable impact on the population."

COVID Shot May Raise Your Risk of COVID Death

What's worse, McCullough cites data showing that those who have gotten the shot and end up with COVID-19 anyway have far higher rates of hospitalization and death.

"The CDC was so overwhelmed [with adverse reports], they gave up. God knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans got vaccinated and got COVID-19 anyway. It looks just like regular COVID. In the data they had, it was a 9% risk of hospitalization and then a 3% risk of death."

What this means is that, by taking the injection, you trade in a 0.26%⁷ risk of death, should you contract COVID-19, for a 3% risk of death if you get infected. If you're younger than 40, you're trading a 0.01%⁸ risk of death for a 3% risk.

The Way Forward Demands We Just Say No

If you want to hear more of what McCullough has to say, you can find his podcast, The McCullough Report, on America Out Loud. Every week, he talks to medical experts from different countries to get a range of perspectives and innovative approaches. In closing, he notes:

"My personal view is that I think the vaccine program has been a disaster. We should have just treated COVID-19 as an illness. We should never have shut down the schools or anything else. None of this wearing masks. We should have just treated the acute problem, and we would have gotten ourselves out of the pandemic."

As for how we move forward, first of all, we need to stop the acute injury, and that means we need to stop taking these COVID shots. Beyond that, we'll need to experiment to determine the best ways to block the damage done by the spike protein, for however long that is produced and stays in circulation.

"If there's any mother who's concerned about their child developing myocarditis, the way to avoid it is just don't bring your child to a vaccination center," McCullough says.

"Everyone is just going to have to learn to say no. We cannot be harmed by the vaccine if we just decline it. And the vaccine is completely elective. The CDC, the NIH, FDA, they've all said it's elective. You don't have to take it. Those agencies, by the way, they're not taking it.

So, nobody has to take it. And everyone who is in a school or a university, or a workplace where they're saying you have to take it, or say you have to take it for travel, the answer is no you don't. You do not have to take it for travel. And yes, you can show up to work without the vaccine. And yes, you can show up to school without the vaccine.

These are forms of intimidation and almost every one of these institutions actually hasn't written a policy. And if they don't have a policy that's been vetted with fair exemptions, that's just intimidation. That's like saying you can't show up to work with a blue tie. If I want to wear a blue tie, I'm going to show up to work in a blue tie.

I think Americans are going to have to have that type of backbone in order to break this wave of propaganda, [this] ill intent that's levered on the American people. I know so many people who are cowering … The fear is extraordinary …

If we had a Data Safety Monitoring Report in place, they would have been having emergency meetings at the end of January 2021, and said, 'You know what? What we're seeing is not good.' We can actually calculate what's called the competence interval.

When we exceed a competence interval for risks above a certain risk limit, we call it, and that [competence interval was exceeded] on January 22, 2021. Yet here we are, five months later. This will go down in history as the biggest medical biological product safety catastrophe in human history, by far. There's nothing close … You can imagine how many heads are going to roll when this thing ultimately comes to its finality."

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In this interview, Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., Frank Ruscetti, Ph.D., and Kent Heckenlively, a lawyer and science teacher, discuss “Ending Plague: A Scholar’s Obligation in an Age of Corruption,” which they co-wrote.

This is the third book in a trilogy that began with “Plague: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth About Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases” and “Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science.”

The first two were co-written by Mikovits and Heckenlively. The inspiration for the third book came from Ruscetti, who has been Mikovits’ mentor and professional collaborator for 38 years. As indicated in the subtitle, we won’t be able to end these plagues of scientific and academic corruption unless or until scholars and scientists honor their professional obligations and responsibilities.

“That's the point of the book, and we wouldn't have this mess if people like Tony [Anthony] Fauci and Bob [Robert] Gallo didn't get away with this thin playbook for things like Ebola, Zika and the autism epidemic, all the way back to HIV/AIDS,” Mikovits says.

Selling Out Public Health for Profit

“Plague” and “Plague of Corruption” detail the scientific discoveries made by Mikovits and Ruscetti, which include the scandalous findings that the blood supply and vaccines are tainted with disease-causing retroviruses, and the U.S. government has been hiding it for decades. The books read like fast-paced thrillers and offer a view into the halls of scientific inquiry, to which few people ever are privy.

Book No. 3, “Ending Plague,” is primarily Ruscetti’s story. By 1983, when Ruscetti hired Mikovits as a lab tech at Fort Detrick, he’d recently discovered T cell growth factor, later renamed interleukin 2. He’d also discovered the first disease-causing human retrovirus, called human T-lymphotropic virus (HTLV-1¹) or human T cell leukemia virus, back in 1980. The book starts with Ruscetti’s story and perspective.

“The motivation for writing the book is not something new,” Ruscetti says, “and unless we change the fortunes of every man, it's just going to get worse. [During] the AIDS epidemic, we were at an impasse. What most people don't realize is that it shouldn't have been at an impasse then, because if you look at the rest of the world, the No. 1 cause of death among women of child bearing age is HIV.²”

That’s a rather extraordinary statement. The leading cause of death among child-bearing women in the world is HIV/AIDS, but do you ever hear anything about that?³ If not, why do you think that is? In short, health agencies have done a terrible job over the last several decades, selling out public health for profit. As noted by Heckenlively:

“Public health has not been serving us well for the past 40 or 50 years. What I think is really extraordinary about Frank's story is he really details how science has gone wrong. We like to think of science as this democracy of experts: top people in their field discussing how the science should move forward. But public health is not like that.

Starting in the 1970s with Nixon's war on cancer, which accelerated under Reagan, these ‘czars’ of science were created. Tony Fauci is one of them. And then they demoted the other scientists to be like serfs. We don't really have that many ‘government scientists.’ We have a lot of scientists under contract with the federal government, and this has really set up a system where people like Tony Fauci essentially control public health.

I think if people understood that the system itself is set up so that relatively few people are in charge, then all of this makes more sense. So, when they talk about in the media ‘science is deciding this,’ ‘science is deciding that,’ it's really not.

It's just a relatively small handful of people, almost like a holy bureau of science, and that's what we're attacking. What we're trying to do is, we're trying to move science back to its original roots in which everybody who is qualified has a voice and can contribute to the discussion.”

Too Much Power in Too Few Hands

Fauci has been the head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. In the 37 years since, he’s been responsible for doling out research funding that amounts to nearly $1 trillion. Who has received those taxpayer dollars? Primarily those who are aligned with the drug industry. It’s become an incestuous relationship that revolves around the creation of profit, while the public receives virtually no benefit.

In fact, in many cases, public health has suffered tremendously, and people have no concept of what has happened, or how their ill health is the outgrowth of corrupted policies and conflicts of interest. Heckenlively says:

“The comparison I make is that Fauci has been head of National Institute for Allergy and infectious Diseases longer than J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI. [Editor’s note: Actually, Hoover was head of the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 to 1972⁴] Whether you're right, left or middle, nobody believes that anybody should hold that kind of power for that long.

In fact, having that kind of power in and of itself is a really bad idea. I think [Fauci] really is a terrible person because not only has he been in charge of this system, he helped design this system. We need to get rid of Fauci and keep the next Fauci from taking power.”

Importantly, Fauci and Big Pharma not only control the funding of research, they also control what gets published and what’s buried. Fauci is the reason you’ve not heard about HIV/AIDS being a leading cause of death among women of childbearing age, worldwide. This statistic is censored, just like facts about COVID-19 treatment and COVID shots are censored.

As explained by Mikovits, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), which primarily affects women, is basically AIDS without the HIV. It’s an immune dysfunction, and it can be traced back to contaminated vaccines, biologics and blood supply that have been used for decades.

As detailed in “Plague,” Fauci was a key figure in covering up the true cause of AIDS, which was incorrectly blamed on homosexuals and drug addicts. By fraudulently changing the definition of the disease and denying the presence of exogenous viruses, so-called xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related viruses or XMRVs, they prevented women from getting correct care. Mikovits explains:

“The definition was ‘Only HIV can cause AIDS,’ and we're looking at the same thing right now. There never was a SARS-CoV-2 monkey virus in hundreds of millions of people. They're being transmitted through the [COVID] vaccine, and through recombinants it can happen in only two weeks.”

SARS-CoV-2 Is a Cloned Monkey Virus

New York-based physician Dr. Andy Kaufman claims the SARS-CoV-2 virus has never been identified. According to Mikovits, he is dead-wrong. SARS-CoV-2 is a cloned monkey virus, manufactured in the Vero monkey kidney cell line and isolated only from that cell line, not from humans with COVID, she says.

The original bat coronavirus was grown in a Vero monkey kidney cell line known to be contaminated with retroviruses and coronaviruses that easily recombine every time the vaccines are manufactured in 100-liter productions.

Mikovits conducted experiments on bat tissue Ebola cultures in the same line of cells in the mid ‘90s, trying to understand how these viruses cause disease. What she discovered was that it’s not the infection that kills. It’s the inflammatory side effects and the dysregulation of the innate immune response that end up being lethal, and the virus causes this in part by shutting down the interferon pathways. Heckenlively explains:

“What Judy is saying is that when you mix these viruses in different cultures, you will get genetic sequences from the culture cells. The thing that our books really talk about is how dangerous this common practice is — taking, for example, a human virus that you isolate, and then grow it in animal cultures.

What a lot of people don't realize is that viruses are not like other living organisms. They're very promiscuous in their swapping of genetic codes. In April or May of 2020, [people said] ‘This bat virus seems to have some HIV spike proteins and sequence.’ How is it that you got monkey sequences in a bat virus?

Our contention is that this common practice of growing viruses in different animal cultures, including human cultures, is creating these Frankenstein viruses which will have genetic sequences from the mediums in which they're grown …

The belief in the ‘80s was that the HIV virus is hiding out in the T cells, which made absolutely no sense. It is true that as the disease progresses, the T cells would absolutely be taken out. That was an indicator of the infection, but what Judy and Frank were saying is that the HIV virus can't be hiding out in the T cells, especially because you got the development of AIDS dementia, and the T cells, are not [found] in the brain.

Judy's seminal work with Frank was finding the actual reservoir in which the HIV virus lived, which was the mono site macrophages. If I understand Andy Kaufman's claims, I think he's throwing out the baby with the bath water. Judy is showing how the virus cause damage and how the establishment is wrong, and how some of these alternative people are missing part of the argument as well.”

SARS-CoV-2 Was Spread by Injection

Mikovits makes a number of shocking assertions in this interview. Among them, that SARS-CoV-2 was spread through the regular use of vaccines that had been contaminated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus because of manufacturing practices.

The monkey kidney cell lines that were used to manufacture many vaccines were contaminated with bat coronavirus and shipped around the world. Those vaccines were then injected into humans, called transfection. Their cells then began replicating what we now understand as the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

“They absolutely isolated a SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Mikovits says. “But there is not definitive-anything showing [that it] satisfies either Koch’s postulates or Hill criteria, which we did with the XMRVs, meaning the virus, in my opinion, is still a monkey virus that was spread via injection.”

In other words, while there is a virus named SARS-CoV-2, no one has proven that this viral isolate actually ever transmitted between humans or causes COVID-19. Her assertion is that SARS-CoV-2 is a monkey virus that is an artifact of culturing a bat coronavirus in Vero monkey kidney cell cultures that, for years, have been contaminated with XMRVs.

To prove SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, you have to extract the virus from a person who has COVID-19, and infect another person with that virus. If the exposed individual gets COVID-19, then the virus would be the causative factor.

We know most individuals have been exposed to people with COVID-19, yet they do not develop COVID-19. This suggests that SARS-Co-V-2 is not the sole causative factor.

How the COVID Shots Produce Variants

Mikovits also believes the COVID jabs add to the pandemic by producing variants through a process called transfection. When a clone of an infectious viral sequence is injected in a synthetic viral particle called a lipid nanoparticle, it is not an infectious transmissible virus particle. Instead, the host cells’ machinery starts replicating the inoculated sequences or expressing the spike proteins.

In the case of the COVID jabs, your cells are producing the spike protein of the virus only, which is actually the pathogenic part of the virus. The spike protein is what’s causing the disease. Put another way, COVID-19 is not a viral infection. It’s caused by a metabolic toxin, namely the spike protein. This viral particle, in and of itself, functions like a synthetic virus.

The spike protein is synthetic because the mRNA injected has been genetically modified. The mRNA is not infectious or transmissible, but when injected, your body starts to make this synthetic spike protein that operates like a virus, and can be transmitted to other people. Heckenlively explains:

“Virologists say you need a complete virus to do harm. What Judy has [found] is that defective viruses can cause harm as well. If you think of a virus as a code, like a computer program, if you have a couple bad lines of code, that can still cause problems in your computer as well.

What Judy is saying is that viruses are dangerous in ways that are not fully appreciated by science. You don't have to have a complete virus in order to do harm. You can do sequences of the virus that they would call defective or garbage pieces, and it can still cause enormous harm, because those parts of the virus, such as the envelope, are affecting the function of your immune system.”

According to Mikovits, 8% of the human genome consists of endogenous viruses that include retroviral envelopes that are critical to the regulation of our innate immune responses, our critical type 1 interferon. Some perform very important functions, including regulatory roles.

However, you cannot express animal or other human endogenous viruses without risking recombinants and new viruses. Hence, when vaccines are contaminated with animal retroviruses, you risk creating brand new viruses that can cause all sorts of harm.

What Is the Hidden Agenda?

In summary, Mikovits and Ruscetti’s work demonstrates an important principle, which is that viruses do not travel alone. They travel in groups, and while one may affect one part of the immune system, another type will produce other immune responses. The end result is what we diagnose as the acquired immune dysfunction or deficiency.

For example, HIV alone does not cause AIDS. To develop AIDS, you need multiple environmental toxins like glyphosate, aluminum or a coinfection of HIV and XMRVs. Again, XMRVs are found in vaccines that have been grown in animal tissue.

The XMRVs cripple your innate immune system, including your natural killer (NK) cells. This then allows the HIV to take out your adaptive immune system, the T and B cells, resulting in disease progression and if left untreated, death. In CFS, the primary coinfection is that of XMRVs and herpes viruses.

Mikovits is convinced that what is now being called “long-haul COVID” is the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein activating and recombining with XMRVs — introduced via vaccinations — and the HIV virus. She also believes those who are most susceptible to dying from the COVID shots are those who are already coinfected with XMRV, HIV, Borrelia, Babesia and other pathogens commonly acquired from contaminated vaccines.

What this all means, then, is that in order to protect yourself against the disease, you cannot focus on protecting yourself against a single virus. The answer is to make sure your immune system is strong enough to take on whatever it encounters. Absolutely never get another inoculation of any vaccines until all of the appropriate testing is done and the contaminants removed, as they should have been decades ago.

That's why the pandemic measures have been so detrimental. Mask wearing, sheltering indoors and staying in a state of perpetual fear all dampen your immune function. The question is, why did those in charge make sure they did everything to lower our immune defenses?

“For me personally, it is the best evidence that this was not simply a series of mistakes by those in charge,” Heckenlively says. “There had to be some other agenda. I'm trained as an attorney. I have people lie to me all the time. I'm always questioning people and I look at what's done. Can I prove it? No, but it seems like an amazing pattern of mistakes to just be the result of stupidity or politics.”

Profiling COVID-19

What do we know about the people who have died from COVID-19? We know they're elderly. We know that they have 2.6 comorbidities. What Mikovits, Ruscetti and Heckenlively are saying is that for the past 60 years, we've been injecting animal viruses into human beings, and the assertion made in “Plague of Corruption” is that this practice has caused many of these chronic diseases in people.

This reality has been covered up, however, which is why many are now hearing about this for the very first time. Along comes SARS-CoV-2, triggering terrible immune system reactions in those who are already infected with these animal viruses.

The coinfections are ultimately what’s killing them. Essentially, SARS-CoV-2 is acting like the executioner of people who are already sick with chronic diseases caused by animal retroviruses, other pathogens and toxins introduced through vaccinations.

Add to this the COVID shots. These injections make your cells produce a synthetic spike protein (a synthetic virus envelope) that has pathological effects. The reason why the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is so dangerous is because it contains the envelope proteins of three of the most harmful viruses: the HIV family, the XMRV family and the SARS family of viruses.

All of them are now rolled into one, and the instructions to produce this synthetic pathogen are now being injected into hundreds of millions of people. What can go wrong? As explained by Mikovits, the XMRVs and HIV were incorporated by growing the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the Vero E6 cell line.

Related to HIV is the simian immune deficiency virus (SIV), and it too is found in the Vero monkey cell line, part of the endogenous viral genome of monkeys. SIV and HIV have overlapping envelope proteins, so they produce the same inflammatory immune response.

Ending Plague

“Ending Plague” goes deep into the history of all this and provides a framework for understanding how something so devastating and disruptive could happen now, in 2021. The basis of this has a lot to do with the actions of Fauci and Robert Gallo, Ph.D. Fauci, for example, was responsible for discrediting all AIDS treatments other than AZT — the drug that he sponsored.

He kept insisting that more randomized controlled trials were needed, yet he held the purse strings and refused to fund the very studies he claimed were required to prove these other treatments. AZT meanwhile, cost $5 to make and was sold for $10,000 per dose. AZT wound up killing some 330,000 people due to its toxicity.

The very same pattern is playing out today with COVID-19, and Fauci is again playing a lead role. Is that really a coincidence? He’s been warning against the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and he’s downplayed the importance of vitamin D sufficiency and any number of other things. According to Fauci, the COVID “vaccine” is the only way forward, and now we’re seeing thousands of people around the world dying within weeks of their injections.

In “Ending Plague,” the three coauthors review how we can reform public health to get us out of this mess, once and for all. “I think that the scholar's obligation in an age of corruption is to tell the truth and make the world a better place,” Heckenlively says, adding:

“These books that I helped Judy, Frank and others put together, these are really stories of defectors from science. In them we see the destruction of the old order and the creation of something new and wonderful.

We're not just saying things are terrible. We are talking about how to bring about change. That's why it's so important that people buy these books because, I hate to say it, sales are power for people like Judy, Frank and me, to continue our message.”

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By Dr. Mercola

You may be aware, and possibly have experienced firsthand, that antibiotics can cause diarrhea.

This is because antibiotics, by design, disrupt the balance of good and bad bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract, often killing off both beneficial and harmful microorganisms without distinction.

It is through this same mechanism that antibiotics may also be causing you to pack on extra pounds.

In fact, Dr. Martin Blaser, a professor of microbiology at New York University Langone Medical Center, suggests that antibiotics may permanently alter your gut bacteria and interfere with important hunger hormones secreted by your stomach, leading to increased appetite and body mass index (BMI).

Antibiotics Lead to Increases in Body Fat and Hunger Hormones

Research by Dr. Blaser has shown that 18 months after antibiotics are used to eradicate H. pylori bacteria, there is a:

• 6-fold increase in the release of ghrelin (the "hunger hormone") after a meal
• 20 percent increase in leptin levels (leptin is a hormone produced by fat tissue)
• 5 percent increase in BMI

Levels of ghrelin should ordinarily fall after a meal to signal your brain that you're full and ready to stop eating; an increase would therefore essentially tell your brain to continue eating, leading to weight gain. Further, the increase in leptin levels is concerning because overexposure to high levels of the hormone can lead to leptin resistance, which means your body is unable to properly hear leptin's signals.

The way your body stores fat is a highly regulated process that is controlled, primarily, by leptin. If you gain excess weight, the additional fat produces extra leptin that should alert your brain that your body is storing too much fat and needs to burn off the excess.

To do this, signals are sent to your brain to stop being hungry and to stop eating. When you become leptin-resistant, your body can no longer hear these messages -- so it remains hungry and stores more fat.

Interestingly, you can easily become leptin resistant by eating the typical American diet full of sugar (particularly fructose), refined grains and processed foods … which, like antibiotics, will upset the balance of bacteria in your gut.

Farmers Use Antibiotics to Fatten Up Livestock Quickly

About 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced are used in agriculture -- not necessarily to fight disease, but rather to promote weight gain.

As stated by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs:

"Continuous, low-dose administration of an antibiotic can increase the rate and efficiency of weight gain in healthy livestock. The presence of antibiotics likely changes the composition of the gut flora to favor growth. Debate is ongoing as to how gut flora are changed; change may simply be a reduction in numbers, a change in species composition or a combination of the two.

… Some antibiotics may also enhance feed consumption and growth by stimulating metabolic processes within the animal."

Unfortunately, this practice is also contributing to the alarming spread of antibiotic-resistant disease. As it pertains to your weight, there's ample reason to believe that this same phenomenon occurs in humans as well, figuratively turning Americans into fatted calves.

Your Gut Bacteria and Your Waistline Go Hand-in-Hand

Research by Dr. Blaser, for instance, found that mice fed antibiotics (in dosages similar to those given to children for throat or ear infections) had significant increases in body fat despite their diets remaining unchanged.

Multiple studies have actually shown that obese people have different intestinal bacteria than slim people, and that altering the microbial balance in your gut can influence your weight. Here are six such studies:

1. When rats were given lactic acid bacteria while in utero through adulthood, they put on significantly less weight than other rats eating the same high-calorie diet. They also had lower levels of minor inflammation, which has been associated with obesity.
2. Babies with high numbers of Bifidobacteria and low numbers of Staphylococcus aureus -- which may cause low-grade inflammation in your body, contributing to obesity -- appeared to be protected from excess weight gain. This may be one reason why breast-fed babies have a lower risk of obesity, as Bifidobacteria flourish in the guts of breast-fed babies.
3. Two studies found that obese individuals had about 20 percent more of a family of bacteria known as Firmicutes, and almost 90 percent less of a bacteria called Bacteroidetes than lean people. Firmicutes help your body to extract calories from complex sugars and deposit those calories in fat. When these microbes were transplanted into normal-weight mice, those mice started to gain twice as much fat.
4. Obese people were able to reduce their abdominal fat by nearly 5 percent, and their subcutaneous fat by over 3 percent, just be drinking a probiotic-rich fermented milk beverage for 12 weeks.
5. Probiotics (good bacteria) have been found to benefit metabolic syndrome, which often goes hand-in-hand with obesity.
6. Probiotics may also be beneficial in helping women lose weight after childbirth when taken from the first trimester through breastfeeding.

Healthy Gut Bacteria Cannot Coexist With Antibiotics

Antibiotics can save your life if you develop a serious bacterial infection, but it's important that you resist the urge to ask your physician for a prescription for every ear, nose, or throat infection you come down with. Likewise for a cold or the flu. Antibiotics are useless against viral infections like these, and when used for this purpose will only harm your health by wiping out the good bacteria in your gut.

Antibiotic use has become so routine in the United States that one round of the drugs may seem like no big deal, but remember that using them drastically alters the makeup of bacteria in your gut, which will need to be rebuilt in order for you to stay in good health. Whenever you use an antibiotic, you're also increasing your susceptibility to developing infections with resistance to that antibiotic -- and you can become the carrier of this resistant bug and even spread it to others.

Ultimately the problem of antibiotic-overuse needs to be stemmed through public policy on a nationwide level, especially in the agricultural community, but I urge you to also take personal responsibility and evaluate your own use of antibiotics, and avoid taking them -- or giving them to your children -- unless absolutely necessary.

Remember that the foods you eat are also a major source of exposure to antibiotics, so to protect your gut bacteria you should buy primarily antibiotic-free, organically raised meat and produce. Keep in mind that conventionally farmed food is often grown in fertilizer derived from factory-farmed animal waste and human sewage, which may be a source of contamination with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The Recipe for Healthy Gut Bacteria

Your gut bacteria are vulnerable to your lifestyle. If you eat a lot of processed foods, for instance, your gut bacteria are going to be compromised because processed foods in general will destroy healthy microflora and feed bad bacteria and yeast.

In addition to antibiotics, your gut bacteria are also very sensitive to:

• Chlorinated water
• Antibacterial soap
• Agricultural chemicals
• Pollution

Because virtually all of us are exposed to these at least occasionally, ensuring your gut bacteria remain balanced should be considered an ongoing process, and consuming fermented foods is one of the best ways to do this.

One of the reasons why fermented foods are so beneficial is because they contain lactic acid bacteria -- a type of beneficial gut bacteria that research shows can help you stay slim.

I have long stated that it's generally a wise choice to "reseed" your body with good bacteria from time to time by taking a high-quality probiotic supplement or eating non-pasteurized, traditionally fermented foods such as:

• Lassi (an Indian yoghurt drink, traditionally enjoyed before dinner)
• Fermented  organic grass-fed raw milk, such as kefir
• Various pickled fermentations of cabbage, turnips, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, squash and carrots
• Natto (fermented soy)

If you do not eat fermented foods on a regular basis, a high-quality probiotic supplement can be incredibly useful to help maintain healthy gut bacteria when you stray from your healthy diet and consume excess grains or sugar, or if you have to take antibiotics.

Also please remember that it is vital to eliminate ALL sugars. They will sabotage any beneficial effects of the fermented foods, as they will act as nutrients for the pathogenic yeast, fungi and bacteria that are in your gut.

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Breast cancer rates dropped by half in tandem with the discontinuation of hormone replacement therapy, according to a study published online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The study was reported in the Telegraph in the United Kingdom.

The Telegraph said:

"Dr Prithwish De, of the Canadian Cancer Society, and colleagues, found that use of HRT dropped from 12.7 per cent in 2002 to 4.9 per cent in 2004.

During the same period breast cancer rates dropped by 9.6 per cent even though the same number of women were having mammography tests.

Between 2004 and 2006 use of HRT remained stable at around five per cent of women aged 50 to 59 but breast cancer rates began to increase again.

Dr De wrote: 'The results support the hypothesised link between the use of hormone replacement therapy and invasive breast cancer incidence and indicate that the sharp decline in breast cancer incidence in 2002 is likely explained by the concurrent decline in the use of hormone replacement therapy among Canadian women.'"

The study's authors said these numbers support existing evidence of the link between HRT and breast cancer.

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In January of this year, Oprah Winfrey invited Suzanne Somers on her show to talk about health tips. The 62-year-old actress uses bio-identical estrogen cream and progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month.

According to Somers, the bio-identical hormones are identical to the ones created by the human body, unlike conventional hormones, which are made from mare’s urine.

The result has been a media firestorm condemning both Somers and Oprah, including the hit piece in Newsweek linked below. The authors of the piece, Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert, argue that bio-identical hormones are just as synthetic as conventional hormones -- although they don’t much discuss the fact that conventional hormones are actually different from the 17-beta-estradiol made by your body, while the bio-identical hormones are 17-beta-estradiol itself.

The real reason for the attacks on bio-identical hormones?

As Somers points out, many doctors, scientists and media figures make a good deal of money off of the pharmaceutical industry.

And one thing you won’t see mentioned in the Newsweek article is the fact that Pat Wingert is the co-author of a pharmaceutically biased book on hormones and menopause, and that  Newsweek is heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies.

This resembles an incident a few years ago when the cattle industry actually sued Oprah Winfrey just for talking about Mad Cow Disease.

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The contraceptive pill may disrupt women's natural ability to choose a partner genetically dissimilar to themselves. This could result in difficulties when trying to conceive, an increased risk of miscarriage and long intervals between pregnancies. Passing on a lack of diverse genes to children could also weaken their immune systems.

Humans tend to be attracted to those with a dissimilar genetic make-up to themselves, maintaining genetic diversity, which is signaled by subtle odors. A research team analyzed how the contraceptive pill affects odor preferences, and found that the preferences of women who began using the contraceptive pill shifted towards men with genetically similar odors.

Not only could genetic similarity in couples lead to fertility problems, but it could ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odor perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners, researchers said.

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Your entire body takes direction from your hormones. Hormones are secreted by your endocrine system and are responsible for telling your organs what to do and when to do it.¹ They are essentially chemical messengers that travel throughout your bloodstream, working slowly over time to affect processes like growth and development, metabolism and reproduction.

Sometimes, these chemical messengers may get out of balance, and this leads to chronic disorders such as Type 2 diabetes, weak bones and infertility.² Hormones may be secreted by your adrenal glands, endocrine-related organs, hypothalamus, sex glands and other organs.³

Progesterone is important to fertility and supporting a pregnancy. It’s a steroid hormone secreted by the corpus luteum and then by the placenta if you become pregnant.⁴ In some cases, when couples suffer from infertility, they choose in vitro fertilization (IVF).

This is a complex series of procedures in which eggs are retrieved from the ovaries, fertilized by sperm in a lab and then transferred into the uterus.⁵ One full cycle can take up to three weeks⁶ and cost $12,000.⁷ In response to her struggles with infertility, Amy Galliher-Beckley, Ph.D.,⁸ co-founded MFB Fertility and the progesterone test Proov.⁹

The Estrogen and Progesterone Relationship

Each of your bodily systems maintains a balance to help you maintain optimal health. Your reproductive system is no different. For a woman, there are several hormones affecting a complex system to mature an egg follicle and release an egg where it travels to the uterus. If fertilized, the egg must implant into the uterus, called the endometrium, where it begins to develop into a baby.

These events are controlled by hormones secreted from several sources in the body. The ovaries produce the eggs and are the main source of estrogen. The adrenal glands sit on top of each kidney and also make a small amount. Estrogen plays a role in physical changes during puberty; it also controls the menstrual cycle, protects bone health and affects your mood.¹⁰

The second hormone essential to fertility is progesterone, a steroid hormone that is first secreted by the corpus luteum. After the egg is released, the corpus luteum is left attached to the ovary, which functions as a temporary gland.¹¹ These two hormones are controlled by the release of other hormones.

During the menstrual cycle gonadotropin-releasing hormone is secreted from the hypothalamus, triggering the secretion of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) from the pituitary gland.¹² This begins follicle development and triggers a rise in estrogen.

Luteinizing hormone (LH), also secreted by the pituitary gland, supports the maturation of the follicle and a trigger to cause the egg to be released. When estrogen levels get sufficiently high it signals a sudden release of LH, around mid-cycle, which triggers a set of events that ultimately release the mature egg from the follicle.¹³

Once released, the empty follicle becomes the corpus luteum, which produces progesterone. The release of progesterone triggers the uterus to develop a highly vascularized bed suitable for implantation of a fertilized egg.

Without fertilization, the corpus luteum begins to degenerate, the secretion of progesterone drops off and menstruation occurs. If pregnancy occurs then the corpus luteum produces progesterone for the first 10 weeks until production is taken over by the placenta.^14,15

Not About Getting Pregnant, but Staying Pregnant

As Beckley explains in her interview with Forbes magazine,¹⁶ her test is not about getting pregnant, but rather staying pregnant. Progesterone not only prepares the uterus for the egg to implant; it also protects the endometrium from degeneration and menstruation. While the body is producing high levels of progesterone during a pregnancy, a second egg will not mature.¹⁷

In order to maintain a pregnancy, the corpus luteum must continue to secrete progesterone. This maintains the blood vessels in the endometrium to feed the growing baby. It is in these early weeks that women with low levels of progesterone may have difficulty, both conceiving and developing the right environment for a fertilized egg to grow.

Some women who do get pregnant are at a high risk for miscarriage.¹⁸ The test Beckley developed comes with sticks used in much the same way ovulation and pregnancy tests are used. These sticks measure the amount of progesterone metabolites excreted in the urine. To date, this is the first at-home, over-the-counter test used to evaluate a woman's ability to produce progesterone.¹⁹ Beckley explains:²⁰

"Low progesterone is the number one cause of unexplained infertility. Women who go through IVF protocols all are offered progesterone. If you are not going through IVF, most doctors don't talk about progesterone, they don't offer progesterone, they don't test for progesterone. When your progesterone crashes too quickly, it is called a luteal phase defect."

Luteal Phase Defect Increases Chances of Miscarriage

The luteal phase in a woman's cycle begins after ovulation and represents the second half of the menstrual cycle. The luteal phase is named after the corpus luteum. Luteal Phase Defect (LPD) results in an abnormal endometrial growth that may not support a pregnancy.^21,22

While researchers struggle to identify the underlying dysfunction and efficacy of LPD in supporting fertility, experts report women undergoing IVF always have LPD present.²³ LPD is marked with a luteal phase less than 11 days. However, not all physicians believe the condition exists; reliable tests are lacking.²⁴

Beckley developed the Proov urine test to help women identify a reduction in progesterone during their cycle. According to Beckley,²⁵ her test gives women more knowledge about how their body works and provides a foundation for asking their infertility doctors better questions.

The test measures the presence of metabolites in the urine that should increase and remain elevated after ovulation. It may be used to confirm ovulation and confirm levels of progesterone afterward. A single negative test before ovulation followed by a single positive test will confirm ovulation for women trying to get pregnant.²⁶

For women trying to conceive, the test is recommended four days after peak fertility and then for continued testing 10 days past ovulation.²⁷ When questions arise about levels of progesterone to maintain a pregnancy, they recommend testing six days after peak fertility and as needed during the pregnancy since the test should remain positive.

Other Functions of Progesterone

Although LPD has a significant impact on a woman's ability to carry a pregnancy, it is the subject of debate.²⁸ In some cases, the ovaries release enough progesterone but the uterine lining does not respond.²⁹ LPD has been linked to other health conditions, including:³⁰

Anorexia	Endometriosis
High levels of exercise	Obesity
Thyroid disorders	Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)
High levels of prolactinemia (the hormone responsible for breast milk)

In some circumstances, when these conditions are treated, the LPD resolves.³¹ Later in life, if levels of progesterone decline, a woman’s period may become irregular, heavier and longer,³² increasing her chance of experiencing anemia, depending on the amount and length of her period.³³

Variations in hormone levels after menopause may also influence cognition and mood.³⁴ In a study of 643 healthy postmenopausal women, researchers found that while estrogen had little effect on tests of executive function or global cognition, progesterone concentrations were associated with verbal memory. The researchers suggest this positive association merits additional study.

Bioidentical progesterone, also known as micronized progesterone in the oral form, has been successful in helping relieve hot flashes and night sweats during menopause. Dr. Jerilynn Prior from the University of British Columbia Vancouver presented her study at an endocrine society meeting during which she compared the use of progesterone to placebo.³⁵

The study assigned 114 postmenopausal women into one of two groups, a placebo group and another who took 300 mg of micronized oral progesterone daily. To be eligible for the study, the women had to be off hormone therapy for at least six months.³⁶

At the end of the 12-week study, researchers found that the group taking micronized progesterone demonstrated a 56% decrease in a score reflecting the number and intensity of symptoms, while the women taking the placebo reported a 28% decrease.³⁷

Age Does Affect Hormone Balance

As is borne out by the number of women struggling with hormonal imbalances as they age and those requiring fertility assistance to become pregnant after 40,³⁸ Beckley is vocal about the difficulty women may have supporting a pregnancy after she turns 40.³⁹

Beckley says,⁴⁰ “The closer a woman gets to menopause, the least likely her body is going to be able to support a pregnancy.” Much of this is related to the imbalance of hormones required to successfully support a pregnancy that occurs as women age.

Her research in designing the progesterone urine test led Beckley to believe 30% to 40% of women who undergo IVF treatment to become pregnant ultimately do not need IVF.⁴¹ Instead, they may require progesterone to develop a healthy endometrial lining and support early pregnancy.

Overall Fertility Is on the Decline

Couples experience infertility for a number of reasons. In a study⁴² released in 2017, researchers evaluated 38 years of information and found sperm counts declined significantly between 1973 and 2011. The sperm counts declined 52% to 59% in men located in North America, Europe and Australia.

The Australian Department of Health reports 1 in every 6 Australian couples suffers from fertility problems, which they attribute to the decision to have children later in life as well as declining sperm count. Quality and lifestyle factors such as smoking, not eating healthfully, consuming excessive amounts of alcohol and not having a healthy BMI also affect fertility.⁴³

In May 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that for the fourth year in a row, key fertility indicators for U.S. couples declined, reaching a record low.⁴⁴ Two of the three indicators used to determine fertility reflected a decline in numbers.

The total fertility rate, or the estimation of the number of children a woman would have in her lifetime, was 1.73 children in 2018. This was lower than the estimate of 1.74 from the mid-1970s.⁴⁵

Research suggests men’s fertility is affected by environmental toxins and chemicals you may find in your own home, which I discuss in a past article, “50 Percent Fertility Reduction Because of These Household Chemicals.”

Additionally, as described in the past article, “Birth Rate Reaches Record Low as Premature Deliveries Rise,” statistics from the CDC show the number of new births was down 2% in 2018 as compared to 2017, but the number of premature births was rising. Infertility and pregnancy are complex conditions that likely need a comprehensive approach to experience a successful outcome.

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