Smut Clyde wrote a book, an map to the quacks guide, and its central character is the Italian-Überquack Marco Ruggiero. From GcMAF yoghurt to time dilating supplements to immortality serum to fermented hemp for COVID-19; featuring fellow medscam travellers, antivaxxers, autism quacks, HIV-denialists and outright criminals. A very long read, and the only cost to you is your time and sanity. If you can spare those, enter now.

The Inventions of the Monsters

By Smut Clyde

In the middle of life’s journey, some people find themselves in a pathless forest where the sign on the gateway advises them to abandon all hope, while the ghost of Virgil offers them a guided tour of the realms on the other side. Other people are merely invited by the editor to contribute to the 2011/2015 Encyclopedia of Cancer, an allegedly prestigious and undeniably expensive volume from Springer.

Why, Prof Schwab, why?

I don’t know what the publisher Springer or the editor Manfred Schwab, the emeritus professor at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) In Heidelberg, were expecting from Marco Ruggiero. What they received and published were

1. “Electromagnetic Fields” – citing Blank & Goodman (2011) to the effect that “DNA is a fractal antenna”, and extrapolating this to the possibility of communicating with one’s own chromosomes by radio.

“This concept of DNA as an antenna opens fascinating perspective that goes far beyond the field of oncology. In fact, if an antenna is capable of receiving signals, i.e., to interact with electromagnetic fields, it is conceivable that it is also capable of sending signals.”

Which all sounds fine until a nano-sized Raquel Welch is tapping into your DNA to send SOS requests for assistance, being marooned in the vicinity of your Islets of Langerhans [Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W].

2. “Bcl2” – a patchwork quilt of plagiarised paragraphs, stitched together with advertisements and self-citations. The Introduction of this magisterial entry (left) is mostly stolen from Zhang et al (2001) but the ultimate authority on Bcl-2 (right, below) turns out to be Wikipedia.

There follows an intriguing proposal that Bcl-2 is not an “oncogene” (for there is no such thing); but rather, it is a gene that by mutating in cancer cells, allows them to survive all their other mutations and general chromosomal anarchy. The suggestion is not credited to Duesberg et al (2006). Orange highlighting is not the authors’, and probably not mine either, though who can be sure in this mixed-up deconstructionist post-authorship world?

The author has a tendency to adopt the perspective of pathogens and disease processes, which is only an admirable trait if you are a character in a J.G. Ballard novel or a Burroughs fiction or a David Cronenberg movie. So he wove passages from two sources into the collage, allowing him to argue that HIV is a benign virus, much-maligned, perhaps even symbiotic.¹ The allusion to HIV’s “delicate survival balance” is from Woodman & Williamson (2009). As it happens, the source of the yellow-marked plagiarism (Mishra et al 2006) was built on faked data and retracted in 2011, but its falsity was of little importance.

The ‘advertisement’ I mentioned above is a paragraph praising Ruggiero’s commercial product “GcMAF”. It is shoehorned rather awkwardly into the text, with an admission of its irrelevance to the nominal topic. You can see that I learned a lot from studying the author’s literary style.

The 2015 Revised Edition acquired a second author in the form of John W. Anderson. Now Anderson is not a scientist or researcher; he is more associated with the Isagenyx ziggurat-scheme multi-level-marketing operation, which deals in food supplements, weight-loss pills, telomere-lengthening flim-flam, and lies. Fortunately he was not called upon to justify his co-authorship by providing detectable additions or revisions. It was enough that by 2015 Anderson’s “Dream Master Laboratory” was bankrolling Ruggiero, and Anderson’s address had been used to register Ruggiero’s company “Bacterix LLC”.

Let’s do the time warp again

What commends all this to our attention is the fact that Ruggiero would soon be publishing science-fiction fantasies in which the biopolymer ‘chondroitin’ is so heavy that its molecules warp time / space curvature in the vicinity of chromosomes (therefore time-dilation effects)… though only when compounded with Vitamin D, in in his unique formulation ‘imuno‘. This gives cells the chance to repair damaged DNA and reverse autism. Also curing cancer, heart disease and Alzheimers, and bestowing immortality upon consumers of the chondroitin.

All extruded through predatory journals that are several sub-barrel basements beneath the well-scraped bottom of the usual barrel. Ruggiero was exempted from the usual predatory publishing fees as a reward for lending his name to the Boards of Editors. His high-concept humbug attained a level that would even be laughed out of a Star Wars script. In the name of the Blood Gods, how did Ruggiero persuade Schwab to treat him as a foremost authority rather than as an AIDS-denialist crank and absolute fuckin’ fruit-cake?

“However, introduction of an uniform, monotonous, highly charged, macromolecule such as chondroitin sulfate that surrounds basic DNA-binding proteins independently of DNA sequence, introduces a type of gravity-induced time dilation that is not dependent on the individual genetic information. Therefore, time will run slower for the DNA to which the chondroitin sulfate is bound; this will give extra time to the well-known DNA repair mechanism to perform their tasks and will slow down aging at the level of DNA.”

The advertisements papers are only a few pages but it seems much longer to read them, due to the concentration of Stupid, dense enough to curve space and cause relativistic time dilation. Quantum Entanglement is also involved. Of course it is. This Bingo Card may be helpful:

I’m writing about this to illustrate how predatory publishing is weaponised to launder egregious scams and to tell the suckers that they have evidential support. In fact it’s a whole series of illustrations. There will also be a parade of implausible characters that I lack the imagination to invent (and each deserving a whole separate blogpost to do them justice); and a series of improbable reminders that Mundus vult decipi, which happens to be my family motto. There are a legion of links and images; there would be more, except that a number of webpages expired with the passage of time, and even stashed copies at the Wayback Machine were deleted on the insistence of the site-owners.

The GcMAF panacea

The backstory is as complex as you want it to be, for it involves the history of ‘GcMAF’: a saga that beggars belief, as well as beggaring (or enriching) the people who believe in it.

GcMAF has since been flung aside in favour of fresher brands of bullshit, and few have bothered to pretend that it cures COVID-19. There was a time, though, when it was much-run-after as the cure-du-jour for cancer and ME/CFS and heavy-metal poisoning and autism, and every other natural shock that flesh is heir to; fêted by mountebanks who follow a narrative that originated with a senile Japanese fabulist and was then monetarised by a globe-spanning network, stretching from Bulgaria to the Caribbean and even as far as exotic New Zealand. The network had their own conferences, and family feuds, and dystopian assassination-centric conspiracy theories, with our man Ruggiero as lynchpin.

That was the time of the Bussigny clinic in Switzerland, where Ruggiero and David Noakes lured terminal cancer patients with promises of an 80% cure rate. Comparisons to the first book of the Divine Comedy come easily to mind. Ruggiero administered his full-immersion “Swiss Protocol“, where GcMAF was administered through IV, and as part of the diet in the form of Magic Yoghurt, and inhaled as an aerosol, and per vas nefandu in the form of Magic Yoghurt suppositories, and maybe injected into the eyeballs though I won’t swear to that. A.k.a. the Ruggiero Protocol. Meanwhile Noakes harangued the clients about trying harder to get well. Now all those moments are lost in time, like tears in rain.

I was not alone in watching the whole squalid imbroglio, or in writing an interminable series of blogposts about it. One of the first conditions that Ruggiero found to be treatable with GcMAF was HIV / AIDS (for he emerged from an AIDS-denial intellectual milieu), which brought him into the ambit of ‘Dora’ at HIVforum.info. The prominence of Italian charlatans in the saga also meant that Sylvie Coyaud covered it in her missives from the Buffalo Park. Others who watched the story unfold are ‘Malarkey’, ‘Snout‘, ‘Jerome Lamb’, Emma Delmayne and Fiona O’Leary, and I am indebted for their research. Incidentally, the English language is indebted to Italian for much of its medfraud-related vocabulary: mountebank, imbroglio, fiasco… But charlatan and chicanery are French.

Anyway, if some publisher sees a readership for a book-length rendition of this hairball, disentangling the multiple plot-lines of the GcMAF story, I am both qualified and available to write it! A six-part mini-series would also work. Of course I will need a substantial advance to fly to all the locations of interest, soak up the local colour, and interview any of the principals who are still at liberty… or at least throw rocks at them from a distance. Not wanting to undermine that potential volume, here I omit the more prurient episodes and personalities, focussing instead on the stuff that oozed into the scientific literature. Even so, what follows will be rushed and crowded – for I am trying to condense seven years of blogposts, over 60 of them (listed at the end), in an attempt to lure people into reading them.

But readers look puzzled already, for I have neglected to explain what GcMAF actually is. We are talking about an immune-modulating protein, part of the web of interactions that rarks up cellular immune responses, so MAF stands for ‘macrophage-activating factor’. ‘Gc’ is short for ‘globulin component c’ (in contrast to Ga and Gb and so on), also known as ‘Vitamin D binding protein (or globulin)’ or VDBP. Such a mundane, arbitrary acronym lacks romance and excitement, so some harder-working grifters reverse-engineered a more satisfactory explanation in which Gc is short for “granulocyte colony”.

VDBP (or Gc) is 55 kDa molecular weight, and sloshes around in human plasma with all the other globulin components, where it presumably serves some function that’s still unknown, leaving the experts to label it only with the bald observation that it tends to glom onto Vitamin D. It does not enter its final form as GcMAF until a few sugars are removed from the right amino acids – they must be a kind of biological safety catch. VDBP is abundant: found in bovine colostrum or even in the whey that’s an industrial waste of the dairy industry, left over from making cheese. Conversely, GcMAF levels in blood hover at the limits of detection, and no-one would be surprised if it’s only a laboratory artefact.

Yamamoto, the vanquisher of nagalase

After that, the narrative can begin, with Nobuto Yamamoto and his discovery of enzymes that perform that ‘deglycosylation’ sugar-removal stage – allowing him to spin VDBP into GcMAF in industrial quantities. He also discovered its power to stimulate macrophages in vitro, and reported how it cures breast cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer and intractable athletes’ foot.

His Manichean world-view required an antagonist as well as a protagonist, an Ahriman to GcMAF as Ahura Mazda, and this unsympathetic role fell to ‘nagalase’ (α-N-acetylgalactosaminidase). To mainstream medical science, nagalase is a vital enzyme and its absence is fatal, but in Yamamoto’s eyes it had no function except to destroy GcMAF and let cancer cells shut macrophages down.

As well as a Manichee, Yamamoto seems to be a Munchausen-level fabulist. He invented collaborators. He invented clinical trials, and an IRB to bestow ethical approval, and entire cohorts of grateful cured patients who then scattered to the winds like wild geese so that none could trace them. There is a broader “Lyons-Weiler Law“,² that the grandiosity of a research institute is inversely related to the number of people it employs, and Yamamoto invented a Socrates Institute of Therapeutic Immunology to house and fund his research and trials, although tax records reveal a glaring absence of cash flow within this one-man entity.

Yamamoto’s assay for the successful synthesis of the mystery molecule was the increased agitation and cancer-cell-killing activities of macrophages in a Petri dish when exposed to each experimental batch. This is somewhat subjective, and vulnerable to expectations; even medieval alchemists would shake their heads in concern at the scope for self-delusion. But this still seems to be the only test, for no-one is selling an antibody specific to the deglycosylated form of VDBP.

Three of Yamamoto’s papers were depublished when his impostures came to light. Those three retractions did not deter Ruggiero from citing Yamamoto et al (2008) in his ‘Bcl2’ opuscule. That one remains unretracted, to the discredit of ‘Transactional Oncology‘, if its editors were capable of feeling shame.

By then, though, the damage had been done. The Saisei-Mirei clinics, a chain of cancer-fraud cash-extraction facilities around Japan, had battened onto GcMAF and added it to their eclectic armamentarium of Healing Modalities snake-oil. The clinics’ CEO never saw a scam he didn’t like, following the principle that when the first five expensive placebos don’t slow the progression of your cancer, and if you still have money that would otherwise be wasted on family bequests, then there is always a sixth, and a seventh… Thus the clinics offer ‘Coley vaccine’, and ‘Ukrain’, electromagical customised ski-jackets, “sonodynamic therapy”, medicinal mushrooms, amygdalin / Vitamin B17 / Laetrile, and so many others, with a fine ecumenical disregard for the contradictions among them.

Anticancer antiresearch

CEO and Chief Scientist Toshio Inui maintains his affiliation to the Universities of Tokushima and Ritsumeikan (because Academic Freedom). Wearing his academic hat, he published a series of advertisements disguised as papers in Anticancer Research, heralding the synthesis of ‘Second-generation GcMAF’ (which is far superior in ill-defined ways to Yamamoto’s version 1.0).

• “Clinical experience of integrative cancer immuno-therapy with GcMAF”. (Inui et al 2013). Anticancer Res 33: 2917-2919
• “Degalactosylated/desialylated human serum containing GcMAF induces macrophage phagocytic activity and in vivo antitumor activity”. Kuchiike et al (2013). Anticancer Res 33:2881-2885
• “Degalactosylated/Desialylated Bovine Colostrum Induces Macrophage Phagocytic Activity Independently of Inflammatory Cytokine Production“. Uto et al (2015). Anticancer Res 35(8):4487-4492
• “Case Report: GcMAF Treatment in a Patient with Multiple Sclerosis”. Inui et al (2016), Anticancer Res 36(7):3771-3774
• “Case Report: A Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Patient Treated with GcMAF, Sonodynamic Therapy and Tumor Treating Fields”. Inui et al (2016), Anticancer Res 36(7):3767-3770

This S-M chain has branch offices in Europe. I mention these “Resurrection Clinics” because the domain registrant and manager of the franchise is Ignatius Massop, who is clearly a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. As Leonid has noted elsewhere, Germany is happy to legitimise quackery (it helps if the quacks stick to ‘medical tourism’, extracting the wealth of dying foreigners without involving locals).

But we can leave the clinics now, pausing only to note their five-page advertorial in the Special Issue of Nature they bought. Yes, Nature editors were happy to pimp out the reputation of their journal to assist the cancer-fraud industry; and because the advertorial was in Nature, cockwombles cite it as actual established science.

Now Anticancer Research is the organ of the International Institute of Anticancer Research, IIAR. We have met them both in the context of Wen Jiang and his Cardiff-connected TCM chicanery. The oncological-publishing niche occupied by ACR is comparable to that of Spandidos journals, though it and IIAR are run by a whole Greek dynasty and not just one dude. There are also IIAR Congresses making the most of Greece as a tourism destination, as the Delinasios clan branch into the more lucrative racket of scamferences.

The IIAR is our segue back to Marco Ruggiero, via his own Anticancer Res papers…

• “Effects of Vitamin D-binding Protein-derived Macrophage-activating Factor on Human Breast Cancer Cells”. Pacini et al (2012) Anticancer Res 32 45-52
• “Oleic Acid, Deglycosylated Vitamin D-Binding Protein, Nitric Oxide: A Molecular Triad Made Lethal to Cancer“. Ruggiero et al (2014) Anticancer Res 34 3569-3578

… and a poster presented to the 9th IIRC Conference in 2014.³ Its colour scheme was inspired by a tequila hangover and it violates the basic tenets of Mad Science in too many ways to count.

Sunt lacrimae rerum

This nonlinear narrative has skipped a number of episodes, requiring flashbacks and introductions to more of the dramatis personae (where the emphasis is on “drama”). But first I must introduce ‘GOleic’, which is the purported complex of oleic acid (olive oil) with Vitamin D and “Deglycosylated VDBP”, presented as even more powerful than mere GcMAF in isolation, compensating for the limited supply of the latter. It also provided Team Ruggiero with brand differentiation in a crowded, unregulated Med-Scam market, where any unqualified but plausible scoundrel can sell distilled water by slapping a ‘GcMAF’ label on the side of the ampoules while the LAW DOES NOTHING to protect medical professionals.

This was the beginning of a pattern, foreshadowing later developments in which GOleic would be replaced by ‘Rerum’… a complex of chondroitin, oleic acid and Vitamin D, stronger yet again than GOleic! (with the GcMAF dropped as superfluous window-dressing). When Rerum attracted cheap knock-offs from unscrupulous rivals, it would be deprecated in turn in favour of ‘Imuno’, which is stronger again and this time certain to work. And then came ‘Immortalis’…

Setting aside these harbingers, what we learn from that poster is that ultrasound scanning is not only for diagnosis but also serves a therapeutic role. When the scanner is in the right hands, its good vibrations will disrupt the Blood-Brain Barrier and allow chemotherapy drugs to do their job by opening pores in cell membranes (though only in cancer cells). Like an evil clown, this is absurd and terrifying in equal parts, and I like to think that after a long day in the laboratory, Ruggiero and his students would chase one another around the lab tables with their scanners making PEW PEW PEW noises.

From a 2016 interview with Ruggiero:

“Therefore it is not surprising that there are genes in our DNA that are turned on by ultrasounds, and, by a leap of imagination, we could visualize someday having a remote control that lets us turn on or off genes […] we noticed that ultrasound at certain frequencies can kill cancer cells, leaving the healthy cells unharmed.“

Ruggiero would ultimately unlock the rare accomplishment of getting sacked from Italian academia. At the time of Yamamoto’s revelatory announcements, he was a tenured professor at the University of Florence, where his AIDS-denial heterodoxy came under the rubric of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘harmless eccentricity’ and ‘benefit of clergy’, leaving him free to teach his students about the benignity of HIV and the non-existence of AIDS.

The TRUTH about AIDS

Here to continue the tequila-hangover visual assault are the first 21 pages of “New Insights into the Role of HIV in the Aetiology and Pathogenesis of AIDS” – the 2010 graduation thesis of Jacopo Junio Valerio Branca, Ruggiero’s student at the University of Florence, and first author of that poster above. It was color-coded by another, funnier blogger to indicate the source of each plagiarised paragraph (“blue for wikipedia, red for Ruggiero, brown for Crupi, green for Bauer, purple for Duesberg…”). For Branca’s mentor is an aficiando of Derrida and of post-truth, deconstructionist philosophy; he has progressed from the outmoded concepts of “original authorship” and “authorial intent” (as we saw above), teaching the new ethos of “Once I lick a paragraph, it’s mine”. So the very first paragraph of Branca’s Foreword begins with a promise to conduct “thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of [texts] to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis)“. No doubt you have recognised the passage from the Whackyweedia entry on Derrida.

Anyway… after Ruggiero’s promising early career, in which he had laboured in Nobel Laureate laboratories, his tenured post might seem like an anticlimactic cul-de-sac. He thought so anyway, and welcomed GcMAF as a new opportunity.

The resulting road-to-Damascus conversion is detailed in ‘Beneath Ruggiero’s Rainbow‘, by Fabio Franchi. It is a tendentious and unsympathetic description, for the author was also from the AIDS-denying community (a dwindling and embattled community, on account of members dying from totally-not-AIDS), from which Ruggiero’s concession that AIDS is indeed a genuine clinical entity (in order to cure it with GcMAF) made him an apostate. This will not be in the test.

The advent of ‘Bravo’ Magic Yoghurt swiftly ensued. Ruggiero relied on a proprietary, curated blend on yeasts and bacteria to deglycosylate milk- and colostrum-sourced VDBP into GcMAF, even as they transformed the milk into yoghurt. A series of progress reports were delivered to successive Alternative AIDS conferences. Supposedly it took 314 attempts to find the right microbiota combination, so this milk-based medicine also went under the cognomen “MAF314”.

Que Bravo Yogurt!

‘Bravo’ has since remained central to Ruggiero’s artistic practice. It became a favourite in autism-quackery circles. Franchises sprung up in the US and the UK, with production centred at ‘Silver Spring Sagl‘ in Switzerland although taxable ownership was outsourced to “Les Alpes“. That was NOT the name of a North England stand-up comedian, but a company-shaped filing cabinet in New Zealand. After the ‘GcMAF’ rationale became obsolete, Bravo was joined by non-dairy Bravo for vegan and dairy-intolerant consumers, but that’s foreshadowing.

Yamamoto’s announcements had independently found an audience in the ME/CFS support community. A circle of Miracle-Working ME-aware doctors – Derek Enlander, Kenny De Meirleir, Paul Cheney – lost no time in adding GcMAF to their scammocopoeia of theatrical placebos (de Meirleir later abandoned that etiology and climbed aboard the Chronic Lyme Disease scamwagon). But a kind of apostolic succession from Yamamoto meant that Ruggiero was identified with GcMAF, to the extent that the ME community elevated him to be Fourth Musketeer in their medical pantheon, and to maintain his status Enlander had to invent his own microbiotic Magic Yoghurt, MAF878. There will be a few chapters in the book about this neglected demographic, and about the ME/CFS alt-medical tradition (readers might recall its involvement in the canonisation of Saint Judy Mikovits, and a cameo role in the Perronne story). But that sub-plot need not concern us.

Noakes, the swivel-eyed loon

More central to the story is David Noakes. His name appears on many of the quasi-science papers, by dint of his ownership of Immuno Biotech. His company commercialised GcMAF, and its advertising was wholly reliant on those fake papers, brandishing them as proof that the panaceal nostrum was backed by the imprimatur of SCIENCE.

Now Noakes rejected milk as a source of VDBP, it being insufficiently manly. He decided instead that the industrial production of GcMAF would be better served by alchemical purification, i.e. by acquiring whole shipments of human plasma and then discarding all the proteins that aren’t VDBP. Followed by Yamamoto’s enzyme VDBP -> GcMAF process. Personally I would have hired a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother to trigger the molecular transformation but no-one consulted me.

Basically this is what Western Blotting does, when proteins are persuaded by an electric current to migrate along a gel, while handicapped by molecular weight, so they spread out along a sort of kiloDalton spectrum. Rather than a gel, Noakes’ refinery used columns of “high-affinity agarose beads” to concentrate all the kDa=55 proteins in one specific centimetre, before washing them out again and bottling all the bathwater into ampoules. Noakes may have been inspired by the Curies’ story of processing tonnes of pitchblende to obtain each gram of radium. There was no way to be sure which centimetre of agarose column was the enriched one, when the test for the presence of magic molecules in the bathwater is a theatrical expression of wish-fulfilment, but that hardly mattered.

Noakes had earlier dabbled in UK politics (after his first career as a software engineer went tits-up). He had unlocked the rare achievement of rejection from nationalist extremists, who feared that his obsessive, toxic personality would undermine their credibility and bring them into disrepute. “Mad as a box of frogs” and “swivel-eyed loon” were two of the gentler epithets provided by his erstwhile comrades in the UKIP. Though I am assured that the latter is in fact a term of respect and endearment in English political rhetoric, ever since the Viking depredations of Sigurd the Swivel-Eyed and his sons Ragnar the Wall-Eyed and Thorkel the Totally Troll-Eyed. Don’t ask me how box-of-frogs comparisons acquired their affectionate connotations.

The point is that Noakes is deeply entrenched in the paranoid-ideation crowd. He was a regular ranter at Ian Crane’s “Alternative Views” conspiracist Woodstock-for-conmen scamborees, and he credited Crane with introducing him to the Suppressed Secrets of GcMAF. Crane, I must explain in passing, was an impresario of UK Alt-Med conspiracism, who hoped to herd the cats of conspiracy-theory into a unified front (with himself as the ultimate leader) until none of the Alternative cures for cancer that he promoted had any effect on his own prostate.

This intellectual milieu is especially vulnerable to the appeal of The Miracle Molecule. “We know that GcMAF really works, because otherwise the Deep State and the Rothschilds wouldn’t bother to manufacture all that fake evidence discrediting it as a scam!” Also, “the proof that all that evidence discrediting GcMAF is faked is that we know it works!”. Noakes at least seems to been a True Believer in GcMAF, though this did not deter his concurrent efforts to get rich quick by on-line sales of a completely different cure for cancer – DCA or Sodium Dichloroacetate – with nothing in common with GcMAF except total uselessness.

Noakes’ GcMAF refinery, run in a warehouse in an industrial estate in Milton, Cambridgeshire, was short-lived. His high-minded unconcern with paperwork, and with adherence to the regulations governing hygiene and purity for medical supplies, brought down a warrant-wielding visitation from the jackbooted storm-troopers of the MRHA regulatory agency. By then, Noakes had moved on from an earlier UKIP-style belief in the undivided sovereignty and authority of the British State, believing instead in his own sovereignty and the illegitimacy of the British State; and the closure of the plant merely reinforced his adoption of this Sovereign Citizen worldview (as more in keeping with his self-importance).

In and out of jail

Noakes had already decamped to Guernsey with his staff and a supply of ampoules of distilled water, to take advantage of Guernsey’s peripheral position and special status within Great Britain (notably, its tax-haven bank-account-secrecy laws). He continued to sell material of unknown provenance through a series of ephemeral webstores, hosted in a series of countries, opening new sites as truth-obsessed national bureaucracies shut down the old ones. He made regular visits to France to set up clandestine distribution routes across Europe… meanwhile collecting yachts, classic cars, and bars of silver bullion. Interviews conveyed an expectation that as a moneyed landowner, he would be treated by the locals with feudal deference, all forelock-tugging and droit de seigneur… but that is not how it works in Guernsey society. Suffice to say that the local press were not as obsequious as Noakes had hoped. Fortunately he still had time to set up pseudonymous poison-pen websites denouncing the Guernsey establishment (as well as the MHRA, and others on an ever-longer Enemies List).

As it happened, the human plasma concentrate that Noakes had acquired as feedstock for the Cambridgeshire refinery – bought in the US, where commerce in human tissue is traditional – had been stamped NOT FOR HUMAN USE. In time this regrettable inattention to detail landed Noakes in court, facing charges of cozenage, mopery, money-laundering and possible miscreance. Along with the clandestine cross-Channel trafficking, it also meant that French authorities were equally not-well-pleased (with other European authorities involved), and a French investigating magistrate enters the story – a certain Jean-Luc Gadaud.

Gadaud’s prior career had been divided between the graft squad, military justice, and provincial prosecutions for unlawful domestication of wildlife, working up to a Vice-Presidency in the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris. He comes across as something of a badass, equally unmoved by the orchestrated media campaigns and the death-threats from the wildlife domesticators. In the movie version he will be played by Keanu Reeves. I imagine Gadaud as Inspector Javert from Les MAFérables, implacable and unrelenting in the pursuit of his inflexible concept of justice, but despite his badassery he must be relegated to this paragraph here, and a chapter in the unwritten book.

So after Noakes served his 15-month sentence for frauding (8 months in practice), and after a second hearing for confiscation of the proceeds of crime, the French put in an extradition request for their bite of the cherry. He went on the run amid cheers from his supporters, though there is no evidence that he absconded from prison by dressing in the clothes of an old washer-woman. Noakes remained at liberty for as long as he could keep his mouth shut, which was not long at all. Arrest and extradition followed swiftly. I would like to think that the French courtroom was enlivened by the presence of Alison and Valerie, singing from the gallery, “David must go free!” but there is no evidence of that either.

Noakes had become an idol of Sovereign-Citizen and Alt-Med US pill-pimps, the National Health Foundation, who shared his opposition to illegitimate “governments” that try to infringe their freedoms to defraud suckers. They awarded him Martyr-of-Freedom trophies; and what better way of honouring his sacrifice for the cause than to use his cause-celebre trial for fundraising? But Noakes went down for 4 years, and once convicted, he lost his value to the cause. If the donations from suckers were indeed spent on legal representation, perhaps the donors should ask for it back.

Who are these people?

But entrancing though it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, it is distracting our minds from matters of almost equal importance; especially the other authors of those paper-shaped artefacts seen earlier. Who are these people?

Rodney Smith was Chief Scientist of First Immune, by dint of his role as operator of “Macro Innovations Ltd”, the GcMAF refinery. His previous laboratory experience consisted of (I am not making this up) microbrewing, being one half of Meridian Brewery.

Lynda Thyer. Again, there is no sign of a background in science, but her position as #2 Chief Scientist obliged her to dress up in a white lab-coat anyway. She can be seen in YouTubes of the 5th GcMAF meeting in Moscow in 2017, regaling the audience with dramatic accounts of vanquishing pancreatic cancer.

This is where the Family Soap Opera element enters the story, as Thyer’s siblings Trevor Banks and Lesley Hutchings were also part of the GcMF world, and also on Noakes’ payroll, as Influencers. That is, they lurked on the discussion boards and support groups for cancer and ME/CFS, poised to leap into discussions, posing as fellow-sufferers and vouching for Noakes’ products. Trevor and Lesley had previously belonged to the Cult of Miracle Mineral Supplement (i.e. industrial bleach as a cure for autism, cancer, malaria, etc.), and when ‘Orac’ wrote a blogpost at Respectful Insolence about a MMS rally, Trevor made a cameo appearance in the Comments thread, defending the filthy stuff. Reading that thread was my entry point into the whole swirling maelstrom of Lunacy and Stupid. Trevor and Lesley moved on to sell GcMAF in competition with Noakes and Ruggiero, and if space permits I’ll come back to them.

Going back to Lynda Thyer, her own part in the cross-channel trafficking made her into another person of interest to that implacable French prosecutor, and another subject of extradition hearings. Before her eventual trial and sentencing I am glad to report that there was considerable DRAMA, with histrionic collapses and overacting; moving speeches to Alternative Views; accidental attempts to board international flights to countries beyond the reach of French extradition; and life as a refugee – all in a series of set pieces that become even funnier when seen through the eyes and maggot-riddled brains of her conspiracist Sov-Cit cohorts. However, Noakes’ pill-pimp supporters were less sympathetic, and cast her as the scapegoat for his legal tribulations, because she upstaged him in court.

Comparisons with Macchiarini are inevitable

Setting this digression aside, I want to get back to the next stage in the main narrative, which is when Noakes and Ruggiero went into partnership with a joint venture: the Bussigny Clinic, for curing terminal cancer. Revolving around the Swiss Protocol, which is not a Robert Ludlam / Elleston Trevor spy-thriller collaboration, but rather an therapeutic regime of total GcMAF immersion.

The clinic was soon shut down by Swiss authorities to limit the reputational damage being wrought on the wider medical-tourism industry: clinics are supposed to send patients back to their home countries before they die. The feds found that Noakes and Ruggiero were elsewhere when they turned up on the doorstep, but as a consolation prize they found an immigrant doctor they could prosecute instead.

A novel is waiting to be written about the clinic’s brief existence, in that tradition of great “Sanitorium novels” like The Rack, The Magic Mountain, The Road to Wellville. I am also open to the idea of a film script, as long as it’s filmed on location in the Beelitz-Heilstätten Hospital – that part is not negotiable. The opportunities for novelistic imagination are enhanced by the absence of first-hand testimony about treatment in Bussigny. Testimony is partly missing because the clients’ treatment contracts included non-disclosure clauses, and partly because they all died soon of untreated cancer.

Hints emerge here and there that Noakes was brusque and unsympathetic, so convinced of the efficacy of the treatment that he lost all patience with clients who insisted on deteriorating, presumably out of sheer contrarian intransigence (e.g. Claire at “triplenegative’). In contrast, Ruggiero is described as charismatic, a source of reassuring confidence, so comparisons with Paolo Macchiarini are inevitable. At “Bisforbanana”, Cancer blogger ‘Rona’ became disenchanted in her final posts, and there is a hint of oblique criticism in her advice to medical tourists that they should carry out their due diligence and kick the tyres in the second-hand car-yard before committing themselves to the clinic of choice.

An earlier post from Bisforbanana conveys a sense of the trust Ruggiero inspired among the Bussigny inmates. For no apparent reason other than shits-&-giggles (or an experiment in how far the envelope of human gullibility could be pushed), Ruggiero calls upon his self-professed wizardry as an ultrasonography operator to convince a random visitor that his thyroid cancer had recurred. In the name of the Blood Gods, who does that? The description borders on Hannibal Lecter territory. I might do it, true, but I’m a high-functioning sociopath.

‘Rona’ also testified how Ruggiero’s sanguine assurance that the treatment was regressing her tumor turned out to be fantasy:

“I may or may not have got shrinkage. Prof Ruggerio maintains I did, but my own radiologist and surgeon could find no difference.”

…And how Ruggiero’s abuse of his clinician’s position of power to subject immobilised patients to sadistic mind-fucks was his ‘wicked sense of humor’:

“So the helpless patient is lying absolutely rock-still on the table, going blue in the face from not breathing when suddenly Prof Ruggiero says out loud: “where’s the serrated knife?”“

When Marco Ruggiero attended the Inaugural GcMAF Congress (in Frankfurt, April 2013) as the newly-appointed Scientific Director of Immuno Biotech, his head-scanning party trick was hailed as one of the Highlights. Such was its success that popular demand insisted a repeat performance at the 2nd GcMAF Congress (in Dubai, December 2013). Here Ruggiero passed on his expertise in repurposing ultrasonography equipment, finding meningeal details unknown to mainstream anatomy, and restoring brain function by way of sonic massage.

I confess to hoping that Ruggiero abused his authority in the same way when he was offering complimentary ultrasound brainscans at GcMAF meetings. The supposed pore-opening, BBB-permeating qualities of ultrasonography were no longer an issue. Ruggiero may also be available as entertainment at children’s parties, though my advice is to stick to someone who’s explicitly a clown.

Transcranial quackography

This is all a convenient segue to Ruggiero’s treatise on the subject of diagnosing autism with ultrasound:

• “A new methodology of viewing extra-axial fluid and cortical abnormalities in children with autism via transcranial ultrasonography” (Bradstreet, Pacini & Ruggiero, 2013).

This collaboration with the autism-quacking antivaxxer Jeff Bradstreet came up in an earlier post, as it was published in a Frontiers journal. One of its editors was another autism-curing charlatan (with business partnerships with Ruggiero). Siniscalco thought so highly of this paper-shaped advertorial that he paid for a second one, to promote the first.

• “The searching for autism biomarkers: a commentary on: a new methodology of viewing extra-axial fluid and cortical abnormalities in children with autism via transcranial ultrasonography” (Siniscalco, 2014).

All you really need to know is that the image-processing protocol described therein is to import the image into Photoshop and adjust the contrast to magnify artifacts until they reach the desired level. On account of all the sound-absorbing bone around it, brain anatomy is not all that amenable to ultrasound exploration. Hence CT scans, and MRI, and blood-flow measures, and the invention of the see-through skull. There are also special-purpose cranial ultrasound scanners, but Ruggiero reckoned that a bog-standard LA523 linear-array soft-tissue probe was adequate for the job when in the hands of a maestro and with the gain cranked up enough.

As any fule kno, what makes sound waves bounce back is an abrupt discontinuity in sound-conduction speed. Ruggiero, though, was determined to identify any reflections with layers of high density (bone), and to interpret the thickness of those reflections (smeared out by the low resolution of the equipment) as the thickness of the temporal bone. It did not occur to him to wonder why the width of temporal squamata and of subarachnoidal fluid layers – as reported in the Frontiers paper – depart so wildly from mainstream anatomy.

For further insights into our man’s expertise and competence, I offer his speculative etiology for ME/CFS, buttressed by two ultrasound scans of the head of author M.R. who does not have ME/CFS. Betteridge’s Law may apply.

In fact cerebral self-portraits of author M.R (who does not have ME/CFS) feature in two salami slices on treating ME/CFS with transcranial sonography. These papers are best read with Kate Bush singing “Experiment IV” in the background.

And here is one more paper, accepted for publication by the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology because why not? The same egregious incompetence is on show but overshadowed by the scale and shamelessness of the plagiarism.

• “Transcranial sonography: a technique for the study of the temporal lobes of the human and non-human primate brain” (Ruggiero et al, 2014).

Homoeopathic scammocopoeia

Sadly, no convenient segue presents itself for the next phase of the story. This is the point of separation between GcMAF strictu sensu and Ruggiero, resulting in separate narrative threads of “GcMAF without Ruggiero” and “Ruggiero without GcMAF”. Ruggiero’s new position was that Yamamoto’s deglycosylation process didn’t happen, and even if it did, then the supposed curative virtues that he had previously ascribed to GcMAF was in fact caused by some other contaminant, from which GcMAF was falsely stealing the credit. After adopting Yamamoto as an intellectual father-figure, our man now repudiated him in a speech to the 3rd Fulda Conference: overthrowing the patriarch in an act of revolt right out of Freud’s Totem & Taboo, though without the Dionysian sparagmos and ritual cannibalism (as far as we know).

The papers pursuing this new intellectual breakthrough appeared in parasitical journals under the editorial purview of M. Ruggiero.

The wave of titles include a collaboration with Dietrich Klinghardt, promoting the latter’s diagnostic technique Autonomic Response Testing, which is pure hocus-pocus and a reboot of an old favourite fraud: the fiction of “Applied Kinesiology” (though arguably no stupider than subjective ratings of macrophage agitation as an assay for the presence of GcMAF). Klinghardt had been an early adopter of GcMAF, with his own innovation of homeopathic dilution to make it stronger while compensating for the scarcity of supply, as if it were not diluted enough already.

Homeopathic GcMAF is just part of an all-embracing scammacopia of Healing Modalities, for Klinghardt’s scholium of thought is eclectic and there is no grift it cannot assimilate (and conversely, when the possible origins of any ailment range from dental fillings to unresolved ancestral trauma, there is always an excuse for therapeutic failure). He accomplished the rare accolade of disciplinary action from a US State medical association for his saline-injection-related activities, and needless to say he is waist-deep in the Curing-Autism trough. 

It is invidious to single out any single Klinghardt pronouncements but here is his advice on eliminating neurotoxins [h/t Orac]:

• Level 3: The next higher body, which I call the “mental body” or “mental field”, extends theoretically into infinity squared (and the higher two levels extend beyond that). Only mathematics is able to conceive the expansive size of the higher levels. Beliefs, attitudes and thoughts form and organize this level. There is an individual mental field and a consensus field (consensus reality). Rupert Sheldrake has named this level morphic field. Every idea or thought ever thought goes into this field and becomes part of an invisible library that can be accessed by anyone.

Magic Yoghurt remained central to Ruggiero’s scammocopoeia, despite its GcMAF content being ineffective now, as well as nonexistent. As noted, it was joined by non-dairy Magic Yoghurt, where the curated blend of yeast and bacteria ferment fruit juice instead of milk. It sounds a lot like prison wine to me.

The most impactful paper in this process of reinvention was an announcement for Rerum. It and the other papers were not just crucial for Ruggiero’s self-image as Maverick Scientist Robbed of his Nobel; they were also crucial to the Rerum advertising campaign, together comprising a reading list that was copy-pasted into the website of every prospective Rerum dealer, to show that the product bore the imprimatur of Science.

The production and distribution of this new product was a joint venture with one Heinz Reinwald, a qualified political economist who discovered his true vocation as a Heilpraktiker (which is German for “Not a doctor”) and joined the payroll of Glogg and Doepp‘s QuantiSana Centre in his capacity as nutritional consultant. We should take a moment to admire Reinwald’s webstore, which was a thing of wonder, selling every Alt-Med tschotsche imaginable, including dietary hydrogen, water concentrate and boxes that go ‘beep’. We find his name as co-author on many Ruggiero papers, and as impresario of the 2013 and 2015 Integrative Cancer Treatment congresses in Fulda in Hesse, Germany. In 2019 a Bavarian court sentenced him to four years for medical fraud, though a retrial was ordered in 2020 and I know nothing of its current status.

[Looks good for Reinwald, he owns a company near Nuremberg, “Dr. Reinwald Healthcare GmbH”, here is his online shop for magic supplements. -LS]

Confederacy of Dunces

Meanwhile, in the parallel story-line. Trevor Banks and Lesley Hutchings (remember them?) persevered with GcMAF. For marketing convenience they elided the distinction between GcMAF and VDBP and stopped pretending that the the former underwent molecular transformation into the latter (tacitly admitting that the latter is just a molecular mirage). Personally I am suspicious when a dairy product changes its name… an honest chemical with nothing to hide has no need for aliases or noms-du-beurre.

Anyway, this simplification enabled them to sell ‘Cytonics’ / ‘Cytoinnovations‘ VDBP products (which still look like ampoules of distilled water), and a range of MAF protein-enriched skin-cream… Crèmes passionelles, as it were, or ‘Liniments of Gratified Desire’ if you prefer Blake. The siblings soon had creative differences and parted in Acrimony (which I believe is a quaint little Tuscan village in the Apennine foothills), splitting up the family business. Trevor took Cytonics while Lesley shifted production of “MAFactive” cream to North-West France, where artisanal batch-production dairy products are all around and where the ferry to Guernsey was just down the road in Cherbourg.

Lesley acquired MAFactive distributors around the world – but also competitors, for the barriers to entering the skin-cream market are low: in less poetic terms it consists of buying an industrial emulsion base as a commodity and customising it with the addition of dairy-sourced proteins (or just distilled water). Distributors included

• In Maine, Margaret Shaver was “MWSdistributing“.
• In Seattle, Intuitive Healer Krizten Breidenich ran ‘Healinginsideandout‘ and the now-defunct Facebukkake group ‘GcmafandmafactiveUSA’.
• “KABdistributing“… those initials sound familiar somehow…
• “ReactivatedWellness” was Candice Lee-Bradstreet (sister-in-law of Jeff Bradstreet, already mentioned).
• In Florida, Nicole Sullivan (ND, MH, CNC, CNHP, LFS, CLT), Health & Lifestyle Coach, whose day-job — when she is not adorning her name with additional medscam qualification-cargo-cult acronyms — is as realtor, because ‘fantasor’ is not an occupation.
• In Canada, “Pure Living Health & Wellness” NO WAIT that was just Nicole again, through a different anonymising service.
• The Australian market was shared with many, including Darren Fleming.

“Dr” Darren Fleming, a.k.a. the Baron of Merlona, can serve as a synecdouche for this larger confederacy of dunces. His career is one of sad wannabee grifting, as if some mail-order trickster had sold him a book on “How To Fraud” that turned out to contain only blank pages, leaving him without the con-artist skills to match his aspirations. Darren would still be hawking fake Givucci handbags from a trestle table in the Flinders St Subway station if it were not for the confluence of Magic Skin Lotion chicanery with the Intertubes, creating an ideal environment where unworldly fantasists can thrive.

Darren entered the GcMAF scene, stage left, when Lynley enlisted him as the Antipodean agent for MAFactive. He displayed his suitability by promptly announcing his own competing version… along with his own continuing attempt to corner the Magic Yoghurt market. A series of products populated his ‘gcmafproducts.com’ webstore pages without ever reaching physical realisation. This is an environment where building castles in the air provides a lucrative income from the suckers lining up to rent them.

• Bonus Fleming: Unguent Fever
• Six characters in search of an author
• The starry wisdom Owned by the Baron And he’s got the cure [Carpe Diem edition]

So when the French gendarmerie arrested Lesley and her French associates, naturally her colleagues / rivals were collegial and supportive HA HA not really. Some suddenly cancelled their websites and observed radio silence, and some pivoted to selling Candice’s rival product “GlycoPlus” / “GcMAFplus” / GlycoProteinPlus, while Candice blamed Lesley – though to be fair, Krizten did urge her customers to donate generously to Lesley’s legal-defenses fund.

This “GlycoPlus” product was supposedly made in New Zealand, though it used a virtual office in Hong Kong. It was especially popular in Australia, where a whole range of retailers vied for the chance to supply it to the suckers.

I am obliged to report that Trevor Banks has not crossed any legal boundaries and remains at liberty. He even drunk-dialed my colleague Fiona O’Leary to harangue her about her anti-GcMAF agitation. He did set up a fund-raiser account so that his customers could help Lynda Thyer with her legal expenses, so credit for that I suppose.

The Deep State Conspiracy

Anyway, despite the diverting and enlivening elements of the proteinaceous skin-cream market, none of the participants has contributed to the literature of cargo-cult science. So I follow that thread no further, and will settle for playing ‘Lotion‘ loudly in the background. I also take the opportunity to introduce you, very briefly, to Senechal and Tent… these are not an odd-couple pair of Oxford academics who solve crime, as their names might suggest, but only two US chiroquacktors / grifters and friends of Candice, who treat the victims of excess money at their “Diverse Health Services” wellness clinic (slogan: “Truth, Compassion, Healing”). They don’t actually have any ‘GlycoPlus’ to retail so they advertised it anyway with preliminary mock-ups of the packaging.

For the same reason of its absence from the literature, I shall not delve in depth into the ‘Assassination Narrative’. Suffice to say that this was the contribution of Erin Elizabeth – partner of leading Alt-Med fraudster Joe Mercola, and a busy little grifter in her own capacity. Elizabeth’s insight was that the suppression of the Awful Truth about GcMAF and Nagalase was so important to the Derp State and the New World Order that holistic doctors were being culled en masse when they came too close to the that Truth. To be more precise: anyone with a vaguely therapeutic vocation (however mainstream), and who died in an accident or by violence was posthumously recruited to the banner of Holistic Healer… because why else would Derp State hit-squads have targetted them? Surprisingly, her fan-base donated $$$ instead of getting angry that by sharing the Awful Truth with them, she had set them up to be next on the list.

The number of dead doctors rose inexorably as the list was passed from one conspiracist to another like a scary story told around a campfire. The popularity of the narrative attracted envious suspicion to Erin from other, even sleazier sectors of the griftiverse, who accused her of being “Controlled Opposition” and part of the whole plot. Then COVID-19 came along and everyone just forgot about the Great Culling, as whole new scams and conspiracies were waiting to be exploited.

There had been one actual suicide to start the snowballing Death-List: that of autism-cure conman Jeff Bradstreet, who ventilated his chest after the FBI visited his office with questions about his GcMAF racket. Clearly the most fitting way to commemorate Jeff’s career of fraud was to exploit his death as part of a scam, so his bereaved sister-in-law Candice Lee-Bradstreet raised $50,000 through crowd-funding to hire a Private Investigator to rake over his “suicide”. That never happened, and the GoFundMe account was quietly cashed in and folded up; instead, Candice proclaimed that the Controlled-Opposition Deep-State agent who had organised the assassination was none other than [fanfare] Professor Marco Ruggiero (though Bradstreet’s ex-wife was part of the plot). This is what kept me blogging about the GcMAF subculture for so many years… the opportunity to encounter so many delightful personalities.

• Bonus Great Culling: What fresh hell is this? (Farnham Freehold edition)
• I have a noble cause for skin, there’s just too many of them
• …and in the manner of Yoalo balladeers — a manner he recalled vividly — he gestured with his right hand to illustrate matters of fact, with his left to embellish and indicate things beyond his knowledge

One of the most histrionic participants in that milieu, and one of the most enthusiastic purveyor of the Assassination Narrative (which allowed her to present herself as a Martyr-to-be), was one Amanda Mary Jewell. Amanda had drifted from real-estate dodginess in Bulgaria to cancer-cure scamming in “Pearl Lodge” (again, starting with MMS as the gateway to GcMAF). She deserves several chapters in the book, not just for her cash-extraction facilities in Bulgaria, Mexico, Dominica, Belize, etc. or for her trail of bodies, but also for her Munchausen fantasy about a pig-colon xenotransplant.

• Bonus Amanda Jewell: Blood Sugar Sex Magik
• Left to die by two good friends Abandoned me and put to sleep: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowd-funding #2
• Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to leave suckers in possession of their money, that is the Law. Are we not Men? #2 is more of a guideline than a rigid directive
• And nothing of value was lost

I mention this as an extreme example of the Shamanic “Wounded Healer” trope. No mountebank’s or charlatan’s Origin Story is complete without a mortal disease, usually cured by their own spiritual efforts, as part of qualifying to heal others. As in the case-study of Harrison Wintergreen, but with a better outcome. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.

The other requirement of any Alt-Med quack’s story is the acquisition of Indigenous Healing Traditions from non-Western societies (in a culturally-respectful non-appropriative way!) in the course of a globe-spanning travelogue. Their autobiographies are Lonely Planet guides to Healing Modalities, modelled on Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men-Machines. I mention this in preparation for instances to come.

Greater fleas have lesser fleas

But it is time for another paper, so please admire “Initial Observations of Elevated Alpha-N-Acetylgalactosaminidase Activity Associated with Autism and Observed Reductions from GC Protein—Macrophage Activating Factor Injections”. Authors Bradstreet and Thyer are already old friends. Emar Vogelaar (of the European Laboratory of Nutrients) is another evocative name, and another convicted fraudster.

Vogelaar contrives to combine the barmy beliefs of orthomolecular psychiatry with the even barmier intellectual scholium of Steiner Anthroposophy. He has argued that Steinerian and homeopathic treatments are cheap; so by performing and billing for worthless tests for those worthless treatments, he was saving money for the insurance companies and the medical system, even if they had not requested them. The court was not convinced at his fraud / forgery / money-laundering trial and imposed a €1.6 million fine.

The Potemkin journal for this bolus of mockademia had been founded by an antivax fraudster as a pukefunnel for his scams, and the publisher (Libertas Academica) erased it as soon as the funding ran out. Richard Poynder wrote in more temperate words in 2016:

‘Subsequently, in January 2010, I was contacted anonymously by someone complaining that one of Libertas Academica’s journals – Autism Insights – was being used as a vehicle to propagate the ideas of the discredited medical researcher Andrew Wakefield. To this end, the anonymous informant said, its editorial board was dominated by members of Wakefield’s Thoughtful House Center for Children, and included Wakefield himself. As the informant contacted me just prior to Tom Hill boycotting me I emailed Hill for a response. He replied that the journal’s EiC did not wish to respond to the allegation, and neither did he.“

The “α-N-Acetylgalactosaminidase” in the title is Nagalase, normally a low-key but essential enzyme for lipid homeostasis. But as already noted, Yamamoto’s alternative conceptual universe assigned it a new role as the villain of the story, the Destroyer of GcMAF. The human centipede of the conspiracist-ideation community swiftly amplified Yamamoto’s outsider perspective into a belief that Nagalase is not even natural, it’s an artificial additive to the human bloodstream – presumably injected as an ingredient of vaccines, as part of the broader Depopulation Agenda. Or added to children’s ice-cream chemtrails.

Greater fleas have lesser fleas, and the parasitical-publishing ecosystem created subsidiary niches for fraud, like fake Citations Indices; and in the same way, the GcMAF economy created a niche of Nagalase testing, for worried customers to find out whether they should be consuming Noakes’ product or Magic Yoghurt or MAFactive cream [spoiler alert: The answer was always YES]. Vogelaar’s “European Laboratory of Nutrients” offers this specialised service; as does Health Diagnostics and Research Institute, an ELN subsidiary / acquisition. They also offer tests for “kryptopyrrole” and/or “The Mauve Factor”, undeterred by its non-existence.

In case you were wondering if this is a reputable institution, “Nordic Labs” in Copenhagen used to provide the same service. Just upstairs from the amber shop and the Shanghai Restaurant.

I hope the readers have not become emotionally invested in Rerum (‘The Stuff’, ‘The Thing’) – Ruggiero’s replacement for GcMAF and GOleic. If it’s any consolation, everyone who signed on to be a Rerum distributor was equally disappointed. For it attracted cut-price knock-off products from various people seeking a suck at the same moneyteat… notably, ‘Omnia‘ from Trevor Banks; and ‘ReViVe®’ from Candice Lee-Bradstreet the anonymous purveyors of GLYCOplus; and ‘KK Chondroitin‘ from Kerri Rivera (High Priestess of the MMS Bleach Cult, who could teach lessons to Depression-era bindlestiffs in “How to leap onto moving wagons”, and who sometimes collaborates with Banks). Rivera marketed her version as a no-frills commodity, undercutting its competitors on price.

Rerum also bound Ruggiero in his business partnership with Reinwald. Thus the next conceptual breakthrough consisted of discovering it to be obsolescent, while its curative properties passed on to a new new composition of food supplements, imuno®. The lower-case-only badly-kerned name imuno needed the same number of letters as its predecessor to avoid redesigning the advertisements.

Of course there were papers in parasitical journals. Ruggiero’s friendships with full-time autism grifters made it easy to obtain clinical evidence for his speculation that the new nostrum cures autism.

Production of this new formulation is allegedly centred in Vanuatu, in a drawer in a filing cabinet in Law Partners House, Port Vila, Vanuatu. I see no reason to doubt that this small Pacific nation has the pharmaceutical capacity, for Vanuatu is coincidentally the source of a cancer-cure scam called TBL-12, the seafood chowder of cancer frauding. TBL-12 is blended from shark-fin, sponge and sea-cucumber squeezings, and hitherto undreamt-of quantities of Exporto Grass: following a recipe that was passed down through the generations until a kindly Chinese fisherman gave it to the proprietor’s father as a cure for his stomach cancer in an inherited version of the Wounded-Healer trope. Yes, TBL-12 will be relevant.

Distribution of TBL-12 is handed by the webstore “naturalsolutions.nz”: also the distributor of imuno. But then we learn from imuno documentation that it is actually produced in New Zealand, on behalf of the “imuno Corporation” [no such corporation exists], subject to NZ standards: “audited by Medsafe, a division of the Ministry of Health of New Zealand, to both GMP and Pharmacy Standards NZ.”

Synclectic Kelly

That website brings us to one Michael Kelly – Practitioner since 2004 in Dynamic Radiometric Thermal Diagnostics and Dielectric Resonance Management Procedures, and since 2005 in Biological Terrain Management. Kelly deserves at least two chapters in my forthcoming book, on account of the range of his business activities in the Wellness Industry. Company archives tell us that he co-owned an Auckland cafe/bar in 2000, progressing through Vibronic Tuning Centre, which shifted focus from musical instruments to gemstone-themed coloured light therapy and became the Vibronic Health home of Crystal Healing Bafflegab, then morphed into Natural Health Ltd.… along the way, acquiring a physical location as a pantechicon of New-Age Flim-Flam at 40 St Benedicts Street. Natural Health begat Natural Cosmetics, and Immuno Biotech, which begat Natural Solutions NZ.

I am not entirely clear on the intellectual foundations of Gemstone Chromatic Vibrational Healing, but it seemed to involve Assemblage Points and Energy Fields, unless these were costumes for performances of the Bauhaus Triadic Ballet.

I am impressed that Kelly had time for all that. In accordance with the Healing Travelogue trope, his autobiography included Sufi mysticism, Western Biomedicine and Acupuncture, munging the best bits from these diverse techniques into a single eclectic, syncretic practice. Or even ‘synclectic’, a word I invented just now which combines the best bits of both. Not to forget the movements, focused exercises, chinese herbs, positive mental attitudes, all part of his self-cure of lymphoma (for the Wounded Healer trope is not neglected). A Patrick Kelly – Michael’s brother? – comes into the story as well.

There used to be stbenedictshealthcare.com as a digital shopfront. Alas, after a number of recensions, that vanished in 2016 — initially redirecting to naturalhealthsolutions.nz and then to healthcentre.nz, which is far more straight-faced and less entertaining. And finally there is the NaturalSolutions.nz webstore to take the place of the old Immuno Biotech. And Rerum.biz, of course.

Where I am going with all this is that Kelly has been a member of Team Ruggiero right from Act 1, the GcMAF period, back when a New Zealand company was created to keep the production of Bravo off-shore (investigation-minded NZ journalists could explore these links, just saying). The earliest sighting was in 2011. It is reassuring that this connection survived the transition to imuno.

Details of registration and administration of the promotional site and webstore ‘imuno.biz’ are veiled behind anonymising services, but it was originally hosted on an IP server exclusive to Kelly’s business activities.

I mentioned the Immuno Biotech Ltd Immunotherapy Clinic, which offered “Licensed Medical Immunotherapy”… GcMAF, amygdalin, sea-cucumber-squeezings, mistletoe squeezings, etc. (the nature of the “licensing” agency is not specified). The name was chosen to encourage confusion with David Noakes’ “Immunobiotech Ltd” (a.k.a. First Immune), to trade on Noakes’ hard-earned reputation and sell GcMAF-branded products, taking advantage of Noakes’ legal entanglements and distracted state (for Noakes was neglecting his First-Immune Faceborg page, allowing queries to accumulate unanswered from desperate clients who’d send $$$ and wondered when their purchases would arrive). Some michievious scamp even spoofed a FB post there, using the NZ Immuno Biotech identity to direct readers in search of GcMAF to the NZ GcMAF-free product range.

Company records reveal that IBt began with two directors: as well as Kelly, a Dr Ulrich-bero Doering. I had not previously realised that the NZ College of GPs recognised a niche for “Anthroposophic General Practitioner“. On first glance, a foundational reliance on Rudolf Steiner’s arsey-versey rectally-sourced doctrines could conflict with primary health provision (and with confidence in a doctor)… for instance, the principle of Spontaneous Blood Circulation, where blood moves around the body of its own accord or under the influence of tides or something, and the heart merely acts as a regulator. Also: “Iscador” (mistletoe tincture) cures cancer; and anatomically speaking the skull is an inside-out femur; and each distinct human race came to Earth from a different planet.

Dr Doering came top in a 2015 St Benedicts Healthcare list of “Doctors who are woke on GcMAF’s all-curing properties” (and will help import it). He has also been unstintingly helpful with advice to terminal cancer patients, who need to set up crowd-sourcing fundraisers in order to pay for the products; even offering a partial-treatment course at a reduced rate, when a previous patient no longer required the full course of doses.

“Cheryl” from Perth was given a fraught account of strife between the Noakes and NZ versions of ImmunoBiotech, which she passed on to GoFundMe supporters. That was about when Kelly dissolved the NZ company. Shifting its webstore activity to naturalsolutions.nz, he promised a clinical trial of Immunotherapy in Vanuatu, under the supervision of noted oncology researcher Sam Grant. Which is to say, the TBL-12 dude. Yeah, right.

All this is hard to understand, for Mr Kelly is otherwise a hard-line advocate of intellectual property, who reproves customers who dallied with parallel importers and their unoriginal images, which is tantamount to theft. This is why we found him quoting a testimonial blogpost in which Jeff Bradsteet vouched for the superiority of NZ-sourced Magic Yoghurt; it was in fact a photoshop of Bradsteet’s endorsement for a UK purveyor’s supply. But if Kelly needs to forge testimonials from a serial fraudster, who am I to cavil?

More recently, an application was made through the Port Vila accountants / legal advisors to register ‘imuno’ as a trademark, but it evidently encountered opposition and was abandoned. But Ruggiero’s opportunistic attempts to ret-con ‘imuno’ as a sovereign cure for COVID-19 (much as it undoubtedly cures HIV-1) suggest that it is still a going concern.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying

Putting this aside, Ruggiero is not one to rest on his laurels, which I have to say from personal experience do not provide comfortable seating, and the aphids get right up your crack. In the course of lucubration and long lonely vigils in the laboratory, he had stumbled upon an unexpected feature of the molecular complexes of Vitamin D3/D4 with biopolymers like chondroitin… namely, that the high molecular weight curves the time-space metric in the vicinity of one’s chromosomes, causing time dilation. This is apparently a Good Thing, and is where we came in.

Ruggiero’s M.O. is not to publish these bong-hit inspirations for the sake of Art or Hilarity alone, but also as science-sounding selling points for products still in the pipeline. Thus it came as no surprise when ‘Klotho Immortalis’ arrived in the marketplace, bringing the promise of immortality.

Ruggiero’s views on immortality are available on Youtube. It turns out that he promises a vicarious version, involving microbiota. Your corporeal body might die but your soul intestinal cargo of bacteria will continue, or at least their genetic duplicates in other people will continue. I would prefer a form of ‘living forever’ that is less metaphorical, and involves less dying.

Which is where Immortalis comes in! Though there is still a microbiotic component: Immortalis consists of the freeze-dried bacteria from Bravo, pre-mixed with the chondroitin from Rerum / Imuno.

Now the new product targeted a different client base from the usual demographic of desperate patients. Ruggiero did not expect to sell many jars of pills, but he didn’t need to; Immortalis came with a risible price-tag, “£8,000 for a year’s supply”, unrelated to the cost of the components. The price was in fact the essential selling-point, along with its associated aura of exclusivity, targeting healthy consumers who think that shopping at Harrod’s is an entrée into Society’s elite. This is the realm of conspicuous consumption, and ‘Veblen Goods‘, where actual real-world efficacy would detract from the product’s value as a signifier of profligate wealth.

No Stone Unturned

Ruggiero’s collaborator on the Immortalis project was one ‘Sacha’ Stone: New Age trustafarian and failed rock star, who aspires to be Leader of Youth in the Age of Libertarius. Stone was in a position to dump serious money on promoting the product, and they commissioned someone to fluff Immortalis with a puff-piece in Vogue, dwelling on the celebrity status of the intended clientele. More uncritical celebrity-fellation stenography was commissioned for the Daily Torygraph. Not to forget this Prospectus for the “Immortalis Retreat”, emphasising the exclusive privacy of the Mexican resort (“one of the most exotic luxury destinations on earth”). The Cuixmala Resort may well feature a perfumed, Delft-tiled milking-shed for guests who want to play at being milkmaids.

Unsolicited testimonials rolled in for the transformative power of Immortalis. Most of the testifying entities are anonymised, or V14GR4 spam-bots who attained sentience without leaving traceable on-line footprints. A few were provided by other monorail salesmen con-men, perhaps motivated by professional courtesy.

I’ve blogged a lot about Stone, a character whom a novelist would struggle to invent – especially about his ITNJ, the International Tribunal of Natural Justice. But Stone is the Ringmaster of an entire nine-ring circus of scams, a portfolio of all-lower-case Childhood’s-End start-ups, all with Spirograph logos that were born when a biohazard warning sign fucked a mandala.

ITNJ was a forerunner of QAnon. It roped in many of the same people as QAnon (Robert David Steele) but also the ineffable John Walsh of Branagh. Donate to them now so they can stop child trafficking hire cheap venues and buy dress-up costumes!

They could have afforded a few more thousand dollars to have Ruggiero’s delirious time-dilation fantasias published in Frontiers or MDPI, or anywhere less scabrous than a Madridge garbage-scow, but no-one asked my advice.

As if foreseeing the short-lived nature of his partnerships with David Noakes and John Anderson / Isagenix, and his need for future hosts, Ruggiero was already grooming Sacha Stone to be his next sugar daddy in 2014. To seal the alliance, Sacha provided an Epilogue or Exegesis to ‘Turd Brain’ (Ruggiero’s microbiome manifesto), in which advertisements for the coming unicorn-jism Immortalis are interspersed with New Age word-droppings in no discernable sequence. The result is not over-endowed with coherence and it will not be in the final exam.

Journal-shaped jizzmops

We are nearly at the end of this long twisty story. A 2021 fantasia in a journal-shaped waste-dump from American Journal of Immunology was all horsetail decoctions and silica; but also quantum entanglement with algae, to extend the radiation resistance of algae as a sheltering, protective aegis over whatever it’s entangled with. “Experimental Evidence for the Role of Natural Radioactivity in Influencing Viability of Commensal Microorganisms” (Ruggiero, 2021) had not altered much from the 2020 preprint version in BioRxiv, except for losing a paragraph of high-concept horseshit that the author couldn’t resist plagiarising from a 2019 brainpuke. As above, so below! The helical structure of the universe!

‘Toroidal structures of DNA and proteins such as ORF252 become entangled because of their spatial geometry; this phenomenon is not dissimilar from the quantum entanglement at the level of the protein tubulin in neuron microtubules, a phenomenon that is thought to be at the basis of human consciousness (66). It is also consistent with a recent paper entitled “Is the Fabric of Reality Guided by a Semi-Harmonic, Toroidal Background Field?” (67). It is interesting to note that DNA itself is endowed with an intrinsic degree of consciousness (68) that obviously does not rely upon quantum entanglement at the level of tubulin. It is also interesting to note that ancient viruses may have been responsible for the onset of consciousness in humans (69) and, therefore, it is plausible that the intrinsic consciousness of the DNA of viruses and humans may have become entangled at different levels.’

Other paragraphs promoted a deuterium-depleted “lightwater” grift, for no obvious reason; and Čerenkov radiation came into the story, because why not?

Salon des Refusés

Given Ruggiero’s praxis, this compendium of bafflegab was sure to be the preparation of a new monetarised combination of microbiome and magic. And sure enough, March 2021 saw the advent of “Praesidum” – pills to protect from radiation damage. In particular, from the scariest, most injurious form of radiation: 5G-telephony radio frequencies.

My show of dumbfounded surprise is slightly disingenuous, as the AJI version of the paper had acquired a sentence to specify the product that it had been written to publicise:

“The method described above has been used as the basis for a proprietary procedure of fermentation aimed at manufacturing a supplement for human consumption designated “Praesidium” (Praesidium Life Limited, Auckland, New Zealand).”

Praesidium Life is a shell company to obscure ultimate control, with Switzerland as the true site of manufacture. The nominal owner turns out to be our old friend Michael Kelly: now “an Auckland-based naturopathy entrepreneur”, and a feckin’ politician, with his own political party to peddle medfraud causes. Alas, the product launch was scooped by a science journalist. It was probably a mistake for Kelly to bring Jami-Lee Ross on board, what with JLR being leaky and incompetent even by the standards of conspiracy-theorist politicians. As Stuff magazine informed in March 2021:

“Kelly is also chairman of Advance NZ, the political party Ross formed in 2020. Ross and Kelly are both directors of Praesidium Life; interests associated with each man own the entirety of the company’s shares, with Kelly holding a controlling interest.”

In fact Praesidium was already in the pipeline in June 2020, courtesy of ‘Sacha’ Stone, as Stone hunted around in a hurry for alternative scams to supplement Immortalis and the £300 Anti-5G Memory Stick that he’d been pimping. A BBC / Radio-4 investigation into 5G conspiracist fleecing had the details:

Alert readers will have noticed that as author of “Experimental Evidence for the Role of Natural Radioactivity…”, our man boasted an affiliation to “National Coalition of Independent Scholars” – a kind of Salon des Refusés for outsider researchers (not to be confused with the Saloon des Refusés, a rather louche absinthe bar in the XIV^e arrondissement, famed for the negative attitude of the staff). This is a continuation of a familiar trend. Ruggiero’s post-Florence career has been a couch-surfing succession of institutional affiliations and physical addresses, reflecting changes in his patrons and business partners. A Research Remora. The only constant is a reluctance to set foot within any European jurisdiction.

Earlier we got as far as his association with Anderson, the pill-mill magnate. Subsequently we find Ruggiero operating under the aegis of the Sophia Health Institute for a while (which in accordance with Lyons-Weiler’s Law, is simply Dietrich Klinghardt again, with Christine Schaffner). In particular, SHI hosted a Ruggiero webinar with the triumphant title “We Found the Coronavirus Vulnerability: Learn to Exploit it“. A transcript of the Ruggieration is here, and the PPT slides are here.

The presentation is padded out to twice its length by Ruggiero’s ironic ambivalence as he regurges “COVID was a bioweapon” conspiracy theories, then denies personal investment in each theory because ‘belief’ and ‘commitment’ are for callow unsophisticates, not for a Deconstructionist disciple of Deleuze; then reminds the audience that the theory has so many followers that it can’t be just dismissed or ignored as absurd. Ruggiero is an old hand at this plausibly-deniable Tergiversation Tango, having perfected it with his just-asking-questions Antivax AIDS denial-cake, both eating and fucking it. The presentation is further padded with boilerplate slides about the author’s scientific eminence and his close encounters with Nobelity. Take all that away and this is what’s left:

1. HIV-1 and COVID-19 are almost the same virus (bioweapon!!).
2. Any antiviral that blocks HIV-1 will also block COVID.
3. Preparations of chondroitin (especially those concocted and marketed by M. Ruggiero) are theoretically certain to block HIV-1 (which doesn’t exist).
4. Therefore those preparations will also cure COVID.

The webinar was foreshadowed by a blogpost by a Mimi Castellanos (US imuno retailer and self-appointed Mouth of Ruggiero) who presents the same logic.

Illiterate quantum-entanglement jibber-jabber

Ruggiero’s subsequent failure to publish this geometrical, irrefutable chain of reasoning in the Am.J.Immunol. or the Madridge J. Immunol. or some other Journal of Ruggiero Studies is a source of perplexity and befuddlement. Perhaps he harbours higher ambitions for a target journal with wider acceptance. At any rate, in the hope of smuggling the central conceit into publication, it has been concealed within the Trojan Horse of a bioRxiv preprint (yet to find its Forever Home), nominally on an anodyne topic: “Significance of hydrophobic and charged sequence similarities in sodium-bile acid cotransporter and vitamin D-binding protein macrophage activating factor“. Quite possibly no reviewer will wonder why SARS-CoV-19 spike proteins and their potential interactions with “low-molecular-weight chondroitin sulfate” were included in a gene comparison ostensibly devoted to sodium-bile acid cotransporter.

Mimi Castellanos was also the first to appraise me of Ruggiero’s latest replacement for his previous panaceas, which is ‘Edestiny’. It is the bacterial-fermentation glycosylation again, but this time the bacteria perform their transformative miracle not on VDBP, but from a similarly-shaped protein found in hemp seeds. Bravo 3.0, as it were. Then the glycosylated version of ‘edestin‘ will confer all the healing benefits that GcMAF used to, before Ruggiero repudiated Yamamoto and all his works; the pendulum has turned full circle.

Really shite photoshop composition

It is not clear whether the putative parallels between edestin and VDBP are inherited from the last common ancestor of mammals and hemp plants, or an example of convergent evolution, driven by a shared need to regulate Vitamin D metabolism. But it was advertised at AutismOne 2021 (a Trade Fair for autism-cure scammers and mountebanks in general), so you know it’s legit!

Bravo-Edestiny features on the Natural Solutions webstore, of course, adorned with immoderate therapeutic claims, hidden in the HTML as as <meta> tags so they will catch the eye of search engines but evade the casual scrutiny of MedSafe or the Advertising Standards Commission. On a scale of 1 to 10, how shocked are you learn that there’s a paper from OAText?

Links between the 17 references in this opuscule and the corresponding in-text citations are often elusive, Partly because 12 were self-citations, shoe-horned in on specious pretexts (e.g. to justify the use of mineral water for bacterial cultivation, despite the absence of mineral-water content in those papers), while a 13th was a shout-out to Bradstreet, Vogelaar & Thyer (2012) (see above).

Another invocation of the VBP / edestin homology features in a citation-turned-footnote in Zunaid, Pacini & Ruggiero (2020) (see above), pretending to be Ref [7], where it serves no obvious purpose. “Not a question so much as a comment”.

Curiously, the ingredient list for ‘Bravo-Edestiny’ is identical – hemp seed and all – to the ad-hoc culture medium “A”, used in “Experimental Evidence for the Role of Natural Radioactivity…” to transfer the radiation-insensitivity of cyanobacteria to probiotic bacteria species via Quantum Entanglement (and from there, readers can infer, to the human hosts who consume those probiotic species, in the form of Ruggiero’s product Praesidium).

That “Experimental Evidence” paper in fact describes two recipes for transferring radiation immunity from cyanobacteria to probiotic species, and Recipe B is the process for making Presidium. In that, the key ingredient is the humble horsetail, Equisetum arvensis. Illiterate quantum-entanglement jibber-jabber about Fractal Silica and the mystical antiquity of Equisetum fills whole pages of the paper.

Thus it will come as no surprise if “resistance to 5G and Electrosmog” becomes a future selling-point for Bravo Edestiny.

I am the first to concede that ground hemp-seeds do have a place as an adjunct to fermentation, but that place is in Lithuanian farmhouse beers. No regional brewing traditions seem to use horsetails as a substitute for hops. This is probably for the best.

Any readers who are still not Ruggieroed out are referred to Dora’s comprehensive coverage (or they can pre-order my book). In the interests of fairness I leave the last word to Ruggiero himself. Here he praises himself in advertising for the Praesidium grift, citing his contributions to the Encyclopedia of Cancer as proof that he is held in high regard in academia, and that his radio / chromosomal blatherings are accepted science. Well done Springer! Take a bow!

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OUT-TAKES:

1. Here is more of that Toroid-Structured Universe fritillary-condamine-hatstand. This time in a Magic-Yoghurt / imuno advertisement published in a journal-shaped pukefunnel from MedCrave, in 2020 when GcMAF was working again.

“Self-assembly of Sak in toroidal structures raises the interesting possibility of non-chemical signaling between the protein and DNA, possibly through biological quantum entanglement between the electron clouds of toroids of DNA and the electron clouds on the surface of toroidal Sak (for reference on biological quantum entanglement between electron clouds of nucleic acids, see 30). It is well known that DNA is organized in toroid units within sperm chromatin and in the head of phages^31,32 and condensation of a constrained DNA molecule into a toroid increases its tension and modifies the electromagnetic properties associated with the distribution of electrical charges on its surface³³. It could then be hypothesized that toroidal structures of DNA and proteins such as Sak may become entangled because of their spatial geometry; this phenomenon would not be dissimilar from the quantum entanglement at the level of the protein tubulin in neuron microtubules that is thought to be at the basis of human consciousness.³⁴ It would also be consistent with the recent paper by Authors from The Netherlands entitled “ Is the Fabric of Reality Guided by a Semi-Harmonic, Toroidal Background Field?”.³⁵ It is interesting to notice that DNA itself is endowed with an intrinsic degree of consciousness³⁶ that obviously does not rely upon quantum entanglement at the level of tubulin. It is also interesting to notice that ancient viruses may have been responsible for the onset of consciousness in humans³⁷ and, therefore, it is at least theoretically plausible that the intrinsic consciousness of the DNA of viruses and humans may have become entangled at different levels.”

2. Clive has travelled the world studying the diets and lifestyles of the world’s longest lived peoples and investigating the very best sources of nutrient rich foods and supplements.

The post was crowded enough with outré individuals so I left out GcMAF / Rerum dealer Clive de Carle. Clive’s autism frauding unlocked the rare achievement of condemnation as a lowlife scumbag by the Murdoch press. His fabulated Origin Story is hagiographic even by the standards of the genre, with two Wounded-Healer self-cure episodes of meeting & overcoming the Final Challenge (himself). Now de Carle has mastered his own body, one can only wonder why he chooses to look like Creepy Uncle Ernie who is no longer in charge of a scout troop.

3. Another peripheral character is Jeremy Ayres. He affected the title of “Doctor”, a qualification he’d acquired in a discipline of his own invention: “Neuropractics“, a bricolage of fragments from osteopathy, naturopathy, chiroquacktice and bong hits. Ayres started out in the GcMAF industry as a buyer / reseller of Noakes’ FirstImmune product, boasting of a bait-shop beach-house luxurious clinic in Barbados, while fostering the impression that he was a partner in the Bussigny cash-extraction clinic. Do not ask about the funds that he solicited to establish a clinic / healing centre / teaching Multiversity on the Yucatan (on donated Mayan land, close to sustainable permaculture sources of organic foodstuffs).

After GcMAF and Rerum fell into abeyance, Ayres and de Carle teamed up with a “Naturally Better” webshop to sell lymph-flow-unblocking weight-loss trampolines, sparkly shit and Debt-Forgiveness fraud. At some point in the last few years the site was taken over by Indian life-insurance grifters, but nothing of value was lost.

4. “In an effort to find an answer to the “health care crisis” he experienced everything from psychic healing to traditional American Indian shamanism. After years of learning to work with people as opposed to treating “conditions” it became clear to Dr. DeAndrea that a more holistic approach was needed. As a holistic physician it has been his goal to include the individual and the environment in the healing process.” … “He uses acupuncture, aromatherapy, nutrition, herbology, Ayurveda, yoga, meditation, creative visualization, colon hydrotherapy, physical therapy, hypnotherapy, oxygen therapy, chelation and the traditional allopathic treatments to create personalized healing prescriptions for his clients. His approach is multidisciplinary and based in information, regeneration, and energy medicine. He is also on the forefront of modern medicine with stem cell therapy. Dr. DeAndrea not only treats patients with stem cells but also trains other physicians from around the world in the latest breakthroughs in stem cells.”

Richard DeAndrea also ended up on the cutting-room floor, despite his role in popularising GcMAF in the South-East Asian marketplace of cancer-cure clinics, and successfully merging it with the stem-cell scam. Originally from Los Angeles, he initially made his bones in the Alt-Med world by running an “Oxygen bar” for self-obsessed quackbait keen to compensate for overdosing on anti-oxidants. Following a tireless medical pilgrimage around the world, marked by a reluctance to linger too long in any one country’s jurisdiction, DeAndrea was last seen in Bangkok. No Wounded-Healer self-cure I regret to report.

“[DeAndrea] has studied and practiced everything from traditional folk medicine in Gabon, Africa to hyperbaric oxygen therapies in the US , peptide stem cell therapies in Asia and Intravenous Laser therapy in Germany.”

As noted above, it was the opportunity to encounter so many delightful individuals that kept me coming back to the topic of GcMAF.

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Riddled bibliography

• 3 August 2014. Skull-blogging: face changing now, guernsey cow edition
• 9 August 2014. We are not monsters, we’re moral people: Chairman of the Bored edition
• 28 February 2015. Gimp Masks of the Illuminati
• 12 March 2015. He who controls the GcMAF controls the universe
• 14 March 2015. I drink your milkshake
• 16 April 2015. We drink elixirs that we refine From the juices of the dying (#2)
• 30 May 2015. Freak industrial accident: Midget caught inside Egg-whisk
• 18 June 2015. It transpires that a “suppository” is not the room in one’s house devoted to inventing weird hypotheses, assumptions and stipulations. We regret the error
• 29 June 2015. You’re very clever, young man, but it’s greater fleas and lesser fleas, all the way down
• 1 August 2015. I have a noble cause for skin, there’s just too many of them
• 3 August 2015. What fresh hell is this? (Farnham Freehold edition)
• 4 August 2015. “I mis-heard the doctor and thought he was recommending a Xenu-transplant, which is why my butt is now stuffed with several million Thetans”
• August 30 2015. The starry wisdom Owned by the Baron And he’s got the cure
  [Recall the dream of Luxor How fluids will arrive]
• 12 September 2015. Skull-blogging: Stool-pigeon edition
• 29 September 2015. Like that of a Repo man, life of a GcMAF dealer is always intense
• 31 October 2015. Blood work
• 2 November 2015. Dramateur Hour
• 12 November 2015. Into the whirlpool, where matter vanishes
• 21 November 2015. I’m Swiss and I’m spending the night
• Don’t miss the deadline
  It’s almost the deadline, darling
  I wouldn’t want it to happen to you
• 10 December 2015. The light that never, never warms
• [Patients are dying The horses are dazed]
• 9 January 2016. The dream will soon turn sour
• 18 March 2016. Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
  Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
  Not to leave suckers in possession of their money, that is the Law. Are we not Men?
  2 is more of a guideline than a rigid directive
• 12 April 2016. Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it’s bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year!
• 15 April 2016. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowd-funding
  [Serious stuff, not enough jokes]
• 7 November 2016. Blood Sugar Sex Magik
• 26 November 2016. A drug by the name of “World Without End”
  #2 — Sympathy for Debility
• 8 December 2016. What keeps bringing me back to the GcMAF market is the high calibre of individuals one thereby encounters (#104)
• 19 March 2017. It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals
• 26 March 2017. And nothing of value was lost
• 31 March 2017. Johnnie’s in the basement Mixing up the medicine
  • 9 April 2017. Six characters in search of an author
  • 19 April 2017. …and in the manner of Yoalo balladeers — a manner he recalled vividly — he gestured with his right hand to illustrate matters of fact, with his left to embellish and indicate things beyond his knowledge
  • 17 May 2017. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun
  • 26 June 2017. These are the first signs of sonic attack
    You will notice small objects such as ornaments oscillating
    You will notice vibrations in your diaphragm
    There will be bleeding from orifices
    There will be an ache in the pelvic region
    You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting or even laughter
  • 28 June 2017. Unguent Fever
  • 7 August 2017. I know they’ll find her some day
    They find them all that way
    After the thaw in springtime
    The snow melts away
  • 13 August 2017. Skullblogging: Fragile Eggshell Mind edition
  • 22 August 2017. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
    Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come
  • 30 August 2017. An extraordinary new cure has just been developed for exactly this kind of sordid problem.
    It wouldn’t have anything to do with leeches GcMAF, would it?
    I had no idea you were a medical man
  • 4 September 2017. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimiliar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings
  • 9 September 2017. In vitro, in vivo You stop when you’re broke
  • 2 January 2018, The touch of undying
  • 13 January 2018. Won’t somebody please think of the children!
  • 24 February 2018. Villagers call her: quicklime girl
    Behind her back: quicklime girl
    Behind the bush: quicklime girl
  • 6 May 2018. Come and take this World without end
    You’ll be inventor. Invention, letter, earth, wind
  • 19 April 2018. You can’t handle the truth
  • 12 August 2018. The Touch of Undying #2
  • 30 August 2018. Well I never did nothin’ But I was framed
  • 8 December 2018. “Roach Motels, Hotel California, and the Noakes-Ruggiero ‘First Immune’ clinic in Bussigny.”
    “I’ll take ‘Places where one checks in but never leaves alive’ for $250, Alex”
  • 9 January 2019. Left to die by two good friends Abandoned me and put to sleep:
    Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowd-funding #2
  • 15 January 2019. An béal bocht a chur ort
  • 10 January 2019. Foundation and Empire
  • 17 January 2019. The starry wisdom Owned by the Baron And he’s got the cure
    [Carpe Diem edition]
  • 21 March 2019. Everything is true, nothing is permitted: This is the Night we Ride edition
  • 1 July 2019. Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun #2 (European Arrest Warrant edition)
  • 30 December 2019. * The French language has 100 terms for different kinds of social-climbing upstart
  • 9 June 2020. Hell is empty and all the Stupid is here
  • 15 June 2020. Everything is true, nothing is permitted: Barmpot edition
  • 27 October 2020. Even when constructing the famous water-box, probably the most delicate and fragile instrument ever made by human hands, de Selby is known to have smashed three heavy coal-hammers and was involved in undignified legal proceedings with his landlord arising from an allegation of strained floor-joists and damage to a ceiling
  • 8 March 2021. In accordance with the Prophecy
  • 14 March 2021. Round in circles like the Archers
    Always stiff or always starchy
  • 22 March 2021. Sometimes a Great Lotion
  • 2 May 2021. Suffering convictions on a two-way stretch inside
    The air in here is pretty thin, I think I’ll go outside

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Notes

1. See Ruggiero (2009) for more symbiotic-HIV-cures-cancer AIDS denial. WARNING: May contain Wittgenstein and Derrida.

2. Named after James Lyons Weiler: antivaxxer, publisher and sole proprietor of the Institute for Pure & Applied Knowledge.

3. That 2014 Conference was further enlivened by Atanas Todorov Atanasov‘s interesting and challenging theory that cells have their own central nervous systems – inspired by Ulam’s noöcyte research, and by James Blish’s observations of paramecium language skills.

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