.This post summarizes the fourth chapter of ‘A Plague of Corruption’ by Dr Judy Mikovits.
For those of you, like me, who have been struggling with the medical details of the previous chapters, you will be pleased to know that this chapter reads more like a detective novel.
We are introduced to Mikovits’ attorney, Mike Hugo. He specialized in vaccine injury cases and at one point was handling several hundred of them, specifically, the DPT (diphtheria- pertussis (whooping cough) -tetanus) shot which was eventually removed from the market due to so many bad reactions. There had been brain injuries and neurological reactions such as seizures which had resulted in a surge in lawsuits which in turn made it harder for manufacturers of DPT to obtain liability insurance.
Hugo’s attorney friend, Jan Schlichtman was at the time suing two big companies – W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods regarding their alleged pollution of the council water supply leading to the deaths and illnesses of local residents. It became known as the Woburn Case and eventually resulted in one of the largest fines ever levied against a corporation regarding environmental issues at that time – approximately $8m in 1986. Hugo’s lucrative practice enabled him to support his friend Schlichtmann financially. Schlichtmann was portrayed by John Travolta in the movie ‘A Civil Action.’
It bears some similarities with the Hinkley groundwater case in California in 1993 where a big corporation was charged with polluting the municipal water supply, portrayed in the film ‘Erin Brockovich’ played by Julia Roberts in 2000. The contamination resulted in over 600 plaintiffs seeking compensation for a range of serious illnesses and deaths. The fine levied against the company responsible (The Pacific Gas and Electric Company) was 333 million dollars, a record for such a case in the whole of previous US legal history.
One of Hugo’s cases involved Wyeth laboratories. They were later bought out by Pfizer and Nestle. A cluster of 11 infant deaths occurred in Tennessee due to Wyeth’s DPT vaccine. The number of brain-damaged children was even more.
Hugo uncovered a memo from Wyeth’s Head of Vaccines, a Dr Alan Bernstein dated August 27th 1979. The memo acknowledged that the vaccine might kill a certain amount of children. For this reason, Wyeth had decided that no more than two thousand doses of the vaccine should go to any one metropolitan area. This would avoid the possibility of several children dying in a small geographical area in a short period of time which could cause suspicion and concern. Babies would die or be injured but parents and local authorities would not be able to join the dots and it would remain a mystery. At least that was Mike interpretation of the memo.
To get a flavour of Mike Hugo’s legal standing and reputation, he spent hundreds of hours liaising with the office of a congressman as he had been requested to play a professional part in drafting new legislation to speed up the time needed to bring a child vaccine injury claim to completion. Unfortunately, Hugo believed that the subsequent 1986 National Childhood injury Act wasn’t a great improvement time-wise, as he had hoped parents could get a decision within 240 days.
We learn about Hugo’s experience of corporate surveillance. For example, he was followed for days by a vehicle as he travelled across the States collecting depositions from clients. On another occasion, he was invited to join the opposition counsel and check in at a hotel they were using on the pretext of discussing the particular case in question. He did so and in the evening in his bedroom he discussed the next day’s strategy with a colleague on the phone. The next day in court, he was surprised that the opposition counsel seemed to know a lot about the evidence he was presenting. On a hunch, he checked the phone in his bedroom, unscrewed the mouthpiece and found a hidden microphone there. Hugo was quite philosophical about these abuses saying that billions of dollars were at stake sometimes and it’s not surprising that the opposite side would go to any lengths to clear their pharmaceutical clients.
Mikovits had worked with Frank Ruscetti in the early 1980s. Ten years earlier Fort Detrick had been a lab and storage facility for biological and chemical weapons but in 1969 President Nixon made a commitment to limiting such weapons and therefore the programme was closed. However, the facility was still a waste dump for very toxic chemicals.
One of Hugo’s clients was a famous televangelist, Randy White, who lived near Fort Detrick. His wife and daughter died of cancer and Randy felt this was due from toxins from the base. Many other families had had similar deaths in their families who also lived around the base. Erin Brockovich even agreed to be involved in a sit-in in the facility.
Hugo believes that Mikovits can’t get her day in court because the powers that be do not want to give her the opportunity to tell her story and disclose that the use of animal tissues to grow viruses for vaccines (or to use in the development of other biological products) has caused a cascade of human diseases including Autism, CFS/ME, cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Mikovits’ struggle has not been in vain, however. Her research with Frank Ruscetti has bought the ideas of a link between some vaccines and ill-health into the public domain.
In February of 2025, Robert Kennedy was sworn in as the new US Secretary for Health and Human Services in Trump’s Cabinet. Under his watch, something has happened which would have been unthinkable in the days of Anthony Fauci, namely the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) is about to initiate a large study into the connections between vaccines and autism. Any discussion of such a link would have been heresy and an anathema in the previous administration led by Joe Biden.
Hugo had made a massive contribution to defending victims of vaccine injury through his work with DPT clients in his own practice, through providing considerable financial support to Schlichtmann in the Woburn case, exposing contamination around Fort Detrick, in his support of Mikovits and many other cases. It is hardly surprising that he became a target of those who sought to protect the interests of Big Pharma. He had dared to take on the high and mighty and they were happy to bring him down just as they had with his client, Mikovits. Mikovits believes that strings were pulled by high officials in the hands of Big Pharma and he was debarred for a very minor and innocently committed infringement which, for any other solicitor, would have been no more than a warning. On a happier note, he was subsequently invited by Harvard University to lecture on the opiod crisis in the US and the treatment of addicts and his award-winning daughter is making a name for herself in the film industry and is planning to shoot a legal drama about an oil explosion in a Texas oil refinery to rival such films as Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action. So the crusade goes on …