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Sunday, June 15, 2008
Hey, Malia! Just the facts, please.
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
Malia Rulon, Washington Correspondent
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Dear Ms. Rulon:
From your article today, Chabot, Schmidt Appear to Stretch Truth in Letters:
(Dr. Victoria) Wulsin, a physician, was hired in 2004 by the Heimlich Institute….
This appears to be a false statement, one which merits a fact-check and, if necessary, a prompt published correction. I’ll explain.
Per these 1998 articles of incorporation, the Heimlich Institute Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cincinnati’s Deaconess Associations Inc. Therefore Deaconess maintains employment records for Dr. Wulsin and would be the responsible source for providing accurate information.
To my knowledge, Deaconess has never confirmed that Dr. Wulsin was an employee of the Heimlich Institute. Furthermore, other information indicates that Dr. Wulsin was not employed by the Heimlich Institute Inc, but by Dr. Henry Heimlich the individual.
Big difference for several reasons, one of which is this: if the Enquirer previously published the claim, then instead of responding to legitimate concerns and fact-check requests, the paper ignored those requests and just kept re-publishing the dubious statement.
As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what’s happened.
Per this March 24, 2008 Cincinnati Beacon article, Wulsin Fact Check Request to the Enquirer and Dayton Daily News Editorial Page Editors, I repeatedly brought this to the attention of various Enquirer personnel after reporter Margaret McGurk published the claim in a so-called “fact-check article” and then again after the same claim was published in an editorial which endorsed Dr. Wulsin in the March 4, Democratic primary. I sent a string of fact-check requests to Ms. McGurk, her editor Carl Weiser, and editorial page editor Dave Wells. I never received a reply, so I presume none of them took action or made any attempt to verify the statement in question which, as of your article today, has now been published four times by the Enquirer.
It’s unclear why the Enquirer has chosen to handle the matter this way. In any event, failure to promptly address and correct errors clearly violates the Gannett Newspaper Division Principals of Ethical Conduct, so I’m copying senior Gannett executives and some media watchdogs on this in hopes of bringing in some oversight.
As for your reporting, it appears that you relied solely upon Robert Kraft, Dr. Heimlich’s press agent (and former Cincinnati Post editor), to verify Dr. Wulsin’s employment record. It’s unclear why you chose to do so. Obviously Mr. Kraft is not a disinterested party. Nor does he represent the Heimlich Institute, although he has falsely made that claim. In this August 25, 2005 letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, Mr. Kraft identified himself as “Communications Director, Heimlich Institute.” Later when pressed, Mr. Kraft (then an employee of Dan Pinger Public Relations Inc, now at The Powers Agency) admitted that he was employed by Dr. Heimlich the individual, not by the Deaconess-owned Heimlich Institute. Why did he pretend otherwise? Dunno, ask him.
In any event, a first-year journalism student would be aware that Mr. Kraft is not the proper source to verify Dr. Wulsin’s employment history - Deaconess is. Therefore I’m submitting the following fact-check request:
1) Please contact Jeff Beckman, Deaconess’s Director of Human Resources, and ask him to verify that Dr. Wulsin was employed by the Heimlich Institute and to provide her dates of employment. Here’s his number: (513) 559-2100
2) Also from your article today:
Bob Kraft, a spokesman for Dr. Henry Heimlich, founder and former president of the institute, confirmed that Wulsin worked for the institute, but he said she was hired as a consultant for a few months and was never a full-time employee.
Please contact Mr. Kraft and ask him to provide Dr. Wulsin’s dates of employment and her payroll records. I’ve repeatedly asked Dr. Wulsin to provide me with the same information, but last year she stopped answering my questions. More recently her campaign manager Kevin Franck has been equally unhelpful.
In the event that you’re unable to verify what you reported, this is to request that the Enquirer publish a correction no later than this Friday. The correction should state:
- That Dr. Wulsin was not employed by the Heimlich Institute.
- The identity of her employer.
- The exact dates of her employment.
Thank you for your attention to my request and I look forward to your reply. Please confirm receipt.
###
By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about the ongoing violative “malariotherapy” experiments on AIDS patients, you may wish to review this video of an April 20, 2007 speech in which Dr. Heimlich states that laboratories in the US and Germany are analyzing the blood samples.
Like Dr. Wulsin, Mr. Kraft has long since stopped answering my questions, but clearly you’ve got access. If you follow-up with him, why not ask Mr. Kraft to provide the names of the labs which are doing the blood work and to provide you with the names of the individuals responsible for collecting, transporting, and analyzing the samples?
Now that the Ohio 2nd race is bringing more attention to Dr. Hankenstein’s bizarre experiments, you could write a follow-up to this February 16, 2003 Sunday front pager about the Heimlich experiments in China. That story went global, so it seems like this is a great opportunity for you to get the byline on the next big “malariotherapy” story!
Sincerely,
[The Dean of Cincinnati]
cc:
GannettInc.
Robert J. Dickey (viaTara Connell)
Barbara Henry
Ben Kaufman, Cincinnati
CityBeat
Poynter Institute
Jim Romanesko
Bob Steele
Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher
ABC News
Joseph Rhee, Rhonda Schwartz
NationalCouncil Against Health Fraud
Robert S. Baratz MD PhD DDS
Quackwatch
Stephen Barrett MD
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15 Jun 2008 at 10:56 pm | #
Hey Malia! Why don’t you verify Dr. Wulsin’s employment history with Mekbib Wondewassen, who says he was the go-to guy in the Africa experiments? Seems like Dr. Vic would have talked to him when she was preparing her (ahem) “literature review.” Mekbib’s in the Daly City, CA phone book: http://tinyurl.com/4b6wn8
From the 11/05 Radar article by Thomas Francis (which also includes more on Dr. Vic): http://winston7.true.ws/ (Published a year <u>after</u> Wulsin fled the Institute. If she had really blown the whistle instead of just pretending to, she might have shut this mess down.)
Mekbib Wondewossen is an Ethiopian immigrant who makes his living renting out cars in the San Francisco area, but in his spare time he works for Dr. Heimlich, doing everything from “recruiting the patients to working with the doctors here and there and everywhere,” Wondewossen says. The two countries he names are Ethiopia and the small equatorial nation of Gabon, on Africa’s west coast.
“The Heimlich Institute is part of the work there - the main people, actually, in the research,” Wondewossen says. “They’re the ones who consult with us on everything. They tell us what to do.”
Wondewossen says that the project does not involve syringes full of malaria parasites. “We never induce the malaria,” he says. “We go to an epidemic area where there is a lot of malaria, and then we look for patients that have HIV too. We find commercial sex workers or people who play around in that area.” Such people are high-risk for HIV, and numerous studies show the virus makes its victims more vulnerable to malaria.
A key to containing malaria is speedy treatment. In the most resource-poor areas, clinicians who lack the equipment necessary for diagnosing malaria will engage in presumptive treatment at the first signs of fever. This, says Wondewossen, runs contrary to Heimlich’s interests. What physicians in Africa usually do “is terminate the malaria quickly when someone gets sick,” he says. “But now we ask them to prolong it, and when we ask them to do that, the difference is very, very big.”
Untreated malaria is horrible and includes periods of 105-degree fever, excessive sweating followed by chills and uncontrollable shivering, blinding headaches, vomiting, body aches, anemia, and even dementia. Heimlich’s malariotherapy literature recommends the patient go two to four weeks without treatment. Delay in treatment, warns the CDC, is a leading cause of death.
Wondewossen say that the researchers involved in the study are not doctors. He refuses to name members of the research team, because he says it would get them into trouble with the local authorities. “The government over there is a bad government,” he says. “They can make you disappear.”
Wondewossen won’t reveal the source of funding for this malariotherapy research. “There are private funders,” he says. But as to their identity? “I can’t tell you that, because that’s the deal we make with them, you know?” He scoffs at the question of whether his team got approval to conduct this research from a local ethics review board. Bribery on that scale, he says, is much too expensive: “If you want the government to get involved there, you have to give them a few million - and then they don’t care what you do.”
Heimlich claims to believe in the importance of evaluating patients through every stage of malariotherapy, but without being present for the onset of malaria his researchers would have a difficult time tracking the disease’s effect on the patient’s viral load. That doesn’t deter him from looking to the future. Wulsin’s report contains a forecast for a clinical trial in Africa that would begin by enrolling 75 patients in 2007, then another 20 to 30 in 2008. These projections are based, however, on the premise that current trials will bear out Heimlich’s theory.
In particular Heimlich targeted South African gold mines….
16 Jun 2008 at 09:48 am | #
There you go again, Dean, always looking for trouble!
Just because Bob Kraft is paid to hype Dr. Heimlich and to keep bad news about Dr. Hankenstein out of the media doesn’t mean Kraft’s not a reliable source about Dr. Wulsin participating in what may be illegal human subjects experiments.
Kraft’s word is good enough for Malia and even Jeff Coryell: http://tinyurl.com/68lrpt I suppose the next thing you’ll say is that Jeff is biased in favor of Dr. Wulsin? (Somebody get the Dean his tin foil hat, bwahaha.)
Also, so what if Kraft lied in a letter to the editor of a major Boston newspaper? Like you’ve never lied, Dean? Wow, talk about your glass houses and pots calling kettles!
So what if the malariotherapy experiments are still going on? It’s not as if Dr. Wulsin didn’t do everything she could to blow the whistle. After all, she filed complaints against Dr. Heimlich and the Heimlich Institute with all of the following organizations:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Okay, well never mind about that, but I don’t care what you say. I’m voting for Dr. Wulsin. She’s a candidate I can trust!
Plus she’s better than Hitler.
17 Jun 2008 at 10:36 am | #
If Ms. Rulon doesn’t respond by Friday, why not file a complaint against her with Enquirer and Gannett HR departments for violating the Gannett ethics principals? Do it publicly and see what happens.
Seems like a win-win as far as holding the Enquirer and Gannett accountable. If they take action, that’s good news. If they fail to take action, media watchdogs may want to use the situation to highlight the toothlessness of Gannett’s newsroom principals.
Either way the story may generate some steam and Ms. Rulon will have to take the lion’s share of the responsibility for using a dubious source like Kraft, then failing to follow-up on a reasonable fact-check request. Jobs are getting scarce in the business. She may not want that smelly fish in her permanent employment record.
01 Jul 2008 at 01:54 am | #
I just read the CE article and threw up on my keyboard. The sad thing is people fall for those stupid letters, and even worse, the people that write them can decide what happens in your life.