At The Washington Post, Michael E. Miller does a deep dive on the late Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet. The moral is that although the Internet allows misinformation and dubious "cures" to spread worldwide, it also opens the way for worldwide pushback, too.
Fiona O’Leary is a far cry from a fearsome detective. She is a thin, pale Irish woman with dyed crimson hair and Asperger’s.
But she also has two sons with autism.
So like Bradstreet’s patients, O’Leary began scouring the Internet for ways to help her kids. Instead, she found GcMAF, which she calls a “dangerous and unethical scam.”
“GcMAF is another dangerous unauthorized, unproven and very expensive treatment being used in the Autism field,” O’Leary told The Post in an e-mail. She is the founder of Autistic Rights Together, an organization that exposes bogus autism magic bullets. “Those offering this treatment are untrained and not medical Doctors,” she said of GcMAF. (Bradstreet, it should be noted, was licensed to practice medicine in Georgia at the time of his death.)
O’Leary began investigating Bradstreet, Noakes, Immuno Biotech and their GcMAF solution, First Immune, in 2014. She began with First Immune’s headquarters in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands.
Her complaints led regulators on the island to raise concerns in December with the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the United Kingdom’s version of the FDA.
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But the GcMAF saga didn’t end there. O’Leary was hounding American officials as well. After spotting Bradstreet’s videos and blog posts mentioning his connections to Noakes and First Immune, O’Leary complained to the FDA about the American doctor.
Four months after First Immune was shut down, the feds came knocking on Bradstreet’s Buford, Ga., clinic.
