#2505: Nancy Banks

Antivaccine conspiracy theorists have, with COVID-19, gotten quite a bit of press, but Nancy Banks is a veteran in the game. Banks is, in fact, an MD (one-time gynaecologist), and therefore frequently appears on vaccine denialist lists of anti-vaccine doctors, such as Ricardo Beas’s 2017 federal class action lawsuit and criminal complaint against ‘mandatory vaccination’. And she is, indeed, an excellent example of the kind of deranged dingbats you will find on such otherwise laughably unimpressive lists. Banks has no background in infectious diseases and has never done research – her self-published book AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire: The Deadly Virus of International Greed is, needless to say, no substitute. She is, however, also an HIV/AIDS denialist and holocaust denier.

 

As a HIV/AIDS denier, Banks was even recruited as an “expert” witness by Clark Baker’s AIDS denialism legal team, which tells you a bit about Baker’s access to genuine experts who support their views.

 

In her book (she has, as mentioned, done no actual research), Banks claims that AIDS is not caused by HIV but by a global conspiracy in league with a range of secret societies and Western governments conspiring to loot Africa of natural resources, in particular diamonds, and that the AIDS epidemic is manufactured to divert attention (“AIDS is the subterfuge for the economic destruction of a continent and psychological warfare against the African people of the Diaspora”). As Banks imagines it, AIDS symptoms are actually due to antiretroviral AIDS drugs, tuberculosis or other diseases that afflict diamond mine workers – they are all work-related, but the categorization as AIDS ostensibly allows diamond corporations to avoid being sued for their working conditions. To support her case, Banks draws heavily on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and literature, such as Eustace Mullins, Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, and Salvador Astucia, and explicitly blames Jewish conspiracies for the AIDS situation in Africa, including Israel, the American Jewish Congress, and Maurice Tempelsman (chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health’s AIDS).

 

For good measure, the book also pushes a large and variegated group of assorted conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, fluoridated water, the Matrix, and 9/11. It is all connected, in the grandest and most unified possible way, to her theory of HIV/AIDS. Indeed, according to Banks, almost all world events past WWII can be tied to HIV hysteria: “The AIDS paradigm has created a universal belief system based not on science but on inference, innuendo, and association. Very few people will exercise the capacity to synthesize what on the surface may appear to be unrelated events. The assassination of President Kennedy, the prolongation of the Vietnam War, the War on Drugs, the War on Cancer, the rise of Kissinger and Iran-Contra, the de-industrialization of the United States and the strengthening of China as a world power, the genocide in the Congo and the current financial crisis are different acts of the same psychodrama.” For instance, “The legal and illegal drug trafficking helps to finance the covert operations within the Deep State,” according to Banks.

 

To connect the dots (or, rather, putting the dots in a blender to mix them together) – she once hosted a radio program called Connect the Dots – she relies on the works of John Coleman, who believes that world governments are controlled by a group of 300 families in England that got their power from the Opium Wars with China; The Gemstone File conspiracy that Aristotle Onassis, Joseph Kennedy, Eugene Meyer, and others were involved in a global conspiracy with the mafia, oil and drug cartels, and rogue militaries (and killed off the Kennedys when they became a nuisance); and Sal Astucia’s idea that the World Jewish Congress, in league with Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky and the FBI, hired French heroin traffickers to murder JFK. A central figure in her thought is, of course, the CIA, whose mission “is to have everything people believe to be true, false.” It is unclear what that means, but it sure sounds bad.

 

Banks’s views on medicine are generally unusual. For instance, according to Banks:

 

-       “The Rockefeller Foundation created the Molecule Biology Model for modern medicine that is fatally flawed from it’s [sic] beginnings” It’s hard to find much details about what the fatal flaws actually are supposed to be, but if you listen to Banks in the first place, you’re unlikely to care much about such details.

-       “Medicine today is in place to control the population, weed out the weak and for profit”

-       “The molecules in the cells are 99% water and 1% DNA, proteins etc. and allopathic medicine studies the 1%.” We admit that that is a new one to us.

-       “Disease is a simple combination of too many toxins and not enough nutrients and cause a lack of energy”. This is not true.

-       “Low energy cells will replicate more low energy cells in their built in programming to survive.” Whatever that might mean.

-       “negative emotions and thoughts we accept as real deplete the cells of energy and a significant factor of ‘disease’ ”

-       “Liver stagnation and toxicity can be a useful place for most to start the cleansing process.” Yes, it’s all about detoxing; of course it is.

-       “The entire vaccine theory is essentially bad science, going after viruses that don’t exist.”

 

And yes, there you go: Nancy Banks is also a germ theory denialist. No, really. She also promotes Bill Gates depopulation conspiracy theories: “The Gates Foundation’s vision of vaccinating third World countries is ostensibly genocide.”

 

Keep in mind that this character once, apparently, received a professional degree. 

 

Diagnosis: And there you have it: an example of the kind of person who passes as an expert in anti-vaccine circles and figures on their lists of doctors to consult. It’s illuminating.

 

Hat-tip: Denyingaids.blogspot