Ninja Turtles

The Dark Secrets and Subterfuge Behind an Anti-Vaccine Classic

Unless you have been living under, well, a giant turtle, you have heard of Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth. It was published in 2022 to instant controversy thanks, in large part, to its association with RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense. Mary Holland, who co-edited and wrote the foreward for the volume, happens to be CHD’s president and general counsel.

So close is CHD’s involvement and association with Turtles that some seem to be under the impression that the group, and perhaps even Mary Holland herself, wrote the book. (See the following screenshot from Science-Based Medicine’s rebuttal.)

In actual fact, the book’s authors prefer to remain anonymous. Mary Holland says so right in the book’s foreward. The reason given is fairly predictable (“if you know who we are, you can attack us instead of attacking our arguments”) but the other night, in Twitter Spaces, someone made an off-hand reference to Turtles’ anonymous authors: they said the word Israeli. I nearly fell out of my seat. You see, anonymous Israeli anti-vaxxers are a pet project of mine. I think I know who wrote Turtles and the story gets deeply, deeply weird. It also emerges from another deeply weird project of mine, the story of which I better start with.

Hunting for Ivermectin

My long-running series Late Sleepers is all about ivermectin, or rather my belief that its rise from humble anti-parasitic to political shibboleth and cultish panacea began as a foreign intelligence operation. I believe that ivermectinist-in-chief Pierre Kory is, wittingly or unwittingly, a Russian asset. (And I don’t believe he’s the only one.) I actually have Pierre Kory to thank for a number of my weird obsessions. In 2021 I saw him appear on Bret Weinstein’s podcast. “That’s a liar. He’s lying and he knows it,” I said aloud, to no one in particular. Overnight, ivermectin was everywhere. I could barely wrap my head around what was happening. I reached out to Bret’s wife, Heather Heying (who I considered to be the more reasonable of the two), and asked her if she could send me a link to someone other than Pierre Kory. She wrote back, glibly, something to the effect that I should do my own research. So I did.

If you have seen this infographic, well, you’ve seen this infographic. It appears less frequently now than it did a couple of years ago, but for a while it was everywhere. The site it promotes promises to be a real-time meta-analysis of the studies evaluating ivermectin for COVID-19. The fact that this is not a serious meta-analysis is not up for debate. It ruthlessly cherry-picks outcomes, compares apples to oranges, and includes data which is either low-quality or fraudulent. Don’t believe me? Check this out.

Wow, a randomised controlled trial (n=399) showing “significantly lower COVID-19 cases with ivermectin prophylaxis.” So what’s the problem? Well the authors of the meta-analysis got this information from a press release by French company Medincell. You mean they didn’t read the study? Nope. How do I know that? Because no one has read the study. It was never published. And this is what happens if you try to access the press release today.

It’s gone. Not only did Medincell never publish their findings, they’d prefer we forget the whole thing. I don’t know whether the study ever actually took place, but what I do know is that a few days after publishing the press release breathlessly announcing the promising results of their ivermectin study, they released another press release (see below). It was, one way or another, a stunt to improve their stock valuation and it probably made someone a lot of money.

To make matters worse, it’s not just ivermectin. It’s a whole network of interconnected websites we collectively refer to as “the c19 sites” covering every possible “early treatment” for COVID-19. (The first of the sites launched, in August 2020, as a “real-time” meta-analysis of hydroxychloroquine). The sites are so prolific, so insanely overstuffed with citations and data points, that they seem almost purpose-built to deceive the layperson.

Eventually people started wondering, “Who built these things and why? We’d like to talk to them about some problems with their work.” There was one significant problem. The authors were, and are, anonymous. There’s that word again.

In early 2022, and again in early 2023, I tried to find out who or what is behind these websites and, let me tell you, it was tough going. For one thing, these websites are extremely peculiar. They’re entirely static (meaning they do not call and present content from a database, which would be customary for a site with this volume of information) but it makes them hard to attack and, even worse, figure out who built them. There may be a database powering the sites somewhere, but the entire contents are retrieved from the database, formatted with HTML and CSS, and then uploaded.

These websites are also deeply weird. Aside from the (deliberately) overwhelming amount of links and citations, they also look somewhat alien. They don’t follow any particular design pattern, the fonts are unusual, as is the spacing and formatting. They’re not the work of an engineer who works in, say, Silicon Valley. They have a strange “outsider art” quality to them, as if the person(s) responsible are either self-taught or learned to code in an unorthodox or highly structured but security-conscious setting outside the tech industry.

I’m a very good profiler. I’m not, however, a good “last mile” ratcatcher. (As some of you may remember, I once rather famously picked the wrong expat German-speaking gynaecologist anti-vaxxer at the University of Sydney who happens to be married to a midwife. My profile was good, but what are the odds.)

So this is what I came up with:

• Does not speak English as a first language. The language is not “Western European;” the language may not use the Roman alphabet, and may be written right-to-left;

• Extremely private, or security-conscious to the point of paranoia, suggesting a desire to keep secrets from emerging or to protect a professional reputation;

• Learned to code websites outside the web development industry, may be self-taught, studied in the late 1990s, or learned to code in a “mission critical” environment;

• May have served in the military, or have done mandatory military/national service;

• Aged 40 to 50.

Of course all this presumes one person and not several working as team. If it’s several, I’m sure you can guess which parts of the profile you can take out and which you can leave in.

The only thing close to a smoking gun we have in this respect comes courtesy of Dr David Boulware, who corresponded with the sites’ maker(s) by email in 2020. This from an excellent 2022 piece called “‘You will not believe what I’ve just found.’ Inside the ivermectin saga: a hacked password, mysterious websites and faulty data” (appearing at, of all places, MarketWatch):

In early 2023 I wrote to Dr Boulware to see if he would share the original emails with me. It turns out that the IP address of the mail server from which Dr Boulware received replies was the Google datacentre in Hamina, Finland.

Hamina is a small town in the middle of nowhere. Why would Google put a massive data centre in… Oh fuck, oh fuck…

That’s right. Google put a data centre as close to St Petersburg as they could. One can only speculate if there is anything more going on here, and I’m disinclined to say it’s anything other than hoovering up as much of the web’s traffic as they can.

So… Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

A Man, Amantonio

Let’s rewind to 2022, before I had received that useful bit of information from Dr Boulware and was doing my own research the brute force way. One of the techniques I use is to try to look at where a person or thing is mentioned, to see if the culprit will give up the ghost during the early days, when they’re likely to be sloppier but more openly proud of their handiwork. One person who seemed unusually fond of the c19 meta-analyses was a Russian-language blogger called “Amantonio.”

(Yes, at some point I discovered that using Russian search engine Yandex yielded much more interesting results for many of my topics of interest than Google. Make of that what you will.)

This is the translation of part of that extremely long blog post. This guy really, really writes like our guy AND he fits the profile perfectly.

Right, so at that point I was reasoning that, if I could figure out who Amantonio is, I might have a good fit. The next part came pretty easily, as it turns out a lot of people were already wondering the same thing.

It turns out Amantonio (or A Amantonio, or Anton Amantonio) is a pretty big deal in the Russian anti-vaccine community. He got in hot water for his book To Vaccinate or not to Vaccinate: A Review of Scientific Literature on Vaccines. The publisher pulled it, and I’d imagine you have to work pretty hard as a Russian anti-vaxxer to get in trouble. Amantonio switched to self-publishing his book which, of course, made him even more popular and sold a ton more copies. Ooh! Available in Ukraine! The Russian pro-vaccine community [I’m impressed guys, hang in there!] set about trying to do the same thing with Amantonio I was trying to do with the c19 sites.

Here’s how easy it is. A Russian speaker living in Austria called “Kelaskin” (I can’t recall if it’s a first name, a last name, or an alias) submitted a PayPal donation of €0.01 to Amantonio’s blog and the receipt coughed up his real name. (Investigators take note special note of that neat trick.)

The name on the receipt is “Tal Ilani,” an Israeli engineer.

From there, Kelaskin is able to work out his birth name, Anatoly Ulanovsky, and also that of his wife, Ruzana Malenkovich. Malenkovich appears to be very involved in the work. She’s also a medical doctor (which is both surprising and not surprising). In the introduction to his Russian-language book, Ulanovsky credits her with teaching him how to read scientific literature.

Malenkovich appears to have taken some software development training, but not very much, and in a country with mandatory military service. (Ding ding ding ding ding.)

From here, Kelaskin is able to find out virtually everything about this pair. It appears that Ulanovsky used to publish a website called SciBook. Look at the structure of this website. IT’S A BIG FUCKING LIST OF THINGS. TWO LISTS, ONE ON THE LEFT AND ONE ON THE RIGHT. (I’d also like you to notice that the website appears to have been developed between 2017 and 2019. Why, in 2019, did he consider the project complete? We’ll get to that.)

Here’s an automated translation of another Russian LiveJournal user describing just how prolific Amantonio’s gish gallop is and yet how he is also capable of wielding scientific literature competently.

So… How am I doing so far? Because I promised you some weird shit and now it’s going to get weird.

Shit Gets Weird

What? What did I just read? Here is this Rudashevsky chap and some of his “followers.” Honestly this one makes me feel a bit sick.

In any case Ulanovsky appears to have broken with the cult and, I guess, met Ruzana Malenkovich who appears to be a member of a completely different (and slightly less groomy cult) called the Anastasians or “The Ringing Cedars of Russia.” According to Kelaskin, Ulanovsky and Malenkovich formed part of a group dedicated to establishing a cell for the Anastasian cult in Israel.

But who are these Anastasians and what do they want? Well, they’re a bit odd. I would describe it as “Slavic essentialist neo-pagan eco-fascism.” In the 1990s a writer by the name of Vladimir Megre wrote a series of books called The Ringing Cedars of Russia in which he claims to have encountered a prophet called Anastasia who is some sort of (presumably hot) Slavic girl-Osho who transmits the contents of his books to him.

This is a photo of some Anastasians. Run. Don’t look back, just run.

Especially important to the Anastasians is child-rearing and enormous emphasis is indeed placed on the early life of the child and living in harmony with nature. I mean I’d kinda be down if it wasn’t also sideloading white, Slavic supremacy—wait a minute, Ulanovsky and Malenkovich are Jewish, what the—?

Ulanovsky and Malenkovich seem full of contradictions. An electrical engineer and medical doctor, both Jewish, repping a Slavic-supremacist Midsommar cult who want to live in nature and eat bugs but no not in that way. Remember that screenshot of Tal Ilani’s profile that led Kelaskin to Ulanovsky? Well at the time he was doing a stint in San Diego working as an electrical engineer for—I think a semiconductor firm?—called Entropic Communications. This was his boss at the time.

Isn’t this all just a bit too much?

Back to the Books

So let’s return to Turtles, specifically Mary Holland’s forward.

OK got it. The book was originally published in 2019 in Israel by those pesky anonymous authors. Well here’s a screenshot of Ulanovsky’s SciBook and then some text from a translation of To Vaccinate or not to Vaccinate: A Review of Scientific Literature on Vaccines followed by a screenshot from Turtles.

Now I want you to take a look at the table of contents for Turtles:

It’s not the same as the table of contents for To Vaccinate or not to Vaccinate, and that worried me a bit at first. But, I assure you the books are functionally identical. Content has been moved around a bit, expanded upon, or molded to fit an American context. This, I think, was Mary Holland’s role. Mary Holland and the CHD took Ulanovsky’s book (Hebrew, 2019; Russian, 2020) and adapted it for an American audience (2022).

Conclusion

What does it mean that an American presidential candidate’s primary source material is this book? Almost nobody in the West has heard of it and yet RFK’s team were like “yeah, let’s beef it up and add a quote from the Matrix.” I stumbled onto this while trying to solve a completely different problem I figured might involve Russians or Israelis or both. What is going on? Listen, if you want to get way in the weeds with this thing, corner me in the pub one night and ask me about my alternate theories (“The Finnish Lone Wolf” and “The French Connection”) this has been a wild ride.

I leave you with a bunch of random screenshots from both To Vaccinate or not to Vaccinate: A Review of Scientific Literature on Vaccines and Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth. At some point while writing this article I got pretty loopy. Reading both books side-by-side is quite a trip. You forget which one is which.