Dr. Philip McMillan,  John McMillan

A retired German immunologist says the brain’s insulation is coming off, and a UK physician’s hospital data suggest the diseases his theory predicts are already climbing.

On Sunday, September 20, at UK Column’s 20th anniversary gathering, a 79-year-old professor walked on stage with a hypothesis he had never shared in public. Sucharit Bhakdi ran the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene at the University of Mainz for two decades before retiring in 2012. During the pandemic he became one of the most prominent scientific critics of mRNA vaccination, then went quiet after his colleague, the pathologist Arne Burkhardt, died in an accident in May 2023.

Now he is back, and this time it is not about hearts or clots. It is about the wiring of the brain.

The Insulation Is Coming Off

The first wave of post-vaccine illness, Bhakdi says, looked as he had warned: cardiac disease, clots, autoimmune disease, cancer. What caught him off guard came this summer. Too many people, of every age, seemed to be losing control of their movements, their memories, their thoughts, even their personalities. In July he settled on a common denominator: demyelinating disease.

Picture the brain as a bundle of electrical wiring. Each nerve fiber, or axon, carries electrical impulses, and electricity cannot travel through water. So the fiber is wrapped in a fatty, water-repellent coat called myelin, the way copper wire is wrapped in plastic. Strip the coating and the signal shorts and fails. The cells that lay down that coating are oligodendrocytes.

Multiple sclerosis is the textbook demyelinating disease. Bhakdi casts a wider net than most neurologists would, adding Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Guillain-Barré syndrome, transverse myelitis and autism. What unites them, in his telling, is a puzzle medicine has never cracked.

“The funny thing is that once a demyelinating disease begins, it does not stop by itself. It doesn’t heal. And this has been one of the greatest mysteries of modern medicine,” said Bhakdi.

Fireworks And Fire Extinguishers

To explain why, he went back to 1972 and his first years at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology in Freiburg. Blood carries two cascade systems. One is coagulation, which makes clots. The other is complement, a chain of proteins that produces inflammation once set off. Bhakdi likens it to fireworks: any cell hit by enough sparks burns and dies.

Complement fires constantly, from birth to death. Cells survive because their surfaces carry protective proteins, fire extinguishers in Bhakdi’s image, that snuff out stray sparks. Blood poisoning is what happens when the fireworks overwhelm the extinguishers. As a young researcher he watched student volunteers injected with bacterial endotoxin. Within minutes they were sweating, pulses racing, blood pressure collapsing.

The lipid nanoparticles that package mRNA vaccines set off complement too, no antibodies required. Laboratory work published in 2024 found that both Comirnaty and Spikevax activate complement in human serum and drive the release of inflammatory cytokines. In Bhakdi’s view, that finding alone should have halted the program.

The Cell With Too Few Extinguishers

Bhakdi has long argued that injected mRNA is taken up by the cells lining small blood vessels, which then manufacture a foreign protein. The immune system attacks those cells, small clots form, and whatever lies downstream of the blockage is starved. If that includes oligodendrocytes, they die and their myelin falls away.

Could the fallen myelin keep the destruction going? Myelin debris activates complement. And research going back to the 1990s found that oligodendrocytes carry fewer complement-regulating proteins than almost any other cell type, which makes them unusually easy to kill.

So each burst of complement lands beside the cells least able to survive it. They die, shed more myelin, and the fireworks start again. A loop that feeds itself would explain why these diseases don’t heal, and why cortisone and other immune suppressants so often disappoint. It is elegant, and for now it is on paper: the human data are messier than the rat studies, with adult human oligodendrocytes showing patchy protection rather than none.

What The Uk Numbers Show

Dr. Philip McMillan, who tracks neurological admissions in England, says the pattern Bhakdi describes is already visible. Using Hospital Episode Statistics from 2016 to 2025, he reports migraine admissions up 33 percent, multiple sclerosis up 32 percent and inflammatory polyneuropathy up 39 percent, all accelerating. Hydrocephalus, an excess of fluid in the brain, is up 21 percent from a flat baseline.

These are his own analyses, not peer-reviewed findings, and diagnostic codes rise for many reasons. Still, the direction is hard to wave away.

McMillan’s model puts the inflammation somewhere specific: the choroid plexus, the tissue that produces cerebrospinal fluid, above all the one behind the brainstem. If the blood-brain barrier fails there, white blood cells and cytokines pour into the fluid that bathes the whole brain: petrol on the fire. Add meningeal inflammation, which shows up as worsening migraine, and cerebral microclots, and you have his three drivers. Patients carrying all three form what he calls the triple overlap: persistent migraine with brain fog, marked fatigue, dizziness and collapses, and a cognitive slowdown steep enough to knock them off their previous baseline. They return to hospital again and again, tests normal, symptoms dragging on for months.

Why The Delay?

If lipid nanoparticles and spike protein do the damage, why doesn’t it show up right after the injection? Fair question, and it is where McMillan parts company with those who blame only the vaccine, or only infection. His answer is priming: a primed immune system is fine on its own, but the trouble starts when the virus keeps coming round. Think of a penicillin allergy: a rash the first time, a severe rash the second, anaphylaxis the third. McMillan calls the result the COVID storm, a spike-triggered autoimmune flare that can lie dormant for a year or three, then erupt after a reinfection that felt mild.

Turmeric And Three Friends

Is there anything to be done? Bhakdi went looking for natural complement inhibitors and landed on curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric. There is real chemistry here: a 2005 study found curcumin blocked both major complement pathways in the test tube, though only at concentrations far beyond anything a supplement delivers.

After Bhakdi raised the idea at a Doctors for COVID Ethics meeting on August 18, a Norwegian physician wrote to say four years of curcumin had done little for his vaccine-injured patients, until he switched to a newly patented German formulation that pushes blood levels much higher. His last few severely ill patients seemed better. And since these patients usually have a leaky blood-brain barrier, what reaches the blood reaches the brain.

Bhakdi bought the product for three close friends three weeks ago. Last Monday one of them, a woman bedridden for four years with two teenage children, phoned to say she felt it was doing her good. That is one phone call, not a trial, and Bhakdi knows it.

A Hypothesis Offered To Be Broken

He ended by asking the room, and the wider scientific community, to try with all their might to disprove the hypothesis, and to let it stand as a beacon of hope until they do. That is how science is meant to work, and more than the vaccine injured usually get.

McMillan’s plea is more urgent. He is not sure triple-overlap patients can be fixed once cognition has slid that far, so the job is to learn the pattern and find people before they reach it. One footnote from him: rebuilding myelin requires nitric oxide, the molecule at the center of his new book, The NO Secrets.

“If you leave them and you wait until the cognitive decline is so far gone, there is nothing that can be done,” said McMillan.

Nobody has proven that mRNA vaccines strip myelin. What two doctors have done is put a mechanism and a dataset on the same table and ask who is willing to look. Leave it another decade, McMillan warns, and the admissions data will answer for us.