Jane Ruby: The Mike Adams of nursing and health economics

Last week, I discussed how antivaxxers had recycled old antivax fears about scary-sounding DNA in vaccines. In the past, they would claim that DNA from HPV in Gardasil or from the old cell lines derived from fetal cells would somehow integrate with the vaccine recipient’s DNA and wreak havoc, usually through a “hypothesized—and I do use the word loosely—link to autoimmune reactions leading to autism and all sorts of autoimmune diseases. In last week’s example, they were fear mongering about “moth DNA” in the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, supposedly from the Sf9 cell line that was originally isolated from the ovaries of the fall armyworm moth. (Sf9 cells are, like the cell lines derived from fetuses in the 1960s and 1970s, used to produce large quantities of antigen for use in vaccines, in the case of the Novavax vaccine, the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2.) A major player in spreading this old antivaccine distortion was someone named Dr. Jane Ruby.

I mentioned at the time that we had met Dr. Jane Ruby once before because she is one of the prime sources of the antivaccine conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines are causing huge numbers of deaths from massive blood clots that only a lone maverick mortician is discovering when he embalms bodies. Of course, as pathologists pointed out to me, the clots that were being shown were almost certainly postmortem, not clots that formed before death, but that inconvenient fact didn’t stop Mike Adams from adding to Ruby’s claim by suggesting that what were likely hairs found in the clots that got there from handling were in actuality “self-assembling nanoparticles.” She’s also a major source of the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines are mostly graphene oxide. In any case, over the last week, it’s become apparent to me that Jane Ruby is a major source of COVID-19 disinformation, which made me want to take a closer look, starting with looking at who she was.

When I first encounter “Dr. Jane Ruby,” I assumed that she was a physician. Certainly, she goes out of her way to give that impression in her appearances, for instance, this appearance on the Stew Peters network:

Note the white coat and the stethoscope draped over her shoulders. (As a historical note, surgeons have in general tended to make fun of this particular look, calling the stethoscope worn this way a “flea collar,” after a frequently used term for internal medicine doctors. At least, they did back in the day, when I was resident.) If I initially assumed that “Dr. Jane Ruby” was actually a physician, then you can bet that lay people seeing her videos almost certainly assume the same thing, and Ruby certainly does nothing to disabuse them of that idea in any of her appearances or articles that I’ve come across thus far. For her, the title of “doctor” plus the stethoscope and white jacket implies that she’s a physician, and I have little doubt that she’s doing this intentionally.

For instance, here’s a photo from her Facebook account:

So I thought I’d follow up on last week’s post and look into her background a bit more, as well as some of her other truly outlandish misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.

Who is “Dr. Jane Ruby”?

The first hints about Dr. Ruby’s background came when I did the most obvious thing and perused her website:

BIO:  Dr. Jane Ruby is a medical professional and a pharmaceutical drug development expert with over 20 years of experience in regulatory processes for drug approval with the FDA and the EMA. She is also a published international health economist who has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows across America.   Dr. Ruby worked on the human research studies to launch some of the most famous compounds in the world in Depression, Alzheimer’s disease, Addiction, and Cardio-pulmonary diseases.

One notes the lack of the terms “physician” or “medical doctor.” I was, however, interested in her claims of having worked for the pharmaceutical industry for so long, as well as her claiming to be a health economist; so I started doing some digging into her background. Why? Mainly, I was curious how someone with this claimed long background in big pharma could have turned so quickly into a major spreader of COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracy theories.

First, I was interested in Ruby’s publication record. Searching PubMed for someone with a name as common as hers always brings up the results of multiple investigators, and this was no exception. I got 186 results from my first search. So next, I looked at other sources. ResearchGate has an entry, and there are 23 publications. Of note, none of these publications appear to be relevant to pandemics, infectious disease, COVID-19, vaccines, or the like. Most were about opioids such as buprenorphine and healthcare costs associated with treating opioid dependence. Certainly, none were about clinical trials of “groundbreaking drugs,” leading me to conclude that if Dr. Ruby did indeed do such work, it isn’t reflected in her PubMed record.

A CV posted to SignalHire lists her as being the CEO of Ruby Health Consulting, doing HEOR (health economics and outcomes research), with an employment record that looks like this:

• President at Ruby Health Consulting – HEOR, Jan 2018 – Current 
• Director, HEOR at SK Life Science, Inc. (Paramus, New Jersey, United States) Jan 2020 – Jan 2021
• Associate Director, Field Medical / HEOR at Pear Therapeutics (Boston, Massachusetts, United States) Jan 2019 – Jan 2020
• HEOR National Lead at Endo Pharmaceuticals (Ballsbridge, County Dublin, Ireland) Jan 2017 – Dec 2019
• Medical Affairs / HEOR Lead at Indivior  (Richmond, VA, United States) Jan 2010 – Jan 2017
• Sr Medical Science Liaison / Managed Care MSL at Forest Laboratories (now Allergan) Dec 2000 – Nov 2010
• Director at Scharf Institute for Research and Tri-State Sleep Disorders CenterJan 1998 – Jan 2001
• Assistant Professor / Researcher at Nazareth College (Rochester, ny, United States) Jan 1994 – Jan 1998
• Nurse Practitioner at University of Rochester Medical Center (Rochester, NY, United States) Jan 1990 – Jan 1994
• Registered Nurse at University of Rochester Medical Center (Rochester, NY, United States) Jan 1988 – Jan 1990

So Dr. Ruby appears to have worked at various times for other pharmaceutical companies in HEOR (health economics and outcomes research). I also discovered that before that she was a nurse and nurse practitioner/advanced practice nurse, not a physician, having gotten a masters in nursing at the University of Rochester. Now don’t get me wrong. I love NPs. I’ve defended them on many occasions against outlandish attacks by my fellow physicians. However, “Dr. Ruby” does not appear to have a doctorate even in nursing. What she does have are a PhD in psychology from Kennedy Western University in Psychology and a Doctor of Education (EdD) from the University of Rochester, as well as masters degrees in nursing and International Health Economics. One can’t help but conclude that Dr. Ruby is definitely trying to give the impression that she is a physician, complete with her frequently appearing with a stethoscope and lab coat. I’d be willing to bet that her audience thinks she’s a physician. She isn’t, and if her CV is any indication she hasn’t even practiced nursing for over 20 years.

These days, Dr. Ruby lists as her position President at Ruby Health Consulting – HEOR (again!), and, of course, she has her own show hosted on the Stew Peters Network, for which she made the video above. Just a perusal of this show, which is on Rumble, of course, shows that it’s a full-on right wing conspiracy and medical misinformation show. Don’t believe me? Just peruse the list of videos for yourself. Also, note how her sponsors include lots of companies marketing quackery and supplements, for example:

• 30 Day Transformation: Rubysuperfoods.com
• MyPillow.com (Promo Code: Ruby)
• The Tower Garden: Drjaneruby.towergarden.com
• Zstacklife.com (Promo Code: Ruby)
• Filterssuck.com (Promo Code RUBY for 10% off and free shipping)
• CardioMiracle: MyPowerHeart.com
• Getyourjava.com Promo Code: Ruby
• Become a Premium Member! Redvoicemedia.net/ruby
• Natural Detox: therootbrands.com/drjane
• Earthing/Grounding: https://www.earthing.com/?rfsn=6528853.01597ca

Then, of course, she has her own “superfoods” line of products.

Again, one of the hallmarks of science denial is fake experts, often with credential inflation, and that’s what we have here. Not only does it appear that it’s been over two decades since Ruby has practiced nursing, advanced practice or otherwise, but there’s nothing that I’ve been able to find about Ruby’s history to suggest that she has any special expertise in the relevant fields of infectious disease, virology, molecular biology, epidemiology, immunology, or, well, any field relevant to commenting authoritatively on the safety and efficacy of vaccines other than—maybe, judging from her publication record—a bit of epidemiology in unrelated fields.

Her “credentials,” such as they are, do appear to be unfortunately more than adequate to provide a veneer of scientific expertise good enough to fool her audience. To boil it all down, “Dr.” Jane Ruby is an advanced practice nurse who has apparently not engaged in clinical practice for at least a couple of decades. She also has a background in health economics and has worked for a number of pharmaceutical companies in their HEOR departments, none of which qualifies her to pontificate on pandemics, vaccines, viruses, molecular biology, or anything related.

COVID-19 misinformation a-go-go!

Jane Ruby has made a name for herself as one of the go-to “medical professionals” providing a veneer of seeming scientific credibility to the most outlandish conspiracy theories. I already discussed her fear mongering about “moth DNA” and “moth cells” in the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, complete with a joke about how Jeff Goldblum (star of the 1980s horror/SF movie The Fly) agrees that there should be no insect DNA or cells ever used for any vaccine whatsoever. However, it didn’t take me long to see that she had taken it all one step further a week ago:

Before I look at the question, I can’t resist commenting on how over-the-top Stew Peters is. Before he gets to this particular question, he goes on a rant about how the NIH should be torn down and everyone who had anything to do with the “shots” should be arrested and prosecuted, thus echoing a common antivax fantasy about “justice” (in reality, retribution only thinly disguised as “justice”) against their enemies, sometimes called “Nuremberg 2.0.) Of course, the funny thing is how both of them are so upset that Donald Trump is now “pushing the shots” and Peters gets even more upset when Ruby suggests that even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is also pushing them, ranting that Trump and DeSantis should be calling the shots “fake.”

In response to the question about the vaccines supposedly “corrupting” human DNA, Ruby answers that “many experts” (more accurately if you’re a science-based person, fake experts) now believe that the human genome “is now poisoned” and that it’s “permanently changed” and will “probably change further.” She then observes:

What that means for future generations, I don’t know, but he discusses something called recombinant DNA, which is a process by which, you know, in life the gene pool is shuffled around so that we don’t have too much similarity. And so what he predicts is going to happen is for jabbed people, if they are lucky enough to procreate—unlucky for the rest of the world—they are sending offspring into the world that may be silent in terms of manifestations, illnesses, death for a generation, but they will pass it on, and it will keep going on and on and on and on. So that’s the diabolical nature of this whole thing.

How convenient! These “permanent changes” in your DNA will be silent for a generation and only manifest themselves a generation on. It’s a lovely seemingly non-falsifiable claim, on the surface, that allows someone like Jane Ruby to dismiss observations that there is no evidence of long term harm from the vaccines by saying that we won’t see it until the next generation. Of course, the claim really is falsifiable, both from a basic science standpoint in that there is no known biological mechanism for existing COVID-19 vaccines to do this, no matter how much antivaxxers try to make one up (as anyone with even a basic understanding of molecular biology knows), as well as from scientific observations that they don’t do this.

Just the other day, Ruby was featured revisiting the claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause clots by introducing “self-assembling nanoparticles” into your body, claiming that they had discovered the makeup of the clots:

Unsurprisingly, she had teamed up with Mike Adams himself to spread this “news” a few days before. Hilariously, she cited new “structures” observed in these clots removed from people who had, according to her, died from COVID-19 vaccines, and…well, let me just let Mike Adams describe it:

Ruby, also a pharmaceutical drug development expert, showed the audience one of Hirschman’s latest discoveries – a white fibrous clot with chunky ball sacs. She pointed out that they may have grown intermittently and are almost like outgrowths of the original white fibrous clot.

Hirschman said the chunky ball sacs, which were all from vaccinated individuals, reminded him of spider eggs covered by spider web.

“And you can see that white fibrous stuff kind of marbling into that little ball, which kind of looks like a small grape. But the thing is, even in the beginning a lot of times I noticed that one end or the other would be some blood attached to the white fibers clot that I’m having. And then other times it’s kind of running along the white fiber material as well,” Hirschman said.

Ruby mentioned that a 1,500 times magnification of the blood clots have shown things that are part of the self-assembling nanoparticles. She noted that Brighteon.TV founder Mike Adams said initial analysis showed the white clots are not organic material, protein, amyloid, fibrin or cholesterol. Hirschman also confirmed that the strange white stuff in the blood clots is not normal.

Again, note the fake expert citation. Whatever she is, “Dr.” Jane Ruby is not a “pharmaceutical drug development expert.” She’s a health economist who did HEOR. She’s already made it abundantly clear that she has no clue what she’s talking about when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines, blood clots, biology, or pretty much everything else that she says about pharma, the pandemic, and vaccines. Again, we’ve met Hirschman before with Ruby in the context of Mike Adams’ incompetent examination of postmortem blood clots under the microscope. You can see the pictures there.

I was particularly amused by the use of the phrase “chunky ball sacs” by Hirschman and Ruby. Yes, I admit to a bit of an adolescent amusement at such a phrase, but as an older man now I was even more amused at how they invoked the imagery of spider eggs in order to provoke fear, as if those structures were actually eggs of some sort ready to hatch the evil self-assembling nanoparticles. I also couldn’t help but notice a mention of how a “radiologist from Michigan told him that the micro clots are very concerning because they can flow through the body and block out vessels and slowly starve the organs from getting the nutrients that they need.” I’m in Michigan. I want to know who that radiologist is, so that I can avoid him or her like the plague.

As for who did the “chemical analysis” of these clots? It was Mike Adams, who reported it last week. Remember how I made fun of Mike Adams years ago for using mass spectrometry to look for heavy metals in vaccines and lead in Flint water? He’s at it again, this time with the clots he got from Hirschman. Never mind that mass spectroscopy of biological compounds with proteins, lipids, and other complex biological molecules is a difficult undertaking, even for experts in mass spectrometry. That never stopped our intrepid Mike Adams before! In the video above, Ruby goes on about how these clots are “not part of blood,” which makes me wonder if she ever studied the clotting cascade in nursing school. She and Adams assume that clots are mostly made of blood and are seemingly amazed to discover that they are not, pointing to that as evidence that these clots are somehow unnatural, even though clots are mostly protein.

Reading Adams’s article on it all just made me laugh out loud, for instance:

It’s clear from the elemental composition that the clots are not made of blood. Thus, they are not “blood clots.” For example, in our human blood sample, magnesium (Mg) was at 35 ppm, while in the clot, magnesium was only 1.7 ppm.

Similarly, in human blood, iron (Fe) was measured at 462 ppm while it was 20.6 ppm in the clot.

That last part about iron caught my attention. Again, clots are mostly proteins and platelets (which do not contain hemoglobin and its bound iron), not “blood.” So it’s not surprising that the concentration of iron would be a lot lower in them than in blood. Adams goes on and on about how various minerals are found in the clots at different concentrations and then concludes:

In summary, it is clear that:

• The clots are NOT blood clots.
• They are self-assembling. They get larger in the body and add to their aggregate size. This does not mean they are “alive,” and we doubt they have their own organs. They do not appear to be parasites. Rather, they self-assemble through some unknown mechanism.
• They are not made of human flesh or tissues that reflect the elemental ratios of macro minerals and trace minerals that we would expect to see in human tissue.
• They seem to harvest electrically conductive elements from circulating blood and incorporate these elements into their own biostructures, resulting in higher concentrations of these elements (Al, Sn, Na) compared to human blood.

We are all still trying to make sense of this, as this is nothing like we’ve ever seen before, and we’ve analyzed tens of thousands of food samples over the years, including flesh-based foods (dog food, cat food) and meat products such as chicken, beef and pork. We have also analyzed thousands of human hair samples. We’ve never encountered this before.

Adams promised a full PDF report on his results this week, but I haven’t been able to find it on his website yet. I might well have to look at that when he posts it and get back to you with a followup post.

In the meantime, Ruby claims that “shedding” from the vaccines is causing all manner of horrors in a truly amusing word salad:

Those who’ve taken the jab are given a genetic code that forces their body to make billions of spike proteins. It is what we believe is the residual off of what their bodies are producing, these spike proteins, that are jumping from people, are transferring from jabbed to the unjabbed. Therefore, it’s the genetic code that is interfering with your own code and turning off your tumor suppression activity. The unjabbed don’t get that material. They only get the offshoot of what their bodies are forced to make. At this point until I see something different in terms of a research study that’s highly controlled that can tell us differently, I don’t believe that we are at risk for the same.

She’s referring to the “unjabbed” getting cancer from shed spike proteins from the “jabbed.” She also wouldn’t know a highly controlled study if it bit her on the posterior, and shedding of spike protein from the vaccinated is just not a thing.

I did like this final question:

Her response:

Only if you allow it. I’m fighting, like Dr. Zelenko said, to my last breath. I’d rather die standing than live on my knees, as he said. So only if you allow it, and I think Stew’s going to have something interesting to add to that.

It wasn’t that interesting. He said that there is hope, to which Ruby added because of God, because of course she did. They both agreed that they’re “fighting for humanity” and “fighting for our kids” as well as “your kids” and “our grandkids.”

The bottom line is that “Dr. Jane Ruby” is not a physician. She is not really a scientist that I can tell. She is highly educated, having earned multiple advanced degrees in education, economics, and nursing. Indeed, she’s more educated than a lot of the physicians that she cosplays. Unfortunately, however, like many physicians (and nurses as well), somewhere along the way she turned full crank, a turn that clearly dates back to years before the pandemic. She’s antivax to the core, as you can see from some of her Instagram pictures:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr Jane Ruby (@drjaneruby)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr Jane Ruby (@drjaneruby)

Then there are the obligatory references to the Holocaust:

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A post shared by Dr Jane Ruby (@drjaneruby)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr Jane Ruby (@drjaneruby)

Basically, to boil it down, “Dr. Jane Ruby” is a fake expert, a conspiracy theorist who has bought into the whole right wing conspiracy ecosystem about the pandemic, masks, “lockdowns,” and vaccines. I realize that some might consider it the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel,” to discuss her disinformation. (Or—dare I say?—dunking on a 7′ hoop.) However, if there’s anything the last few years has taught us, it’s that those who do not take even the seemingly ridiculous seriously can fall prey to these conspiracy theories.