Watch For This Ad From Steve Black

Updated: Vic Wulsin's campaign issued this statement about the ad:

Black Lies to Voters

Continues His Negative Campaign Of Smear And “Innuendo”

With one last dying gasp, Steve Black’s campaign, in a desperate effort to mislead the voters, is accusing Vic Wulsin of covering up experiments described in press accounts a full 10 years before her work occurred.

Steve Black’s inability to connect with voters on the issues that matter to the people of Ohio led him to run this baseless and negative ad.

The Cincinnati Enquirer described Black’s attacks as “based more on innuendo than fact,” and the Dayton Daily News said the attacks “don’t wash.” Both papers took Black to task for running a negative campaign against Wulsin.

In his commercial, Steve Black supports his misleading claims with an LA Times article from October 30, 1994.

Medical experiments: "Dangerous" "Scientifically unsound"
Source: Los Angeles Times, 10/30/94

What Steve Black doesn’t tell voters is that Vic Wulsin’s work for the Heimlich Institute was in 2004, a decade after the article was written. How could Dr. Wulsin be responsible for “covering up” experiments described in a newspaper article ten years earlier?

The answer, of course, is that she didn’t cover up anything. Dr. Wulsin, as she has maintained all along, did nothing wrong. She was hired by The Heimlich Institute to perform a literature review and was fired when the Institute realized her report opposed further research without proof of effectiveness and significantly upgraded standards of review.

In fact, Steve Black supported Vic Wulsin in her 2006 run against Jean Schmidt, and the families have known each other for decades. His $1000 donation to her campaign was the largest he's ever given to a Democrat.

With over 270 physicians donating to her campaign and support from the political arms of the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Psychiatric Association, and the American Medical Association, Wulsin’s reputation and character should not be in question.
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There's a new anti-Victoria Wulsin ad from the Steve Black campaign that essentially accuses Wulsin of covering up controversial experiments with AIDS patients and malaria.




Dan Herkert, Black's campaign manager, said the ad wasn't pulled from Ch. 5, as had been believed by the Wulsin camp. If it ran, Herkert said, it ran too early - it's supposed to air tonight through Monday night.


He wouldn't tell Enquirer reporter Margaret McGurk today how much the campaign spent on the ad or whether it will run on other stations.




Jerry Imsicke, Channel 5's political sales manager, said this afternoon that the ad had already aired several times and would continue to do so. "It's not going to be pulled."




The ad's referring to a complaint against Wulsin from Dr. Robert Baratz, a Massachusetts doctor and long-time critic of Dr. Henry Heimlich. Wulsin once worked for the Heimlich Institute. Baratz's 2006 letter to the Ohio Medical Board accusing Wulsin of unethical behavior has been a source of ammunition for Black. Baratz condemned Wulsin for conducting a literature review of the Heimlich Institute's controversial experiments using malaria on HIV/AIDS patients in China and Ethiopia. The medical board will not release any information about the resulting investigation. Wulsin said she did nothing wrong, and that she was fired when her report to Heimlich outed problems with the experiments.




Here's some of the wording in the ad, courtesy of the Wulsin camp:


It opens with a black and white picture of Black, reviewing papers, and with the standard words: "I'm Steve Black, and I approve this message."

"An institute's unethical experiment, horrifying but true; Deliberately infecting AIDS patients with malaria; Dr. Vic Wulsin could have blown the whistle, but didn't. She took their money and stayed silent."

"Medical experiments: "Dangerous" "scientifically unsound" source: LA Times, 10/30/94. Medical experts call the experiments dangerous and scientifically unsound."

"A council called for an investigation, charging Wulsin with covering up the experiments. Dangerous Experiments. A cover-up. Ohio deserves better than Dr. Vic Wulsin."