VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
AIDS HERESY AND THE NEW BISHOPS
By James P. Hogan
Monadnock Review 1997, 2001
Science is supposed to be concerned with objective truth — the way things are, that lie beyond the power of human action or desires to influence. Facts alone determine what is believed, and the consequences, good or bad, fall where they may. Politics is concerned with those things that are within human ability to change, and beliefs are encouraged that advance political agendas. All too often in this case, truth is left to fall where it may.
When the hysteria over AIDS broke out in the early eighties, I was living in the Mother Lode country in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California. Since I had long dismissed the mass media as a credible source of information on anything that mattered, I didn't take a lot of notice. A close friend and drinking buddy of mine at that time was a former Air Force physicist who helped with several books that I worked on there. Out of curiosity, we checked the actual figures from official sources such as various city and state health departments. The number of cases for the whole of California turned out to be somewhere between 1100 and 1200, and these were confined pretty much totally to a couple of well-defined parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles associated with drugs and other ways of life that I wasn't into. So this was the great "epidemic" that we'd been hearing about? Ah, but we didn't understand, people told us. This was being spread by a new virus that was 100% lethal and about to explode out into the population at large. You could catch it from sex, toilet seats, your dentist, from breathing the air, and once you did there was no defense. The species could be staring at extinction.
But I didn't buy this line either. I can't really offer a rationally packaged explanation of why. Part of it was that although AIDS had been around for some years, it was still clearly confined overwhelmingly to the original risk groups to which the term had first been applied. If it was going to "explode" out into the general population, there should have been unmistakable signs of it happening by now. There weren't. And another large part, I suppose, was that scaring the public had become such a lucrative and politically fruitful industry that the more horrific the situation was made to sound, the more skeptically I reacted. All the claims contradicted what my own eyes and ears told me. Nobody that I knew had it. Nobody that I knew knew anybody who had it. But "everybody knew" it was everywhere. Now, I don't doubt that when the Black Death hit Europe or smallpox reached the Americas, people knew they had an epidemic. When you need a billion-dollar propaganda industry to convince you there's a problem, you don't have a major problem.
So I got on with life and largely forgot about the issue until I visited the University of California, Berkeley, to meet Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology, whom a mutual friend had urged me to contact. Talking to Duesberg and some of his colleagues, both then and on later occasions, left me stupefied and led me to take a new interest in the subject. This has persisted over the years since and has involved contacts with others not only across the U.S., but as far removed as England, Germany, Australia, and South Africa. We like to think that the days of the Inquisition are over. Well, here's what can happen to politically incorrect science when it gets in the way of a bandwagon being propelled by lots of money — and to a scientist who ignores it and attempts simply to point at what the facts seem to be trying to say.
The first popular misunderstanding to clear up is that "AIDS" is not something new that appeared suddenly around 1980. It's a collection of old diseases that have been around for as long as medical history, that began showing up in clusters at greater than the average incidence. An example was Pneumocystis carinnii, a rare type of pneumonia caused by a normally benign microbe that inhabits the lungs of just about every human being on the planet; it becomes pathogenic typically in cancer patients whose immune systems are suppressed by chemotherapy. And, indeed, the presence of other opportunistic infections such as esophageal yeast infections confirmed immunosuppression in all of these early cases. Many of them also suffered from a hitherto rare blood-vessel tumor known as Kaposi's sarcoma. All this came as a surprise to medical authorities, since the cases were concentrated among males aged 20 to 40, usually considered a healthy age group, and led them to classify the conditions together as a syndrome presumed to have some single underlying cause. The victims were almost exclusively homosexuals, which led to a suspicion of an infectious agent, with sexual practices as the main mode of transmission. This seemed to be confirmed when other diseases associated with immune deficiency, such as TB among drug abusers, and various infections experienced by hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients, were included in the same general category too, which by this time was officially designated Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or "AIDS."
Subsequently, the agent responsible was stated to be a newly discovered virus of the kind known as "retroviruses," later given the name Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV. The AIDS diseases were opportunistic infections that struck following infection by HIV, which was said to destroy "T-helper cells," a subset of white blood cells which respond to the presence of invading microbes and stimulate other cells into producing the appropriate antibodies against them. This incapacitated the immune system and left the victim vulnerable.
And there you have the basic paradigm that still pretty much describes the official line today. This virus that nobody had heard of before — the technology to detect it didn't exist until the eighties — could lurk anywhere, and no vaccine existed to protect against it. Then it was found in association with various other kinds of sickness in Africa, giving rise to speculations that it might have originated there, and the media gloried in depictions of a global pandemic sweeping across continents out of control. Once smitten there was no cure, and progression to exceptionally unpleasant forms of physical devastation and eventual death was inevitable and irreversible.
While bad news for some, this came at a propitious time for a huge, overfunded, and largely out-of-work army within the biomedical establishment, which, it just so happened, had been set up, equipped, trained, and on the lookout for exactly such an emergency. Following the elimination of polio in the fifties and early sixties, the medical schools had been churning out virologists eager for more Nobel Prizes. New federal departments to monitor and report on infectious diseases stood waiting to be utilized. But the war on cancer had failed to find a viral cause, and all these forces in need of an epidemic converged in a crusade to unravel the workings of the deadly new virus and produce a vaccine against it. No other virus was ever so intensively studied. Published papers soon numbered thousands, and jobs were secure as federal expenditures grew to billions of dollars annually. Neither was the largess confined to just the medical-scientific community and its controlling bureaucracies. As HIV came to be automatically equated with AIDS, anyone testing positive qualified as a disaster victim eligible for treatment at public expense, which meant lucrative consultation and testing fees, and treatment with some of the most profitable drugs that the pharmaceuticals industry has ever marketed. And beyond that, with no vaccine available, the sole means of prevention lay in checking the spread of HIV. This meant funding for another growth sector of promotional agencies, advisory centers, educational campaigns, as well as support groups and counselors to minister to afflicted victims and their families. While many were meeting harrowing ends, others had never had it so good. Researchers who would otherwise have spent their lives peering through microscopes and cleaning Petri dishes became millionaires setting up companies to produce HIV kits and drawing royalties for the tests performed. Former dropouts were achieving political visibility and living comfortably as organizers of programs financed by government grants and drug-company handouts. It was a time for action, not thought; spreading the word, not asking questions. Besides, who would want to mess with this golden goose?
And then in the late eighties, Peter Duesberg published a paper suggesting that AIDS might not be caused by HIV at all — nor by any other virus, come to that. In fact, he didn't even think that "AIDS" was infectious!
What he saw was different groups of people getting sick in different ways for different reasons that had to do with the particular risks that those groups had always faced. No common cause tying them all together had ever been convincingly demonstrated; indeed, why such conditions as dementia and wasting disease should have been considered at all was something of a mystery, since they are not results of immunosuppression. Drug users were ruining their immune systems with the substances they were putting into their bodies, getting TB and pneumonia from unsterile needles and street drugs, and wasting as a consequence of the insomnia and malnutrition that typically go with the lifestyle; homosexuals were getting sarcomas from the practically universal use of nitrite inhalants, and yeast infections from the suppression of protective bacteria by overdosing on antibiotics used prophylactically; hemophiliacs were immune-suppressed by the repeated infusion of foreign protein; blood recipients were already sick for varying reasons; people being treated with the "antiviral" drug AZT were being poisoned; Africans were suffering from totally different diseases long characteristic of poverty in tropical environments; and a few individuals were left who got sick for reasons that would never be explained. The only difference in recent years was that some of those groups had gotten bigger. The increases matched closely the epidemic in drug use that had grown since the late sixties and early seventies, and Duesberg proposed drugs as the primary cause of the rises that were being seen.
Although Duesberg is highly qualified in this field, the observations that he was making really didn't demand doctorate knowledge or rarefied heights of intellect to understand. For a start, years after their appearances, the various "AIDS" diseases remained obstinately confined to the original risk groups, and the victims were still over 90% male. This isn't the pattern of an infectious disease, which spreads and affects everybody, male and female alike. For a new disease loose in a defenseless population, the spread would be exponential. And this was what had been predicted in the early days, but it just hadn't happened. While the media continued to terrify the public with a world of their own creation, planet Earth was getting along okay. Heterosexuals who didn't use drugs weren't getting AIDS; for the U.S., subtracting the known risk groups leaves about 500 per year — fewer than the fatalities from contaminated tap water. The spouses and partners of AIDS victims weren't catching it. Prostitutes who didn't do drugs weren't getting it, and customers of prostitutes weren't getting it. In short, these had all the characteristics of textbook non-infectious diseases.
It is an elementary principle of science and medicine that correlation alone is no proof of cause. If A is reported as generally occurring with B, there are four possible explanations: (1) A causes B; (2) B causes A; (3) something else causes both A and B; (4) the correlation is just coincidence or has been artificially exaggerated, e.g. by biased collecting of data. There's no justification in jumping to a conclusion like (1) until the other three have been rigorously eliminated.
In the haste to find an infectious agent, Duesberg maintained, the role of HIV had been interpreted the wrong way around. Far from being a common cause of the various conditions called "AIDS," HIV itself was an opportunistic infection that made itself known in the final stages of immune-system deterioration brought about in other ways. In a sense, AIDS caused HIV. Hence, it acted as a "marker" of high-risk groups, but was not in itself responsible for the health problems that those groups were experiencing. The high correlation between HIV and AIDS that was constantly being alluded to was an artifact of the way in which AIDS was defined:
HIV + indicator disease = AIDS
Indicator disease without HIV = Indicator disease
So if you've got all the symptoms of TB, and you test positive for HIV, you've got AIDS. But if you have a condition that's clinically indistinguishable and don't test positive for HIV, you've got TB.
And that, of course, would have made the problem scientifically and medically trivial.
When a scientific theory fails in its predictions, it is either modified or abandoned. Science welcomes informed criticism and is always ready to reexamine its conclusions in the light of new evidence or an alternative argument. The object, after all, is to find out what's true. But it seemed that what was going on here wasn't science. Duesberg was met by a chorus of outrage and ridicule, delivered with a level of vehemence that is seldom seen in professional circles. Instead of a willingness to reconsider, he was met by stratagems designed to conceal or deny that the predictions were failing. This is the kind of reaction typical of politics, not science, usually referred to euphemistically as "damage control."
For example, statistics for new AIDS cases were always quoted as cumulative figures that could only get bigger, contrasting with the normal practice with other diseases of reporting annual figures, where any decline is clear at a glance. And despite the media's ongoing stridency about an epidemic out of control, the actual figures from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for every category, were declining, and had been since a peak around 1988. And this was in spite of repeated redefinitions to cover more diseases, so that what wasn't AIDS one day became AIDS the next, causing more cases to be diagnosed. This happened five times from 1982 to 1993, with the result that the first nine months of 1993 showed as an overall rise of 5% what would otherwise — i.e., by the 1992 definition — have been a 33% drop. By 1997 the number of indicator diseases was 29. One of the new categories to be added was cervical cancer. (Militant feminists had been protesting that men received too much of the relief appropriations for AIDS victims.) Nobody was catching anything new, but the headlines blared heterosexual women as the fastest-growing AIDS group. Meanwhile, a concerted campaign across the schools and campuses was doing its part to terrorize young people over the ravages of teenage AIDS. Again, actual figures tell a different story. The number of cases in New York City reported by the CDC for ages 13-19 from 1981 to the end of June 1992 was 872. When homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs are eliminated, the number left not involving these risks (or not admitting to them) reduces to a grand total of 16 in an 11 year period. (Yes, sixteen. You did read that right.)
Viral diseases strike typically after an incubation period of days or weeks, which is the time in which the virus can replicate before the body develops an immunity. When this didn't happen for AIDS, the notion of a "slow" virus was introduced, which would delay the onset of symptoms for months. When a year passed with no sign of an epidemic, the time of onset was upped to five years; when nothing happened then either, to ten. Now we're being told ten to fifteen. Inventions to explain failed predictions are invariably a sign of a theory in trouble.
[Note: This is not the same as a virus going dormant, as can happen with some types of herpes, and reactivating later, such as in times of stress. In these cases, the most pronounced disease symptoms occur at the time of primary infection, before immunity is established; subsequent outbreaks are less severe — immunity is present, but reduced — and when they do occur, the virus is abundant and active. This does not describe AIDS. A long delay before any appearance of sickness is characteristic of the cumulative buildup of a toxic cause, like lung cancer from smoking or liver cirrhosis from alcohol excess.]
So against all this, on what grounds was AIDS said to be infectious in the first place? Just about the only argument, when you strip it down, seems to be the correlation — that AIDS occurs in geographic and risk-related clusters. This is not exactly compelling. Victims of airplane crashes and Montezuma's revenge are found in clusters too, but nobody takes that as evidence that they catch their condition from each other. It all becomes even more curious when you examine the credentials of the postulated transmitting agent, HIV.
One of the major advances in medicine during the last century was the development of scientific procedures to determine if a particular disease is infectious — carried by some microbe that's being passed around — and if so, to identify the microbe; or else a result of some factor in the environment, such as a dietary deficiency, a local genetic trait, a toxin. The prime criteria for making this distinction, dating from the last century and long adopted universally, are known as Koch's Postulates. There are four of them, and when all are met, the case is considered proved beyond reasonable doubt that the disease is infectious and caused by the suspected agent. HIV as the cause of AIDS fails every one.
(1) The microbe must be found in all cases of the disease.
By the CDC's own statistics, for 25% of the cases diagnosed in the U.S. the presence of HIV has been inferred presumptively, without actual testing. And anyway, by 1993, over 4000 cases of people dying of AIDS diseases were admitted to be HIV-free. The most recent redefinition includes a category in which AIDS can be diagnosed without a positive test for HIV. (How this can be so while at the same time HIV is insisted to be the cause of AIDS is a good question. The required logic is beyond my abilities.) The World Health Organization's clinical case-definition for AIDS in Africa (adopted in 1985) is not based on an HIV test but on combined symptoms of chronic diarrhea, prolonged fever, body-weight loss, and a persistent cough, none of which are new or uncommon on the African continent. Subsequent testing of sample groups diagnosed as having AIDS has given negative results on the order of 50%. Why diseases totally different from those listed in America and Europe, now not even required to show any HIV status, should be called the same thing is another good question.
(2) The microbe must be isolated from the host and grown in a pure culture.
This is to ensure that the disease was caused by the suspect germ and not by something unidentified in a mixture of substances. The tissues and body fluids of a patient with a genuine viral disease will have so many viruses pouring out of infected cells that it is a straightforward matter — a standard undergraduate exercise — to separate a pure sample and compare the result with known cataloged types. There have been numerous claims of isolating HIV, but closer examination shows them to be based on liberal stretchings of what the word has always been understood to mean. For example, using chemical stimulants to shock a fragment of defective RNA to express itself in a cell culture removed from any active immune system is a very different thing from demonstrating active viral infection. Despite the billions spent, no isolation of HIV has been achieved which meets the standards that virology normally requires.
(3) The microbe must be capable of reproducing the original disease when introduced into a susceptible host.
This asks to see that the disease can be reproduced by injecting the allegedly causative microbe into an uninfected, otherwise healthy host. It does not mean that the microbe must cause the disease every time (otherwise everyone would be sick all the time).
Two ways in which this can condition can be tested are: injection into laboratory animals and accidental infection of humans. (Deliberate infection of humans would be unethical). Chimpanzees have been injected since 1983 and developed antibodies, showing that the virus "takes," but none has developed AIDS symptoms. There have been a few vaguely described claims of health workers catching AIDS from needle sticks and other HIV exposure, but nothing conclusively documented. For comparison, the figure for hepatitis infections is 1500 per year. Hence, even if the case for AIDS were proved, hepatitis is hundreds of times more virulent. Yet we don't have a panic about it.
(4) The microbe must be found present in the host so infected.
This is irrelevant in the case of AIDS, since (3) has never been met.
The typical response to this violating of a basic principle that has served well for a century is either to ignore it or say that HIV is so complex that it renders Koch's Postulates obsolete. But Koch's Postulates are simply a formalization of common-sense logic, not a statement about microbes. The laws of logic don't become obsolete, any more than mathematics. And if the established criteria for infectiousness are thrown away, then by what alternative standard is HIV supposed to be judged infectious? Just clusterings of like symptoms? Simple correlations with no proof of any cause-effect relationship? That's called superstition, not science. It puts medicine back two hundred years.
So how did HIV come to be singled out as the cause to begin with? The answer seems to be, at a press conference. In April, 1984, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, sponsored a huge event and introduced the NIH researcher Robert Gallo to the press corps as the discoverer of the (then called HTLV-III) virus, which was declared to be the probable cause of AIDS. This came before publication of any papers in the scientific journals, violating the normal protocol of giving other scientists an opportunity to review such findings before they were made public. No doubt coincidentally, the American claim to fame came just in time to preempt the French researcher Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who had already published in the literature his discovery of what later turned out to be the same virus. From that point on, official policy was set in stone. All investigation of alternatives was dropped, and federal funding went only to research that reflected the approved line. This did not make for an atmosphere of dissent among career-minded scientists, who, had they been politically free to do so, might have pointed out that even if the cause of AIDS were indeed a virus, the hypothesis of its being HIV raised some distinctly problematical questions.
Proponents of the HIV dogma assert repeatedly that "the evidence for HIV is overwhelming." When they are asked to produce it or cite some reference, the usual response is ridicule or some ad hominem attack imputing motives. But never a simple statement of facts. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever provided a definitive answer to the simple question, "Where is the study that proves HIV causes AIDS?" It's just something that "everybody knows" is true. Yet despite the tens of thousands of papers written, nobody can produce one that says why.
Sometimes, reference is made to four papers that Gallo published in the journal Science after the press conference, deemed to have settled the issue before any outside scientists had seen them. But even if the methods described are accepted as demonstrating true viral isolation — which has been strongly disputed — they show a presence of HIV in less than half of the patients with opportunistic infections, and less than a third with Kaposi's sarcoma — the two most characteristic AIDS diseases. This is "overwhelming" evidence? It falls short of the standards that would normally be expected of a term-end dissertation, never mind mobilizing the federal resources of the United States and shutting down all investigation of alternatives.
And the case gets even shakier than that.
Viruses make you sick by killing cells. When viruses are actively replicating at a rate sufficient to cause disease, either because immunity hasn't developed yet or because the immune system is too defective to contain them, there's no difficulty in isolating them from the affected tissues. With influenza, a third of the lung cells are infected; with hepatitis, just about all of the liver cells. In the case of AIDS, typically 1 in 1000 T-cells shows any sign of HIV, even for terminally ill cases — and even then, no distinction is made of inactive or defective viruses, or totally non-functional viral fragments. But even if every one were a lethally infected cell, the body's replacement rate is 30 times higher. This simply doesn't add up to damage on a scale capable of causing disease.
HIV belongs to a class of viruses known as "retroviruses," which survive by encoding their RNA sequences into the chromosomal DNA of the host cell (the reverse of the normal direction of information flow in cell replication, which is DNA to RNA to protein, hence the name). When that part of the host chromosome comes to be transcribed, the cell's protein-manufacturing machinery makes a new retrovirus, which leaves by budding off through the cell membrane. The retrovirus, therefore, leaves the cell intact and functioning, and survives by slipping a copy of itself from time to time into the cell's normal production run. This strategy is completely different from that of the more prevalent "lytic" viruses, which take over the cell machinery totally to mass-produce themselves until the cell is exhausted, at which point they rupture the membrane, killing the cell, and move on, much in the style of locusts. This is what gives the immune system problems, and in the process causes colds, flu, polio, rabies, measles, mumps, yellow fever, and so on.
But a retrovirus produces so few copies of itself that it's easy meat for an immune system battle-trained at dealing with lytic viruses. For this reason, the main mode of transmission for a retrovirus is from mother to child, meaning that the host organism needs to live to reproductive maturity. A retrovirus that killed its host wouldn't be reproductively viable. Many human retroviruses have been studied, and all are harmless.
(Some rare animal cancers arise from specific genes inserted retrovirally into the host DNA. But in these cases tumors form rapidly and predictably soon after infection — completely unlike the situation with AIDS. And a cancer is due to cells proliferating wildly — just the opposite of killing them.)
HIV conforms to the retroviral pattern and is genetically unremarkable. It doesn't kill T-cells, even in cultures raised away from a body ("in vitro"), with no immune system to suppress it. Indeed, HIV for research is propagated in immortal lines of the very cell which, to cause AIDS, HIV is supposed to kill! — and in concentrations far higher than have ever been observed in any human, with or without AIDS. Separated from its host environment it promptly falls to pieces, which has led some researchers, looking skeptically at the assortment of RNA fragments, bits of protein, and other debris from which its existence is inferred, to question if there is really any such entity at all. (Q. If so, then what's replicating in those culture dishes? A. It has never been shown conclusively that anything introduced from the outside is replicating. Artificially stimulating "something" into expressing itself — it could be a strip of "provirus" code carried in the culture-cell's DNA — is a long way from demonstrating an active, pathogenic virus from a human body.)
For the same reason, HIV is almost impossible to transmit sexually, requiring something like 1000 different contacts, compared to 4 for genuine STDs (which is neither here nor there if it's harmless anyway). Hence, far from being the ferocious cell-killer painted by the media, HIV turns out to be a dud.
Most people carry traces of just about every microbe found in their normal habitat around with them all the time. The reason they're not sick all the time is that their immune system keeps the microbes inactive or down to numbers that can't cause damage. An immune system that has become dysfunctional to the point where it can't even keep HIV in check is in trouble. On their way downhill, depending on the kind of risk they're exposed to, every AIDS group has its own way of accumulating a cocktail of just about everything that's going around — unsterile street drugs; shared needles; promiscuity; accumulated serum from multiple donors. By the time HIV starts to register too, as well as everything else, you're right down in the lowest 5% grade. And those are the people who typically get AIDS. Hence, HIV's role as a marker of a risk group that collects microbes.
If HIV is virtually undetectable even in its alleged terminal victims, how do you test for it? You don't; you test for the antibody. That is, the body's own defense equipment — that you either acquired from your mother, learned to make yourself at some time earlier in life when you encountered the virus, or were tricked into making by a vaccine. In other words, your way of making yourself immune. Is this starting to sound a little bit strange?
Actually, testing for the antibody to a suspected pathogen can make sense, given the right circumstances. If a person is showing clinical symptoms — say, fever, with a rash, sweating, shaking, delirium — that are known to be caused by that pathogen (perhaps by satisfying Koch's postulates), and a test has been shown independently to identify an antibody specific to it, then testing for the antibody in the presence of the observed symptoms can be a convenient and dependable way of confirming the suspected disease. But none of this is true of HIV. HIV has never been shown to cause anything, nor has a likely explanation even been advanced as to how it could. And the only way of showing that an antibody test is specific to a virus is to compare its results with a "gold standard" known to measure the virus and nothing else. Establishing a standard requires isolating the virus from clinical patients in the true, traditional sense, and for HIV that has never been done. What, then, if anything, does the "HIV test" mean?
A genuinely useful antibody test can confirm that an observed sickness is due to the virus thought to be the culprit. A positive HIV result from somebody who is completely symptom-free, on the other hand, means either that the antibody has been carried from birth without the virus ever having been encountered, or that the virus has been successfully neutralized to the point of invisibility. So in this context, "HIV positive" means HIV-immune. Interpreting it as a prediction that somebody will die years hence from some unspecifiable disease makes about as much sense as diagnosing smallpox in a perfectly healthy person from the presence of antibodies acquired through childhood vaccination.
The test can mean a lot of other things, too. The most common test, known as ELISA, was developed for blood screening. Now, when you're looking for contaminated blood, you want a test that's oversensitive — where anything suspect will ding the bell. If the positive is false, after all, you merely throw away a pint of blood. But if a false negative gets through, the consequences could be catastrophic. (Whether or not what you're screening for is a real hazard isn't the issue here.) But the same test started being used for diagnosis. And when people are being told that a positive result means certainty of developing a disease that's inevitably fatal, that's a very different thing indeed.
Here are some of the other things that can give a positive result, which even doctors that I've talked to weren't aware of: prior pregnancy; alcoholism; certain cancers; malaria antibodies; leprosy antibodies; flu vaccination; heating of blood sample; prolonged storage of the sample; numerous other viruses; various parasitic diseases; hepatitis B antibodies; rheumatoid arthritis. The WHO performed 50 million antibody tests in Russia over a two-year period and found 50,000 positive results. Attempts to confirm these yielded around 300, of which 50 or so were actual AIDS cases.
African AIDS affects both sexes equally and is frequently cited as a heterosexually transmitted epidemic and foretaste of what's in store for the rest of the world. The actual diseases are very different from those reported in New York and San Francisco, however — the same that have afflicted those parts of Africa through history. Today they're called AIDS on account of correlation with positive HIV results. But we've already noted that lots of factors endemic to those regions — malaria, leprosy, parasitical infections — can test positive. Nevertheless, it is decreed that all positives shall be interpreted as due to HIV, making every instance automatically an AIDS statistic. Further, every case of "AIDS" thus diagnosed that is not a homosexual or drug abuser is presumed to have been acquired through heterosexual transmission. It isn't difficult to discern an epidemic in such circumstances. People in desperate need of better nutrition and sanitation, energy-intensive industrial technologies, and capital investment are instead distributed condoms.
Over 90% of the inhabitants of Southeast Asia carry the hepatitis B antibody. And we all "know," because the newspapers say so, that an AIDS epidemic is ravaging Thailand. The figure for actual disease cases in this region populated by tens of millions was around 700 in 1991, and by 1993 had grown to 1500 or so. Perhaps what the papers meant was an epidemic of AIDS testing. Just like the inquisitors of old, the more assiduously the witch hunters apply their techniques and their instruments, sure enough they find more witches.
In the cuckoo land of HIV "science" anything becomes possible. To combat the effects of an agent declared soon after its discovery as being inevitably lethal after a dormancy of 10-15 years (?), HIV positives, sick and symptom-free alike, were put on the drug AZT, which was billed as "antiviral." Well, it is, I suppose, in the same sense that napalm or Liquid Plumber is antiviral — it kills everything. AZT was developed in the 1960s as a chemotherapy for leukemia but never released because of its toxicity. It's a DNA chain terminator, which means it stops the molecule from copying. It kills every cell that tries to reproduce. The idea for cancer treatment is that a short, shock program of maybe two or three weeks will kill the tumor while only half killing the patient, and then you get him off it as quickly as possible. You can't take something like that four times a day indefinitely and expect to live. (Although some people don't metabolize it but pass it straight through; hence the few long-term AZT survivors that are pointed at to show how benign it is.)
Chemotherapies are notoriously immunosuppressive. The "side effects" look just like AIDS. Yet this is the treatment of choice. Nobody says it actually cures or stops AIDS, but the recipients have been told that they're due to die anyway — which could possibly be one of the most ghastly self-fulfilling prophecies in modern medical history. The claim is that it brings some temporary respite, based on results of a few trials in which the augurs of biochemistry saw signs of short-term improvement — although bad data were knowingly included, and other commentators have dismissed the trials as worthless. In any case, it is known that a body subjected to this kind of toxic assault can mobilize last-ditch emergency defenses for a while, even when terminal. A sick chicken might run around the yard for a few seconds when you cut its head off, but that isn't a sign that the treatment has done it any good.
In the 15 years or so up to the late eighties, the life expectancy of hemophiliacs doubled. This was because improved clotting factor — the substance they can't make for themselves — meant fewer transfusions. The cumulative burden of constantly infused foreign proteins eventually wears down an immune system and opens the way for infections. Many also acquired HIV, but the death rates of those testing positive and negative were about the same. Then, from around the late eighties, the mortality of the HIV positives from conditions diagnosed as AIDS rose significantly, and a widely publicized study cited this as proof that their AIDS was due to HIV. What it didn't take into account, however, was that only the HIV positives were put on AZT. Nobody was giving AZT to the HIV negatives. Peter Duesberg believes that AZT and other "antivirals" are responsible for over half the AIDS being reported today.
The latest diagnostic disease indicator, "viral load," is an indirect measure divorced from any actual symptoms at all, based on the "polymerase chain reaction" method of amplifying formerly undetectable amounts of molecular material by copying them in enormous numbers. But errors are amplified by the same amount. The mathematical basis of the model has been shown to be fatally flawed and based on wrong assumptions. The inventor of the PCR method, Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, has dismissed its application in this way as totally worthless.
And the AZT story of hastily rushing into print to claim miracle cures based on selective anecdotal reporting and uncompleted trials performed without controls seems to be in the process of being repeated with the new drug "cocktails" based on protease inhibitors. Researchers who have worked with PIs all their professional lives state flatly that they are incapable of doing what the highly publicized claims say they do. Their efficacy is assessed by measuring the reduction of the number designated "viral load," which has never been shown to correspond to anything defining sickness in the real, physical world. As a "control," the viral load of those given cocktails is compared with the former level when they received AZT. A reduction is taken as meaning that the cocktails have reduced sickness. On the same basis you could claim that chewing gum stops cancer because fewer smokers who switch go on to develop it.
Although the mainstream media don't report it, a growing number of scientific and medical professionals are coming around to Duesberg's position or somewhere close to it. Many, especially in times of uncertainty over careers and funding, keep a low profile and refrain from public comment. When you see what happened to Duesberg, you can see why. One of the pioneers in retroviral research — the first to map a retroviral genome, seven-time recipient of the NIH Outstanding Investigator award, and tipped for a Nobel Prize — he was subjected to vilification, abused at conferences, and his funding cut off to the point that he can no longer afford a secretary. In two years, he had 17 applications for funding for research on alternative AIDS hypotheses turned down. Publication in the scientific literature has been denied — even the right of reply to personal attacks carried in the journal Nature, violating the most fundamental of scientific traditions. His scheduled appearances on talk shows have been repeatedly canceled at the last moment upon intervention by officials from the NIH and CDC.
Duesberg is accused of irresponsibility on the grounds that his views threaten confidence in public health-care programs based on the HIV dogma. But scientific truth doesn't depend on perceived consequences. Public policy should follow science. Attempting to impose the reverse becomes Lysenkoism.
In any case, what do those programs have that should command any confidence? After all these years they have failed to save a life or produce a vaccine. (And if they did, to whom would it be given? The function of a vaccine is to stimulate the production of antibodies, and HIV positives have them already.) No believable mechanism has been put forward as to how HIV kills T-cells. And billions of dollars continue to be spent every year on trying to unravel the mysteries of how HIV can make you sick without being present, and how an antibody can neutralize the virus but not suppress the disease. Scientific principles that have stood well for a hundred years are arbitrarily discarded to enable what's offered as logic to hang together at all, and the best that can be done at the end of it all is to prescribe a treatment that's lethal even if the disease is not. Yet no looking into alternatives is permitted; all dissenting views are repressed. This is not the way of science, but of a fanatical religion putting down heresy.
The real victim, perhaps not terminally ill but looking somewhat jaded at the moment, is intellectual honesty and scientific rigor. Maybe in its growth from infancy, science too has to learn how to make antibodies to protect itself from opportunistic infection and dogmatism. And in the longer term it seems that it can. Today, everybody remembers Galileo. Yet how many can name the bishops who refused to look through his telescope?
James P. Hogan is a science-fiction writer. See: www.jamesphogan.com
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE