WE WERE PLAYING A MACABRE GUESSING GAME, DRIVEN BY HYSTERIA

By Nicholas Regush

www.nicholasregush.com 5 Nov. 2001

The report on AIDS in Africa in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine (www.rollingstone.com) is a lengthy eye-opener and a softly-worded indictment of World Health Organization fear-mongering about AIDS. In reading the piece by Rian Malan, a well-known South African writer, one gets the feeling throughout of how exasperating it must have been for him to try to get at the truth behind WHO’s AIDS statistics. It took him one full year to reach the disturbing conclusion that no one really seems to know what is going on with AIDS in South Africa. There are many conflicting versions of how many people are afflicted

Of course, if you raise this issue with any of the HIV Establishment types or AIDS activists, they will quickly call you a “denialist,” and claim that any questioning of so-called “facts” that 17 million Africans are dead of AIDS and 25 million are HIV positive will only help to make things worse. In other words, aside from the sheer stupidity of the accusation, there is no room for questioning or discussion of any kind. I have personally lost count of the numbers of so-called “scientists” that have said as much to me over the past several years, whenever I’ve focused my ABCNEWS.com column to question mainstream AIDS propaganda. Malan got some of the same unprofessional reaction to pertinent questioning.

Considering that Malan was pretty much set in writing a piece that agreed with WHO numbers on AIDS, his turnabout makes the piece all the more credible. For instance, he discovered in finer detail what many had already red-flagged. Here are a few tidbits:

(1) There is no credible science available that provides a clear understanding of how many Africans are HIV positive or who have died from AIDS.

(2) In South Africa, for example, there is considerable disagreement amongst scientists and government officials about how many people are dying of AIDS.

(3) In the United States, a person being tested for antibodies to HIV can go through several stages of testing before a diagnosis is achieved. This is to avoid a false positive. In South Africa, if a test is even done at all, there is only one shot at it, and it is a test that can also be riddled with cross-reactions from malaria and other diseases.

(4) In the west, at least AIDS cases are verified according to set standards and are reported to the public health system. But WHO does it very differently in Africa where it cannot count cases due to a very thin health-care infrastructure and lack of laboratories to confirm positive HIV antibody cases. So WHO therefore uses a computer program that estimates the numbers of HIV positive cases and likely AIDS deaths. The information fed into the computer model essentially comes from blood samples at selected clinics. (Keep in mind these tests are not confirmed.) The formula goes on to project the numbers of people who are likely to die based on one-crack-at-it HIV antibody testing. Malan concludes this way: “Hence when UNAIDS [which works with WHO] announces 14 million Africans have succumbed to AIDS, it does not mean that 14 million infected bodies have been counted. It means that 14 million people have theoretically died….”

I find it unsettling that this subterfuge continues. I suspect that one major reason these “scientists” at WHO and UNAIDS can get away with this is because the media, for the most part, has totally swallowed this unacceptable form of mathematical modeling. But then who has time these days to do proper homework and demand some accountability? Well, certainly not The New York Times.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: This is an example of a newspaper that has lost its way on AIDS. It rarely raises penetrating questions about any aspect of how science is focused on this collection of illnesses. Its editorial policy AIDS appears knee-jerk and lacks depth. Consider this poorly reported, all too predictable comment: “Thabo Mbeki’s views on AIDS have drawn so much criticism that he has lately kept them to himself. Last month, however, the South African president gave two speeches that showed he remains badly misinformed about a virus that now infects one in four adult South Africans and will kill between five and seven million over the next decade….”

The editorial goes on to accuse the South African president of doing nothing to make antiretrovirals available to the poor. And so on. Another shot at a man who rightly has some questions about the numbers of AIDS deaths in his country as tabulated by a kooky statistical model.

At stake here is a ton of money. Malan goes into some detail about how both western and African scientists are making a bundle because of the fear-mongering statistics that WHO unleashes. Governments also have their hands out for AIDS money, while money is relatively scarce to fight malaria, tuberculosis and other common African diseases. What a mess!

I would like to commend Rolling Stone for publishing the Malan piece. A breath of fresh air!

See also Neenyah Ostrom’s article on the same topic (www.chronicillnet.org). It is entitled, “WHERE ARE THE DATA?” Ostrom also keys in on how AIDS statistics in South Africa “are not based upon actual counts of sick people, but upon mathematical models that produce varying results.”

This informative piece also discusses how false positives can occur with HIV antibody tests.