VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
IS THERE SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE DEMONSTRATING THAT HIV CAUSES AIDS?
By Dave Steele
25 February 2001
1. Introduction
The great Albert Einstein once said that in science, "the most important
thing is to never stop questioning." In this debate over AIDS, I think a
reasonable person would begin with the elemental questions; namely, (1)
What is this disease? and (2) How many people are dying from it?
First, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is defined by the Center
for Disease Control (CDC) since 1985 as person who, (1) is infected with
the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and (2) has 1 or more of 30
unrelated diseases, including pneumonia, tuberculosis, yeast infection,
weight loss, dementia and diarrhea. The important dynamic is that each
AIDS victim has some mechanism that suppresses his immune system, which
supposedly renders it helpless to prevent contracting any of the
AIDS-defining diseases. Of course, we've all heard of pneumonia and
tuberculosis. The important point is that NONE of the AIDS-defining
diseases are new, nor is immune deficiency new. Here's our friend, Dr.
Robert Gallo, the scientist who discovered the "cause" of AIDS. "Of
course, immune suppression has occurred in the past, and especially the
recent past in association with some drugs, radiation, ... and pronounced
malnutrition." (Gallo, autobiography, pg. 291.) We'll talk about Gallo's
rather odd approach to scientific inquiry a little later, but, to
reiterate, the important point, is that nothing involved with the clinical
diagnosis of AIDS is new.
Second, since it was first reported in 1981 (by Dr. Michael Gottlieb of
UCLA) the general discussion of AIDS has been fraught with hysteria,
designed to frighten, rather than inform the public. "Without massive
federal AIDS intervention, there may be no one left," shouts Donna Shalala,
Clinton's former Secretary of Health and Human Services. (Wash. Times,
6/8/99.) "By 1991, 1 in 10 babies may be AIDS victims," reads a headline
from USA Today in 1988. The head honcho of AIDS research, Dr. Anthony
Fauci of the National Institute of Health, states, "By 1996, 3 to 5
million Americans will be HIV positive, and 1 million will be dead of
AIDS." (NY Times, 1/14/86.)
Did these dire predictions come true? Well, let's look at the numbers. In
1998, 2.3 million Americans died. (CDC National Vital Statistics Reports,
7/24/00.) Here is a list of the top 5 killers:
1. Heart Disease -- 724,000
2. Cancer -- 541,000
3. Stroke -- 158,000
4. Pulmonary Disease112,000
5. Accidents -- 97,000
AIDS isn't even in the ballpark. A whopping total of 13,000 AIDS deaths
(out of 270 million Americans) were reported in all of 1998. The Number 6
killer, pneumonia, caused 91,000 deaths in 1998. However, if you're
HIV-positive and have pneumonia, they call it AIDS, and Alec Baldwin wears
a red ribbon on your behalf on Oscar night. But if you're HIV-negative,
and have the same pneumonia, you die at a rate 7 times higher, but no one
gives a flying hoot.
These underwhelming numbers are not some aberrant trend, either. The TOTAL
amount of American deaths attributed to AIDS from 1981 through 1998, is
410,000. For the same time frame, there were 800,000 auto fatalities, and
9 million cancer deaths. For you history buffs, the flu epidemic in 1918
killed 20 million people in 1 year. For the same reporting period of
410,000 AIDS deaths, there were 1.7 million deaths from adverse reactions
to properly presrcibed and correctly taken pharmaceuticals. (Lazarou,
Journal of American Medical Association, 1998.)Based on these figures, one
could argue that the best advice is to ignore your doctor.
As for the fears of pediatric AIDS, hold on to your hats. In 1998, there
were 4.1 million live births, and 28,000 infant deaths (age 1 and under).
Of these, there were a mere 14 deaths due to AIDS! For you math wizards,
that's 14 out of 4.1 million. Of course, 14 infant deaths are 14 too
many, but as anyone can see, pediatric AIDS is not only NOT an epidemic,
but it barely even registers as a blip on the medical radar screen. In
contrast, there were 2,822 deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome that
same year.
So the numbers paint an entirely different picture than what has been
crammed down our throats since 1981. There is also another remarkable
number -- unlike every other contagious disease known to mankind (chicken
pox, polio, herpes, the flu, measles, etc.) somehow AIDS has found a way
to discriminate against men -- 85% of all AIDS cases are men, while 15%
are women. Although the great Oprah Winfrey predicted that by 1990, 1 in
5 heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS (Transcript from Oprah Winfrey
show, 2/18/87), the CDC reports that only 10% of AIDS victims contracted
the disease through heterosexual sex. But even this number is likely
exaggerated, since the best epidemiological study on heterosexual
transmission of AIDS, concluded that it takes 1000 encounters with an
infected male to transmit it to a woman. (Padian, Journal of Epidemiology,
1997.)
So, following 20 years of intense AIDS study and billions of dollars in
research, how do we respond to Einstein's initial elementary questions?
Well, that AIDS, a supposedly new disease, comprised of 30 old diseases,
has killed about 20,000 Americans per year since 1981 (cancer kills
500,000)and, that, 90 to 95% of the victims are gay males and drug users.
The table having been set, we now turn to the $64,000 question: What is
causing this disease called AIDS?
2. The Prevailing Theory of the Cause of AIDS
Before I jump into specifics, I want to briefly discuss the general
scientific principles of "cause and effect." Indeed, the entire body of
science is dedicated to observing stuff in nature (the effect) and then
trying to explain why and how stuff happens (the cause). If you see a man
lying in the middle of Wilshire Blvd., legs broken in a pool of blood, with
a Mack truck stopped in front of him, you don't need a doctorate in
Kinetics to state that the man's injuries were probably caused by an
impact with the truck.
But what about a less clear example, such as back pain? An honorable man,
with impeccable integrity, swears to his employer that his back was injured
lifting heavy boxes at work, whereas the employer (or his attorney)
replies that an x-ray shows no herniated disc, and furthermore, the back
pain was caused by 28 years of bad posture and a lumpy mattress. Who is
right? How can we tell?
With disease, it's even more difficult to establish the underlying cause
since there are thousands of viruses and other microbes living in your
body, neither named nor catalogued, because they have not been shown to
manifest in any symptom whatsoever. If a 14-year old boy breaks out with
itchy, reddish bumps on his body, how do we determine the discrete
offending microbe out of thousands?
Thank God for the field of epidemiology, the study of disease. This
scientific discipline has developed time-honored methods for establishing
the cause of disease -- in short, the controlled study of populations. Take
smoking -- you measure the rate of lung cancer in the general population,
and compare it to the rate in the smoking population. Guess what? Most of
the studies have shown that smokers get lung cancer in far great numbers,
than non-smokers. Of course, many people smoke and never get lung cancer
and many lung-cancer victims never smoked a cigarette in their life. But
the important point is that the controlled studies, show a pronounced
increase in risk associated with smoking, so much so that scientists can
authoritatively state that smoking causes cancer. And all sane people
believe this.
Returning to AIDS, the prevailing theory is that AIDS is solely caused by a
virus, HIV. The prevailing theory posits that HIV suppresses your immune
system by killing T-Cells, the white blood cells created to fight off
foreign microbes. By analogy, think of a gang of thugs in downtown L.A.,
that doesn't rob, rape, smoke crack, or chew gum in class, but rather kills
policemen so efficiently, that other hoodlums can run wild throughout the
city with impunity.
Now, if the prevailing theory of viral disease is correct, there obviously
has to be detectable HIV. Surprisingly, there is not with AIDS patients.
Only 1 out of 500 T-Cells are infected. (Schnitman, Fauci et al., Science,
1989.) But T-Cells regenerate at a rate of about 15 per 500. Do the math --
new healthy T-Cells are naturally created at a faster rate than HIV
infection. So how is it possible for T-Cell depletion to lead to immune
suppression to lead to pneumonia or diarrhea, with such a small army of
thugs? With all viruses before HIV, the subject cells were infected at a
rate of 30 to 40%, not 0.2%. If you have hepatitus, you've got
virus-infected cells all over your liver. Same with strep throat. There is
no trouble, whatsoever, finding an abundance of viral activity,
immediately after infection, not 10 years down the road as with AIDS
cases. The dirty little secret is that AIDS researchers can barely even
find HIV in AIDS patients, let alone count the virus using conventional
methods.
Now, here's another conundrum -- is it possible to have AIDS without HIV?
The prevailing theory says, as do the time-honored Koch's postulates
(discussion deferred), "NO". You can't have polio, without the polio virus,
nor chicken pox without the Varicella Zoster Virus.
But at the 1992 8th Annual AIDS conference in Amsterdam, a score of
HIV-free AIDS cases was added to the 4,621 AIDS cases identified in the
medical literature that were determined to be entirely free of HIV. This
confounded the AIDS establishment, who had banked so much on an infectious
agent. Unable to explain this phenomenom, (clinically diagnosed AIDS cases
without HIV), they renamed this disease, Idiopathic CD4-lymphocytopenia
(ICL). I'll give anyone in this courtroom 10 bucks if they've ever heard
of this "disease," let alone pronounce it correctly. In fact, the same
yahoo, Dr. Fauci, who predicted 1 million American AIDS deaths by 1996,
published a paper in 1993, which concluded that ICL could not possibly be
caused by a virus, because the resulting diseases were too
"heterogeneous." (Fauci, New England Journal of Medicine, 1993.)
Earth to Dr. Fauci --- comprised of 30 unrelated diseases ranging from
diarrhea to cervical cancer, AIDS is fairly heterogeneous, too! Even though
Dr. Fauci may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, the real travesty
lies with his conscious disregard for genuine scientific inquiry. These
4,621 HIV-negative, AIDS cases should have served as a control group for a
perfectly valid epidemiological study to settle the issue once and for all.
You compare the numbers of HIV-positive, AIDS patients, with HIV-negative,
AIDS patients (like the 4,621), to determine any statistical significance
between the rate of disease in the two groups. Despite 50 billion dollars
in tax-payer money spent on this so-called epidemic, no such study has
ever been done.
One last point on cause: Besides the controlled epidemiological study, you
can also do animal testing. Simply inject
a rat or monkey with a virus or toxin and see if it develops the disease.
Since 1984, at least 150 chimpanzees (which cost about $50,000 a pop) have
been injected with HIV, and as of 1996, none have developed AIDS.
The bottom line is that at a government press conference in 1984, Gallo
declared that he had found the "probable cause" of AIDS. His supporting
data was later shown to be fraudulent, and no epidemiological study ever
bore his assertion out. In 1985, the CDC linked AIDS with HIV by mere fiat
-- they defined it that way without any solid scientific data to support
it.
3. The Alternative Theory of Causation
We return to the elementary questions posed at the beginning, the next
question would surely be, "If AIDS is not caused by a virus, then what
causes it?" My truthful answer is, "I'm not sure." The 1993 Nobel Prize
winner in Chemistry, Kary Mullis, says, "We have not been able to discover
any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a
disease caused by a virus..There is no evidence that this is true and no
one who can claim it by ways of science."
The 1980 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Dr. Walter Gilbert states that
the leading opponent of the prevailing theory, Dr. Peter Duesberg, "is
absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by
the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the
laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS. (Omni, 1993)
The bottom line is that Gallo and the other government
scientists/bureacrats predicted that AIDS would spread into the general
population (like all infectious diseases) and they predicted they would
develop a vaccine by 1986. Neither of these items came true --- neither
of these items will ever come true.
The most logical explanation for the AIDS phenomenom is that prolific drug
use (cocaine, heroin, amyl nitrates, amphetamines, etc.) wrecks your immune
system. In fact, long before AIDS was claimed to be infectious, here's
what our nation's foremost scientific journal had to say:
Perhaps, one or more of these recreational drugs is
an immunosupressive agent. The leading candidate are the
nitrites, which are commonly inhaled [by homosexuals] to
intensify orgasm. (Durack, New England Journal of Medicine,
1981.)
Apparently, there is high drug use, including these amyl nitrites, among
the gay population, who are contracting AIDS. This coupled with admitted
drug users, who comprise 33% of the AIDS cases, suggests a strong
association between drugs and AIDS.
Another culprit is AZT, the highly toxic, chemotherapeutic pill, prescribed
for AIDS since 1987. AZT is the ultimate anti-biotic, since it is
literally "against life" -- its sole purpose is to kill all T-Cells,
healthy and infected. Few people can survive large doses of AZT, just as
few people can survive large doses of chemotherapy. Recall that 1.7
million Americans (compared with 410,000 AIDS deaths) have died from the
adverse side effects of drugs, properly prescribed and taken.
I've gone a little longer than anticipated, so I'll stop for now. There is
however, much more to discuss, particularly on the last topic, as well as
African AIDS, protease inhibitors, antibodies and other matters.
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE