VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE

THE AIDS WAR
Lies and Censorship in Coverage of the Epidemic

By John Lauritsen

The New York Native 12 Aug. 1991

"The first casualty when war comes is truth"

- Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917

Analogies to war are frequently used in the discourse on AIDS, and a cogent case has been made that, on the level of group psychology, AIDS is the equivalent of war.(1) It is arguable just how far the analogy can be taken. For example, if AIDS is war, what are the opposing forces? One can easily identify the victims of aggression as being gay men and drug users, the two main "risk groups," but it is more difficult to define the aggressors. Casper Schmidt, in his brilliantly original essay, "The Group- Fantasy Origins of AIDS," hypothesizes a "sacrificial witch hunt, in which the participants are the Moral Majority and an assortment of other conservative groups (as hunters) and the nation's drug addicts and homosexuals (as hunted)."(2) In support of his thesis Schmidt cites such activities of the New Right moralists as Anita Bryant's phenomenally successful campaign, "Save Our Children [From Homosexuals], Inc.," the literal "Declaration of War" by Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour, and the proliferation of bumper stickers urging: "KILL A QUEER FOR CHRIST."

On one level, perhaps even on the core level, I think there is validity to Schmidt's paradigm. However, certain features of the AIDS epidemic are hard to assimilate to a war model. One has to consider, for example, the immense profits being made by the Medical Industrial Complex, the precarious prestige of the United States Public Health Service, and the vested interests of the various research syndicates. There is also the fact that many of those playing leading roles in the extermination of gay men are themselves gay men, and many of these "traitors" have already died of AIDS. This would seem to be unusual behavior for a war, though perhaps not for a sacrificial ritual.

The war analogy seems stronger on the issue of genocide.

Well over 100,000 gay men are being poisoned right now with the nucleoside analogues AZT and DDI. They will not recover, even though several tens of thousands of them are objectively healthy, suffering only from harmless antibodies, coupled with the lethal diagnosis of being "infected with HIV." The decision- makers at Wellcome and Squibb, makers respectively of AZT and DDI, might well wish that their products were less toxic and more beneficial. But their indifference to human life, their lack of scientific scruples in promoting their deadly nostrums, indict them of crimes against humanity. While profits may be the main motive, the pharmaceutical companies are in practice waging war against gay men.

Most of all the war analogy helps to explain the consistently wretched performance of the media. Time and again those of us who are "AIDS dissidents" have been dismayed and disgusted by the falsehoods, distortions, and omissions in AIDS coverage. In the United States, a degree of censorship has obtained which would normally be found in a totalitarian country in the midst of a war. And this is the point. If AIDS is equivalent to war, it would be naive to expect truthful reporting.

Phillip Knightley's book, The First Casualty-From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker,(3) demonstrates that war correspondents have seldom been concerned with the facts. Even the very few who were intelligent enough to understand what was happening, and who cared about truth, more often than not found themselves gagged by their editors or by the censors. Not only have war correspondents traditionally been contemptuous of reality, but they have been zealous collaborators in the manufacture of lies, sometimes known as "black propaganda":

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. (George Orwell in "Looking Back on the Spanish War"-quoted in Knightley)

I maintain, then, that AIDS reporters should be regarded as war correspondents, in which case their performances, however appalling, are par for the course. I maintain further that the salient characteristics of war coverage are also those of AIDS coverage, namely: censorship (self-imposed, official, and in-between), hysteria, the use of black propaganda, the fabrication of "atrocity stories," and garden variety incompetence. In this article I will examine recent examples of AIDS coverage characterized by censorship, lies, and irrationality.

The gay dentist, the innocent virgin, and Jesse Helms

David Acer, a gay dentist in a small town in Florida, died of "AIDS" in September 1990. Before his death he sent a letter to all of his patients, informing them of his health status and urging them to take the HIV test. Acer reassured them that he had always followed standard infection-control procedures.

Three-quarters of a year later, in June 1991, one of Acer's patients became front-page news. A young woman, Kimberly Bergalis, wrote an angry letter to a health care worker, which was obtained and published by the Miami Herald. Bergalis described herself as suffering from AIDS and near death, and delivered a diatribe against Acer and the health officials:

I blame Dr. Acer and every single one of you bastards. Anyone who knew Dr. Acer was infected and had full-blown AIDS and stood by not doing a damn thing about it. You are all just as guilty as he was. You've ruined my life and my family's.(4)

Bergalis, 23 years old, described herself as a virgin who had never used intravenous drugs, and who was in no way responsible for her illness:

Whom do I blame? Do I blame myself? I sure don't. I never used IV drugs, never slept with anyone, and never had a blood transfusion.

None of the news stories disclosed when or on what basis Bergalis received an "AIDS" diagnosis. Presumably it was after Acer's death. Bergalis' letter indicated that she may actually be dying of AZT poisoning rather than "AIDS":

I have lived through the torturous acne that infested my face and neck, brought on by AZT. I have endured trips twice a week to Miami for three months only to receive painful IV injections. I've had blood transfusions. I've had a bone marrow biopsy. I cried my heart out from the pain.

The main point of Bergalis' letter, the pitch, comes at the very end: "P. S. If laws are not formed to provide protection, then my suffering and death was in vain. I'm dying guys. Goodbye." This somewhat too obvious pitch, along with major contradictions in the news reports, suggests a fabricated atrocity story. I'll come back to the contradictions later, after describing the use that was made of the Kimberly Bergalis story by Jesse Helms, the worst antigay bigot in Congress.

On Tuesday June 18 the Senate voted overwhelmingly to impose criminal penalties on health care workers who failed to inform their patients that they were HIV-positive. The amendment, offered by Senator Jesse Helms (Republican from North Carolina), mandates $10,000 fines and a minimum prison sentence of ten years for those who fail to disclose their HIV status before beginning any "invasive procedure".

Helms made effective use of the Kimberly Bergalis story, conveying not only the pathos of the "innocent" victim, but also the turpitude of the "not"-innocent people with AIDS:

"She [Bergalis] doesn't have a chance, so I don't think 10 years' time is severe when you consider what these people are willing to do to innocent patients," Helms said. "Don't tell me this is too severe. I'm so old-fashioned I believe in horse-whipping."(5)

In light of his other activities, it requires little imagination to realize that by "these people" Helms means gay men. This is a guilt-trip that we do not deserve to have imposed on us. I'm old-fashioned too, and believe that from an ethical standpoint we have every bit as much right to horse-whip Jesse Helms as he would one of us.

Coverage of the proposed legislation in The New York Times amounted to deliberate obscurantism. The headline of the 19 July 1991 story reads: "Senate Adopts Tough Measures On Health Workers With AIDS-Backs Prison and Fine for Failure to Tell Patients." Even reading the story closely it is impossible to determine whether the Helms Amendment applies to health care workers with full-blown AIDS, or merely to those with HIV antibodies. If the Times had been concerned with accuracy it could have quoted the text of the Helms Amendment. But instead, the Times set out to conflate two totally different things: having antibodies to a harmless retrovirus with having an illness generally (and erroneously) considered to be "invariably fatal". The AIDS Establishment has been practising this bit of deception for some time, in its efforts to redefine "AIDS" as "HIV disease". The full equation being foisted on us, subliminally as well as consciously, goes something like this: Gay man = HIV-positive = AIDS = DEATH. It is a form of psychological warfare.

The next day (20 July 1991) The New York Times had an editorial, "When the Doctor Has AIDS. " (More obscurantism: not "Is HIV-Positive" but "Has AIDS") In it the Times hypocritically rued that the Helms Amendment had gone too far, and commented revealingly on the David Acer case:

Thus far only one infected health practitioner-a Florida dentist-has been found to pass the AIDS virus [sic] to his patients through medical procedures, and even that case is less than certain. [Emphasis added.] In all the other highly publicized cases of infected practitioners, not a single patient has yet been found harmed.(6)

To refer to the David Acer case as "less than certain" is extreme understatement. That Acer managed to infect five of his patients with HIV is not just "less than certain," it is impossible. Let's examine some of the contradictions in the David Acer-Kimberly Bergalis story.

Unlike many war atrocity stories which are made up of whole cloth,(7) some elements in the Kimberly Bergalis story appear to be true. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Kimberly Bergalis exists, that she is dying, and that she is HIV-positive. Let's also assume that David Acer died of "AIDS," and that five of his patients (including Bergalis) tested positive for HIV antibodies. All of this is possible.

However, it is not possible that Bergalis is dying from HIV infection, for all of the reasons that molecular biologist Peter Duesberg has mustered in his refutation of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis.(8) Readers of the Native are by now familiar with these arguments: the biochemical inactivity of HIV, the epidemiological contradictions, the absurdities of the postulated latency period, and so on. HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

Above all, it is not possible that David Acer infected five of his patients with HIV. All of the news accounts agree that Acer's case is the first-and only-known case of HIV transmission from a health care worker to a patient. There are probably tens of thousands of HIV-positive health care workers, and hundreds of thousands of patients treated by them, and yet not one other health-care-worker-to-patient infection has ever been reported. It is therefore beyond probability that a single dentist in Stuart, Florida (population 9,467) could have infected, not just one, but five patients.

HIV is very hard to transmit. Out of several thousand carefully monitored needle-stick cases (health-care workers who accidentally inoculated themselves with the blood of AIDS patients), there have been only about two dozen sero-conversions, and not a single confirmed case of AIDS. Many sexual partners of people with AIDS, exposed hundreds of times to HIV-infected sperm, remain HIV- negative themselves.

When something is impossible, and yet you hear a report that it happened, how do you respond? I submit that the intellectually mature response is to assume that the report is false. Pigs can't fly. If there's a report that a pig was seen flying, then something's wrong, and it's the report -- because pigs can't fly.

Michael Kinsley, writing in The Washington Post, fell into the trap of trying to explain the impossible, rather than denying it:

There is only one known case of a health care worker transmitting AIDS to his patients. [sic-"AIDS" not "HIV"] That is the notorious [emphasis added] Dr. Acer in Florida, who seems to have infected five patients. How one dentist could infect five people with this hard-to-transmit virus has been a puzzle. The odds against it happening in the normal course of a practice are stratospheric. And evidence is emerging that Dr. Acer was criminally irresponsible about sanitary precautions. [emphasis added.](9)

It is defamatory to refer to Acer as "notorious" and accuse him of having been "criminally irresponsible about sanitary precautions". When Acer was alive and able to defend himself, he said he had followed standard infection-control procedures in keeping with American Dental Association guidelines. There is no reason not to believe his statement.

Another writer accused Acer of sloppiness, as though sloppiness could somehow suffice to transmit the virus from dentist to patient:

The exact means of transmission remains a mystery. But published reports, based on interviews with his staff and social workers, said Acer ran a sloppy practice.(10)

A moment's reflection should have persuaded the AIDS correspondents that the accusations against Acer could not be true. But none allowed themselves a moment's reflection; they kept on listening to, parroting, and embellishing the lies. Malcolm Gladwell in The Washington Post gave credence to ridiculous speculations of unnamed "health officials":

Health officials now have evidence [unspecified] that the dentist failed to sterilize his equipment properly and may have allowed tainted blood drawn during one procedure to get into crevices in dental tools that would be used again in another patient.(11)

The above is a good example of suspending the critical faculties in the presence of an atrocity story. If that's what happene-if tainted blood from an HIV-infected patient was somehow transferred to uninfected patients-then the HIV status of David Acer himself was completely irrelevant. A robot could just as well have transferred the blood from infected to uninfected patients.

The most absurd and despicable defamation of David Acer was published in The Washington Post:

Public-health experts [unnamed] say they cannot explain how so many patients of one dentist could have contracted AIDS ["AIDS-not "HIV"]. Although thousands of doctors, dentists and other health-care workers with AIDS have treated patients, no other instance of transmission is known. This has led to speculation that another factor, perhaps even deliberate transmission, [emphasis added] might be to blame(12).

Acer appears to have been a conscientious man who cared enough about his patients to inform them that he had AIDS. It is monstrous calumny to insinuate that he would deliberately have tried to infect his patients. What fantasies are running through the heads of these unnamed "public-health experts"? Do they envisage the dentist drawing samples of his own tainted blood and then fiendishly injecting it into his patients? Or did The Washington Post just make it all up?

David Acer, being dead, cannot defend himself. Kimberly Bergalis settled her case with the Acer estate for $1 million, an incentive for her to stop taking AZT and recover. The atrocity story served its purpose very well, and a witch-hunt is now in progress against HIV-positive health-care workers. Hysteria grows. People have stopped thinking. The AIDS correspondents keep on churning out lies.

Postscript: the day after the above was written a half-page article by Lawrence K. Altman, formerly of the CDC, appeared in the New York Times, "An AIDS Puzzle: What Went Wrong In Dentist's Office?"(13) The upshot of the piece is that Florida State health officials, the CDC, and Altman himself are completely baffled as to how Acer could (allegedly) have infected five of his patients. CDC officials have been studying the case for over a year now, and they are more in the dark then ever. None of their speculations have panned out. There is no more talk of Acer's having been "sloppy" or "criminally irresponsible about sanitary conditions". Such charges were rumors with no basis in fact. Almost grudgingly Altman admits that "the dentist and his staff followed standard infection control measures."

Some truly preposterous conjectures were entertained, and then ruled out, by the CDC:

The most talked about explanation-that Acer transmitted the virus while having sex with patients under anesthesia-has been ruled out. No infected patient had general anesthesia and all denied having sex with the dentist.

According to Altman, "Acer was reported to be bisexual, but epidemiologists have not found any of his sex partners." Acer's discretion in sexual matters dampened speculation along these lines, though someone at the CDC was able to imagine a scenario in which Acer might have treated a sex partner carrying the same HIV strain as himself, and then immediately afterward treated one of the patients who became infected. It's bizarre to imagine this scenario once, but to imagine it happening five times is utter madness.

The people in the CDC seem to have active, if not very disciplined imaginations. They have speculated that perhaps Acer, with cut hands, had bled through torn gloves into the mouths of his patients. If, on top of this, Acer had had a super-high concentration of HIV in his blood, then perhaps this would have sufficed to infect the patients.

Normally one would expect to hear speculations of this caliber from those under the influence of LSD or other hallucinogenic drugs. I hate to be a spoil-sport by bringing in the reality principle all the time, but please! -- wouldn't you remember it if you'd been operated on by a dentist with wounded hands who dripped blood in your face?

John Hardie of the Canadian Dental Association suggested the possibility that Acer had deliberately infected his patients by adding his own blood to injections of a local anesthetic. This theory was too silly for even the CDC to take seriously. Everyone who knew Acer described him as a nice man, and said there was nothing unusual about his behavior.

The CDC thinkers are also mulling over the possibility that there was "something different about the dentist's strain that allowed it to survive longer in the environment, thus allowing contamination of instruments." An Andromeda strain of HIV. Just what we need.

Altman's article concludes on a note of despair. "We have been over the data again and again, and still we don't have an answer," Dr. Witte said, "But I am not ready to quit."

A missing piece in the puzzle would be knowledge of just how widespread HIV is in the general population. We don't know. To find out would mean doing a true, random probability sero-prevalence survey of the population of the United States. At one time the CDC discussed doing such a survey, but apparently it has not been done.

The real Ryan White story

Ryan White, who died last year at the age of 18, put an appealing face on AIDS. His struggle against illness and discrimination won the hearts of Americans, including the famous and powerful, and helped in fostering tolerance for those with the dread disease. His story is inspiring in part because of media manipulation; it is an example of censorship in the service of myth-making.

In 1984 Ryan White, then 13, was diagnosed as having "AIDS". He had been infected with HIV through Factor VIII, a blood-clotting agent used to treat his hemophilia. It was assumed that HIV was the cause of his illness.

In July of 1985 Ryan was barred from attending school in his home town, Kokomo, Indiana. The school authorities felt that the health risk for the other children would be too great. Over a year of legal battles ensued. Ryan finally established his right to attend school, but he was treated very badly by the other children, and his family encountered great hostility from the community.

In the summer of 1987 Mrs. White moved her family to the small farming community of Cicero, Indiana, where they were welcomed by the residents and the school system. In August 1987 Ryan began taking AZT. On 3 March 1988 Ryan White testified before the White House AIDS Commission. "I came face to face with death at 13 years old," but he decided "to live a normal life."

Many famous people befriended Ryan, including Michael Jackson, Elton John, Vice president Dan Quayle, Senator Edward Kennedy, President George Bush, and Donald Trump.

A necessary part of Ryan's appeal was that he, like Kimberly Bergalis, was perceived as an "innocent victim". Unlike other people with AIDS, he had not broken the moral code with regard to drugs or sex, and the media affirmed his normality.

For example, Richard Pearson wrote in The Washington Post: "White also tried to live something of a normal life.... After moving to Cicero, he got a job at a skateboard store, earned a driver's license, and had a girl friend." [Emphasis added](14)

Ryan White died on 8 April 1990. The causes of his death and the nature of his illness were the targets of censorship.

Let me describe the sequence of events which led to the discovery that Ryan did not die of "AIDS" but rather of hemophilia aggravated by Factor VIII concentrate and AZT poisoning. Craig Schoonmaker, founder of Homosexuals Intransigent, told me he had heard over the radio and on television that Ryan White had been admitted to the hospital with uncontrolled internal bleeding. We followed the print media closely for several days, but could not find a single mention of bleeding. Then Ryan died, and not a single reference to bleeding could be found in the Associated Press, New York Times, or Washington Post obituaries. However, the Times story contained this curious passage:

Ryan, a hemophiliac who contracted the virus through a blood transfusion, died of complications of AIDS in Riley Hospital for Children, said Dr. Martin Kleiman, the youth's physician. He would not elaborate. [Emphasis added.](15)

What this indicates is that censors intervened to prevent the print media and Ryan's doctor from mentioning bleeding. I related these things to Peter Duesberg, who was most interested. Duesberg in turn told molecular biology graduate student Bryan Ellison, who took the bull by the horns and contacted the Hemophilia Foundation of Indiana. The people there knew Ryan White very well, and confirmed that hemophilia itself was his major health problem and the cause of his death. In a jointly-written article Duesberg and Ellison give the following account:

Hemophilia has always been a fatal condition. This has only been partly alleviated by recent medical advances. Not only are blood transfusions still frequently needed, but blood clotting factors used by hemophiliacs today are somewhat immunosuppressive themselves. Interestingly, the controlled epidemiological study of hemophiliacs, cited above, found evidence to support the idea that hemophilia may be an inherently immune-deficient condition on its own. In the case of Ryan White, now often cited as an example of an AIDS death, the Hemophilia Foundation of Indiana has confirmed that his death was due to such complications as liver failure and internal bleeding, conditions that typically result from hemophilia itself. Indeed, White already had a severe case of hemophilia, ultimately requiring clotting factor therapy every day. He also underwent daily AZT therapy, the dangers of which are reviewed below.(16)

In wartime this kind of censorship is not uncommon. For example, in 1917 Philips Price, the Russian correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, cabled the immensely important story of the March Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. The Guardian ran his story for one edition only, at which point the censor intervened, and there was a total blackout on these events in the United Kingdom.(17) It is understandable, if regrettable, that censorship would be applied to coverage of a revolution, but it is disconcerting to find such censorship applied to public health issues. What public interest is served by covering up the fact that a hemophiliac died of hemophilia?

DDI approval

On 19 July a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee recommended that dideoxyinosine (DDI) be approved for marketing. So-called "AIDS activists" hailed this as a "historic decision" and a "new era" for drug approval. In a way it was. Approving DDI on the basis of flimsy and even fraudulent data would mean the end to any pretense of drug regulation in the United States, and a return to 19^th century anarchy, in which poisonous patent remedies, cosmetics, and food adulterants were freely sold to uninformed and unprotected consumers.

I did not attend the meeting in Washington, DC, so my information is based on news reports from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press, as well as a "DDI Update" prepared by Mark Harrington for Act Up New York.

By far the best of the four media reports was Marilyn Chase's Wall Street Journal article, "DDI Decision Heralds a New FDA Activism." She at least reported the views of two members who opposed DDI approval:

"This is a rush to judgment," said Deborah Cotton of Harvard University Medical School. And statistician Paul Meier of the University of Chicago abstained from the vote because he was "greatly troubled" by what he called an abandonment of scientific standards.(18)

From Chase's article and from information that Mark Harrington supplied at last Monday's Act Up meeting, it is possible to piece together what happened at the meeting. DDI's manufacturer, Squibb, presented data allegedly demonstrating the benefits of DDI therapy. Having no data from a controlled study, they fell back upon comparisons to "historical controls," a statistically unacceptable procedure. Among the "historical controls" was the placebo arm of the fraudulent Phase II AZT trials, which were conducted in 1986.(19) In addition to this garbage Squibb presented data based on the discredited P-24 antigen test. This was a mistake, for an FDA woman then got up to say that results from the P-24 antigen test are meaningless in terms of clinical outcomes or survival.

At this point DDI would not have been approved, but the FDA came to Squibb's rescue. They requested permission from the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to have "a peak" at data from an uncompleted study being conducted by James Kahn of the University of California at San Francisco. The committee looked at a slide which seemed to show that DDI was just as good as AZT, which was approved four years ago. CD4 cells went up and down. The new head of the FDA, David Kessler, told the committee members to "be creative". They took the hint and voted to approve DDI, but only conditionally - for adults and children who had failed or were intolerant of AZT.

Like AZT, DDI is a random terminator of DNA synthesis, the very life process itself. Apparently no data on DDI's carcinogenicity was presented at the meeting. The results of such in vitro tests as the Cell Transformation Assay are unknown. Presumably a rodent carcinogenicity test is in progress. By the very nature of the drug, we should expect cancer to be among the chronic (long-term) toxicities of DDI. When a nucleoside analogue, like DDI or AZT, is incorporated into a cell, there are only two possible outcomes: either the cell dies, or if it is lucky it mutates into cancer.

The acute (short-term) toxicities of DDI are also severe. It damages the pancreas and the nerves. Pancreatitis is an extremely serious condition; unless treated within a day the outcome is death.

Mark Harrington was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "It's the beginning of the era of choice.... People with HIV need choice." In my opinion it's a pernicious Hobson's choice when someone has to choose between AZT and DDI, or between arsenic and strychnine. People who merely have HIV antibodies already do have a choice: Take care of yourself and you won't get sick. People with "AIDS" also have a choice: Get appropriate therapy for treatable infections, follow good health practices, keep poisons out of your body, and you have a good chance to recover.

Phillip Knightley in The First Casualty describes how some of the most important events in modern history happened under the noses of war correspondents who were too dumb to understand what was happening. It's the same with AIDS correspondents. *

References

1. Casper Schmidt, "The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS," The Journal of Psychohistory, Summer 1984: "Hypothesis:...(k) that the epidemic represents, in the group's unconscious fantasies, an "equivalent of war" during which the group keeps careful count of the sacrifices."

2. Schmidt, work cited.

3. Phillip Knightley; The First Casualty - From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker; San Diego, New York, and London; 1975.

4. This and following quotes from AP report, 21 June 1991.

5. Eric Pianin, "Senate Votes To Order AIDS Disclosure;

Penalties Imposed For Medical Workers," The Washington Post, 19 June 1991.

6. "When the Doctor Has AIDS" (editorial), The New York Times, 20 July 1991.

7. See Knightley, work cited. Also, Arthur Ponsonby's Falsehood in Wartime, London 1928 -- an elegantly concise account, written by a member of the House of Lords, of World War I propaganda. After the war was over, the British War Office admitted to having fabricated some of the most widely believed atrocity stories of the war.

8. Peter H. Duesberg, "Human Immunodeficiency Virus And Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Correlation But Not Causation," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 86 (February 1989) pp. 755-764.

9. Michael Kinsley, "Doctors, AIDS and A Costly Long Shot," The Washington Post, 25 July 1991.

10. Paul Geitner, "AIDS-Medical Workers," Associated Press, 26 July 1991.

11. Malcolm Gladwell, "Senate Vote Ordering AIDS Disclosure a Setback for Activists," 20 July 1991.

12. "'I Blame ...Every Single One of You'; Dying Florida Woman Faults Dentist, Agency in Letter," Washington Post, 22 June 1991.

13. Lawrence K. Altman, "An AIDS Puzzle: What Went Wrong In Dentist's Office?", The New York Times, 30 July 1991.

14. Richard Pearson, "AIDS Patient Ryan White Dies; Indiana Youth's Plight Touched the Nation," The Washington Post, 9 April 1990.

15. Dirk Johnson, "Ryan White Dies of AIDS at 18; His Struggle Helped Pierce Myths," The New York Times, 9 April 1990.

16. Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison, "Is the AIDS Virus a Science Fiction?", Policy Review, Summer 1990.

17. Knightley, work cited.

18. Marilyn Chase, "DDI Decision Heralds a New FDA Activism," The Wall Street Journal, 22 July 1991.

19. John Lauritsen, Chapter II: "AZT on Trial" in Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story, New York 1990.

VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE