A DISSENTING VIEW ON AIDS POLICY
South African President Thabo Mbeki deserves praise
for questioning 'official' beliefs about cause of disease
By Michael Wright
The San Francisco Chronicle 24 May 2000
As a former AIDS research grant recipient, I wish to
praise South African President Thabo Mbeki for his
courage in having publicly declared his willingness to
listen to scientists who challenge AIDS orthodoxy. Mbeki
arrives today in San Francisco, where he will address a
joint meeting of the Commonwealth Club and the World
Affairs Council, as part of his first state visit to the United
States since succeeding Nelson Mandela as president last
year.
The 33-member AIDS panel that Mbeki appointed includes
researchers who have postulated that HIV does not cause
the disease. This is in conflict with the official viewpoint
established within South African governmental health
agencies. For nine years beginning in 1987, I was involved
professionally in AIDS/HIV research. During the 1990s, I
was awarded two federal grants for this work by the Small
Business Innovation Research program of the U.S.
National Cancer Institute. By the end of this period, I had
become skeptical about official beliefs concerning AIDS.
My project was to design computer software that
assessed risk for current HIV infection. After computing
the probability of infection by incorporating the
anonymous user's answers into a detailed history
interview conducted in privacy, the software makes a
recommendation about whether the indi vidual should
have an HIV-antibody test.
In order to win these grants, I had to review the
epidemiologic literature to arrive at plausible measures of
HIV transmission risk for different kinds of sexual conduct
and at reasonable estimates of HIV-infection prevalence
within various U.S. population groups.
From this research, I concluded that there was absolutely
no reason to fear a heterosexual HIV epidemic sustained
by the practice of vaginal sex in the United States.
Although numerous studies have demonstrated the
enormously low possibility of a heterosexual HIV
epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control chose to ignore
them and launched a fraudulent campaign of fear to
convince the majority of the American public that sexually
active people are at significant risk of contracting HIV.
The scare campaign was initiated in the late 1980s, and
was nothing more than a political strategy to stir up
popular support for elevated government spending for
various AIDS programs, including pursuit of the elusive
dream of miracle cures. Pharmaceutical companies have
enjoyed handsome benefits from this endeavor, and now
seek to expand their enterprises in South Africa and other
Third World nations. There is a large body of literature
which supports the conclusion that the possibility of a
heterosexual HIV epidemic is enormously low. For
brevity's sake, I shall offer only a few examples:
--In December 1987, the CDC issued a publication which
recognized that those at high risk for HIV infection are
mostly gay and bisexual males, intravenous drug users,
and their sex partners. Members of the U.S. population not
belonging to any of the listed groups were classified by
the CDC as "heterosexuals without specific identified
risk,'' and the CDC estimated the size of this population to
be 142 million. The agency estimated the HIV infection rate
for this group --the vast majority of American adults and adolescents --
to be 2 in 10,000 (.02 percent) compared to 20 to 25 percent
for homosexual males. Thus, for gay males the infection
rate was 1,000 times greater compared to heterosexuals
outside of specific risk groups (Source: CDC, Morbidity
and Mortality Weekly Report, Dec. 18, 1987, Vol. 36/No.
S-6, Table 14).
--The infection rate for this same heterosexual population
has declined from the 1987 level and was estimated to be
1.5 per 10,000 (.015 percent) in 1992 (Source: CDC, National
Serosurveillance Summary, Vol. 3 (HIV/NCID/11- 93)).
--At a 1987 AIDS conference, epidemiologist Nancy
Padian and colleagues presented a paper in which they
demonstrated that the odds were 1,000 to 1 against
transmitting HIV in a single act of unprotected vaginal sex
between an infected male and an uninfected female
(Source: Abstract THP.3-48: 171, presented at the Third
International AIDS Conference, Washington, D.C., June
1987).
--In a 1988 publication, researchers demonstrated that the
odds were 5 million to 1 against a new HIV infection taking
place in a single act of unprotected vaginal sex between
members of that population which the CDC had earlier
recognized and labeled as "heterosexuals without specific
identified risk'' (Source: Journal of the American Medical
Association, April 22/29, 1988, Vol. 259/No. 16, pages
2428-2432).
In one of the more honest moments of reporting by the
mainstream American press, the Wall Street Journal
exposed the political nature of the scare campaign in a
long article published May 1, 1996. The Journal described
the creation of the CDC's "marketing campaign'' to spread
the belief in universality of risk for AIDS. The article
reported that federal funding for AIDS-related medical
research grew to $1.65 billion in 1996 from $341 million in
1987 while the CDC's prevention dollars grew to $584
million from $136 million.
Interestingly, as shown by the CDC's own published
numbers, the HIV prevalence within the vast population
they were intending to frighten was actually declining as
the scare propaganda was escalated.
As I observed the growing credibility gap between the
perception manufactured by the scare campaigners and
the reality described in the scientific press, I became open
to arguments attacking other elements in the officially
promoted belief system about AIDS. In plain terms, one
might ask: If they would lie as shamelessly as they have
about heterosexual risk, could they be trusted to be honest
about other aspects of AIDS? Robert Root-Bernstein, a
Michigan State physiologist and author of "Rethinking
AIDS''(Free Press, 1993) was the first skeptical writer to
influence me to begin questioning the view that HIV is the
sole cause of AIDS.
In a Wall Street Journal guest editorial (March 17, 1993), he
pointed out that AIDS had remained within specific risk
groups: gay men and "an ever-growing population of
urban, drug-addicted, poverty-ridden, malnourished,
hopeless and medically deprived people.''
Root-Bernstein further emphasized that those who suffer
from AIDS "have many additional immune-suppressive
factors at work for them that predispose them to disease.''
His list of examples included semen-induced autoimmunity
following unprotected anal sex, blood transfusions,
multiple concurrent infections, both recreational and
pharmaceutical drug use, malnutrition and anemia. His
opinion was that HIV does not explain AIDS in the
absence of a co-factor. It follows that eliminating the other
risk factors is the plausible strategy for combatting AIDS,
instead of treatment with toxic antiviral drugs.
In the forward to "Inventing the AIDS Virus'' (Regnery
Publishing, Inc., 1997) by prominent AIDS dissenter Peter
M. Duesberg, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis reports his
failure to discover a single scientific publication
demonstrating that HIV is the cause of AIDS. I suggest
that the very hypothesis that HIV causes "AIDS'' is
scientifically nonsensical. It makes no sense to attempt to
explain something which has not been adequately defined
for scientific discourse.
The official definition of "AIDS'' has been an evolving
political drama whose script has been written by
bureaucratic operatives scheming on maximizing
advantage for their agencies. In the United States, there
have been four official AIDS definitions since 1983.
Duesberg says, "Every time the CDC needs higher rates of
new AIDS cases, it expands that definition once again, and
more diseases are reclassified into the syndrome.''
In Africa, an altogether different definition is used. Created
by the World Health Organization, it does not even require
that presence of HIV be detected in order to diagnose an
"AIDS'' case.
Given this state of affairs, a more plausible statement of a
tenable scientific hypothesis would be: what factors
explain serious illness and mortality in those who have
been labeled "AIDS'' patients? Are there, on published
record, any cases of such patients for whom all proposed
causes of immunosuppression, other than HIV infection,
have been contradicted by evidence?
Before giving Western pharmaceutical companies a free
hand to peddle their toxic products in his country,
President Mbeki should demand that defenders of HIV
orthodoxy answer this question.
Michael P. Wright is an independent researcher and
writer living in Norman, Okla. AIDS dissent information
is available at these Web sites: duesberg.com,
sumeria.net, aliveandwell.org, and rethinkingaids.com.)