VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
CBS "60 MINUTES" ON AIDS
By Mark Gabrish Conlan
Zenger’s 24 January 2001
On January 21, 2001 the CBS news program 60 Minutes broadcast a
segment on AIDS whose theme was essentially one of stark terror. We
were
supposed to become excited at the prospect that the highly-touted
combination "cocktail" therapies for AIDS no longer worked for many
patients, either because HIV had supposedly evolved "resistance" to the
medications or because the unwanted "side" effects were either
life-threatening in themselves or so horrendous patients could no
longer
stand them. We were also supposed to become frightened at alleged
dramatic increases in the rates of new HIV infections in San Francisco,
where most of the segment was filmed, and we were supposed to be
shocked
at the so-called "AIDS denialists," clinging to the "discredited" idea
that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS and using that as an excuse to
"confuse" people about the AIDS message and encourage them to have
unprotected sex. And in reporter Lesley Stahl’s in-studio tag, we were
told that even if we’re heterosexual and live far from San Francisco,
we
shouldn’t feel safe from AIDS because "San Francisco has been the
canary
in the coal mine throughout the AIDS epidemic: that it’s the first to
see the rise in new infections, but it isn’t going to be the last."
(Just how the actions of San Francisco’s Gay men are going to bring
increased HIV infection rates to the straight heartland was never
mentioned, but in this AIDS "reporting" genre it doesn’t have to be.)
In other words, it was about par for the course for the mainstream
media
when they choose to address our issues at all. It wasn’t that different
from the hatchet job Newsweek did August 21, 2000 on Christine
Maggiore, founder and director of the Alive & Well group in Los
Angeles,
though at least Maggiore got more space in that article than the
leaders
of ACT UP San Francisco, Michael Bellefountaine and David Pasquarelli,
did in the 60 Minutes piece to explain the alternative point of view
about AIDS. It emphasized once again the extent to which "HIV/AIDS" has
become a secular religion in the United States, beyond public
controversy or challenge. For the benefit of anyone who may choose to
respond to the 60 Minutes piece, I offer a link
to a complete transcript, prefaced with my own analytical comments on the
piece and its errors and omissions. 60 Minutes may be contacted by
phone at (212) 975-3247, or by letter to 524 West 57th St., New York,
NY, 10019. 60 Minutes does not have a direct e-mail address, but the
general e-mail address for comments on CBS programs is audsvcs@cbs.com.
1) At the beginning of the piece Lesley Stahl says that in 1996
"everybody thought" that the protease inhibitor/nucleoside analogue
"combinations" or "cocktails" would either cure AIDS or make it "a
chronic, manageable illness." Later on in the piece, Dr. Michael Saag
of
the University of Alabama at Birmingham said the cocktails are showing
"longer-term toxicities that we really didn’t anticipate," and that
they
were so obsessed by what the combinations did to so-called "viral load"
counts that the AIDS doctors didn’t stop to think of the fact that they
were essentially prescribing their patients open-ended chemotherapy and
"it might have side effects."
Well, excu-u-u-u-u-se me! We so-called "AIDS denialists" have been
warning about the potential toxicities of these drug regimens since
they
were first announced, with breathtaking hyperbole, at the 1996
international AIDS conference in Vancouver. At the conference itself,
ACT UP San Francisco staged a demonstration that successfully disrupted
a forum on the new medications. ACT UP San Francisco’s protesters
"demanded an immediate end to the practice of treating AIDS patients
with dangerous chemotherapeutic agents," according to the group’s press
release issued immediately after the action. "The activists asserted
that the therapies hyped during the week-long conference such as AZT,
ddI, ddC and protease inhibitors impair the immune system’s natural
ability to fight HIV and control the opportunistic infections that kill
people with AIDS." The release also demanded that "AIDS researchers
replace the current ‘kill the virus with toxic drugs’ treatment
paradigm
with an immune-based therapeutic strategy that focuses on improving
overall health and strengthening the cellular immune response that is
deficient in AIDS."
ACT UP San Francisco’s activists weren’t the only one warning of the
potentially catastrophic side effects of "cocktail" combination
therapy.
The now-defunct New York Native published an article by veteran AIDS
journalist John Lauritsen exposing the shaky research on which the
claims for combination therapy’s effectiveness were based, and Native
editor-publisher Charles Ortleb accompanied Lauritsen’s piece with a
full listing of all the potential side effects mentioned in the label
inserts for the first two protease inhibitors to win FDA approval. This
author also published the side effects listed in the label inserts in
his own publication, Zenger’s Newsmagazine, and two months later did
an interview with protease expert David Rasnick, Ph.D. in which Dr.
Rasnick correctly predicted that among the most serious unwanted
effects
of the drugs would be damage to the gastrointestinal system. In this
case, while the mainstream AIDS researchers were steadfastly insisting
that these regimens would have no adverse effects at all, it was we
so-called "denialists" who were giving accurate information about the
toxicities of these drugs.
2) During the segment, Lesley Stahl refers to "the drugs that have
saved
Jeff Getty’s life." There is absolutely no valid scientific evidence
that the cocktail therapies have saved anybody’s life. The
advertisements for these drugs say as much; they typically contain
statements like, "At present, there are no results from controlled
trials evaluating the effect … on the clinical progression of HIV. …
The
long-term effects … are not known at this time either." (Abbott
Laboratories, Kaletra ad, Frontiers newsmagazine, January 19, 2001,
pp. 72-74.) The reports that "people on the verge of death got out of
bed and went back to work" are only anecdotal evidence. Without valid,
placebo-controlled clinical trials, there is no way of knowing whether
these so-called "deathbed recoveries" had anything to do with drug
therapies or were natural remissions — or, even if they positive
results
are drug-associated, whether the drugs work by blocking HIV replication
(as they’re supposed to) or by killing the organisms that cause the
opportunistic infections that actually sicken and kill people with
AIDS.
What’s more, without valid, placebo-controlled clinical trials there’s
no way of knowing whether people who test "HIV-positive" live longer if
they medicate or if they don’t. These studies haven’t been done on the
basis that, since the drugs are presumed to be effective, it would
supposedly be "unethical" to withhold them from a patient population in
a classic double-blind study design. But members of organizations like
ACT UP San Francisco, Alive & Well and H.E.A.L. [Health, Education,
AIDS
Liaison], who reject the HIV/AIDS model and have already decided not to
use HIV medications under any circumstances, could be used as a control
group for such studies. That would be the only way to answer the
question patient Harry Wingfield raises in the piece — whether he’s
going to die from HIV, from the direct toxicities of anti-HIV drugs or
from a heart attack or stroke because the drugs have vastly elevated
his
blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
The only placebo-controlled trials that have been done on AIDS
medications since the 1990’s — the Hamilton/VA AZT study in 1992, the
Concorde trial in 1994 and a privately reported protease inhibitor
trial
announced at the 1997 Gordon conference (and reported on by Dr. David
Rasnick in the June 1997 Zenger’s) — have shown that the drugs have
absolutely no statistically significant effect on life expectancy or
quality of health either way. Indeed, to the extent to which there were
positive results, people in these studies who stayed off the drugs
until
they actually developed AIDS symptoms lived longer and healthier lives
than those who took the drugs immediately after testing "HIV-positive."
Thus the statement of Dr. Saag’s that "we absolutely can prolong
survival" simply is not supported by the available research evidence,
and only research involving "HIV-positive" people who have never taken
drug therapy at all can yield an answer to the question of whether the
drugs prolong life, shorten it or do neither.
3) Lesley Stahl and Jeff Getty repeat the lie that the reason the drugs
start "failing" after a time ("failing" being described as no longer
raising T-cell counts or lowering so-called "viral load" counts,
surrogate markers that have never been shown to have an actual
correlation with lifespan or quality of health) is because HIV evolves
resistance to them. HIV is one of the simplest viruses known to man.
Most of its genome is taken up by the basic instructions it needs to
tell itself how to enter a cell, infect it and use that cell to
replicate itself. As Dr. Rasnick pointed out in the above-cited
Zenger’s interview, the alleged "mutant strains" of HIV were in fact
dead — they had altered so much in the process of evolving resistance
to
the drugs that they were no longer able to enter a cell, infect it and
replicate. And a virus that can’t do those things is a dead hunk of
protein you don’t need to worry about.
4) The claim that HIV infection rates are rising in San Francisco is
based on highly dubious research by the San Francisco Department of
Public Health. Its sources are an alleged increase in gonorrhea
infection rates (gonorrhea, a genuine sexually-transmitted disease,
being used as a leading indicator for the supposedly
sexually-transmitted HIV) and a new, so-called "denatured" HIV antibody
test — not licensed by the FDA for this purpose — that purports to be
able to tell when a person has been exposed to HIV. (That’s all an
antibody test can tell you, by the very definition of the term — not
whether a person has an active viral infection, but only whether a
person has been exposed to a virus and developed an immune response.)
When the Bay Area Reporter, a Gay-oriented publication, publicly
questioned these statistics, the response of the San Francisco
Department of Public Health was to stop releasing gonorrhea infection
statistics altogether and demand that all future inquiries from the
Reporter be in writing. The claim that San Francisco is experiencing
an explosive increase in HIV infection rates must therefore be regarded
as dubious and unproven at best.
5) Typically, the only representatives on the 60 Minutes segment who
challenged the belief that HIV causes AIDS were ACT UP San Francisco
members Michael Bellefountaine and David Pasquarelli. Lesley Stahl
commented that "scientists call their claims ‘specious’ and ‘a
dangerous, deadly form of denial.’" Not the 1,100 scientists who have
signed the petition of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the
HIV/AIDS Hypothesis. Not the 11 members of South African President
Thabo
Mbeki’s AIDS advisory panel. Not Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary
Mullis, whose polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology is the basis
of
the so-called "viral load" tests (which Mullis believes are an invalid
and fatally flawed view of his invention) and the claims by the
National
Institutes of Health that HIV has met the classic scientific criteria
for proving that a microbe causes a disease (which it hasn’t). In the
early 1990’s a competing network, ABC, did two segments (on Day One,
March 28, 1993; and Nightline, April 4, 1994) in which scientists on
both sides of the HIV/AIDS debate were fairly represented and the
segment reporters actually presented the issue objectively instead of
acting shocked that anyone would believe the supposedly "discredited"
(actually never scientifically tested) theory that AIDS is a chronic,
multifactorial breakdown of the immune system over time from various
toxic, infectious and psychological factors rather than a single
illness
from a single virus.
Stahl accuses us of regarding the maintenance of the HIV/AIDS model as
a
"conspiracy." I would merely describe it as a public-private
partnership
devoted to maintaining a very lucrative industry merchandising anti-HIV
medications — the normal actions of a capitalist enterprise trying to
keep itself in business. In order to keep HIV at the center of the AIDS
universe, mainstream scientists have had to invent ever-more bizarre
theories of HIV’s "viral dynamics" to avoid confronting the reality
that
HIV simply does not behave in the ways genuine disease-causing viruses
behave. These models have long reminded me of the extent to which
medieval astronomers made their models of planetary motion more and
more
complex to keep the earth at the center of the universe — and it was
exactly this mind-numbing complexity that led Copernicus to consider
the
possibility that maybe the earth wasn’t the center of the universe
after all. If Jeff Getty is getting more and more people coming up to
him after meetings insisting that HIV and AIDS do not exist, it’s
because more and more people are seeing for themselves that the
"scientific" claims and justifications for the HIV/AIDS model simply do
not make sense.
6) Regarding the term "AIDS denialists": This is just another example
of
the HIV/AIDS propaganda machine using language in an Orwellian fashion,
both to shut out debate on the question and to vilify their opponents.
Until last year, both scientists and lay activists who questioned the
link between HIV and AIDS were generally referred to either as
"reppraisers" or "AIDS dissidents." Once Mbeki’s highly publicized
effort to re-evaluate the evidence for and against the HIV/AIDS model
by
recruiting scientists and experts on both sides made it no longer
possible for the HIV/AIDS mainstream to ignore us, the mainstream
coined
the term "denialists" in early 2000 to give us as negative a public
image as possible. After all, "dissidents" conjures up associations
with
the brave people in the former Soviet Union who resisted Communist
tyranny, while "denialists" makes us sound like those nuts who believe
the Nazi Holocaust didn’t happen.
7) In what is supposed to be the emotional show-stopper, Jeff Getty
challenges us, "If you think AIDS is all a lie and a myth and a
conspiracy, come live in my body for a week, and put up with what I
have to deal with to stay alive." No, thank you, Jeff. After you’ve
spent years pickling your body with various toxic drugs — you couldn’t
tell Lesley Stahl how many because there are so many you can’t even
keep
count of them all — and after you’ve had baboon marrow shoved into your
bones in yet another pathetic high-tech attempt to treat what’s really
a
low-tech condition, I wouldn’t want to live in your body because I’m
all
too aware of what you’ve done to make it sick.
8) Perhaps the worst sin in this 60 Minutes piece is one of omission.
Partly this is due to the fact that the piece was actually edited and
assembled last November, scheduled to air December 3, then bumped at
the
last minute for an interview with former vice-president Al Gore
regarding the Florida election controversy, and this development has
occurred since. But surely Lesley Stahl should have mentioned in her
postscript to the piece that the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services and the National Institutes of Health have decisively rejected
David Ho’s "viral dynamics" model of HIV and the "hit hard, hit early"
treatment strategy derived from it. Now doctors are being urged not
to
give people combination "cocktails" from the moment they test
"HIV-positive," but instead to wait until patients’ T-cell counts drop
below 350 per milliliter of blood and their "viral loads" (measured by
the branch DNA system rather than by the more sensitive but less
specific PCR) rise above 30,000.
Even within the context of the HIV/AIDS model and the belief that the
drugs work at all, this is still a major favorable advance in patient
care. It acknowledges that many people who tested HIV-positive but were
otherwise totally healthy were being given these drugs too early and
getting sicker than they otherwise would have due to the drugs’ toxic
effects. Surely any responsible reporter addressing this issue would
want to publicize this important change right away so doctors who
actually treat people with AIDS and HIV would get the word immediately
and stop writing prescriptions that would cause their patients
unnecessary illness. Instead, Stahl ignored it and used her postscript
instead to spread yet another degree of AIDS terror without any facts
presented in her piece to back it up.
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VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE