THE AIDS BLUNDER

By David Rasnick

Mail & Guardian (South Africa) 24 Jan. '01

The contagious, HIV hypothesis of AIDS is the biggest scientific, medical blunder of the 20th Century. The evidence is overwhelming that AIDS is not contagious, sexually transmitted, or caused by HIV. I have come to realize that embarrassment is the main obstacle to exposing this simple fact.

So why are we barraged, almost daily, by an endless litany of AIDS horrors and HIV statistics? Why do virtually all doctors and public health officials profess their unswerving allegiance to the unproven hypothesis that AIDS is contagious and sexually transmitted when the evidence is greatly against it?

There are more than 100 thousand doctors and scientists who have built their careers and reputations by simply accepting the articles of faith about AIDS. At this late date, it is simple human embarrassment that is the biggest obstacle to bringing the AIDS insanity to an end. It is the fear of being so obviously and hopelessly wrong about AIDS that keeps lips sealed, the money flowing and AIDS rhetoric spiraling to stratospheric heights of absurdity.

The physicians who know or suspect the truth are embarrassed or afraid to admit that the HIV tests are absurd and should be outlawed, and that the anti-HIV drugs are injuring and killing people. We are taught to fear antibodies, and to believe that antibodies to HIV are a harbinger of disease and death ten years in the future. When you protest this absurdity and point out to health care workers that antibodies are the very essence of anti-viral immunity your objections are met with either contempt or embarrassed silence.

The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Medical Research Council of South Africa, and the World Health Organization are terrorizing hundreds of millions of people around the world by their reckless and absurd policy of equating sex with death. Self preservation compels these institutions to not only maintain but to actually compound their errors, which adds to the fear, suffering, and misery of the world-the antithesis of their reason for being.

The only way we can free ourselves from the AIDS blunder and bring an end to the tyranny of fear is to have an open international discourse and debate on all things AIDS. Anger will be a natural response to facing the enormity of the scandal of AIDS. Anger has its place but it should be put aside quickly. It is a mistake to focus on villains and on whom to punish. The AIDS blunder is a sociological phenomenon in which we all share a measure of responsibility.

Ultimately, the AIDS blunder is not really about AIDS, nor even about health and disease, nor even about science and medicine. The AIDS blunder is about the health of our democracies. A healthy democracy demands that its citizens keep a skeptical, even suspicious, eye on its institutions in order to prevent them from becoming the autonomous, authoritarian regimes they are now.

The AIDS blunder shows that we need to rethink and restructure our institutions of government, science, health, academe, journalism and media. We must replace the National Institutes of Health as the primary gatekeeper of research funding with numerous competing sources of funding. We must restructure the peer review processes of scientific publishing and funding so that they do not promote and protect any particular dogma or fashion of thought or exclude competing ideas. A robust and mean investigative journalism must be revived, rewarded and cherished.

Finally, as citizens we must take back the authority and responsibility for our own health and well being and that of our democracies.