Mainstream magazine prints AIDS Rethinking views

The New African magazine, a prominent and respected periodical, has published a critique of two books that hew dogmatically to HIV/AIDS theory: Tinderbox, by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, and The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back by Nicoli Nattrass.
With matter-of-fact cogency, Charles Geshekter exposes some of the absurdities of the mainstream dogma, like the supposed origin of HIV in a jump from monkey to man and its subsequent spread via innumerable  implausibilities; and the unsustainable mis-calculations about South African deaths where a model’s estimate of ~300,000 is substituted for the South African Statistics count of ~15,000.

Read and enjoy Aids: Anomalies and Contradictions.

HIV and AIDS: Context and perspective

I became an AIDS Rethinker through reading and looking at data long after the AIDS era had started. So there’s much about the early days that I still don’t know, which is unfortunate for me. What’s even more debilitating is that I’ve known so few of the people who have suffered personally from the monstrous mistake of HIV = AIDS. Just now, a correspondent reminded me of a useful way to broaden my understanding: looking at some videos.

In particular, my friend sent me a link to a 2-hour program assembled by Gary Null from earlier videos. It touches on most of the salient issues, gives glimpses of the early days, and covers in some detail the central issue that positive “HIV” tests do not and cannot diagnose infection. For me, though, the most useful parts were the many appearances by HIV+ people talking about their dilemmas and their various ways of coping under circumstances where the medical dogma was and is to give them toxic drugs.

When mentioning videos about HIV/AIDS, one should always bear in mind the splendidly informative collection  that Joan Shenton makes available at the Immunity Resource Foundation  and her recent documentary, “Positively False — Birth of a Heresy”. The wealth of other material at the Foundation’s website  includes a long list of pertinent websites and many links to pertinent articles as well as an archive of Continuum magazine*.

I had come to learn about Peter Duesberg’s dissent from HIV/AIDS orthodoxy in the mid-1990s because my academic interest has long been in scientific unorthodoxies. I was impressed by the strength of the case against HIV as cause of AIDS, and read more useful books: by Hodgkinson, Lauritsen, Root-Bernstein, Shenton, and others. Then around 2005 I came upon Harvey Bialy’s scientific bio of Duesberg, useful in several respects but mainly because one of his remarks would not stop bugging me, that testing of military recruits in the mid-1980s showed male and female teenagers from all across the country to be testing HIV+ at about the same rate. That is so obviously impossible in light of official HIV/AIDS theory that Bialy must surely have got the source wrong, I thought, or else had cited something that had later been superseded. That led to my collating the mainstream data on HIV test-results and discovering that the epidemiology of positive HIV tests is incompatible with the spread of an infectious agent. Not only that “HIV” doesn’t cause AIDS, it isn’t even an infection (The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory). (It took me longer and more reading to realize that “HIV” has not even been shown to exist in the form of free virions.)

In high school I had become fascinated with chemistry, and worked as a chemist in academe for a couple of decades. I also became interested in learning about things that science seemed to ignore utterly, like Loch Ness Monsters and UFOs and psychic phenomena. But I never lost my enthusiasm for science as THE way to gain understanding of how the world works, and I never lost faith in the ability of science to gain reliable, trustworthy understanding.
So HIV/AIDS theory struck me as an extraordinary, unprecedented, unique aberration. In these modern times of superb technological resources and evidence-based, scientific medicine, it seemed incredible that such a blunder could not only be perpetrated but could remain uncorrected for so long.

Well, that would indeed be incredible, if medicine were actually evidence-based and if science were still a basically truth-seeking enterprise. But I had learned about an increasing number of specialties in which mainstream dogmatism was increasingly suppressing competent dissent (Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels) and slowly came to realize that the “HIV/AIDS blunder is far from unique in the annals of science and medicine”.

The reason lies in the way modern science has changed, from truth-seeking by passionate amateurs to a vast enterprise intertwined with commercial, political, and social forces and subject to innumerable conflicts of interest (From Dawn to Decadence: The Three Ages of Modern Science). Contrary to popular belief, contrary to what most pundits and science writer and journalists say, science nowadays is not self-correcting. Science has emerged from its erstwhile ivory tower and stepped down from its erstwhile disinterested pedestal to become, like other social institutions, at the mercy of commercial and other sociopolitical forces. It matters who you know rather than what you know. The situation is encapsulated by one of Peter Duesberg’s younger colleagues — that’s a misleading term, I mean someone who is employed quite non-collegially in the same university as Duesberg:
“I don’t think Peter is necessarily wrong . . . . He may well be 3,000 percent right . . . . [But] he was overturning generally held views. . . . Political savvy is intrinsic to a scientific career. . . . There’s no such thing as totally right or totally wrong. . . . He would have been OK if he had just done things as convention dictates. . . . Peter may be right about HIV. . . . But there’s an industry now . . . . He’s like a child” (Celia Farber, Serious Adverse Events, pp. 54-6).
That colleague did not wish to be identified, but I fear it was for the wrong reason; not that she’s ashamed of her views, she just wants to remain hidden within what convention dictates and make a good career doing “what everyone does”.
Had science and scientists half a century ago been like that faculty member at Berkeley, my peers and I would not have been attracted into wanting to be scientists. We had thought we were joining a community of truth-seekers working for the public good.
Peter Duesberg, by contrast, believes that science and scientists should follow the evidence wherever it leads and that researchers are duty-bound to tell others what they find.

The manner in which Duesberg has been treated by his Department and his university demonstrates that the bulk of his “fellow” faculty acquiesce in the disgusting sentiments cited by Farber. With the present and future of science in the hands of such people, in what is still regarded as one of the leading institutions of science in the so-called free world, every critique in Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine  can only understate the parlous condition of 21st-century science.

That faculty member is right, though, on one point: Peter Duesberg is in some ways like a child. He is naively innocent of the evils and nastiness all around him, and has the qualities that cause all human beings to love children: innocence, enthusiasm, and because they represent the real hope for better futures.

Things are just as bad in medicine as in science. Practicing physicians gain their knowledge from sources that are just as unreliable as the careerists masquerading as scientists at Berkeley, namely careerists in universities generally and bureaucratic careerists at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Dozens of books have been published in the last couple of decades describing how medicine has been commandeered by profit-seeking institutions and individuals, with drug companies playing a lead role (Critiques of the Commercialization of Science, Medicine, Academe). Yet nothing has been done to ameliorate the situation.

The HIV/AIDS blunder is not an aberration unique in the annals of science and medicine, rather it is a microcosm of 21st-century circumstances. AZT may have killed about 150,000 people, and various antiretroviral drugs continue to maim or kill untold numbers; but so do statins,  and doctors continue to prescribe blood-pressure-lowering drugs  and cholesterol-lowering drugs  even though there is no sound evidence for doing so, so that the risks of the “side” effects outweigh by a large margin any possible benefit. Medicine does not practice what it preaches in the Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm”.

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* The Continuum archive at Immunity Resource Foundation is missing a few issues. Comparing this archive with the list at virusmyth, seemingly missing are volume 1 #1, December 1992; volume 1 #2, February 1993; volume 1 #6, October/November 1993; volume 2 #1, February/March 1994 and #3-#6, June/July 1994, August/September 1994, November/January  1994/95.
Continuum will remain of considerable importance to historians of medicine and of science, so I hope anyone who has copies of those will let Joan or me know about it. In the meantime, browsing in the available issues can only add to one’s astonishment that so much evidence against HIV/AIDS theory, and against the use of AZT and its analogues, was simply ignored by the mainstream.

Italy’s Mbeki?

Political pundits are having a field day over the results of the election in Italy: the Five Star Movement came from nowhere to finish ahead of the major parties, clearly a resounding protest against the professional politicos.

Head of the movement is a one-of-a-kind comedian, blogger, political critic, Beppe Grillo.

Whether a government can be formed, let alone a viable one, depends on the cooperation of Grillo and his Movement. While the pundits speculate endlessly over the negotiations and prospects, they have so far failed to comment on the fact that Grillo is a maverick not only politically but also in having recognized the flaws in HIV/AIDS theory.

Google “Beppe Grillo HIV AIDS” and a number of links turn up, some of them with the convenient sub-link “Translate this page”. For instance, the English version of http://salutepertutti.comunita.unita.it/2012/10/14/aids-il-silenzio-di-grillo/ remarks:

“At the end of the nineties Beppe Grillo . . . called AIDS ‘the greatest hoax of the century’, inspired by the theory of Duesberg, who denied the link between HIV and AIDS.”

The Google search also turns up several videos, for instance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7m_spqBE1Q

Beppe Grillo, like former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa before him, is obviously unsuited to politics since he seems more concerned with evidence and facts than with the popular wisdom  and the propaganda from self-interested “experts”.

Denialism

Those who don’t accept that HIV has been proven to be the cause of AIDS are nowadays labeled “denialists” — as a substitute for answering their arguments and the evidence they point to.

The same has happened to people who do not accept that it has been  proven that human-caused emission of carbon dioxide appreciably adds to global warming.

In many fields of science and medicine, a mainstream consensus has become dogma, and dissenters are treated as heretics to be professionally excommunicated (Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland 2012)

It is worth pointing out that it is the so-called “denialists” who exemplify the skeptical conservatism that was a traditional safeguard of reliability, whereas the mainstream bandwagons of HIV/AIDS theory and human-caused-global-warming theory gained hegemony long before convincing evidence was at hand.

The media have failed dismally by not pointing out that the “denialists” are actually doing what scientists are supposed to do and that they comprise a large number of highly qualified and accomplished people with substantial credentials in pertinent disciplines; see “Denialism” — Who are the “denialists”?

Altman on AIDS (and homosexuality)

“AIDS and homosexuality”  described how two of Dennis Altman’s books helped me get a better feel for the intensity of emotional release that “gay liberation” beginning with Stonewall had brought to some number of gay men; which made it even more plausible for me that the small proportion of gay men who contracted AIDS did so as a result of a decade or so of exuberant but unwise “fast-lane” living.

A few years after AIDS appeared, Altman published AIDS in the Mind of America, (Anchor/Doubleday, 1986). Neither there nor later has he expressed doubts about  HIV = AIDS; yet his writings continue to provide evidence for the lifestyle hypothesis. For example, Altman views sex and sexuality as central to his and others’ sense of identity:
He cites (p. 7) Richard Goldstein: “For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with years of glances and guises, the furtive past we left behind”. Another man put it like this: “Whenever I threw my legs in the air, I thought I was doing my bit for gay liberation” (p. 143).
Altman acknowledges, directly but also indirectly, that there was a great deal of unwise behavior: “Far too many of us assumed that modern medicine could cure any of the illnesses that seemed to accompany ‘fast-lane’ living” (p. 93). Some gay men were more interested in having fun than in the political activism of gay liberation: “We’d be out partying on Fire Island during the Gay Pride marches” (p. 104) — and for a sense of what partying on Fire Island in the 1970s meant, see the 2003 TV documentary, When Ocean Meets Sky. There were T-shirts saying, “So many men, so little time” (p. 142). For most heterosexual people, promiscuity might mean several extramarital partners during the life of a marriage, to some gay mean it meant more partners than several in a single night (p. 144). Being responsible was commonly interpreted as having frequent checks for syphilis and gonorrhea, and such “doubtful practices as taking a couple of tetracycline capsules before going to the baths” (p. 143) — practices that can wreak havoc on the intestinal immune system.

Altman also knew that the average age of the early AIDS patients was mid-30s (p. 20), surely a pointer to the result of years of burning the candle at all ends, rather than a sexually transmitted disease since the latter tends to strike at younger ages already. Altman knew that hepatitis and enteric parasites, not easily treatable, had become well known among gay men in the 1970s (p. 143), and Altman himself had experienced an opportunistic infection, toxoplasmosis, in the mid-1970s (p. 96).

I would guess that for those gay men for whom sexual freedom was a central feature of gay liberation, cognitive dissonance would be hard at work to avoid a lifestyle explanation for AIDS and to accept the virus hypothesis. Yet if Altman had followed the statistics, he would have learned that AIDS remained largely a phenomenon of gay men and drug abusers, with the addition — following on the re-definition of AIDS as “HIV-positive” — of TB patients and people of African ancestry. Surely such restriction to a few social sectors makes no sense for a sexually transmitted condition. Admittedly, the mainstream emphasis on AIDS in Africa muddies the waters by providing apparent support for the prevalence of heterosexually associated AIDS.

At any rate, Altman has been far from alone among gay men in failing to recognize the significance of the evidence for the lifestyle explanation; exceptions have been few indeed. A powerful incentive will have been the degree to which AIDS had been associated since the beginning with gay men, and a desire that the stigma of AIDS should not fall only on gay men. Official agencies had included representatives from gay groups in discussion from the earliest years (pp. 12-3). It was a shibboleth (p. 22) that the most characteristic gay activity of the 1980s was to examine the skin for signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma. Chapter 5, “The Gay Community’s Response”, recounts how prominent a role gay men played in everything to do with AIDS research and treatment, and they were the chief pressure groups for public funding (Chapter 6).

So AIDS in the Mind of America makes the lifestyle explanation for AIDS yet more plausible, and also illustrates how difficult it must nevertheless be for even highly intelligent, well-read, cultured gay men to take it seriously. The book is also of historical interest, not least for reminding how hysterical the popular reaction was to the notion of a fatal sexually transmitted disease (pp. 60-5, 184-5): medical personnel refusing to treat AIDS patients, airlines suggesting they might not load passengers suffering from AIDS, schools excluding “HIV-positive” students. In hindsight this makes remarkable reading: suggested measures to be taken included the possible quarantining of gay men, suggested by no less than James Chin, then epidemiologist for California and recently author of The AIDS Pandemic which makes the extraordinary suggestion that 20-40% of sub-Saharan adults are in concurrent sexual relations with about a dozen people at any given time and change those partners about annually.

We are reminded that the “HIV” tests encountered difficulties before finally being licensed, that it took nearly a year after Gallo’s claim to have identified HIV.

As in his earlier books, Altman mentions some of the uneasiness in the relations between lesbian groups and organizations of gay men. Cited is a complaint that “women’s health issues” were being ignored in favor of funding AIDS ventures (p. 94); one outcome of which was that the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention looked intensely for some way to include women among at-risk groups and coming up with cervical cancer as an AIDS disease.

Given my interest in science, and how it has become increasingly unreliable and corrupt in recent decades (scimedskeptic.wordpress.com), I was struck by a citation (p. 180) from historian June Goodfield who recognized already around 1980 that “grantsmanship as much as discovery, has become the art form of American science” (An Imagined World, Penguin, 1982, p.105).

Once again I recommend Altman’s book as well worth reading. My interest in his work led me to get his autobiography and to learn of several similarities to my own history: son of German-speaking refugees, growing up in Australia, experiencing the University of Sydney at roughly the same time, continuing education in the United States.