UPDATE: MORE SPONTANEOUS SEROREVERSION

According to HIV/AIDS dogma, testing “HIV-positive” denotes infection by “HIV” which is permanent and ineradicable. One of several independent proofs that HIV/AIDS theory is wrong is the fact that people do spontaneously revert from “HIV-positive” to “HIV”-negative, perhaps most notably and frequently, babies born “HIV-positive” and reformed drug abusers (p. 96 ff. in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory). But whenever spontaneous reversion happens to be noticed, it’s treated as the secular equivalent of a miracle (HIV “INFECTION” DISAPPEARS SPONTANEOUSLY, 22 January 2008). Here are a couple more instances:

“BEIJING, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) — A farmer in northeast China’s Jilin Province has tested HIV negative, six years after being diagnosed as HIV-positive, according to the provincial Center of Disease Control (CDC).
Wen Congcheng . . . first tested HIV positive in 2001 [during testing of blood donors]. . . . Late in 2003, he was re-confirmed to have HIV/AIDS as a result of another test . . . . However, in July this year [2007], Wen received a negative test result at the No. 1 Clinical Hospital of Beihua University in Jilin. Wen decided to seek another opinion and went to the First Hospital of the China Medical University and another three hospitals for HIV tests, which all proved to be negative. The Jilin municipal CDC carried out a follow-up test which confirmed the negative result, and later the provincial CDC also confirmed the result.”

But, of course, the white-coated gurus refuse to accept this, and have questioned the original positive result, while the lab that made the diagnosis sticks by it.

“ ‘I am pretty sure there are no problems with the blood samples and the tests,’ said Liu Baogui, former director of the HIV/AIDS and STD Section of the CDC of Jilin City. . . . Professor Wu Min, a member of the HIV/AIDS experts’ committee under the Ministry of Health, is sceptical about the validity of the original positive test result. ‘I can not believe that such miracle could have really happened,’ he said. ‘Some patients appear to be free of the virus after effective treatment, but the HIV anti-body is always there, so the test result will still be positive.’ Wu said the inaccuracy rate of tests by the provincial CDCs is lower than 0.01 percent. ‘But it is possible that the person’s name and blood sample was mixed up at the Chuanying District CDC where Wen tested HIV positive for the first time,’ he said.
. . .
In 2003, Andrew Stimpson, a 25-year-old Briton, tested HIV-negative 14 months after testing positive in May 2002. The case has never been scientifically explained.”

And here’s more detail about Andrew Stimpson:

“Doctors baffled as HIV man ‘cures’ himself” (Sophie Kirkham, Sunday Times, 13 November 2005)

“A MAN who tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes Aids [sic, British usage], has subsequently shown up negative for the disease in a case that has mystified doctors. It was claimed last night that Andrew Stimpson, 25, may have shaken off the virus with his own immune system after contracting HIV in 2002.
If proved, the NHS has said the case would be ‘medically remarkable’. … The Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS trust, which treated Stimpson, has said he needs to undergo more tests before it can be established how he apparently conquered HIV. ‘These tests were accurate and they were his, but what we don’t know at the moment is why that has happened, and we want him to come back in for more tests… It is potentially a fantastic thing.’ Stimpson was tested three times in August 2002 … and the results showed he was producing HIV antibodies to fight the disease. Stimpson … contracted the virus from his boyfriend, Juan Gomez, 44. He began taking vitamins and other dietary supplements to keep his body healthy in the hopes that this might fend off the development of full-blown Aids. In October 2003, after impressing doctors with his good health, Stimpson was offered a new test, which came back negative. Further tests in December 2003 and March last year also proved negative. … ‘I couldn’t understand how anyone could cure themselves of HIV . . . I thought it had to be wrong because no one can recover from HIV, it just doesn’t happen.’ The tests were re-checked by the Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust when Stimpson threatened litigation believing there must be a mistake, but the results confirmed all the tests had been accurate. In a letter understood to be from the NHS Litigation Authority in October this year, Stimpson was told: ‘The fact you have recovered from a positive antibody result to a negative result is exceptional and medically remarkable.’ The trust said there had been several other cases of claimed ‘spontaneous clearance’ of the virus worldwide, although it is not believed any have been proved. A spokeswoman added that the trust had urged Stimpson to return for tests, but that so far he had not done so.”

If I were Stimpson, I too would decline further tests administered by people who would love to be able to tell me that I do, after all, have an incurable and fatal illness. Stimpson’s case is readily explicable by Tony Lance’s intestinal dysbiosis hypothesis [WHAT REALLY CAUSED AIDS: SLICING THROUGH THE GORDIAN KNOT, 20 February 2008] or by the Perth-Group view that testing HIV-positive merely denotes oxidative stress. It was not that Stimpson “contracted the virus from his boyfriend”, but that they shared a lifestyle conducive in some manner to oxidative stress or intestinal dysbiosis.

THE “GALILEO GAMBIT STRAWMAN”

Perhaps the most common reaction to dissident arguments is the argumentum ad populum, more commonly known as the “argument from consensus”. You know, “Fifty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong”. This is perfectly exemplified by a quote Robert Gallo gave to Anthony Liversidge in 1989:

“There is no organized body of science that thinks it is anything but comedy with Peter right now. That’s the fact. Why does the Institute of Medicine, WHO (World health Organization), CDC (Centers for Disease Control), National Academy of Sciences, NIH, Pasteur Institute and the whole body of science 100 percent agree that HIV is the cause of AIDS? If there was anything to what Peter is saying, wouldn’t it occur to you that there would be some other scientists that would agree with Peter? Can you tell me anyone?”

Twenty years later, little has changed:

“Debating denialists dignifies their position in a way that is unjustified by the facts about HIV/AIDS. The appropriate way for dissenting scientists to try to persuade other scientists of their views on any scientific subject is by publishing research in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. For many years now, AIDS denialists have been unsuccessful in persuading credible peer-reviewed journals to accept their views on HIV/AIDS, because of their scientific implausibility and factual inaccuracies. That failure does not entitle those who disagree with the scientific consensus on a life-and-death public health issue to then attempt to confuse the general public by creating the impression that scientific controversy exists when it does not.” — “Answering AIDS Denialists”, AIDSTruth.org

The argument from consensus is a logical fallacy. The truth of a claim is not dependent on how many people hold the claim to be true. There are many counterexmaples from history, but a favorite is Galileo’s advocacy of Copernicanism. The response runs as follows: “Almost everyone thought Galileo was wrong, but he turned out to be right. Therefore, just because almost everyone thinks something is true, doesn’t make it so.”

The fallaciousness of the argument from consensus is a banal fact which is hardly in dispute. Therefore, people arguing from consensus are forced to either defend their claims with other valid arguments or to defend the argument from consensus with further logical fallacies. The clever try their hand at the former; the dim-witted almost invariably try their hand at the latter by using a logical fallacy I like to call the “Galileo Gambit Strawman”.

The idea behind the fallacy is to replace the above response to the argument from consensus with a strawman called the “Galileo Gambit”. The fallacy runs like this: “Yes, Galileo was right when almost everyone thought he was wrong. However, for every Galilieo, there are a thousand Bozo the Clowns who are wrong. Just because you compare yourself to Galileo, doesn’t mean you are right. You are far more likely to be wrong. Stop using the ‘Galileo Gambit’.”

The “Galileo Gambit” has become a favorite tactic of pseudo-skeptics, as it was recently popularized by one of our favorite surgeons-turned-blogger “Orac” (“Respectful Insolence”), certainly familiar to many readers of this blog. Unfortunately for dear Orac and his readers, it is a strawman argument.

When someone invokes Galileo as a counterexample against the argument from consensus, they are not asserting that because almost everyone disagrees with them, they are necessarily correct in their claims. Such an argument is patently absurd, and I have rarely, if ever, seen it advanced. When someone invokes Galileo, they are not claiming that such a comparison is sufficient to establish their claim, they are simply asserting that the example of Galileo provides evidence that consensus itself is insufficient reason to reject a claim.

The Galileo Gambit Strawman is committed in response to a perceived use of the Galileo Gambit, not the Galileo Gambit itself. It is ironic that such an elementary and obvious logical fallacy as this is perpetrated almost invariably by those who most claim to be “rational”, “skeptical”, and “scientific”.

APPENDIX

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For those wishing a more precise mathematical explication of the “Galileo Gambit Strawman” fallacy:

Let

D = “Everyone disagrees with me.”, and

R = “I am right.”

The skeptic is saying

“~(D ==> ~R),”

where “~” indicates logical negation, in words,

“It is not the case that because everyone disagrees with me, I am necessarily wrong.”

The defender counters

“~(D ==> R)”

in words,

“It is not the case that because everyone disagrees with you, you are necessarily right.”

The statement

“(D ==> R)”

in words,

“Everyone disagrees with me, therefore I am right.”

is called the “Galileo Gambit”, and it is correctly described as a fallacy.

But the skeptic did not say “(D ==> R)”, they said “~(D ==> ~R)”. So I call the strawman counter above from the defender the “Galileo Gambit Strawman”.

The Galileo Gambit Strawman then takes the precise form:

“~(D ==> ~R) <==> (D ==> R)”

The first statement is the correct argument against the argument from consensus. The second statement is the fallacious Galileo Gambit. Taking the two statements to be logically equivalent is the fallacious Galileo Gambit Strawman.

WHAT’S IN A NAME? VITAMIN THERAPY BAD, MICRONUTRIENT THERAPY GOOD

Linus Pauling created an astonishing number of significant advances in the chemical sciences, including the theory of chemical bonding and the physicochemical basis of biological activity, and he was the first to discover the molecular basis of a disease, the misshapen structure of hemoglobin in sickle-cell anemia.

Pauling’s political activism against the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere made him something of a pariah in political circles, and his insistence on the dangers of the radioactive fallout produced in the tests was pooh-poohed by the expert white-coated gurus of the establishment. For a long time now, of course, his view on that has been the mainstream consensus, though I am not aware that there’s ever been a public acknowledgment that Pauling had been right and that the Government and its experts had been wrong.

For his chemical work, Pauling received a Nobel Prize. For his political activism, another Nobel Prize, for Peace. But when he began to stump for the desirability of large doses of vitamin C in particular, as well as the benefits of other supplements, he was labeled a crackpot who had lapsed into senility. Yet his argument for such “orthomolecular” practice was eminently reasonable: he pointed out that the “minimum daily requirements” established for vitamins and minerals were based only on clinical knowledge of the minimum amounts needed to avoid illness; it seems very likely that the optimum amounts for healthy functioning would be greater than those minimum amounts. As to vitamin C, he pointed out that our vegetarian primate cousins get far more of it from their diet than we do.

In dribs and drabs, here and there, consensus medicine has been catching up to Pauling; for instance, we are informed that senior citizens should take supplements of vitamin D, and ophthalmologists advise vitamin E, selenium, and zinc to stave off macular degeneration. At the same time, determined “crank busters” and representatives of consensus medicine continue to castigate anyone who recommends a mineral, vitamin, or other supplement that has not already been approved by the bureaucracies.

One result is that periodically a “breakthrough” is announced that comes as no news at all to people who know about these historical facts. For example, two recent articles report the discovery that for Africans seriously ill from TB, and sometimes even “HIV-positive”, “micronutrient supplements appeared to decrease the risk of early tuberculosis recurrences among HIV-positive patients”, and they “significantly decreased… incidence of peripheral neuropathy, regardless of HIV status.”

(Peripheral neuropathy is described as “a condition that can be caused by both HIV infection and key medication used to treat tuberculosis”. The second statement is correct, but the first is not; it is antiretroviral drugs, not “HIV infection”, that causes peripheral neuropathy. This is the same sleight-of-mouth as when there’s talk of “HIV-associated lipodystrophy”—the lipodystrophy comes from the drugs, chiefly the protease inhibitors. Lipodystrophy was not a widespread condition among AIDS victims or “HIV-positive” people before the advent of HAART.)

“Micronutrients”, then, offer benefits to Africans suffering from TB and also “HIV-positive”. Still, castigation and calumny are heaped upon Dr. Matthias Rath http://www.dr-rath-foundation.org.za/ for his research on the role of nutrition in various illnesses, including HIV/AIDS, and his advocacy of a variety of supplements. Rath had worked with Linus Pauling and had been Director of Cardiovascular Research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto (CA). Rath is now vilified just as Pauling was; and just as with Pauling, some of Rath’s insights are likely to be accepted belatedly by consensus medicine. And just as with Pauling, Rath is unlikely to be then given his due credit. From the Pooh-Bah point of view, the misunderstanding needs to be preserved, that the mainstream consensus in medicine and in science is always right.

HIV/AIDS ILLUSTRATES COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Oh that one would hear me! … and that mine adversary had written a book
King James Bible, JOB 31:35

As a target of debunking, a review may serve as well as a book, especially when it happens to be a review of what’s [not!] known about HIV/AIDS: “The spread, treatment, and prevention of HIV-1: evolution of a global pandemic”, by Myron S. Cohen, Nick Hellmann, Jay A. Levy, Kevin DeCock, and Joep Lange, Journal of Clinical Investigation, 118 [2008] 1244-54; doi:10.1172/JCI34706. The authors are heavyweight white-coated HIV/AIDS gurus, at least two of whom (Levy, DeCock) have been in this business from the beginning. The review is a textbook case of cognitive dissonance or, using Thomas Kuhn’s term, incommensurability (1).

Cognitive dissonance is the inability to “see”, or to comprehend the implications of, evidence that—objectively speaking—disproves a belief. Popular parlance might describe it as a state of denial. In Festinger’s classic study (2), when the predicted end of the world did not come on the calculated date, the believers concluded only that they had gotten something in the calculations a bit wrong, and their basic belief hardened rather than weakened.

“Incommensurability” signifies that researchers get so vested in the prevailing paradigm (i.e., dogma) that they cannot understand—quite literally cannot understand—how data could be interpreted in any other fashion than the one dictated by their belief.

Imre Lakatos (3) identified a strategy researchers use quite routinely to preserve belief in the face of contradictory evidence: they invent ad hoc explanations for each new piece of data that their theory cannot accommodate. They do not modify at all the basic belief (the “core theory”); rather, they attach to it ad hoc extensions that are not genuine corollaries because they are not inherently demanded by the theory, and they are not necessarily consistent in any natural way with other such ad hoc extensions of the theory.

This aspect of science is not part of the conventional wisdom about “science”; the popular myth, oversimplified and reverential, holds science to be trustworthy under all circumstances (4, 5). But illustrations of the fallibility of science abound, and HIV/AIDS dogma offers some cogent examples of cognitive dissonance, for example:

— The prediction that the AIDS outbreaks in major American cities would be followed by a spread into the general population was almost immediately falsified; yet the belief that HIV is sexually transmitted hardened rather than weakened.

— The prediction that a vaccine would be available within a couple of years after 1984 has been falsified over and again, despite the deployment of every conceivable strategy for design of such a vaccine, not to speak of untold millions of dollars expended. These failures have brought only increasingly strident calls to continue the attempts.

— The finding that the observed apparent rate of sexual transmission is far too low to explain the observed distribution of “HIV-positive” people was met by the ad hoc postulate that there must be some higher rate of infectivity during short periods; and this unobservable and unobserved infectiousness is nowadays dogma without the benefit of proof.

The cited review by Cohen et al. of the state of the art of HIV/AIDS offers further illustrations of accepting as fact, and disseminating as fact, things that are plainly not true, or that are unproven or unprovable, or that border on the absurd. As well, interpretations are invoked or implied that in other contexts would be immediately recognized as unwarranted, and racist to boot.

Simply wrong:

“[M]ale circumcision provides substantial protection from sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-1”
Four references are given, but left unmentioned is the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (6), which found no such effect.
Even were such an effect to be suggested by correlations (which are the only available evidence), one might question a causal interpretation for its extreme implausibility with respect to “HIV-1”: how could circumcision protect males from an agent whose apparent transmission from female to male is already significantly lower than the apparent transmission from male to female, which itself is only about 1 in 1000? And given those almost immeasurably small apparent rates of transmission, how massive a set of trials would be needed to gather potentially convincing evidence?
As to circumcision protecting against known STDs, there is controversy extending over centuries and still not resolved to the satisfaction of all researchers, see http://www.circumcision.org/. For example, Professor Andrew Grulich (National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research [Australia]) reported recently at the Australasian Sexual Health Conference (Gold Coast, 11 October 2007) that there was no association between infection and circumcision status for any disease apart from syphilis (Thaindian News, 14 November).

Hardened belief in face of contrary facts:

“28 years after AIDS was first recognized…, HIV-1 requires continued global focus and investment”
Required, presumably, only because researchers want the money; for in the very same paragraph, Cohen et al. acknowledge that “global HIV-1 prevalence seems to have been stable since around the turn of the 20th century; and HIV-1 incidence peaked worldwide in the late 1990s and has been declining ever since”.

“Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the unequal spread of HIV-1”
Exactly; “surprising” because no infectious agent behaves like that.
On the one hand, “HIV-1 does not respect social status or borders”—because no sexually transmitted agent does—yet on the other hand, “racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans and Hispanics, are disproportionately affected… in Europe … many infections today are found among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa”. The obvious contradiction between “no borders” and “racially discriminatory” can only be resolved by recognizing that HIV is not sexually transmitted; but those hewing to the dogma are incapable of that recognition, as Festinger, Kuhn, and others have pointed out.

“Africa has witnessed the full devastation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic”
but the population there has continued to grow at an annual rate of a few percent!

Swallowing improbabilities:

“DNA sequences of viruses in distinct clades can differ by 15%-20%”
and yet all of them are supposed to do about the same thing, with only minor differences in efficiency of transmission and “pathogenic potential”.
But in other contexts we’re told that human and chimp genomes differ by less than 1%, which suffices to produce quite major differences in the products of those genes.

“In Eastern Europe … brisk and severe epidemics emerged among injecting drug users in the late 1990s”
Grant—for the moment—that HIV can be transmitted via infected needles: how to conceive “brisk and severe epidemics” from shared needles? Try to picture the orgies of needle-sharing that would be required, particularly when two decades of experience have revealed that catching “HIV-positive” from needle punctures is even less probable than the 1 in 1000 chance via unprotected intercourse.

How HIV is transmitted in different parts of the world:

Since this figure sports precise percentages, the casual observer might be tempted to regard this as scientifically established fact, instead of pausing to recognize how absurd it is on its face. Marital sex responsible for half of all infections in the most affected area, and for a quarter of them in Asia—but not at all in Eastern Europe? Casual sex more significant in Eastern Europe than transmission among men who have sex with men, who remain in the United States the group most regarded as at risk?! Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) virtually unknown outside Africa, including in Asia where “marital sex” represents a quarter of all transmission?? Doesn’t marital sex in Asia ever lead to pregnancy?!? Medical injections, too, virtually unknown outside Africa; and in Africa allowed just a few percent, ignoring the numerous publications by Gisselquist, Potterat et al. that indict such injections as a more plausible source of the “pandemic” than sexual intercourse?!?! Sex workers a substantial risk in Asia and Latin America, but far less dangerous than marital sex in Africa, and no risk at all in Eastern Europe?!?!?
To believe all this, one would have to also believe that these various regions of the globe are characterized by cultures and lifestyles so different as to bespeak the presence of altogether different species of Homo.
The text of the review article notes that “the US epidemic remains a paradigm of HIV/AIDS in the developed world”, indicates that sex among males is the greatest source of infections there, and suggests something similar for Western Europe. Those are the regions for which the data are most copious and reliable; and moreover North America is the region where HIV/AIDS originated, the veritable “mother of all HIV/AIDS regions”; so why are Western Europe and North America absent from the figure, whose source is “Bringing HIV prevention to scale: an urgent global priority”?

Subterranean racism:

“even in settings of generalized epidemics [i.e., self-sustaining in the population], the risk of infection with HIV-1 is … increased in persons with higher rates of partner change or who acquire classical … STDs … [or] who experience other significant exposure(s) to HIV-1, such as injection drug use”
— those people who also happen to be endowed with black skin, in other words, because all our data has shown for a couple of decades that they, everywhere in the world, are the most likely to test “HIV-positive”: “In the US, racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans and Hispanics… in Europe … many infections today are found among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa”.

Note how the term “minorities” is deployed as a euphemism in mainstream discourse about HIV/AIDS (and in many other contexts too). In the United States, Asians constitute a much smaller numerical minority, and Native Americans an even smaller minority again, than either blacks or Hispanics. But Asians are significantly less affected by “HIV” than are white Americans, and Native Americans are affected not much more than Caucasians and significantly less than Hispanics, let alone blacks. “Minorities” serves as a euphemism for both “liable to reprehensible behavior” and “black”.

****************

This review article constitutes a goldmine of additional opportunities to debunk HIV/AIDS theory. It is replete with unproven assertions, for instance about “acute viral syndrome”, and contains the occasional nugget of acknowledgment that the most fundamental, central, matter of all remains as mysterious as when it was first declared that HIV destroys the immune system:

“To date, the destructive properties of HIV-1
have not been completely unraveled”.

If one omits the misleading euphemistic weasel-word, “completely”, this statement is demonstrably true. None of the many suggested mechanisms have stood the test of reality. No plausible mechanism for the destruction of the immune system by HIV has been discovered in a quarter century, following more than $100 billion spent on research.

————————–

References:
(1) Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press (1970, 2nd ed., enlarged; 1st ed. 1962)
(2) Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, & Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, University of Minnesota Press (1956)
(3) Imre Lakatos, “History of science and its rational reconstruction”, pp. 1-40 in Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences, ed. Colin Howson, Cambridge University Press (1976)
(4) Henry H. Bauer, Fatal Attractions: The Troubles with Science, Paraview Press (2001)
(5) Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, University of Illinois Press (1992)
(6) Millett GA et al., “Circumcision status and HIV infection among Black and Latino men who have sex with men in 3 US cities”, JAIDS 46 (2007) 643-50

Rethinking AIDS Day

The Group for Rethinking AIDS decided to name April 23rd “Rethinking AIDS Day” to commemorate Robert Gallo’s announcement of the pseudo-discovery of “HIV” on that date in 1984. A press release was issued, and there was tentative agreement on a “Green Ribbon” icon:

A fine video was created for the occasion.

An earlier PR venture in New York had taken advantage of an art auction in connection with the Bono “RED” campaign, informational leaflets were offered to people entering the auction:

(thanks to Darin Brown for gatherng the links and information)