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theory that Bialy must surely have got the source wrong, I thought, or else had cited something that had later been superseded.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.

Lessons from the “baby cure”

ABC News has an unusually well researched, insightful discussion by Sydney Lupkin of the much-ballyhooed alleged cure of an HIV-infected baby: “Experts question so-called HIV ‘cure’”.

The chief points raised are about lack of proof of infection and questions of informed consent. But I would like to point to some deeper issues in medical practice: doctors’ dilemmas and doctors’ ignorance.

“Caplan [medical-ethics specialist] and Kline [pediatric HIV specialist] said they believe Gay [the doctor responsible for the ‘cure’] had the patient’s interests at heart, and that she had the right to deviate from standard of care”.
Having a patient’s interest at heart is no more than the good intentions that, in general, pave the road to hell. Good intentions coupled with technical ignorance can have horrible consequences. Furthermore, human psychology being what it is, one’s belief to be acting with good intentions may not be well based if one suffers the usual conflicts of interest, say, wanting to demonstrate expertise.

“‘When we consider starting any medication in any patient, we always consider the risk-benefit ratio,’ Gay said during Monday’s press conference. ‘When the risk is something as serious as HIV disease, then it’s worth the benefit that you may get from preventing that disease. Even though you never want to start drugs that may cause toxicities, if the benefit outweighs the risk, you do it.’”
“Risk-benefit”, like “evidence-based medicine”, are phrases that can lull the unwary into believing that things are being done to the highest scientific standards.
But “evidence-based medicine” is a hope, a motto, an (impossible?) ideal, it is not a description of current practices, few if any of which are actually based on evidence; for example, innumerable people, are taking drugs to lower cholesterol or blood pressure and increase bone strength, yet “There are no valid data on the effectiveness . . . [of] statins, antihypertensives, and bisphosphanates” (the last, e.g. Fosamax, are prescribed against osteoporosis) — Järvinen et al., British Medical Journal, 342 (2011) doi: 10.1136/bmj.d2175.
As to “risk-benefit”, that sounds like a careful weighing of quantitative statistical data, when in practice — as in the baby-cure case — it’s no more than a subjective guess.

Ignorance about HIV/AIDS is the current “standard of care”, sadly.

For example, “transmission-reducing drugs during pregnancy . . . have been found to reduce the rate of HIV transmission to 1 percent, said Dr. Mark Kline, a pediatric HIV and AIDS specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Without these prenatal preventive measures, babies have a 20 to 25 percent chance of becoming infected with their mother’s HIV”
— but those authoritative, impressive-appearing percentages are based, like all else about HIV, on tests that are simply not valid. Once more:

 THERE   ARE   NO   “HIV”   TESTS
 CAPABLE   OF   DIAGNOSING
 ACTUAL   INFECTION

—— S. H. Weiss & E. P. Cowan,
 “Laboratory Detection of Human Retroviral Infection”,
 Chapter 8 in Gary P. Wormser (ed.),
 AIDS and Other Manifestations of HIV Infection, 2004 (4th ed.).

The truth is hidden in plain sight, obscured only by cognitive dissonance. Thus Kline, who gets so much right — if only the premises were not wrong — apparently has not thought seriously about the implications of the absurdities  and conundrums that pervade HIV/AIDS theory:
“‘That’s a rather surprising statistic, I think, because you think to yourself: If the mother has HIV, won’t the newborn almost certainly also have HIV?’ Kline said. ‘In fact, even in an era in which we did nothing at all, only minor numbers of infants actually acquired HIV infection.’”

Exactly. Just as this supposedly sexually transmitted disease that supposedly galloped through southern Africa and elsewhere is, in the words of Gallo himself, “distinctively [sic] difficult to transmit” (Robert Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, 1991, p. 131);
and the officially claimed HIV+ rate in southern Africa can only be explained by postulating promiscuity so extraordinary that people could hardly have time for anything except sex and changing partners: James Chin, former epidemiologist for California and the World Health Organization, calculates that 20-40% of adults must have “multiple concurrent relationships” with several sexual partners, changing to new partners weekly or monthly, totaling to tens of different partners over the course of each year (The AIDS Pandemic, Radcliffe 2007, Table 5.1 on p. 64).

Surely the colossally mind-boggling absurdities and self-contradictions required by HIV/AIDS theory call for the most careful reconsideration of that theory; and reconsideration might bring to the fore the fact that “HIV” virions have never been isolated from patients even during so-called viremia when HIV is supposedly plentiful; and in absence of a sample of such virions, there cannot be a “gold standard” test to validate currently used tests. As Rodney Richards has pointed out, the so-called “HIV” tests are actually “AIDS” tests and have never been shown by evidence, only by official opinion, to show infection by HIV ( “The birth of antibodies equal infection”, Appendix II in Celia Farber, Serious Adverse Events, Melville House, 2006). “HIV” tests react positive when sera contain some of the things found in AIDS patients BUT  NOT  ONLY  IN  AIDS  PATIENTS  NOR  IN  ALL  AIDS  PATIENTS: several dozen conditions are capable of producing a positive “HIV” test, for instance such common diseases (in Africa) as tuberculosis (Christine Johnson, “Whose antibodies are they anyway? Factors known to cause false positive HIV antibody test results”, Continuum 4 (#3, Sept./Oct. 1996); also Figure 22, p. 83 in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

When Dr. Gay talked of “something as serious as HIV disease”, her belief was based in large part on the fact that, since the introduction of antiretroviral drugs, “HIV” is being held responsible for all the “side” effects of the drugs; for instance the mal-distribution of fat caused primarily by protease inhibitors (PIs) is often referred to as “HIV lipodystrophy”  as though HIV and not the PIs were at fault.

In the abstract I can sympathize with doctors who follow official guidelines and believe they are doing right by their patients. In practice I am appalled at the human carnage consequent on stubborn adherence to an unsupportable theory, which remains unquestioned by innumerable so-called “researchers” even as contradictions of the theory crop up all the time. And I find myself unable to comprehend the mindset of practicing physicians who continue to administer “medications” to babies even when the result is screaming and convulsions; or the mindset of doctors supervising clinical trials where the drugs are so intolerable that they have to be forcibly administered via gastric tubes. Not to speak of the fanatics who try to justify such actions.

The baby “cure”

I’ve remarked in responding to recent comments why the hullabaloo about a baby being cured of HIV infection rests on essentially no real evidence. An excellent exposition of that fact is in a piece at the website of the Alliance for Human Research Protection:

A Baby Alleged to Have been “HIV Infected” is “Deemed Cured”–But Where is the Proof?
Tuesday, 05 March 2013

Penalties for Scientists’ Sins of Omission

Jail terms of 6 years have been imposed on Italian seismologists for misleading the public about the possible danger of a possibly impending major earthquake following a host of smaller tremors (Jailing of Italian seismologists leaves scientific community in shock):
“the seismologists got the science right, but left the job of public communication to a civil protection official with no specialist knowledge of seismology. His statement to the press was, to put it mildly, a grossly inaccurate reflection of the situation: “The scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable.” At this point, the seismologists should have stepped in. But they did not” (Italian earthquake case is no anti-science witch-hunt).
Under this precedent, scientists are required to correct any public statement that they know to be inaccurate. So, for example, whenever it is publicly stated that positive HIV tests bespeak infection by a human immunodeficiency virus, every HIV/AIDS researcher should publicly correct that, given that no test is 100% certain: Stanley H. Weiss and Elliott P. Cowan, “Laboratory detection of human retroviral infection”, Chapter 8 in AIDS and Other Manifestations of HIV Infection, ed. Gary P. Wormser, 4th ed. 2004.
There are innumerable other aspects of HIV/AIDS dogma that persistently misrepresent reality as represented in data in the published mainstream literature. Thus every statement that a single act of unprotected intercourse can cause infection should be immediately accompanied by a correction that the probability is on the order of a few per thousand (and for most people hunderdds of teimes leess than that, since the probability that ones’s partner is infected is on average only a few per thousand). Every statement that AIDS has become a manageable chronic disease should be accompanied by detailed specification of the common “side” effects of antiretroviral drugs — including perhaps the information that the notorious AZT, acknowledged in practice if not in words to have been too toxic at the original high doses, is present in smaller but far from negligible amounts (typically 300 mg twice a day) in many treatment “cocktails” under pseudonym (zidovudine ZDV; Retrovir), for example in a recent “Preferred Regimen for Pregnant Women” [LPV/r (twice daily) + ZDV/3TC1 (AI) — Treatment Guidelines  updated to October 2011; the “AI” marks the strongest possible recommendation used in these Guidelines: “A: Strong recommendation for the statement; I: One or more randomized trials with clinical outcomes and/or validated laboratory endpoints”]. The first dosage of AZT was often 1500 mg/day, though at first as high as 2400 mg (400 mg every 4 hours). A clinical trial comparing this with 750 mg revealed no significant difference in mortality, less than 10% of AIDS patients on these regimens surviving for more than 33 months (Joseph Sonnabend, “Remembering the Original AZT Trial”, 29 January 2011).  One might wonder whether current regimens of 300 mg twice a day are appreciably less toxic than 750 mg/day had been in that long-ago trial.

But of course it is not only with respect to HIV/AIDS that experts fail to correct public statements. Whenever someone claims that there is no doubt that human-generated carbon dioxide is adding appreciably to the rate of global warming, for instance, the computer modelers should rush to point out that all they claim is some sort of statistical probability. When it is mentioned that the universe began about 13 billion years ago in a Big Bang, astrophysicists should hasten to remind us that this is an inference based on various other inferences and assumptions as well as evidence. Indeed, whenever any scientific conclusion is broadcast as tantamount to truth, scientists should leap to correct that and point out that science is perpetually self-correcting — in other words, changing all the time — and that it never claims or can claim or should be allowed to claim final certainty.

Current circumstances are quite different, though. In an increasing range of fields of science, one finds dogmatic adherence to and promulgation of a contemporary mainstream consensus as beyond doubt, together with excommunication of dissenters as heretics, under the more modern term of “denialist”, which the unwary may not recognize as synonymous with heretic — see my latest book, Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth.

Why is HIV/AIDS a disease of black people?

“Throughout last month’s International AIDS Conference, HIV advocates highlighted the enormous disparities afflicting U.S. women of color, for whom HIV infection rates are skyrocketing and reaching levels similar to those of sub-Saharan Africa. . . . the rate of new HIV infections among black women was 15 times that of white women and over three times the rate among Hispanic/Latina women” — “HIV/AIDS Rates Rocket for Black U.S. Women”, ForbesWoman 8/13/2012.

Note first that the disparities are NOT enormous for “U.S. women of color”, only for black women, since they are affected 3 times as much as “Hispanic/Latina” women. Moreover, “Hispanic/Latina” is a highly artificial ethnic-linguistic category, within which genetically black people are affected by “HIV/AIDS” far more than whites: West-Coast “Hispanics”, who are largely Mexican, test “HIV-positive” at about the same rate as Native Americans and not much more than white Americans, whereas East-Coast “Hispanics”, who  are largely Caribbean and black, test “HIV-positive” at about the same rate as African Americans (see copious data from official sources cited in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

As also shown in that book, the reason why black people test “HIV-positive” far more often than others — whites, Asians, Native Americans — is because the “HIV” tests are racially biased: something about the genetic haplotypes common in some sub-Saharan natives, probably related to the Bantu, produces a very high rate of testing “HIV-positive”.

But don’t go to the bother of looking at the data, which are conclusive. Just use common sense. Either African Americans and sub-Saharan natives share an inescapably determinative cultural or genetic proclivity for promiscuous and unsafe sex, or there is something physiological about their shared genetic ancestry that conduces to testing “HIV-positive” — bearing in mind that testing “HIV-positive” can result from innumerable conditions, including pregnancy or getting vaccinated.
The degree of promiscuous and unsafe sex needed to explain the “HIV” “pandemic” in sub-Saharan Africa has been calculated by Dr. James Chin, former epidemiologist for the World Health Organization and for California: 20-40% of adult Africans must be having about a dozen sexual partners at any given time and must be changing them about annually, to generate the network needed for the apparent “spread” of HIV (The AIDS Pandemic, 2007).

So which are you willing to believe?
That about one third of African Americans, women in particular, have about a dozen sexual partners at any given time, without practicing safe sex, and changing those partners about annually

 OR

  that there’s something about those highly non-specific “HIV” tests that responds to proteins commonly found in the sera of people with sub-Saharan genetic haplotypes?