Eroding the HIV/AIDS bandwagon

The mistaken belief that a positive HIV test proves infection is one of the mainstream’s Achilles heels, in some part because so many conditions — e.g. pregnancy, various vaccinations, TB . . . — can stimulate an apparent positive. The problem is to find a venue in which this weakness can be exploited.One such venue is in a court, and here Clark Baker’s Office of Medical and Scientific Justice has been doing a lot and meeting with a lot of success. They have just announced 49th favorable outcome, for a military veteran who faced great possible penalties if convicted. Read the details at the OMSJ website.

Congratulations once again, OMSJ team!

Defeating HIV/AIDS — in the court-room

A few days ago I posted hurriedly  the splendid news that the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice  had been able to organize witnesses and defending lawyers to achieve a signal success against the HIV/AIDS true-believers and the misguided belief that “HIV-positive” individuals present a danger to their sexual partners.
An Army sergeant was acquitted despite admitting that he had not informed several women of his status as “HIV-positive” before they engaged in consensual condom-protected sexual intercourse. The crucial point: there was reasonable doubt as to whether the sergeant was “infected with HIV” because

it was established that
 no “HIV” tests prove infection

Lawyer David Steele was an observer at the proceedings and describes them in an audio piece  that makes fascinating hearing. Listen also to Steele’s interview on the Robert Scott Bell show.

I was reminded of the remark that “the most rigorous peer review . . . comes from cross-examination . . . in the courtroom” (Sheldon Krimsky, “Protecting scientific integrity”, Chemical Heritage, 27 [#1, Spring 2009[ 42-3).

In the Robert Scott Bell show, astonishment was expressed several times that someone could be found to be infected on the basis of antibody or PCR tests and in absence of any symptoms of illness. Actually, diagnosis on the basis of lab tests and irrespective of clinical condition or examination has become quite routine practice in medicine. As I had mentioned in “Medicine isn’t science — nor should it be”, Jeremy Greene in Prescribing by Numbers recounts the history of how this has come about. But surely everyone is now familiar with the constant refrain of “know your numbers” — about cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, just about anything that can be measured by numbers.
So ingrained is this that even recommendations by mainstream medical associations have not been able to bring about change in actual practices. For example, for years competent clinicians and researchers have warned against routine use of PSA tests as a purported way of screening for prostate cancer, because PSA numbers produce so many false positives and unnecessary biopsies that carry a certain risk, for instance of infection; yet this abuse of PSA tests continues to be widespread. The Institute of Medicine has pointed out that many of the biomarkers in common use are simply not valid measures of the ailments that they supposedly detect: Tumor size is not a measure of cancer progression or prognosis. Blood pressure or cholesterol (“bad”, total, ratio, whatever) do not measure progression or prognosis of heart disease (Evaluation of Biomarkers and Surrogate Endpoints in Chronic Disease, Institute of Medicine, 2010).
Moreover, treatments intended purely to bring the numbers to a supposedly appropriate value have not been shown to preserve health; a recent article in the British Medical Journal points out that “there are no valid data on the effectiveness” of “statins, antihypertensives, and bisphosphanates” (the last are prescribed against osteoporosis; see Järvinen et al., “The true cost of pharmacological disease prevention”, British Medical Journal 342 [19 April 2011] d2175). doi: 10.1136/bmj.d2175. Indeed, statins do more harm than good: “side” effects include myalgia, fatigue, dyspnea, memory loss, and peripheral neuropathy (Langsjoen et al., BioFactors 25 [2005] 147–152).
But try telling that to your family physician or your specialist and see how they react.

The point is that HIV/AIDS is quite a natural consequence of deeply ingrained attitudes and practices in modern medicine. Once an approach has come into general use, it is extremely difficult to modify let alone discard it, no matter how much evidence accumulates that the approach does more harm than good. Too many interests become vested in the “standard” way of doing things: the authority and prestige of medical authorities, the unwillingness or inability of practicing physicians to question official doctrine or what drug companies tell them, the profits made by manufacturers and clinical labs from tests and devices, the profits made by Pharma which supplies the drugs used to treat the numbers . . . .
The HIV/AIDS blunder differs only in scale from present-day test- and drug-centered medical practice. Admittedly, antiretroviral drugs have done immediate harm to many more people (Hidden in plain sight: The damage done by antiretroviral drugs, 2011/07/25) than have the blood-pressure-lowerers and blood thinners and statins and bisphosphanates and the other popular prescription drugs — AZT alone killed about 150,000 in a decade in the USA alone (HAART saves lives — but doesn’t prolong them!?, 2008/09/17). Still, one has only to note the increasing rate at which drugs have to be withdrawn from the market, sooner and sooner after the initial approvals, and to note the proliferation of class-action lawsuits ( e.g. regarding Fosamax or Pradaxa) to realize that present-day drug-based medical practice represents a genuine danger to global public health.

It is simply no longer possible to believe
 much of the clinical research that is published,
 or to rely on the judgment
 of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.
 I take no pleasure in this conclusion,
 which I reached slowly and reluctantly
 over my two decades as an editor
 of The New England Journal of Medicine

—— Marcia Angell
“Drug companies and doctors: a story of corruption”
New York Review of Books, 56 #1, 15 January 2009

Federal court finds “HIV” tests flawed

The Office of Medical and Scientific Justice helped attorneys gain dismissal of all charges against an “HIV+” Army sergeant who had had sexual intercourse with several women. Read about this signal victory at Military Court Acquits Soldier in OMSJ Case

Defeating HIV = AIDS

There is zero evidence that “HIV” causes AIDS. Incidence of the two doesn’t correlate. “HIV” tests don’t detect viral infection. There are no published articles establishing that “HIV” causes AIDS. “HIV” virions have never been isolated and characterized in pure form, and when they are synthesized by cloning purported HIV genomes they are not infectious and they self-destruct within days (see PMID: 1386485). “AIDS” has been defined as requiring presence of “HIV” and has been expanded over the years to include an increasing number of conditions in which “HIV” tests deliver (false) positives.

The science is quite clear. Experience has shown that this does not influence the mainstream. Those who have suggested anything approaching disbelief in HIV/AIDS theory have been excluded from publication, denied research grants, and personally vilified. Not only is there no incentive for medical scientists or practicing physicians to question the dogma, the penalties for doing so are steep and well known. So how then can this horrific mistake be rectified?

In the very long run, it might just wither away; or perhaps be explained away by some sort of sleight of facts after increasingly widespread distribution of antiretroviral drugs in Africa is seen to be accompanied by increased mortality. But one would prefer not to wait that long. At the Rethinking AIDS Conference in Oakland I suggested these possibilities:

— Politicians might begin to ask, what are we getting for $20 billion annually?
— African Americans might begin to protest that they are not 10-20 times more promiscuous than Asian Americans; Africans might begin to ponder why they are supposed to be 10-100 times more promiscuous than others.
—The media might begin to take up those points.
— A court case or series of them might do the job.

That last possibility may bear fruit sooner than I had thought possible, owing to initiatives being taken by Clark Baker through the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice and its HIV Innocence Project. The aims and rationale of those initiatives are described in this must-read essay posted on 15th October.

Baker draws intriguing parallels between people charged with transmitting or potentially transmitting HIV and people charged with driving under the influence: defense attorneys can cross-examine expert witnesses about technical aspects of the purported data, in particular how valid or reliable the data are — or how unreliable.

Many if not most doctors accept a laboratory report of a positive “HIV” test, especially if accompanied by a CD4 count below 200, as diagnosing infection, even though the tests have not been approved for diagnosis and only the United States regards the CD4 count as a criterion, and even though authoritative sources emphasize that the tests can only be an aid in diagnosis. How would a doctor fare in cross-examination if unaware of those points?
Or unaware that Western Blot is not a confirmatory test but merely a supplemental one?
Or unaware that “positive” in low-risk people is very likely to be a false positive for purely statistical reasons (and not only with “HIV” tests)?
(For details of those see “’HIV’ tests are self-fulfilling prophecies”.)

The questions, “Who proved that HIV attacks cells and causes AIDS? How? Where was this published?”, are routinely evaded by defenders of the orthodoxy; but they could not evade them in court. How could even the most expert witness respond? — “the most rigorous peer review . . . comes from cross-examination . . . in the courtroom” (Sheldon Krimsky, “Protecting scientific integrity”, Chemical Heritage, 27 [#1, Spring 2009] 42-3). Could Fauci or Gallo be reduced to pleading the Fifth, not answering for fear of self-incrimination?  8)

As Clark Baker points out, that so many individuals have been convicted of spreading or potentially spreading HIV is owing to the inexperience of attorneys in such cases, their ignorance of the technical issues and how vulnerable the orthodox theory is to cross-examination. Defendants suffer from the same ignorance — and in the rare case that they didn’t, they were not able to get competent legal representation, as Kim Bannon found.

Nowadays competent representation is available with the help of the HIV Innocence Project and OMSJ. But it is crucial that defendants and their lawyers take advantage of that help before the first substantive arguments in court. After a guilty verdict has been delivered, appeals may fail purely for reasons of legal technicalities; that may have been a critical factor in the Parenzee case in Australia.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *

That doctors don’t know beans about HIV tests should not be surprising. Practicing physicians don’t have time to read research literature, they have to work on the basis of the information fed to them, and that comes from the mainstream during their training and is heavily influenced by drug companies in the “continuing medical education” they are offered later (see, for example, Marcia Angell’s The Truth about the Drug Companies).
That researchers don’t query the basic axioms on which their work is based is not unusual either. It is a mistaken view of science, entrenched by popular dissemination of the myth of the scientific method,  that researchers are continually engaged in setting up hypotheses and testing them. Most science is just routine filling in or cleaning up by standard techniques to produce results that are rarely of any special interest to others — upwards of 90% of research articles are never cited by anyone beside the author (Cole & Cole, Social Stratification in Science, University of Chicago Press 1973: 228; Menard, Science: Growth and Change, Harvard University Press, 1971: 99; Price, Little Science, Big Science . . . And Beyond, Columbia University Press, 1963/1986: Chapter 2).

So the HIV/AIDS “research” industry is no different in essence from any other. Most of the researchers are pursuing esoteric details of the unending array of strains and hybrid strains of “HIV”, or trying to find some clue to what might make a useful vaccine, or synthesizing possible new antiretroviral drugs, and so on. Nothing they do throws light, or is even intended to throw light on the fundamental questions of HIV/AIDS theory. HIV/AIDS researchers are not designing experiments to test the hypothesis that HIV is really the cause of illness. Routine work along standard lines simply accepting the orthodox view is judged worthwhile by those who administer grant funds and those who edit journals and those who review manuscripts for journals. There is simply no incentive to re-examine the basics. The bandwagon has momentum and inertia impervious to attacks from the inside.

What may be rather different in the HIV/AIDS case is that the gurus, those who got the bandwagon rolling, are just as uninterested as their camp followers in looking continually at the basic axioms in hopes of getting a better understanding and resolving the increasing number of apparent conundrums. Gallo is an enigma: Does he really believe HIV has been shown to cause AIDS? If so, why does he believe it? Does he not know of the lack of correlation between “HIV” and “AIDS”? Does he not know that idiopathic CD4-T-cell lymphopenia is HIV-negative AIDS? Does he not know that Kaposi’s sarcoma, once the iconic AIDS disease, is not caused by HIV? Does he not wonder why it is that no one has been able to discover how HIV causes depletion of CD4 cells? Has not the failure of 25 years of efforts to find a vaccine led him to reconsider the basic evidence? Why not?