Darin BrownHOW CAN THE HIV/AIDS BANDWAGON BE STOPPED?
Posted by Henry Bauer on 2008/01/27
I’ve been wondering for several years, and I’ve also been asked quite often, “When will HIV/AIDS theory be abandoned? How will that happen?”
According to Yogi Berra, prediction is very hard, especially about the future. The only solid basis for attempting predictions is to extrapolate from the past and present, which can’t take account of the “unknown unknown”—the totally unforeseeable stuff—waiting to trip up even the most judicious and careful projections.
But when it comes to HIV/AIDS, there aren’t even comparable cases from which to extrapolate. Sure enough, plenty of beliefs in science, and a fortiori in medicine, have been found wanting over the centuries, that’s how understanding has advanced; “scientific revolutions” have overturned, displaced, repudiated long-held beliefs—about atoms, about the Earth’s age, about the relation between chemicals in living and non-living entities, about literally innumerable matters.
However, HIV/AIDS isn’t just a belief in medical science, it’s a huge industry, of direct benefit to many groups and to enormous numbers of people at many levels of society and throughout the world (see “Vested Interests”, p. 212 ff. in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory). Researchers benefit from expenditures on HIV/AIDS that are 10 to 100 times more per patient or per death than is spent on diabetes or cardiovascular disease (Fair Allocations in Research Foundation) . Africa gets far more for HIV/AIDS-related matters than for anything else; for instance, while researchers in developed countries make a good-enough grant-living from HIV/AIDS, academics and researchers and their assistants in African countries enjoy largesse that others in those countries couldn’t even dream of having. Drug companies make enormous profits. Researchers and drug companies are able to carry out clinical trials in Africa that would never be approved in developed countries (DRUGS OR FOOD?, 25 December 2007; ARE INTESTINAL WORMS GOOD FOR US? ARE THEY GOOD FOR AFRICANS? FOR AFRICAN CHILDREN?, 30 December 2007). Tens of thousands of organizations are involved in HIV/AIDS, and innumerable individuals—very much including so-called activists—make their living from HIV/AIDS-related activities.
Of course, if the scientific community were to proclaim a consensus that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, others would fall in line. But what might move the scientific community to reach such a consensus? All the funding agencies, all the official institutions international as well as national, all the editors of the most entrenched and prestigious journals and the “peer” reviewers they choose, all the science journalists who have specialized in covering HIV/AIDS, are vested in HIV/AIDS dogma—vested in terms of career, reputation, plain self-interest.
Those are the facts. Documented testimonies are freely available. Scientific papers challenging any aspect of HIV/AIDS dogma are routinely rejected by Nature, Science, Lancet, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, etc. “Dissidents” are persecuted shamefully (DISSENTING FROM HIV/AIDS THEORY, 8 December 2007). Thousands of signatories to petitions that HIV/AIDS be rethought understand that they had better keep that belief separate from their work, and some unknown number are even unwilling to have their names publicly known.
So, one cannot reasonably expect that some epidemic of heart-changing by the powers-that-be will transform this situation. If the mainstream scientific consensus is to change, it will have to be pushed by external forces to reconsider the evidence.
This situation prompted me to take special notice of a sentence in a mystery I was reading (Philip Kerr, “The One from the Other”):
“Hard to comprehend, yes. But not so hard to believe.”
The accumulated evidence forces belief, forces one to accept that, indeed, the mainstream medical-scientific community ignores competently presented and substantively supported views that run counter to the contemporary bandwagon. The evidence forces intellectual acceptance of the fact that this is the way things are. But we rebel against that emotionally, because we cannot comprehend, grasp, that medical science is so very different from how we have been conceiving science to be: objective, self-correcting, concerned primarily and only with truth.
That ideal view of science was not obviously misguided up to perhaps the middle of the 20th century, when one could still understand much about scientific activity as the result of an intellectual free market in which individual truth-seekers collaborated and competed. However, roughly since the Second World War, science has increasingly become a matter of knowledge monopolies and research cartels (for a longer discussion, read my essay on 21st-century science).
At a personal level, I find that I cannot comprehend that individuals should be so impervious to evidence or so uninterested in the whole subject. Like other human beings, I tend to judge others by myself. I came to be an HIV skeptic through a particular combination of personal experience and objective evidence. Subsequently, I make naturally the common yet mistaken assumption that others exposed to the same objective evidence would draw the same conclusions. But others don’t have the same background of personal experience that I do, and it is that personal background that explains why I took an interest in the topic in the first place and why I was able to view the evidence in a non-bandwagon manner.
I suggest that I’m fairly typical of HIV/AIDS dissidents in this. Books, articles, blogs, letters to the editor, and more, have been produced by dissidents under the implicit belief that the HIV/AIDS paradigm can be toppled by presenting the evidence against it. We have to comprehend that this is not so.
Certainly it was necessary to make the scientific case. But that has been overwhelming for a long time now, and the question becomes, How can the evidence be used to bring down this bandwagon? What social or political forces can be harnessed that are sufficiently influential to stand against this colossal combination of vested interests? How can those forces be enticed to take a fresh look at beliefs that have become so entrenched? Who would benefit from it?
HIV/AIDS Skepticism 
Martin Kessler said
I don’t think understanding what’s going on with AIDS is as complicated as the establishment makes it out to be. They present it as a very complicated problem to awe the lay population. It’s too complicated for untrained people to comprehend. Well I don’t buy it. I don’t know very much about the intricacies of virology or its arcane terminology. The establishment have done a good job of making AIDS a mark of stigma at the same time as it’s also a politically correct disease. That’s a good feat. The mantra HIV=AIDS=Death has been pounded into the lay population’s collective conscious ad nauseum. The New York Times without fail prints the word HIV and follows it with “the virus that causes AIDS”. To not believe this is almost like not believing the sun will rise. That’s the lay side. The professional side (doctors, virologists, labs, government (NIH, CDC and assorted agencies), pharmaceutical firms, etc.) would have much to lose by suddenly proclaiming they had been wrong all along. I don’t think they would be forgiven. In fact the resulting chaos and mayhem that would take place would make our current economic woes look like a walk in the park. Lawsuits, stock market plunges, potential for riots to take place. They are metaphorically addicted to the paradigm. The only way is to withdraw gradually. How might they do this? Since HIV (if it exists at all) is really harmless, claim that HIV has mutated into a harmless bug and that they have created a drug (fake/placeblo, but they won’t tell) that will accelerate the mutation in individuals where it still might be deadly. Note this will be an expensive (profitable) drug to compensate for the withdrawal of the other expensive (profitable) ARVs currently in use.
hhbauer said
Martin:
You ought to consider patenting that escape concept!
Darin Brown said
I think we miss a piece of the puzzle by focusing so sharply on the economic and vested interests of the AIDS establishment and neglecting the significant psychosocial factors.
Yes, it is true, “career, reputation, plain self interest” are at stake with HIV/AIDS. However, I don’t feel that these alone can account for the support of the viral hypothesis. Through my experiences at Wikipedia, blog wars, email wars, and general interaction, I have come across a large number of people who vociferously defend the viral hypothesis while having little, if any, direct personal, financial, or reputational stake in its outcome. These are generally doctors and general scientists who are not virologists in particular, and in any case, are not in any fashion connected with the AIDS establishment.
What could account for the fanatical defense of the viral hypothesis by these individuals with little, if any, direct stake involved? To say that these individuals, which in my experience comprise more than a minority of viral defenders, are motivated primarily by money or self-interest not only strains credulity but also leaves us open to attack — e.g. when such individuals without any direct stake earnestly do defend the viral hypothesis, and then are attacked as being “pawns of the establishment” or “only saying what they say because of money and politics”, when this is often not the case, this only serves to galvanize disinterested observers to be more receptive to the “all dissidents are cranks” viewpoint.
My feeling is that the viral hypothesis is kept in place primarily out of self-interest, but that monetary and career self-interest pale in comparison to a much more profound kind of emotional self-interest which stems from a combination of factors, including an irrational belief in the infallibility of modern science and medicine, the social and politically-correct attractiveness of the hypothesis, and most especially, an almost religious symbolism of HIV, the abstract embodiment in the collective subconscious of external threats which can only be neutralized and eliminated by medical priests, whose authority is questioned by almost no one. A good place to start on this line of thinking is Hiram Caton’s book The AIDS Mirage, which places the root problem on a misunderstanding of the nature of medicine itself:
http://www.reviewingaids.com/awiki/index.php/Document:Mirage_contents
“At a personal level, I find that I cannot comprehend that individuals should be so impervious to evidence or so uninterested in the whole subject. Like other human beings, I tend to judge others by myself. I came to be an HIV skeptic through a particular combination of personal experience and objective evidence. Subsequently, I make naturally the common yet mistaken assumption that others exposed to the same objective evidence would draw the same conclusions. But others don’t have the same background of personal experience that I do, and it is that personal background that explains why I took an interest in the topic in the first place and why I was able to view the evidence in a non-bandwagon manner…. I suggest that I’m fairly typical of HIV/AIDS dissidents in this.”
Yes, this seems to be a common trait. As a mathematician, I always viewed science from the sidelines in college and grad school, and I was fortunate enough to have a number of science professors who “viewed Science [journal] with a jaundiced eye” (to quote one) and I took a wide range of science classes which were not strictly “scientific” in the sense of Chemistry 101 or Genetics 101, in that they dealt with topics at the intersection of science and society or science and philosophy, e.g. environmental studies and cognitive science respectively. The key point is that “Science” never got the last word, ethicists and philosophers and lawyers and so on were all contributors and their viewpoints were not discarded simply because of their academic pedigree.
And this I think is the problem with science students today, and 10-fold for medical students and doctors — they have not had sufficient exposure to topics which by their very nature are interdisciplinary and require input from a range of scholars and “non-scientific” thinkers. Environmental science, e.g. is by its very nature interdisciplinary; one would no more make blanket assertions about issues in environmental science without consulting a wide range of experts, from lawyers to ethicists to economists. Similarly for cognitive science, one would not make blanket assertions with appeals to “biological authority” without invoking the wrath of countless philosophers, computer scientists, psychologists, and so on who are involved.
But this is not the case for the typical science student nowadays. They are taught that the authority of their superiors in science classes is a given, and that the viewpoints of thinkers from other areas is negligible, if not non-existent. A challenge to the viral hypothesis is perceived as an attack by outsiders who lack the requisite “training” and academic pedigree to have a right to an viewpoint at all.
Sepp said
How can the HIV/AIDS bandwagon be stopped?
Evidently, it isn’t enough, as you point out, to bring the inconsistencies and failures of current views on HIV and Aids to notice. To the public, these are too arcane to be easily understood (all we can do is instill some doubt) and to the professionals they are the very thing that must be avoided so as not to lose a lucrative job.
My suggestion: Start treating opportunistic infections with standard protocols of pre-AIDS times. In the absence of such infections, ONLY take action to strengthen the individual’s overall health and defense system.
In other words, our campaign should swing towards being FOR proper treatment instead of AGAINST whatever the flaws in the current view are. Only a positive campaign will—in short order—show tangible results. It is the only thing that will overcome the mistaken HIV/AIDS paradigm that has kept the problem alive and has gradually worsened it for over two decades.
We could call it the “Evidence Based Treatments for HIV/AIDS” Campaign or some such name. It would bypass all the emotional issues and get medicine back to where it should be: helping people get well, including those suffering from “HIV disease”.
Martin Kessler said
Isn’t it sad that Gallo duped the patent office (and just about everyone else) with his so-called HIV antibody test? Obviously if they could be sold the ELISA and Western Blot (did Gallo invent both?) as authentic tests, they could, in the complicated world of virology, be sold the Brooklyn Bridge or swampland in Saudi Arabia.
I’m probably too honest to do that kind of thing – you really have to be a lowlife like Gallo do do something like that. If Duesberg were less than honest he would have the Nobel Prize. His name would be a prayer not a curse.
Andrew Maniotis said
Dear Friends,
Sepp makes a very good point-a positive campaign as opposed to a negative one is in order. Desperate folks caught in the AIDS hypnotic trance will listen to anything that promises an alleviation of their death sentence, and, if the protocol(s) of cure and immune reconstitution can be made to sound at least a little “scientific” instead of sounding like “place a magnet on your nose and drink cod-liver oil,” then, perhaps, and just maybe, and always this is a gamble depending on how the legitimacy of the advocate(s) appear(s), mainstream will stand behind it—would be willing to give it a try (because doctors aren’t bound by any laws or human-rights issues, as they are God-like creatures). It doesn’t need to be a money maker either (don’t need to convince the market place, only the patients and a small group of practicing, frustrated physicians).
One good example. Last year, a group up in Canada led by Michelakis et al. published in Nature that TCA, a drug used for years to treat mitochondrial disorders in children with the inherited mitochondrial defect syndrome published that cancer cell mitochondria are known to be asleep while the cells carry out their deadly colonization, but these mitochondria specifically, and only in tumor cells can be induced to “wake up” with TCA and tumor cell mitochondria begin aerobic metabolism as the drug wakes the mitochondria up from their metabolically dormant state. The waking-up process results in 100% kill rates of tumor cells in vitro and in small rodents (normal cells are unaffected as they are not harmed by the drug as their mitochondria are already metabolically active). Because the drug TCA (trichloroacetate) had been used for years in children already for the disorder with minimal if any toxicity, there were minimal concerns regarding toxicity in cancer patients.
When the publication was accepted and advanced last year (in Nature Medicine I believe), there was a blizzard of news reports stating the fact that TCA will never make money—it is a cheap and ubiquitous chemical found in many biology labs—it costs pennies to make, and consequently, no pharma will invest in it. However, the drug, and its wake-up effects on mitochondria and the precedent of mitochondrial defects in cancer cells goes back to Warburg and Szent-Gyorgyi, and thus a rational basis for the drug’s action was already in place (just like AIDS docs know that therapies that support or non-toxically boost the immune system are also rational to consider and try, despite their belief in the ravages of “HIV.”)
Following the press storm pointing out the fact that no pharma would be interested, a plea went out by Michelakis (who is a cardiologist in good standing in his profession) to support a clinical trial of brain cancers (that is ongoing right now). A website was created by Michelakis, a fund was established through this website, and patients with neuroblastomas (who have failed other therapies, which is a flaw in this approach—drug-naive patients also should be recruited based on informed consent and their willingness to look at current treatment failures) was created, and trials are currently proceeding. But Michelakis is a DOCTOR! I am a mere cell watcher and I couldn’t get something like that going despite 7 years of trying. One needs to have a bone in one’s nose in this culture. Scientists, unless they are connected to NCI directly or NIH, or the gene madness, don’t have a snowball’s chance. You need some sympathetic docs that can muster a rabid look in their eye stating that “we have the cure.” But that’s no big deal if indeed something works for patients in desparate circumstances. So the docs get the glory. So what? We scientists work with them and cut their grass and bring them their nail clippers, and hope they will invite us to their Nobel dinner.
Many elements of this story could translate, similarly, into the AIDS arena. The idea of supporting the immune system in AIDS isn’t new or controversial within the Church of Modern Medicine. How to do it, however, is. When Fauzi published her vitamin observations in NEJM a few years ago, it was seriously considered and even adopted by much of the AIDS world as being “something at least” we can do in the present, that makes sense, and there isn’t a single AIDS clinic I’m aware of that doesn’t also push vitamins along with their black-box-label poisons. All Fauzi needed to do to get her trial results into NEJM was to say in one made-up sentence, that “although of course vitamins are no replacement for HAART especially in resource-poor countries, it’s worth it to give them vitamins and food in the present until we figure out ‘the vaccine’ or something else”. She wasn’t a threat, and at the same time, got a protocol through that was positive, didn’t hurt anybody, and hopefully in time will cause many to reconsider that nutrient therapy is something they should indeed look into. Mathias Rath and Rasnick are called “vitamin pushers” by AIDS truth and TAC, and lied about as being only interested in “pushing vitamins to support their company.” Same therapy Fauzi et al suggested, different perception of their credentials by the mainstream = ridicule. Credentials do matter, in addition to the proposed treatment.
It has to sound “legit” to the Church of Modern Medicine, yet at the same time promise to show some efficacy based on accepted (imagined) mechanisms, and be based on the Western view of allopathy (law of contraries as I have written about in the past on these blogs instead of the law of similars) to be seriously entertained by The Church. It doesn’t need to be a money maker (Michelakis is now obtaining all kinds of private foundation and private individual support for his trial although pharma remains unmoved by TCA’s promise, or mechanism). I am even hopeful for Michelakis, I have contacted him; I don’t think it will work by itself, but I think because of TCA’s track record of non-toxicitiy already established in long-term—13 or so years—in children, that it is worthy of a concerted try, and support by the cancer community, to see if it indeed selectively targets tumor cells in humans, without any toxicity.
Endostatin, the anti-angiogenesis drug that failed, is another similar example (that I was associated with, because our 1999 results predicted it inadvertently, by our finding of tumor-made vascular channels in melanoma and now many other tumors) when the world had finally accepted Folkman’s idea enough to invest 12 billion behind it, that it would probably not work for cancer, which of course, it hasn’t. Now Dr. Folkman is dead (last weekend), and my former mentor will be credited with curing macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, which are truly angiogenic diseases, for which of course he deserves full credit and the Prize.
This is all well and good, but it assumes you accept “the AIDS catch,” that AIDS is real, that it will kill you unless you are on HAART, etc. If you want to “be positive” to the extent you willingly condone attacking something you don’t believe in (remember, some 75% of all “HIV/AIDS” diagnoses are made in healthy folks with no symptoms), we are left pondering how to topple the testing ediface, in a positive light. This is why we are talking about retroids and HERVs as being “the cause” of “HIV’s molecular signature, which again, brings any issues of treatment back to the cell biology instead of the virology. This is why I consider Jes’s new contribution regarding genetically modified foods and such to be a new direction to push forward because, it is new, it makes sense, but, although doubtful that it is the cause of “HIV” springing forth in 1983 when genetically modified foods were first introduced and despite the fact that they cross react with p24, it has not been hackneyed to death, and points gently again to the fact that there are many reasons for testing positive other than the fact that you sleep with the devil, you are gay, you are black, or, a “high risk” person. In a positive manner, we need to continue to dissociate “HIV’s” molecular signature from any disease syndrome, and show as many reasons as we can for its appearance for reasons other than those for which the mainstream keeps its lies about sex, drugs, and “the Plan For The New Century” alive. It is a political disease, as Michael Ellner has said many times, and that’s how we need to fight it, positively.
Cheers,
Andy
hhbauer said
Excellent points, Darin, thank you.
The vested interests are not a matter of deliberate, wilful pursuit of selfish ends while knowing better; rather, they influence individuals subconsciously. It’s analogous to conflicts of interest, or maybe the same thing. When you’ve been taught something, and have worked along that line for a while, and everyone around you accepts the same ideas, you become less and less able to see things from a different point of view, even plain facts in the matter you’re working with. Yet I think it’s still the magnitude and range of those real career, reputation, etc., interests that needs to be somehow neutralized if the dissident case is to be attended to, that’s surely the only way effectively to counter their emotional and psychological effects.
Another aspect is that science is a mosaic of specialties, and specialists in one area are used to trusting what those in other areas believe. So epidemiologists will “think”, about anomalies they find as to HIV/AIDS, that these mysteries will one day be cleared up, because after all the virologists and immunologists etc. must know what they are talking about. And so on. And beyond that, as you say, there’s quite a general belief that medicine and science, in the forms of doctors and researchers, know what they are talking about and can be relied on–a belief very much shared by doctors and scientists themselves, who tend to think that if they express doubts, they are being unprofessional. That’s why I thought Part II of my book was essential, illustrating that science is very much a matter of trial and ERRORS.
You were fortunate and unusual, I think, in having such a multidisciplinary education in science-related matters. Not only nowadays, I think even more in times past, students of chemistry, physics, etc., got no glimpses of any insightful history, philosophy, or sociology of science, and tended to graduate with the implicit belief that science automatically uncovers truths. It took a couple of decades before I began to learn something from those subjects.
Thanks for your relevant and important comments, Darin.
hhbauer said
Sepp:
Indeed, yes, a positive initiative always stands better success than a reactive, negative one.
Your suggestion, together with Martin’s to which I made too-flippant a comment, combine to quite a feasible scenario:
The NIH’s Treatment Guidelines already acknowledge and list the benefits of “deferring” antiretroviral treatment. An entrepreneurial researcher will apply for grants to study how well and for how long one can defer antiretrovirals if one assiduously treats the manifest illnesses. One could window-dress this by including the measuring of CD4 counts, viral loads, etc., as though “HIV” mattered. Eventually, then, the use of antiretrovirals would wither away as this approach was found to work; and the drug companies might be slightly assuaged by being allowed to introduce new and expensive medications for those manifest illnesses.
No one would need to mention that this approach was the one used by Josef Sonnabend in the early 1980s, by which someone like Michael Callen could survive full-blown AIDS for more than a dozen years.
Liam Scheff said
Well….it can’t.
I mean, were the Crusades ever stopped? (Sure, after Europe had gotten a lot of loot for its trouble in trekking and warring South).
But, were they stopped by protest? What, you don’t think there were protests? Sure there were. I’ll bet a lot of people opposed the Crusades, when a lot of people died on route, and there was little to show for it.
A lot of people had opposed slavery, for a long, long time, before a war was fought over it… And today, we buy, what, 90 percent of our retail goods from South East Asian near-slave-labor factories.
So, is slavery over?
“Can a paradigm be shifted?“, however, is a different question. Paradigms do shift. My answer to how, is…well, time and tide take care of a lot of that, but if you (or I) want to be effective, I think the only place to do it is the only place that matters: Choice. Informed Consent.
Or, in short, and to paraphrase a former President Clinton: “It’s the tests, stupid.”
That is, people ought to have a right to know the miserable failings of these little broken, dishonest pieces of technology that we laughingly call “Hiv tests.”
And they ought to have a right to choose to refuse any of them, based on a reading of the critical medical literature for 25 years on the subject.
So, it is Informed Consent that I stand for, and a patients right to choose – or reject – these tests, and the drugs, without prejudice.
See this elucidated more fully (with pictures even), here:
http://liamscheff.com/daily/2007/12/05/fighting-the-crime-known-as-hiv-testing/
Steven Burrall said
I would like to respond to Darin Brown’s comment that “vested and economic interests” do not explain much of the wide acceptance of the viral hypothesis. The fact that so many people without any vested interest, particularly practicing physicians, are unquestioning believers of the viral hypothesis can still be explained by economic factors. I am not dismissing the other factors cited by Darin, but I don’t think he gives due credit to a simple two-step process: 1. economic interests influence medical research, medical journal content and media coverage 2. doctors construct their reality based on those influences. The sheer volume of information doctors have to internalize precludes spending much time engaging in critical thinking, so it is not surprising that they will accept what the NIH, the New England Journal and the NY Times is telling them.
Croft Woodruff said
The HIV/AIDS Express is heading for a chasm, big time.
More and more people are waking up to the fact that allopathic medicine has failed and is failing dismally. It is the number one reason sickness care (wrongly labelled health care) is the fastest growing failing business in the western industrial world with costs threatening to bankrupt the treasury.
Heart disease is still the #1 killer—many of the drug treatments for cardiovascular disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, type 2 diabetes, auto immune diseases, mental disease, etc., actually cause or help facilitate or other wise aggravate cancer, heart disease and many other disease problems via nutrient depletion. Vioxx, Baycol, Prepulsid, were withdrawn because they caused vitamin deficiencies that either aggravated the problem they were supposed to treat or caused problems like heart attack or heart failure.
The war on cancer (the #2 killer in North America) was lost decades ago—the losers have now moved on to deal with so-called HIV/AIDS with their failed anti-cancer drugs, compounded by their ignorance about viruses and immune function. Examples of the medical profession’s ignorance about viruses include their foolish attempt to treat virus infections with antibiotics that led to a plethora of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and now the use of anti-metabolites that have not effect on viruses (which have no metabolism to poison) but do poison the host cell or organism which do have a metabolism easily poisoned. For the past 25 years, these so-called virus experts have been wasting billions on treatment by death in search of the “Golden Fleece.”
Meantime taxpayers and people of good will (charities)are getting fleeced in the process of raising money to finance the development of a vaccine for a virus that does not exist. And even if the virus did exist—how would the virologists know the vaccine could or would confer protection? By testing HIV positive? In September 2008, Merck announced their vaccine had failed for that very reason, recipients tested HIV positive—Iatrogenic (doctor caused) AIDS!
No virus, no vaccine and no Nobel Prize.
The real successes in Africa and elsewhere are by the small groups of physicians and health professionals who are successfully treating malaria, tuberculosis in conjunction with access to whole nutrition, potable water, healthy lifestyle and sanitary conditions.
hhbauer said
Liam:
Yes.
BUT: how do we reach all the people who need to be informed that the tests are not valid?
Lukas said
The people described by Darin Brown–the fierce fans of the mainstream–may be in a large part spiritual opportunists–and so many of them might become supporters of a new paradigm when it gains momentum (not necessarily any, though).
On the other hand, has the West seen any changes since the French revolution? 😉 And even that not in science.
PS. The hormone from “cod liver oil”–which Andrew Maniotis uses as an example of silliness–reportedly entertains a significant rise of interest in the mainstream journals. Please see here.
Simon Daniel said
Has anyone seen the Terminator 2 movie? In it the T-1000 robot (made of liquid metal) is frozen by liquid nitrogen and then shattered into thousands of tiny pieces. In this state it is completely helpless, each piece impotent. However, as they absorb the heat from the surrounding steelworks, the pieces liquify and begin to join together again. Larger and larger pieces form, eventually recreating the powerful terminator.
I don’t want to downplay the importance of the HIV/AIDS dissidence movement but at the moment it is like one of the helpless bubbles. Indulge me for a moment and look beyond this bubble. The availability of information over the internet has resulted in an increase in the number of HIV dissidents over the last few years. Could the same thing be happening in other areas as well? Are there bubbles of skepticism forming to challenge mainstream thinking in almost every area of life? Here are just two examples:
– The Weston A. Price Foundation is challenging conventional ideas about nutrition, their numbers are growing.
– Ron Paul’s political movement is challenging the validity of the world’s monetary system (reserve banking), his supporters are growing in number.
I could list many more, whether or not you agree with these groups is irrelevant. What is important is that there are many bubbles forming as people access the wealth of information now available to them. These bubbles are growing and merging, and will eventually be strong enough to challenge orthodoxy across the board. I suspect that when critical mass is reached the effect will be revolutionary social change.
Henry Bauer has asked “How can the HIV/AIDS bandwagon be stopped?”. I think it is inevitable, the real question is when do we hit critical mass?
Fascinating site, Henry. Keep up the good work.
hhbauer said
Michael Ellner submitted the following (slightly edited) via Sepp Hasslberger:
You may quote me on the following if you like:
One needn’t be a virologist, medical doctor or rocket scientist to notice that nothing we were told about HIV/AIDS makes sense—
1. AIDS did not behave like an infectious syndrome from day one.
2. 250,000 people estimated to be infected for more than 20 years have not developed AIDS without the lifesaving treatments.
3. 2/3 of current AIDS cases have low CD4 counts without the expected opportunistic diseases
4. Etc., etc, etc.
It is long past time for dissident experts to stop marking time and educate themselves about “social marketing” and mass hypnosis. I truly believe that we might be able to tame this murderous monster—if more of you gave the science of manipulating people the attention it demands!
hhbauer said
Michael, thank you. I agree wholeheartedly that we need to realize that the science is clear (and has been for a long time), what’s needed is to find ways of locating and convincing the right people, those who can force a public, uncensored discussion of the science.
Martin Kessler said
Dissident views of AIDS do not get published in peer-reviewed journals. Why? Because the reviewers and editors of those journals are marching to the same song, HIV = AIDS = Death. How could a peer-reviewed journal that promotes the dissident view be created? Money (that might be a problem). Scientists who act as peer reviewers (there are probably sufficient numbers). Influential people who skeptical of the paradigm that would actually read the journal (that might be a problem). Can you think of others?
Valerie W. McClain said
The HIV antibody test-kit patent was assigned (owned by) to not just Gallo, but also to the US Department of Health and in a compromise also to Luc Montagnier and the Pasteur Institute. It was Margaret Heckler of the US Department of Health that made the announcement that HIV caused AIDS. This was done without peer review. One might say that the US Department of Health had a vested interest in the invention. Anytime a government scientist patents, the US Government has an “interest” in the invention. I believe they have an interest in some of the AIDS drugs, too.
OraSure Technologies (rapid testing) has a single-bid contract in Florida through the Florida Department of Health. No competive bidding done. Florida legislature requires all pregnant women to be tested for HIV. If infant born and mother not tested, infant is tested.
A government that has a stake in medical devices and drugs will have a blind spot regarding research that contradicts their investments. Currently I would say our government acts more like a corporation. Change will happen, but who knows in what direction. It is possible that enough people are getting tired of the corporate state.
Valerie W. McClain
hhbauer said
Martin, re peer-reviewed journals:
The Journal of Scientific Exploration (http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse.php) was founded by a group of scientists in 1987 to provide a peer-reviewed forum for matters excluded from or ignored by mainstream journals. Medical Hypotheses was founded by David Horrobin for much the same reason but specifically for medical science. The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is also peer-reviewed and is open to heterodox discussions; re HIV/AIDS it had an important article by Rebecca Culshaw, my article criticizing the ad hominem critics of dissidents, and nice reviews of Rebecca’s book and mine. Duesberg had a 2003 article in the Journal of Bioscience, based in India.
Publication by dissidents in places such as these serves the useful purpose of clarifying issues, but it doesn’t provide a publicly effective counter to the mainstream dogma, in part because the mainstream also controls abstracting and indexing services that most scientists use.
As to practical matters, cost is indeed a great barrier, even for mainstream journals. Libraries have been reducing subscriptions for many years because of the escalating costs of journals, and on-line publication is increasingly becoming the norm. Peer reviewing remains a problem in either case.
hhbauer said
Valerie:
Yes, governments have blind spots when it comes to anything in which they are vested, whether it’s financial or merely opinion. The mechanism by which these blind spots work is the bureaucracy, in which no individual is usually willing to go against the official line. So you have prosecutors’ offices denying they did anything wrong even when innocent people were prosecuted and imprisoned, as in the child-care cases. Whistleblowers (like David Graham in the FDA) are just as rare in government as elsewhere.
Valerie W. McClain said
I wanted to clarify a few points. We can blame certain individuals like Gallo for the tragedy of the standard belief that HIV causes AIDS. But Gallo isn’t the problem, he is the symptom of a greater problem. Margaret Heckler made her wonderful speech to the world on April 23, 1984. The file date on the original patent (now partially disclaimed–whatever that means), by “inventors” Gallo and Popovic and owned solely by the USA as represented by the Department of Health, is the exact same date OF April 23, 1984. Subsequent patents were shared arrangements because of the dispute between Montagnier/Pasteur and Gallo/USA. Gallo’s first patent with the US Department of Health suggests to me that the US Department of Health acted unethically and perhaps illegally in making such an announcement on the same day of filing at the US Patent Office. The Department of Health has used their power to influence legislation to create laws that create mandatory testing. In a democracy, the Congress/the people create law, not the Health Department.
This is particularly important, when a Health Department owns or has partial ownership to patents on test kits, medical devices, and drugs.
Valerie
hhbauer said
Valerie:
Yes, a very important point that’s overlooked too often: Gallo and his ilk are symptoms of the problem.
A full and devastating account of the shenanigans over LAV/HTLVIII, sloppy science, patents, and more is in John Crewdson’s “Science Fictions”.
Darin Brown said
Steven Burrall said:
“The fact that so many people without any vested interest, particularly practicing physicians, are unquestioning believers of the viral hypothesis can still be explained by economic factors.”
and supported this with the statement
“…doctors construct their reality based on those influences. The sheer volume of information doctors have to internalize precludes spending much time engaging in critical thinking, so it is not surprising that they will accept what the NIH, the New England Journal and the NY Times is telling them.”
But this latter problem is not an economic problem, it’s an institutional and professional problem. The fact that certain people don’t think, the fact that medical training encourages conformist thinking and discourages critical thinking, the fact that doctors “construct their reality based on… influences” has nothing to do with economics.
I had to learn a huge “volume of information” over 13 years in college and grad school, certainly comparable to, if not more than, doctors in medical training. At no point in time was this volume of information expected to “preclude spending time in critical thinking”. At no point in time was it expected that I would start accepting theorems on faith and stop reading proofs.
Economics may explain why a certain consensus develops without evidence, but it can’t explain why the consensus is then accepted. I’m sorry, I just don’t buy this argument that the practice of medicine, by its very nature of having a huge volume of information, necessarily precludes critical thought. It’s a cop-out.
Why are doctors let off the hook, intellectually? There’s no other profession I can think of where people have such low intellectual expectations for the profession than for medicine. We EXPECT lawyers to be able to argue both sides of an issue, see through it, think critically, question bias and influence, despite the huge volume of information they have to learn. We EXPECT scientific researchers to do the same, despite the huge volume of information they have to learn. We EXPECT this of every kind of profession or occupation except medicine, where we just say, “Well, they’re just doctors. What do you expect?” And you know what, they live up to our expectations.
The fact that doctors don’t, or can’t, recognize economic influences and so don’t, or can’t, recognize that they shouldn’t just accept something because NIH, NEJM, or NY Times told them so, to me is not a problem of economics, it’s a sign of deep problems in the profession of medicine itself.
hhbauer said
Darin (& Steven):
Surely economic factors play a part in setting the social atmosphere and ethos.
But in my view, a central point about doctors is that their training discourages skeptical thinking about medical knowledge. Physicians need to make decisions, usually under extreme pressure of time—i.e., within the course of an appointment, or even more so in an emergency room—so they must rely on what they have been told is “current best knowledge”. Trying to read the to-and-fro on the innumerable topics where there is to-and-fro would be impossible, but also “the native hue of resolution [would be] sickl’ed o’er by the pale cast of thought”, and we don’t want our doctors to be dithering, we want them decisive.
Researchers and pundits who can take their time have assembled data showing that many standard approaches are not justified by the available evidence; see for example Joel Kauffman, “Malignant Medical Myths”.
I think we—the general public— do expect much of doctors, too much; Steven is among a small minority in being more realistic.
MacDonald said
Ah! But the to-and-fro on innumerable topics is itself an illusion created by the approach of medical (and many other branches of) science. The invention of the microscope apparently also signified the era of the mental microscope and a tendency for science to lose itself amidst endless bewildering minutiae.
Nietzsche commenting on this tendency with the “deep thinkers” (philosophers—especially German ones) says (from memory), “all problems must be viewed from a height”; and: “I dive into the great problems like a chill mountain pool: quickly in, quickly out.”
Sickness, health and healing are matters of simple principles, and the purpose of science, contrary to what the censorious HIV enthusiasts would have us believe, is not to make the simple complex. A doctor can be expected to immerse himself in minutiae during his ongoing studies, but not to let them overwhelm him, obscure what is clear and crowd out his capacity for
personal judgment.
Neither are alert critical faculties and decisiveness incompatible. To make such a distinction not only produces poor MDs, it also produces poor Commanders in Chief. In the latter case the hypocritical nature of the excuse is admirably expressed in the words “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
From a more civilized era:
“218. If a physician make a large incision with the operating knife, and kill him (the patient), or open a tumor with the operating knife, and cut out the eye, his hands shall be cut off.”
Codex Hammurabi
James Foye said
I’d like to make a movie, a documentary. I know there have been one or two made, but I imagine when making mine taking a team of doctors to Africa, some believers in the established line, others are dissidents. Let the former go around diagnosing (or perhaps just confirming diagnoses) of all these poor Africans, adults and children, who have “AIDS”. Then let the other doctors figure out in each case what is really going on. Give the patients more HIV tests (hmmm…why do they test positive on some and negative on others?). Get them off retrovirals and treat them for what they have, provide them with proper nutrition and clean water, etc.
It would probably take some serious money and also would take time (to compare the results of treatment by the second group of doctors with those left on retrovirals, etc.). Meanwhile, the film should also be tracing out the flow of money to the various governments, sales of retrovirals, validity of reported statistics, and on and on. It would be quite an understaking, but so many people who will not spend two hours reading a paper written by an AIDS dissident (even one intended to be easily understood by the general public), might spend two hours watching such a movie. It could really make a difference.
Did I say two hours? My goodness, this movie could be ten hours. The hardest thing would deciding what not to put into it.
hhbauer said
The HIV/AIDS films putting a dissident view that I’m aware of are these:
HIV = AIDS—Fact or Fraud? (113 minutes) http://www.hiv-aids-factorfraud.com/
Questioning AIDS in South Africa (56 mns) http://www.aliveandwell.org
The Other Side of AIDS (86 mns) http://www.theothersideofaids.com
AIDS Inc (113 mns) http://www.garynull.com
What is AIDS? http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/268.html
I would appreciate being told of any others
heja said
I would like to turn your attention to another field where the hands of the orthodoxy are being increasingly watched, namely, international aid.
This report by one of the mainstream institutions, surveyed in the Financial Times, says that basically the structure of international aid is very much at odds with the actual needs and that e.g. the alleged virus is sucking up 75% of aid to countries like Rwanda! Now, it is only a little extra step for people to realize that this must be driven by some specific agendas!
It is so clear to me that I cannot understand why others cannot see it!
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d68300fe-ddc2-11dc-ad7e-0000779fd2ac.html
hhbauer said
Heja, re “It is so clear to me that I cannot understand why others cannot see it!”, remember the saying, “None are so blind as those who WILL NOT see”.
One factor in international aid is the chain of bureaucracy through which it must travel. For a rather devastating insider description of the World Bank, read Sebastian Mallaby, “The world’s banker: a story of failed states, financial
crises, and the wealth and poverty of nations” (2004).
Second, “aid” is typically given in restricted form—in other words, to satisfy in some way the donor’s values or wishes; US aid mustn’t be “anti-life”, for example.
Re HIV/AIDS, it’s abundantly clear that a central purpose is to make money for drug companies; that’s why it’s necessary to carry out elaborate studies to “prove” that feeding Africans is a worthwhile adjunct to giving them toxic drugs, even though the food costs orders of magnitude less than the drugs—see DRUGS OR FOOD?, 25 December 2007.
heja said
I totally agree but for me it is a sign of hope that the organisation like this which itself is a part of international bureaucracy came up with such a sobering assessment! This can be used readily in stopping or slowing the bandwagon!
CathyVM said
I am rather more cynical. Pharma industry has a long history of getting out from under when the manure hits the twirly thing. Imagine if all the AIDS proponents decided to announce they were wrong and all funding for ARVs in Africa stopped. Many African leaders and the “HIV+ve” people who do believe the drugs are lifesaving would see this as another depopulation measure. The drugs would simply be sold on the black market and Pharma still rakes in the lolly. Those who have followed the shenanigans of milk formula companies (baby murderers) in developing countries know that private corporations have a much greater control ($$$) over the minds of the people than government and educational institutions.