Progress in science requires suspension of disbelief

Jon Meacham’s review of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York Times Book Review, 4 April 2010, 14-5)  contained these thought-provoking sentences:

Faith requires a willing suspension of disbelief.
But that is a different thing from the suspension of reason.

Dogmatic atheists, who are typically also dogmatic scientific materialists, disbelieve anything that they do not know how to explain in straightforward terms within the limits of contemporary scientific knowledge; and they describe as irrational anyone who confesses a belief, a faith, that appears incompatible with their own scientistic world-view. There are, however, many religious people who happen also to be competent scientists and who have written cogently about the compatibility of reason and religious faith — Kenneth Miller, say, or John Polkinghorne. They manage to be rational about their faith and about other matters while suspending the scientistic dismissal of anything that doesn’t seem to fit the current mainstream scientific consensus — which they, being historically informed as well as intelligent, understand to be tentative and temporary, as all scientific knowledge is.

The epithets of irrational and unscientific are hurled not only at religious believers, of course, but also against people who study such unproven topics as extrasensory perception or the possible existence of UFOs or Loch Ness monsters or yetis, and also against those of us who deny that HIV causes AIDS. But it is we who are the rational ones, because we are informed by history in the knowledge that scientific mainstream consensuses have always changed; and we understand that it is absurd to treat opposing a consensus as automatically wrong.

It becomes wearisome to continue to recall examples, which are legion, of counter-mainstream contentions that turned out to win the later day:
— The Earth DOES move.
— There ARE disease-causing germs, and it’s good to wash your hands before delivering a baby.
— Energy DOES travel in discrete quanta.
— The supposedly mythical Kraken DOES exist: it’s the giant squid.
— Children ARE, in unfortunate numbers, physically maltreated by their parents or caretakers.
— Rocks DO fall from the skies.
— Ulcers ARE caused by bacteria.
— Kuru and mad-cow diseases are NOT caused by “slow viruses”.
— Acupuncture sometimes works, and NOT via the placebo response.
— “Civilized” folk, not only Australian aborigines, ARE likely to suffer when subjected to bone-pointing or the like.
— And innumerable others.

It is irrational to hold that any contemporary belief held by some majority of researchers is automatically true. It is irrational and uninformed to criticize people just because they disagree with a mainstream consensus. The devil is always in the details, and those who wish to support any mainstream consensus can only do so rationally by invoking the specific evidence that is supposed to support that consensus.

It is rational to take seriously evidence that seems to contradict any given mainstream consensus.

Of course, that a mainstream consensus is almost bound to be wrong over the long haul — that’s how science and human understanding progress, after all — does not make it automatically or demonstrably wrong in the short run, just because some phenomena remain inexplicable. But it is irrational to exclude the possibility whereas it is rational to explore the evidence pro and con.

In the case of HIV/AIDS, the evidence pro is thin at best, which is why, plausibly, the HIV/AIDS dogmatists and their groupies persistently fail to cite it and resort to name-calling and reiteration of :everyone knows”, “no one doubts”, “hundreds of thousands of papers”, etc.
On the other hand, the evidence con is copious and strong.

So the rational ones are the Duesbergs, the Perthians, the Lauritsens, the Culshaws, and the many others of that ilk.
The irrational ones are the Faucis, Gallos, and their groupies, who attempt to explain away contradiction after contradiction:
— vaccines that enhance instead of countering “infection”;
— antiretroviral drugs that cannot kill their supposed target when they are present in microbicides;
— putative retroviruses that mutate to the extent that there is no prototype or archetype while maintaining pathogenicity;
— a sexually transmitted agent that brings enormous epidemics while being almost impossible to transmit via sexual intercourse;
— an infectious agent that cannot survive for long outside physiological conditions and yet is said able to produce epidemics via unsterilized needles in regions where the agent’s prevalence is minuscule;
— an agent transmitted via breast milk, but not if babies are fed exclusively with breast milk. And so on and so forth.

Goodreads

A couple of years ago a friend invited me to join Goodreads where one benefits from recommendations of good books to read and can recommend one’s favorites to others. They claim a readership or membership of 3,200,000. However I didn’t join, because I’ve got too much waiting to be read all the time. I was reminded of the venture this morning, when the Google Alert for “The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory” told me that a review had just been posted at Goodreads. Such out-of-the-blue kudos, like the favorable ones on amazon.com from people I don’t know, are very gratifying.

The case against HIV

It’s generally believed that HIV causes AIDS, in part because it seems incredible that “science” could be so wrong. But history of science teaches that it’s anything but incredible.

The considerable evidence that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS includes:
— Lack of correlation between HIV numbers and AIDS numbers
— No correlation among “viral load”, CD4 counts, and clinical prognosis
— Published data on deaths and “infections” show no sign of purported latent period: “infection”, symptoms, deaths all show the same age distribution peaking in early middle age
— Impossible level of promiscuity needed to explain African prevalence of “HIV-positive”
— Failure of every vaccine trial
— Failure of every microbicide, even those containing antiretroviral drugs
— Constant number of “HIV-positive” Americans for three decades
— Constant demographics of “HIV” by age. race, and sex
— No actually observed sexual transmission
— Condom use has no effect on incidence of “HIV-positive”
— Pregnant women more likely to become “HIV-positive”
— Health-care workers at no risk of infection
— More breastfeeding protects babies against becoming “HIV-positive”

AIDS is a lifestyle phenomenon, not an infectious ailment.

“HIV” is a misnomer for misinterpreted “HIV” tests.

HIV/AIDS theory became established as a result of political and social pressures, not because of scientific evidence.

Those points are set out in a just-published article in EdgeScience — Current Research and Insights, #3 (April-June 2010) 6-8.  The magazine is published by the Society for Scientific Exploration and edited by Patrick Huyghe, a science writer whose credits include many articles in such major magazines as OMNI and co-authorship of books with scientists, for example, with (Louis A. Frank) The Big Splash. The Journal of Scientific Exploration,  founded in 1987, contains peer-reviewed and rather technical articles; EdgeScience is intended to make technical matters accessible to a general audience.

Ignoramuses at Elsevier and their Ignorant Advisers

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
(Even the gods are helpless in the face of stupidity)
—– Friedrich Schiller

Laughter would be as fitting as tears over Elsevier’s contortions in setting out to destroy the raison d’être of Medical Hypotheses without admitting to it. These people who control much scientific publishing have not the slightest understanding of the nature of science and how it progresses or regresses. What they do understand is that their profits depend on a cozy relationship with the powers that be, hence they act as shills for drug companies by publishing fake “medical” journals [“Elsevier published 6 fake journals”].  But publishing anything that questions the prevailing orthodoxy is taboo when it offends mainstream Pooh-Bahs.

Why did David Horrobin found the journal Medical Hypotheses? Why has its value been attested by innumerable people — many established scientists who could not have their best ideas published elsewhere, bystanders sending comments on stories about Elsevier-Gate, members of the Editorial Board, and others?

Anyone with even the most superficial acquaintance with the history of science and the work of philosophers and sociologists of science recognizes as axiomatic that peer review is inevitably informed by the prevailing paradigm. In other words, research proposals and manuscripts for publication are judged for their plausibility on the basis of what is already supposed to be known. Anything that doesn’t question the contemporary consensus sails through the process, even as it may never be found worthy of citation by others (most published scientific articles are never cited, except by their own authors). Anything that contradicts what the prevailing consensus imagines to be true is likely to be rejected.

In hindsight, but only in hindsight, universally lauded are the ideas that overturned a prevailing consensus.

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Human knowledge and human lack of knowledge have been nicely described as
1.  the known (= thought to be known);
2.  the known unknown:  Gaps in what’s thought to be known, and presumed to exist — so long as what’s thought to be known really is known;
3.  the unknown unknown, from which serendipity occasionally releases intellectual lightning strikes of immense significance for the expansion of human understanding.

Peer review serves to guard against the publication of such intellectual lighting strikes, embryonic scientific revolutions.

In that light, consider the absurdity of Elsevier’s attempted justification for its intended changes for Medical Hypotheses:

The proposed new arrangement should ensure “that potentially controversial articles receive especially careful review”! . . .  “reviewers would only judge the ‘premise, originality, and plausibility’ of hypotheses submitted”! (“May deadline set for controversial journal’s Editor”, Martin Enserink, 1 April 2010)

Perhaps it was a subtle message, that the reporting these idiocies emanating from Elsevier occurred on April Fool’s Day. Peer review finds objectionable precisely anything that questions the status quo because it judged such hypotheses not only implausible but beyond the pale, wrong.

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Serendipity brings things to hand not only out of the unknown unknown. A long-delayed culling of my file cabinets turned up this just as I was composing this blog post:

“Disbelief greeted classics in top U.K. medical journals” [Bernard Dixon, The Scientist, 17 April 1989].
“Truly innovative science is often — perhaps usually — accompanied by skepticism, dismissal, and/or disdain from the ranks of established expertise. That proposition receives surprisingly strong support from a study of the top-ranking papers from Britain’s premier medical journals. . . . No less than four of the six papers most cited from The Lancet and the British Medical Journal during the years 1955-1988 record ideas that were initially rejected or disbelieved.”
The examples include:
— Marina Seabright’s discovery of stripes or bands in certain chromosome preparations, dismissed for four years; but then it became the most referenced report in The Lancet between 1955 and 1988 (2,643 citations).
— George Miller’s finding of an association between high-density lipoprotein and atherosclerosis.
— Martin Skirrow’s recognition of Campylobacter as responsible for more cases of food poisoning than Salmonella.
— Alice Stewart’s study of lymphatic leukemia leading to discoveries of the fetal origins of all childhood cancers and an understanding of the role of cancers of the immune system in other diseases.

Perhaps worth noting as well is that 50% of these wrongly rejected breakthroughs were made by women. Given that women have been historically greatly underrepresented in the ranks of scientists, this adds at least anecdotal evidence for Bernard Barber’s generalization that low status of the proponents is among the reasons why the Establishment pooh-poohs a given novelty.

GAYnocide in San Francisco

In “Predicting rates of ‘HIV-positive’ — and racial cleansing” (2010/03/14), I pointed out that Washington DC was setting out on an unwitting campaign of racial cleansing: testing everyone for HIV and administering toxic drugs to all “HIV-positive” people, irrespective of their state of health, would lead to a disproportionate number of African Americans being killed by the toxic drugs, since black people test “HIV-positive” far more often than others.

Now San Francisco is setting out to cleanse itself of gay men in the same manner:
“City endorses new policy for treatment of H.I.V.” (2 April 2010, Sabin Russell)

“San Francisco public health doctors have begun to advise patients to start taking antiviral medicines as soon as they are found to be infected . . . . The new, controversial city guidelines, to be announced next week by the Department of Public Health, may be the most forceful anywhere in their endorsement of early treatment against H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. . . . Behind the policy switch is mounting evidence that patients who start early are more likely to live longer, and less likely to suffer a variety of ailments — including heart disease, kidney failure and cancer — that plague long-term survivors.”
As I’ve pointed out before, perfectly healthy people take longer to be killed by toxic drugs than people who are already ill. Testing “HIV-positive” can result from a huge variety of different conditions. Among gay men, one prominent cause may be the practice of rectal douching, which can damage the intestinal microflora that constitute a significant arm of the immune system, acting in particular to control fungal infections — see Tony Lance’s hypothesis of intestinal dysbiosis and his presentation at RA 2009, now available in video format (most conveniently on YouTube).
People who test “HIV-positive” AND have symptoms of illness are surely less healthy than people who test “HIV-positive” and do NOT have symptoms of illness. Up to now, therefore, the less healthy people are, the more immediately they have been put on antiretroviral treatment, and therefore they have died sooner from the drugs’ “side” effects than those who start HAART while they are more healthy. We already know that the majority of adverse events among people on HAART are “non-AIDS” events — “side” effects of the treatment that result in organ failure [NIH Treatment Guidelines, 29 January 2008, p. 13; ; p. 21, November 2008].

The first thing that any “HIV-positive” person should do
is to try to discover WHY they are testing “HIV-positive”:

Have they recently taken antibiotics? Have they recently had surgery? Been pregnant? Had an anti-tetanus shot? A flu shot? Do they eat healthily and eschew douching? And so on. Almost any unusual physical condition appears able sometimes to stimulate a positive “HIV” test — certainly the use of “recreational” drugs and thereby probably the intake of significant amounts of other drugs as well.

The “variety of ailments — including heart disease, kidney failure and cancer — that plague long-term survivors” do NOT plague long-term non-progressors. Those adverse events were never suffered by AIDS patients in the 1980s, that has happened only since the introduction of antiretroviral drugs. Those ailments — “non-AIDS events” as the NIH Treatment Guidelines classes them — plague long-term HAART-treated “survivors”.

“Studies suggest that in the early years of infection, when a patient may show few signs of immune system failure, the virus is in fact causing permanent damage that becomes evident later.”
“Studies suggest” that only because it is assumed, without any direct evidence, that “HIV” somehow damages every cell in the body — magically, since it has never been found in any cells to any significant degree. Demonstrably “infected” people’s CD4 cells, the purported primary target, are “infected” at a rate of much less than 1%, after all (references cited at p. 176 in Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus).

“For instance, in older patients who finally start taking the drugs, the effects of chronic inflammation take their toll.”
Re “older”: Bear in mind that everything about HIV/AIDS is at a maximum in early middle age, 35-50. There is no indication at all of the postulated latent period, and the mortality of PWAs (People With AIDS) does not increase with age, even as mortality from every other known cause increases dramatically with age above the middle years. In 2004, for example, the mortality of PWAs ≥65 was 1.8% whereas that at ages 25-34 was 1.7%, at 35-44 3.2%, at 45-54 3.8%, and at 55-64 2.6% [How “AIDS Deaths” and “HIV Infections” Vary with Age — and WHY, 15 September 2008; HAART saves lives — but doesn’t prolong them!?, 17 September 2008;  No HIV “latent period”: dotting i’s and crossing t’s, 21 September 2008; Living with HIV; Dying from What?, 10 December 2008]
The “chronic inflammation” is a pure guess. Since it has never been discovered just how “HIV” supposedly kills the immune system, a popular guess nowadays is that it must cause chronic inflammation, chronic stimulation of the immune system, which then by some unknown mechanism destroys itself — even though an earlier speculation that AIDS is an autoimmune disease turned out to be wrong. The logic of “chronic inflammation” is analogous to the invention of the term “immune restoration syndrome” to describe the finding that recovery of CD4 counts and diminution of “viral load” was often accompanied by severe illness or death on the part of the fortunate patient whose treatment had been so successful.
Bear in mind, too, that these speculations about chronic inflammation and the like are largely based on observation of HAART-treated individuals, or at least individuals who are not only “HIV-positive” but also in poor health, because most healthy untreated “HIV-positive” individuals are not being monitored. Long-term non-progressors or elite controllers have remained perfectly healthy for as long as a quarter century while “HIV-positive”, and since they are healthy, their existence as “HIV-positive” has never come to official attention. By contrast, it is beginning to be noticed that HAART produces premature aging [“Another kind of AIDS crisis”, David France, 2009/11/01].

“Dr. Diane V. Havlir, chief of the H.I.V./AIDS division at San Francisco General Hospital, said the new policy was already in effect for her patients. Although a decision whether or not to take the medicine rests with the patient, all those testing positive for H.I.V. will be offered combination therapy, with advice to pursue it.”
How many of her patients have had the opportunity to hear the reasons offered by Rethinkers for not starting HAART?

“The turning point in San Francisco’s thinking may have been a study in The New England Journal of Medicine on April 1, 2009, that . . . found that patients who put off therapy until their immune system showed signs of damage had a nearly twofold greater risk of dying — from any cause — than those who started treatment when their T-cell counts were above 500.”
Exactly. Those who were ill “from any cause” when they started HAART were twice as likely to die as those who were not ill when they started taking the toxic drugs. What a surprise!

“When the first combinations of AIDS drugs came out in 1996, the thinking was ‘hit early, and hit hard.’ But as patients battled nasty side effects, like diarrhea and disfiguring shifts in body fat, therapy was deferred until T-cell counts fell as low as 200. Today, with safer drugs, quick viral suppression is back in fashion.”
“Safer” drugs does not mean safe, of course. Just read the NIH Treatment Guidelines.

“The field is moving, inexorably, to earlier and earlier therapy,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He called San Francisco’s decision “an important step in that direction.”
Connoisseurs of bureaucratese will recognize the passive voice of “The field is moving, inexorably” as the typical maneuver designed to disclaim responsibility for decisions being made or influenced by the person who deploys the passive-voice statement. “Mistakes were made” is a common enough example; they just happen, no one committed them.
And this “inexorable” move is actually opposed by some highly qualified HIV/AIDS experts like “Jay Levy, the U.C.S.F. virologist who was among the first to identify the cause of AIDS”, who commented that “It’s just too risky”; “The new drugs may be less toxic, . . . but no one knows the effects of taking them for decades”.
“San Francisco’s decision follows a split vote in December by a 38-member federal panel on treatment guidelines. Only half of the H.I.V. experts gathered by the Department of Health and Human Services favored starting drugs in patients with healthy levels of more than 500 T-cells. . . . The risks of early treatment — giving powerful drugs to people at low risk of disease — could outweigh the ‘modest predicted benefit’ . . . . Dr. Lisa C. Capaldini, who runs an AIDS practice in the Castro district, also has strong reservations. . . . [Although] today’s drugs are a vast improvement over earlier therapies, the program, she said ‘is not ready for prime time.’”

But San Francisco pushes ahead,
“advising” everyone to get tested
and “advising” all “HIV-positive” people
to start treatment immediately,
thereby preparing for
genocide of gay men in San Francisco
to accompany
genocide of African Americans in Washington DC