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.

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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?