Spam e-mail from a discredited source

This morning’s e-mail greeted me with this:

 

I don’t think I had ever corresponded with Murtagh, but the name was familiar: the Office of Medical & Scientific Justice has had dealings with him:
“he committed perjury, manipulated evidence, withheld discovery documents, and breached a settlement agreement with Emory University by impersonating Emory officials and sending defamatory emails
. . . .
Because of Murtagh’s notorious and ongoing behavior, OMSJ provides support to the website JamesMurtaghMDtruth.com, which tracks lawsuits and will post public court documents filed on his behalf.”

I’m posting this on the presumption that many other people received this spam and may not be aware of Murtagh’s character (although the “causes” listed at the bottom of his e-mail do offer some clues).

* * * * * * * *

The “Good news!” promised in the e-mail is the attached description of the conference of the International AIDS Society in Vancouver. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the talking points, for example:
“UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that the goal of having 15 million HIV-positive people on antiretroviral therapy by the end of 2015 — the so-called 15 by 15 strategy — had been achieved in March, nine months early.”
Not everyone would agree that bringing toxic medication to healthy people is necessarily always a good thing.

The chief goal now is a world free of AIDS by 2030. This too has to be sold by a snappy slogan like “15 by 15”, this time “the 90-90-90 milestone”: “90 per cent of people aware of their HIV status, 90 per cent of those infected on antiretroviral therapy, and 90 per cent of those being treated showing undetectable viral loads”.
That milestone would need to be met five years from now to make the world free in 2030.

One can only marvel at the knowledge and understanding that allows such accurate predictions decades ahead. But then Bill Gates, who surely knows almost everything about computers and therefore projections, also told us not so long ago that there would be an HIV vaccine in 15 years from now. The IAS Conference blurb does mention vaccine: The 2030 goal is only
“the virtual elimination of the AIDS pandemic. We’re not talking about eradicating HIV — HIV will remain a low-level endemic condition going forward and we will need a vaccine and we will need a cure”.
So HIV/AIDS researchers and administrators can rest assured that even when 2030 arrives, there will still be jobs and research funds for them. In the meantime, drug companies can look forward to ever-increasing revenues from antiretroviral drugs.