OFFICIAL! HIV does not cause AIDS!

The World Health Organization has issued a press release reporting that Swiss researchers have demonstrated that HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS because the so-called isolates of HIV routinely used in studies of HIV and of AIDS do not actually contain live infectious particles of a retrovirus.
Reporters have so far being unable to get responses to questions they have addressed to a variety of institutions and individuals:
The World Health Organization was asked why it had ignored its own sometime epidemiologist who had pointed to the fudging of data to create apparent epidemics [1].
Robert Gallo was asked where he regretted having described as flat-earthers [2] the scientists who had disagreed with him.
Anthony Fauci was asked whether he regretted threatening journalists who covered dissenting voices about HIV [3].
Dr. Nancy Padian was asked why she had not recognized the significance of her failure to observe during ten years any transmission of HIV among sexually active couples of whom one was HIV+ and the other not [4].
The Centers for Disease Control were asked to explain how they could have issued patently wrong statistical information.
The Food and Drug Administration were asked how they could have approved the use of toxic substances as purported medication for a non-existent virus.
The drug company Gilead Sciences was asked to explain how it had decided that its drugs were capable of killing a non-existent virus.
…………….

All that is a fable, of course, or rather a parable — it is not true literally but it points to important truths.
Perhaps it may serve to drive home the important insight that it is quite inconceivable, quite impossible, that any official institution would admit that HIV/AIDS theory is wrong, it would raise too many unanswerable questions.
And yet the evidence is so copious and clear-cut that the theory is in fact wrong (The Case against HIV).

That hugely important fact about the role of science in the modern world, that a wrong theory could become generally accepted, reflects what President Eisenhower warned against more than half a century ago, namely, that public policy could be captured by a scientific-technological elite.
That has now actually come to pass not only in the case of HIV AIDS but also over the theory of human-caused global warming and climate change (Anthropogenic Global Warming, AGW, and ACC).
For that latter case, Christopher Booker [5] recently offered Groupthink as explanation for how an elite group could come to believe and promote a faulty belief.
Booker came upon the concept of Groupthink in the work of psychologist Irving Janis [6], who had discussed the idea in explaining how disastrous failures in American foreign policy had come about, for example in Vietnam and the muffed invasion of Cuba.

A crucial part of the context that makes for Groupthink is that it would be fatal for the elite group if its belief were not accepted.

That’s the point of the fake news story with which I began this blog post: It illustrates that it would be an act of collective suicide for the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, innumerable charities and foundations, and many activist groups if they were to admit that they had been wrong in what they had vigorously promoted and defended for several decades and which had led to expenditures of tens of billions of dollars. The credibility of leading institutions would be shattered and innumerable individuals would be publicly shamed and their careers and livelihoods destroyed.

The analogy with high finance is straightforward: HIV/AIDS theory is simply “too big to fail”.

So that will not be allowed to happen. Rather, the mainstream HIV/AIDS behemoth will continue to sweep aside challenges by ad hominem polemics (labeling dissenters as morally despicable denialists) and by mis-direction on substantive points, for example, claiming that even temporary recovery of health by some sick HIV+ individuals proves that antiretroviral drugs are effective and that HIV had caused the illness.

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[1]    James Chin, The AIDS Pandemic, Radcliffe 2007

[2]    Robert Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: a Story of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, 1991, p. 297

[3]    Anthony Fauci, “Writing for my sister Denise”, AAAS Observer, 1 September 1989, p. 4

[4]    Padian et al., “Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Northern California: results from a ten-year study”, American Journal of Epidemiology, 146 (1997) 350–7

[5]    Christopher Booker, GLOBAL WARMING: A case study in groupthink — How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time, Global Warming Policy Foundation, GWPF Report 28, 2018. A summary is in “Groupthink on climate change ignores inconvenient facts”, 21 February 2018

[6]    Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink (1972; Groupthink (1982), both Houghton Mifflin

Intestinal dysbiosis hypothesis goes mainstream

It seems that the idea of recommending probiotics for “HIV+” people has become downright mainstream now. The following links were sent me by Tony Lance; they mention among other things dysbiosis and microbial translocation, which Tony had pointed to in his essay, cited on this blog nearly a decade ago (What really caused aids: slicing through the Gordian Knot).

“Impact of probiotic Saccharomyces boulardii on the gut microbiome composition in HIV-treated patients: A double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial” by Judit Villar-García et al.

“Microbes & HIV” by Jeannie Wraight

“STUDY: Probiotic could help prevent disorders in people with HIV” by Jeannie Wraight.
This mentions “A new study reported in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences”, presumably “Probiotics differently affect gut-associated lymphoid tissue indolamine-2,3-dioxygenase mRNA and cerebrospinal fluid neopterin levels in antiretroviral-treated HIV-1 infected patients: A pilot study” by Carolina Scagnolari et al. [Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2016, 17(10), 1639; doi:10.3390/ijms17101639] .
This article was in a special issue of IJMS, “Immuno- and Neuropathogenesis of HIV Disease: Mechanisms, Prevention, Treatment, and Cure” which included another pertinent piece:

“Impact of HIV infection and anti-retroviral therapy on the Immune profile of and microbial translocation in HIV-infected children in Vietnam” by Xiuqiong Bi et al. [Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2016, 17(8), 1245; doi:10.3390/ijms17081245] .

Neither of those sources mentions the probiotic Visbiome, referred to in Wraight’s article. However, the Visbiome website  cites “Probiotic supplementation promotes a reduction in T-cell activation, an increase in Th17 frequencies, and a recovery of intestinal epithelium integrity and mitochondrial morphology in ART-treated HIV-1-positive patients” by Gabriella d’Ettorre et al. [Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, 2017; doi: 10.1002/iid3.160]  whose Conclusions are worth quoting:
“These findings highlight the potential beneficial effects of probiotic supplementation for the reconstitution of physical and immunological integrity of the mucosal intestinal barrier in ART-treated HIV-1-positive patients”.

 

Larry Kramer in Love and Anger

Larry Kramer in Love and Anger is a 2015 HBO documentary. It recounts most of the history of AIDS through Kramer’s personal involvement and it is largely accurate in what it discusses, though omitting and ignoring some crucial points.

Watching it brought home to me once again what an enormous tragedy this has been and still is and will continue to be because the ultimate crux remains unaccepted: namely, that “science” including medical science can go wrong, and that there are no systemic safeguards against that, no checks or balances, because minority voices within the scientific community are not attended to, instead are castigated and persecuted.

This film gives a good account of the fear that spread among gay men as a mysterious syndrome of illnesses was bringing deaths, several hundred thousand in about half-a-dozen years. But the film also misses the opportunity to make the case against HIV, despite some significant clues. Thus Kramer’s 1978 novel, Faggots, is correctly described as his jeremiad against the fast-lane lifestyle that included much health-damaging use of “recreational” drugs. The film might well have been pointed out that this preceded the appearance of AIDS and could indeed explain why so many people became very ill — as some of them recognized, for instance Michael Callen and his physician Sonnabend. Again, Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) is mentioned as a characteristic AIDS disease, but the film neglects to point out that KS virtually dropped out of the picture after some years as insightful gay men abandoned the use of the nitrite inhalants (“poppers”) that cause this damage to blood vessels (“AIDS KS” is probably different from the classic KS.)

Completely missing is the tragic story of how HIV came to be the accepted cause of AIDS, essentially by declaration at a press conference before any scientific publication.

Kramer’s initiatives are properly credited for revision of the FDA’s procedures for approving drugs — but missing is a discussion of the damaging consequences, not only because of the toxicity of AZT and later “anti-retroviral” drugs but because the fast-track approval system is now abused routinely by Big Pharma to bring to market avalanches of new drugs that reveal their toxicity within a short time after marketing: note the TV and print announcements by lawyers about class-action suits against such medications as Pradaxa, Xeralto, Invokana, and others at the very same time as the drug companies continue to advertise those drugs with dishonest descriptions of potential benefits (“remission is possible”, for example) and down-playing of “side” effects, for instance in TV ads showing healthy actors instead of actual patients actually on the drugs.

The film applauds the introduction of protease inhibitors, but fails to describe their toxicities, again despite obvious clues. Thus the film opens and closes with Kramer in hospital after a liver transplant; and there is a short clip of Kramer warning earlier about the side effects of his medications. The New York Times review of the film of course says, misleadingly, “liver transplant necessitated by his H.I.V. infection” instead of “made necessary by the anti-retroviral medication including protease inhibitors”: “Drug-induced hepatitis and hepatic decompensation (and rare cases of fatalities) have been reported with all PIs” (Table 14, Guidelines for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in HIV-1-Infected Adults and Adolescents, 8/8/2014).

And of course nothing is said about dissent from HIV/AIDS theory.

So this documentary can serve only as a reminder of the tragic history of AIDS. I realized also how the nature of the tragedy has changed. Initially it was the mis-identification of the cause as HIV and the subsequent hundreds of thousands of deaths from AZT. But nowadays this has been compounded by the abuse of HIV tests as proof of infection, whereby no sector of society is free from the danger of mis-diagnosis and subsequent mistreatment. Since pregnancy seems to stimulate positive “HIV” tests, especially with women of African ancestry, women and their fetuses and babies are being harmed in significant numbers and will continue to be until the HIV/AIDS blunder is corrected.

For the facts about HIV and AIDS, see The Case against HIV. For why HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS, and the story of how the error was made and entrenched, read The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory [Jefferson (NC): McFarland 2007].

HIV infectivity: high, low, or non-existent?

Analysis of essentially all published results of HIV tests in the USA reveals properties unlike those of an infectious agent (The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland 2007).  In every social sector, the same regularities are seen: rates of testing positive vary by US official “racial” and ethnic classification (black >> native American > Caucasian > Asian); rates of testing positive decrease drastically from birth into the teens and increase from the late teens into middle age and then decline again; in early teens, females are more likely to be HIV+ than are males but by the 20s that is reversed (see references cited in section 3.3.5 in The Case against HIV).

In cloned HIV virions, only between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 10 million were infectious (Layne et al., “Factors underlying spontaneous inactivation and susceptibility to neutralization of human immunodeficiency virus”, Virology, 189 (1992) 695-714).

The instructions that come with HIV test kits warn that a positive test is not proof of infection.

Innumerable conditions produce HIV+ results (see references cited in section 3.2 in The Case against HIV), so all claims to have measured infectivity or transmission are at best dubious and at worst — or more accurately — meaningless. There is no valid published evidence of transmission or infectivity (see references cited in section 3.3 in The Case against HIV). The Office of Medical and Scientific Justice successfully defended more than 50 individuals http://www.omsj.org/human-rights/52nd charged with transmitting HIV because the prosecution could not prove HIV to be transmissible.

Researching phantoms

It can take a long time before researchers realize that they have been on a wild-goose chase, pursuing phantoms (“Phantom phantoms”, pp. 110-116 in Fatal Attractions: The Troubles with Science, Paraview Press 2001); even “an unknown phenomenon [that] towered 6 standard deviations above the mundane background of known physics — enough to satisfy a 99.9999% confidence level that it wasn’t a fluke” and that had been reported in more than a dozen experiments turned out to be non-existent.

Given that HIV/AIDS theory is wrong (The Case against HIV), observations and experiments and clinical trials will continually throw up what seem to be conundrums, which serve as the basis for yet more research. To date, mainstream HIV/AIDS researchers have failed to recognize the accumulation of conundrums and absurdities  as being in reality the hard evidence that HIV/AIDS theory is simply wrong: HIV is not infectious, and “HIV” doesn’t cause AIDS.

Mainstream science sticks to theories that had once been accepted by ignoring anomalies, conundrums, absurdities for as long as possible (Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press 1970 [2nd ed., enlarged; 1st ed. was 1962]). Things that don’t fit an existing theory are accommodated by ad hoc adjustments (Imre Lakatos, “History of science and its rational reconstruction”, pp. 1-40 in Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences, ed. Colin Howson, Cambridge University Press 1976), just as Ptolemy long maintained belief in the circular perfection of heavenly motions by adding epicycles upon epicycles, wheels within wheels, to avoid acknowledging that the movements are not really circular after all.

So too HIV/AIDS researchers create new hypotheses to bolster their belief whenever they seem unable to explain what they observe. Since all the data point to HIV not being infective, or being apparently infective to so low a degree as to be incapable of producing an epidemic, auxiliary hypotheses were suggested which have become accepted as shibboleths:

1. The epidemic in Africa is said to have come about because of an incredible rate of promiscuity. Sexually active South Africans (black South Africans, that is) are postulated to have an average of 10 sexual partners at any give time and to change them about annually (pp. 63-65 in James Chin, The AIDS Pandemic, Radcliffe 2007).
2. Soon after initial infection, there is an “acute phase” where large amounts of HIV are present, and intercourse during that phase makes transmission much more likely: infectivity is very high during these short periods, so overall measurements of transmissibility are deceiving.

The first suggestion is absurd, since such behavior would be so visibly evident that it could not be overlooked; yet it is not observed.

The second suggestion has been undermined by a careful re-analysis of the single study on which it had been based: the “excess hazard-months attributable to the acute phase of infection” is about 5.3, not the previously estimated 31-to-141 (Bellan et al., “Reassessment of HIV-1 acute phase infectivity: accounting for heterogeneity and study design with simulated cohorts”, PLoS Medicine, 12(3):  e1001801).

HIV/AIDS research is chasing red herrings, phantoms, in a decades-long wild-goose change that has been enormously expensive in lives and in dollars. But the interests vested in this state of affairs — drug-company profits, research careers, administrative careers, honors and awards — are so widespread and powerful that the actual evidence is given little or no chance of speaking for itself. Try to imagine what it would take for Anthony Fauci to shed cognitive dissonance and admit that he has been so disastrously wrong.

 

HIV and Intestinal Dysbiosis: Probiotics are good for HIV+ people

I thank Marco Ruggiero for alerting us to these important articles, which report that probiotics can increase CD4 counts and improve health in general:

Irvine et al. (including Gregor Reid), “Probiotic Yogurt Consumption is Associated With
an Increase of CD4 Count Among People Living With HIV/AIDS”, Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, 44 (2010) e201–e205 (ProbioticCD4increase)

Gregor Reid, “The potential role for probiotic yogurt for people living with HIV/AIDS”, Gut Microbes, 1 (2010) 411-414 (ProbioticReidGutMicrobes)

Ruben Hummelen et al. (including Gregor Reid), “Effect of 25 weeks probiotic supplementation on immune function of HIV patients”, Gut Microbes 2: (2011) 80-85 (25weeks-probiotics)