My new blog at Substack

This blog has been largely inactive for quite a while, in large part because nothing fundamentally new has happened about HIV or AIDS, although the drug companies continue to devise and promote various combinations of antivirals.

I continue to be interested in controversial issues in science and medicine, and am trying out a new blogging platform at https://henryhbauer.substack.com. I began with a couple of general discussions:

The Proper Place for Science in Modern Societies; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-proper-place-for-science-in-modern

and

When the Experts Disagree; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/when-the-experts-disagree-fe2

Of course I hope that those of you who have followed this blog will subscribe to the new one.

Substack gives its bloggers the possibility of offering paid subscriptions, but I do not plan to do so. My hope is that readers will find the discussions sufficiently worthwhile to tell other people about them.

This return to blogging reflects my continuing frustration at the misleading stuff that appears continually in the mass media, even in the most widely respected places and sometimes by even the least biased and most respected pundits.

A great deal is misleading because it ignores contrarian minority views and the evidence that makes those views worth attending to.

Among the things that irritate me more or less continually nowadays is the hysteria about climate change, and the continuing confusion, lack of clarity, conflicting claims, over COVID.

In a number of instances, differing views over supposedly scientific issues correlate with political leanings, and I have observed, unhappily, how political correctness, which first affected me in the 1980s, has become ever so much worse since then and has come to influence even scientific matters in a significant way: see Anna I. Krylov, The peril of politicizing science, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 12 (2021) 5371−5376;
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475, and
https://quillette.com/2021/12/18/scientists-must-gain-the-courage-to-oppose-the-politicization-of-their-disciplines.

The HIV/AIDS blunder: Missed opportunities for mainstream research to self-correct

This long post is published at my other blog, Scimed-WordPress

The Unending Human Tragedy—and Scientific Scandal— of HIV/AIDS

The need to check facts carefully has become something of a shibboleth with respect to present-day political discourse in the United States. Only voices crying in the wilderness, however, have pointed to the need for fact-checking what society gleans from the scientific community — see my Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland, 2017).

the title of this blog is also the title my review of How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France, A 2012 film and 2016 book, both of which received enthusiastic plaudits from the mainstream media and which repeat and thereby entrench the mistakes of HIV AIDS theory and practice.
The opening and closing paragraphs of my review reflect the fact that the journal in which it is published specializes in anomalistics — such topics as Loch Ness Monsters, Bigfoot, UFOs, psychic phenomenon — that are ignored and denigrated by the mainstream scientific community

The Unending Human Tragedy—and Scientific Scandal— of HIV/AIDS

The need to check facts carefully has become something of a shibboleth with respect to present-day political discourse in the United States. Only voices crying in the wilderness, however, have pointed to the need for fact-checking what society gleans from the scientific community — see my Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland, 2017).

The title of this blog is also the title of my review of How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France, a 2012 film and 2016 book, both of which received enthusiastic plaudits from the mainstream media and which repeat and thereby entrench the mistakes of HIV AIDS theory and practice.

The opening and closing paragraphs of my review reflect that the Journal of Scientific Exploration, in which it is published, specializes in anomalistics which refers to such topics as Loch Ness Monsters, Bigfoot, UFOs, psychic phenomenon, that are ignored and denigrated by mainstream science.

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.

———————————————

[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