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.

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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

Quality of life when diagnosed HIV+ or AIDS

An obscure publication from Universidad Juan Agustín Maza (in Argentina) came to my attention via Research Gate:

“Iniciativas para mejorar la calidad de vida de personas con VIH positivo y SIDA: Revisión del Diagnóstico, el Pronóstico y la Terapéutica a la luz de la Ciencia y de la Ética” by M. E. Molina, J. Abou Medelej, S. Perez Daffunchio, D. E. Crisafulli & J. Álvarez.
[Initiatives to improve the quality of life of HIV-positive and AIDS-diagnosed patients: A review of diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy from viewpoints of science and ethics]

The full article is in Spanish with an Abstract in English:
“The first cases of AIDS occurred in 1981. There are not fully appropriate therapeutic interventions for treating this medical condition yet. People who are diagnosed with positive HIV or AIDS suffer a poor quality of life and receive medication that produces severe adverse reactions. The purposes of this investigation are: * To review the existent reports on the etiology, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of HIV. * To bring the affected people updated information for healthcare and improvement of their quality of life. We have analyzed a significant number of papers published in several countries on these topics, and we have found the following inconsistencies: * HIV risk behaviors: According to the CDC in the United States, the Estimated Per-Act Probability of Acquiring HIV from an Infected Source, by Exposure Act (heterosexual) is about one in one thousand for woman, and about one on two thousands for man. Nevertheless, an investigation conducted through the University of San Francisco, California, on 442 discordant heterosexual couples no seroconversion was observed throughout the ten years the research lasted. (1985-1995). * Diagnostics methods: In Argentina, we employ the ELISA screening method, posteriorly confirmed by a western blot test, but in the United Stated this last is discouraged since 2014. * Medication: The drugs that are used to treat HIV are DNA chain terminators which interfere with the normal functioning and replication of normal cells. As a result, damage in the immune system and the mitochondrial DNA are reported. We wonder what should we inform the patients and people in general about all these. We require the experts´ opinion on the ethical management aspects. Due that the diagnostic tests employed may result in false positives, and the fact that the medication is highly toxic, we recommend that patients with HIV positive diagnosis re-test their condition at least once a year”.

This all seems quite sound, but after citing false positives, no sexual transmission, and the toxicity of ARVs the last sentence is quite a let-down.

The mention of vaccines is also a mixture of sound and doubtful:[Google translation]:
Regarding the possible development of vaccines.
The difficulty in developing vaccines due to HIV mutation has been explained: the high coding error rate produced by the reverse transcriptase enzyme and the recombination of various phenotypes of HIV in the DNA of infected cells (Montagnier L., 2008). However, other retroviruses that respond to the same replication mechanisms do not produce mutations that impede the development of vaccines. Example: Murine Leukemia Virus. Likewise, a purification of up to 20% of HIV has not been reported to date, so doubts remain about the specificity of antibodies used in diagnosis (Leung, Hans Gelderblom Extended Interview min 37.48) , 2011”

Evidently the authors accept HIV/AIDS theory but are puzzled by its internal contradictions.

 

Countering the conventional wisdom

Individuals who have looked at primary evidence about HIV and AIDS have invariably concluded that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. That evidence is quite clear in the primary research literature, see for example the >900 citations in THE CASE AGAINST HIV.

Honest journalists recognize what the facts are, and some of them have written excellent books about the matter. One such book is Positively False by Joan Shenton, who has also filmed and archived a number of informative documentaries.

In the face of the facts, the official position of authoritative institutions remains that HIV causes AIDS, and the mass media help to enshrine this as the conventional wisdom. One consequence is that many individuals and many organizations who have no acquaintance with the primary evidence try to suppress those like Shenton who persist in drawing attention to the damage that HIV=AIDS dogma brings to countless people via the highly toxic, indeed quite deadly “antiretroviral” drugs.

Shenton’s latest  documentary, Positive Hell, “is a 30-minute documentary that tells the stories of five Spanish people, living in northern Spain, who tested positive for HIV in the late 80s who, defying the overwhelming medical consensus, chose not to take medication …”.  Widely praised and nominated for awards, some announced screenings were canceled because of pressure from “AIDS charities” and ignorant individuals. An outline of these acts of censorship has now been posted by the Index on Censorship.  Well worth reading.

Why do gay men test “HIV-positive” more frequently than others?

AIDS was first noticed and described among gay men.

In 1984, it was concluded, officially but mistakenly, that AIDS was caused by HIV.

That AIDS is not caused by HIV follows from innumerable pieces of evidence (The Case against HIV http://thecaseagainsthiv.net), for example that the incidence of AIDS does not correlate with instances of “HIV-positive” (1).
Why then do gay men test “HIV-positive” more often than others?

That is of more than academic interest. If there is some inherent connection between HIV and gay men, and since AIDS is inextricably connected historically to gay men, the two connections reinforce the mistaken conventional wisdom that HIV causes AIDS.

Well: Do gay men really test “HIV-positive” more often than others?

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, “Gay and bisexual men are more severely affected by HIV than any other group in the United States. From 2005 to 2014, HIV diagnoses decreased in the United States by 19% overall, but increased 6% among all gay and bisexual men … . Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men made up an estimated 2% of the population but 55% of people living with HIV in the United States in 2013. If current diagnosis rates continue, 1 in 6 gay and bisexual men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime, including 1 in 2 black/African American gay and bisexual men, 1 in 4 Hispanic/Latino gay and bisexual men, and 1 in 11 white gay and bisexual men” (“HIV Among Gay and Bisexual Men” [Page last updated: September 30, 2016] ).

In New Zealand, it is claimed that 1 in 15 gay and bisexual men are “HIV-positive” (New Zealand AIDS Foundation, “Three reasons gay guys are more likely to get HIV”) — the three reasons given include anal sex and the statistical likelihood of having sex with “HIV-positive” men.

A survey of global data for the years 2007-2011 reported (2) relative rates of “HIV-positive” for gay men as compared to all adults, in different regions of the world, showing consistently higher prevalence among gay men; once again the authors suggest that the greater likelihood of transmitting HIV by anal sex is the reason.

But since we know that HIV is not sexually transmitted (see section 3 in The Case against HIV), what could be the real reason for this disparity?

When greater incidence of “HIV-positive” among gay men is cited in terms of numbers found to be positive, one can suspect that it is because gay men are more likely to be tested in the first place; but no such explanation in terms of sampling bias can be invoked when the disparity appears to be in relative rates.

We know also that positive “HIV” tests are not proof of the presence of the purported retrovirus HIV; and we know that innumerable physiological circumstances may produce a “positive” result on an HIV test, see sub-section 3.2.2 in The Case against HIV). Those circumstances include many types of infections and ailments, as well as some conditions that are not ill health , say pregnancy or vaccinations, or some quite non-specific indications of perhaps quite minor threat to health, say oxidative stress.

It is not easy to see, however, why any or all of those “false positives” should be more common among gay men across cultures and regions. Perhaps anal sex, with possible tissue damage and transfer of semen, could induce release of substances reflective of physiological stress. Where antibody “HIV” tests yield an indeterminate result, it is known that heterosexual men and women tend to be reported as negative but gay men as positive. Perhaps too there is a nocebo effect: gay men have been indoctrinated to worry about “getting HIV”, and such worry is likely to be greatly exacerbated when anticipating or undergoing testing. Perhaps social persecution has also brought on average a higher rate of anxiety and somehow unhealthy living among gay men.

No combination of those possibilities seems adequate to explain the reported variations in rates, however. Moreover, as to anal sex, it is unlikely in the extreme that this is in itself notably dangerous to health: humans have been practicing anal sex for millennia, and if it were a significant risk to health, that would surely have been noticed very long ago.

Could it be that there is a biological, genetic basis for a tendency toward homosexuality? That suggestion has been ventured at times, albeit without convincing proof coming to hand as yet (3).

It is quite certain, though, that the tendency to test “HIV-positive” is strongly determined by genetics: the relative rates of testing “HIV-positive” are universally race-associated (chs. 5 & 6 in [1]), and substances taken to be characteristic of HIV are characteristic of commonly occurring human endogenous retroviruses, HERVs (4).

I find it amazing that mainstream researchers venture hand-waving non-explanations (5) for the much greater incidence of “HIV-positive” among African Americans than among white Americans, even though “risky” behavior is less among African Americans, and national rates of “HIV-positive” are highest in countries with a large proportion of people of African ancestry, namely Africa and the Caribbean. The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention has published innumerable data showing persistent and consistent variations by race, for instance (above) the rates of 1 in 11 for white Americans, 1 in 4 for Hispanics, and 1 in 2 for black Americans.

But the most likely reason why gay men test “positive” is also a major reason for the “AIDS” illnesses and deaths in the early years: INTESTINAL DYSBIOSIS; search this blog for all the posts describing this condition and confirming the plausibility of this hypothesis.

Why all this matters so much

The continuing refrain in the media about the prevalence of “HIV-positive” among gay men reinforces the mistaken notion that “HIV-positive” is dangerous to health, in particular that it presages overt illness, AIDS, and death. At the very least this strengthens the force of the mainstream dogma and makes it more difficult to present the Rethinking case. Very likely it exerts a nocebo effect that itself contributes to poor health.

It needs to be said, shouted, over and over again:

“HIV-positive” does not mean definitely ill, it does not mean infected by HIV, and anyway HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Anyone, gay or not, who is told they are “HIV-positive”, should consult a physician who is not indoctrinated into HIV=AIDS, see Rethinking AIDS Medical Professional List.

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1. Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland 2007.
2. Chris Beyrer, Stefan D. Baral, Frits van Griensven, Steven M. Goodreau, Suwat Chariyalertsak, Andrea L. Wirtz & Ron Brookmeyer (2012). “Global epidemiology of HIV infection in men who have sex with men”, The Lancet,  380 (9839) 367-77.
3. Brian P. Hanley (2011). “Dual-gender macrochimeric tissue discordance is predicted to be a significant cause of human homosexuality and transgenderism”, Hypotheses in the Life Sciences, 1 #: 63-70.
4. Etienne de Harven (2010). “Human endogenous retroviruses and AIDS research: Confusion, consensus, or science?”, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 15: 69-74.
5. Gregorio A. Millett, John L. Peterson, Stephen A. Flores, Trevor A. Hart, William L. Jeffries 4th, Patrick A. Wilson, Sean B. Rourke, Charles M. Heilig, Jonathan Elford, Kevin A. Fenton & Robert S Remis (2012). “Comparisons of disparities and risks of HIV infection in black and other men who have sex with men in Canada, UK, and USA: a meta-analysis”, The Lancet, 380 (9839): 341-8.