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.

HPV does not cause cervical cancer; HPV vaccination can be deadly

(Cross-posted from http://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/)

Evidence continues to mount that the presumed connection between HPV and cervical cancer is no more than a statistical association, not a causative relationship:

The Gardasil controversy: as reports of adverse effects increase, cervical cancer rates rise in HPV-vaccinated age groups

Annette Gartland

“The Gardasil vaccines continue to be vaunted as life-saving, but there is no evidence that HPV vaccination is reducing the incidence of cervical cancer, and reports of adverse effects now total more than 85,000 worldwide. Nearly 500 deaths are suspected of being linked to quadrivalent Gardasil or Gardasil 9.
As Merck’s latest human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil 9, continues to be fast tracked around the world, the incidence of invasive cervical cancer is increasing in many of the countries in which HPV vaccination is being carried out.”

Once again independent scientists without conflicts of interest are maltreated by bureaucratic organizations with conflicts of interest to commercial interests, drug companies in particular:

“This article was updated with information from the AHVID  on 14/09/2018.

Update 15/9/2018:

Peter Gøtzsche has been expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration. Six of the 13 members of the collaboration’s governing board voted for his expulsion.
. . . . .
‘This is the first time in 25 years that a member has been excluded from membership of Cochrane. This unprecedented action taken by a minority of the governing board . . . . ‘
In just 24 hours, Gøtzsche said, the Cochrane governing board had lost five of its members, four of whom were centre directors and key members of the organisation in different countries.
Gøtzsche says that, in recent years, Cochrane has significantly shifted more to a profit-driven approach. ‘Even though it is a not-for-profit charity, our ‘brand’ and ‘product’ strategies are taking priority over getting out independent, ethical and socially responsible scientific results,’ he said’”.

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

Disproving HIV/AIDS theory

After an old friend, a notably successful scientist, had read my book, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (McFarland, 2007), he remarked that the trouble was that it would lead to undermining trust in science overall.

But he was assuming, as do so many scientists, and so many of us who have been promoting HIV/AIDS dissent and AIDS Rethinking, that it is the facts of the matter that count; that evidence and factual reality are bound to carry the day in public discourse and public policies. That is simply not so nowadays.

Perhaps it was not so far from the truth in times past, when there was a “basic” or “pure” science carried on by relatively disinterested truth-seekers who were able to command sufficient research resources that came without strings attached.

Was that a purely mythical past?

Not really. During my student days and early faculty jobs at an Australian university, technical facilities were automatically available to the faculty: glass-blowing and other technical needs were provided by permanently employed service people; routinely used chemicals were on hand; reasonable sums of money were provided for purchase of more exotic items; publication was supported by secretarial staff, and of course in those times one’s articles were published in journals that did not demand “page charges” or other fees. We studied what interested us, what we thought would be fruitful, not what others told us to study.

That was half a century ago. There was competition, of course, but it was within civilized bounds. Peer reviewers could make bad decisions, perhaps partly under the influence of bias, but there was not much attempted suppression of rivals just for the sake of personal advancement, and outright fraud was rare indeed. We studied and practiced science pretty much as idealists. A fellow academic of my generation told me about 20 years ago that he still had his graduate students read Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith for its early-20^th-century message of honesty, integrity, disinterestedness.

Younger people will doubtless read the above with incredulity. Nowadays a career in scientific research begins by working on what the scientific consensus considers appropriate. One spends a significant number of years in postdoctoral and other temporary positions waiting for the rare tenure-track slot to open up, competing then with other hopefuls who are also supported by long publication lists and records of research support; or perhaps one goes into “applied” research in industry or government. In any case, the research that gets done and then published is determined by the prevailing scientific consensus, not by the individual inspiration and ingenuity of an intellectual entrepreneur. In 1980, the recipient of a prize for scientific work described the subterfuge needed to get research support for anything novel, unconventional (Richard A. Muller, “Innovation and scientific funding”, Science, 209 [1980]: 880‑883).

No mechanism exists for mainstream science to rethink accepted ideas. Rather, everything works against dissent from contemporary theory. When it comes to HIV/AIDS, a simple thought-experiment will illustrate the point:

Try to imagine how Anthony Fauci, Robert Gallo, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention could possibly manage face-saving explanations for how and why HIV doesn’t really, after all, cause AIDS; how the Food and Drug Administration would find excuses for all its approvals of toxic antiretroviral drugs. Imagine the reactions of all the researchers who had avidly pursued mindless “research”, and all the science groupies and researchers who had defended wrong theory and maligned and persecuted the “denialists” who now turned out to have been right all along. Think about what would be said and done by the Gates Foundation and all the other charities and non-profits who had diligently worked to provide health care for people being made sick not by disease but by medication.

It seems to me simply inconceivable that “the scientific consensus” and its agents could ever retract about HIV/AIDS.

So the task of disproving HIV/AIDS theory is not a matter of offering contradictory facts, which have in any case been available in profusion for decades (The Case against HIV http://thecaseagainsthiv.net). The task is first to persuade society that “science” can get it wrong, even and in particular on a matter that affects such huge numbers of people and huge expenditures by governments and by non-profits and charities.

Society as a whole needs to be disabused of mistaken beliefs about science, in other words. My old friend had it backwards: until unquestioned faith in science is replaced by sensible skepticism and a demand that evidence for claims be openly presented and defended against skeptics, evidence-based criticisms of HIV/AIDS theory will not gain even a foothold in the conventional wisdom, the popular media, the mainstream discourse.

On my other blog, I’ve just posted a detailed discussion of the salient points:

⇒ What has been so damaging is not so much sheer ignorance as beliefs that are wrong (Dangerous knowledge).

⇒ Wrong views about the history of science are rampant throughout society; especially how drastically different today’s science is from the idealized popular view of it — which, as I opined above, was actually not that unrealistic only about half-a-century ago (Dangerous knowledge II: Wrong knowledge about the history of science).

⇒ The popular belief is wrong, that science is infallible and made so by “the scientific method”. The fact is that the scientific consensus always defends itself vigorously even when it happens to be wrong (Dangerous knowledge III: Wrong knowledge about science).

⇒ There exists a vicious cycle: HIV/AIDS dissent (and dissent from any contemporary scientific consensus) is dismissed out of hand because science couldn’t possibly be wrong about so important a matter; but until it is realized that the scientific consensus on many contemporary issues is flawed, dissent in any given case will be dismissed out of hand, preventing the accumulation of the evidence that science nowadays is pervasively untrustworthy (Dangerous knowledge IV: The vicious cycle of wrong knowledge).

President Trump and HIV/AIDS

AIDS Rethinkers glimpsed a momentary ray of hope at the news that President Trump had fired the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS; could it be that government policies on AIDS might become evidence-based?

I suppose that is not entirely impossible, but this presidential action is no indication of it. One possible reason for the firing is simply that a new administration chooses new sets of advisers; and Trump has shown that he wants to undo everything the previous administration had done.

Another possible reason is that 6 months earlier, half-a-dozen members of the Council had resigned in protest, stating that
“The Trump Administration has no strategy to address the on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic, seeks zero input from experts to formulate HIV policy, and — most concerning — pushes legislation that will harm people living with HIV and halt or reverse important gains made in the fight against this disease …
the final straw for us — more like a two-by-four than a straw — is President Trump’s handling of health care reform”.
It is well known that Trump is enraged over any criticism, and those statements alone, made publicly in Newsweek, would be enough to goad him to “clean out” that whole Council.

Further, it is also known that Trump is largely ignorant of details on any topic, so what happened re HIV/AIDS may reflect only the attitude of some aide in the White House who is perhaps actually opinionated about HIV/AIDS or is just following the current extremist wing of the Republicans to dismantle as much as possible of all government activities.

In any case, any genuine turning from present policies and actions about HIV/AIDS would require that the National Institutes of Health replace Anthony Fauci and make a wholesale change in the AIDS division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Such a move would be opposed by all the interests vested in present-day HIV/AIDS policies — all the bureaucratic niches involved, and most notably the drug companies, which presently are in effective control of Congress on all health-related matters. There is no actual sign in practice of any significant change in continuing policy about HIV/AIDS:

“Federal funding for HIV has increased significantly over the course of the epidemic, rising from just a few hundred thousand in FY 1982 to more than $32 billion in FY 2017”; the Trump budget request for FY 2018 has an estimated $32.0 billion for combined domestic and global HIV efforts. If enacted by Congress, it would mark a decrease in funding for HIV of $834 million, or 2.5% … compared to current levels ($32.9 billion). Most of this decline would be in the global portfolio (a $1.2 billion or 18% decline), although domestic discretionary programs would decline by $789 million or 10%; mandatory funding would continue to increase” (U.S. Federal Funding for HIV/AIDS: Trends Over Time, 9 November 2017.

Above all, the sad and bitter fact is that truth-seeking does not have a political constituency, be it about HIV, AIDS, or anything else.