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

What’s wrong with HIV/AIDS — and with ideologically determined “science”

Donald Miller, cardiac surgeon and now Emeritus Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington (Seattle) has written an excellent critique of HIV=AIDS theory:

Fallacies in Modern Medicine: HIV/AIDS  (15 May 2014)

The venue, Lew Rockwell’s website, might be described as right-leaning libertarian: it advertises itself as “anti-state — anti-war — pro-market”. That HIV/AIDS dissidence can find an outlet virtually only in right-leaning places illustrates the sorry state of political-ideological division that shows no signs of ameliorating.
The same situation bedevils public discourse about “global warming” or “climate change”. Conservative-leaning media and groups and individuals seem almost always to be “denialists” on HIV/AIDS and global warming, whereas progressive-leaning media and groups and individuals seem almost always to regard HIV=AIDS and human-caused “climate change” as established fact, even as the plain evidence demonstrates that they are not established facts; see “A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?”  and “The Case against HIV”  (or for book-length treatment, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine).

These circumstances add to the characteristic loneliness of any position that lies between two extreme beliefs. My own sociopolitical leanings fit much better with MSNBC than with Fox News, but I can’t watch MSNBC without cringing whenever global warming or HIV/AIDS is mentioned, as individuals who have no familiarity with the actual evidence rant against us “denialists”.
I’ve also never stopped thinking of myself as science-trained, and have never lost my wonder and awe, that human beings have managed to gain so much evidence-based, science-mediated understanding of the natural world. So I cringe also when “scientific experts” hold forth about “the established fact” of HIV=AIDS or human-caused global warming. Or when President Obama declaims with full conviction about the necessity of combating climate change following indoctrination by his doctrinaire Science Advisor. Scientists (and “experts” generally) who abuse their expertise to propagandize their own beliefs instead of purveying summaries of the range of professional opinion are traitors to their profession.

The global news is replete with descriptions of warring groups of human beings killing one another over apparently irresolvable divisions of ethnicity or religion or political ideology, when it is so obvious to outsiders that all sides would benefit from compromises grounded in available evidence of what makes for sustainable, peaceful, human living.
It’s a great sadness that in the most advanced societies, in which science and technology have gained the most ground, such major issues as HIV/AIDS and global warming have become faiths that distort the facts just as egregiously as traditional religions so often have done.

My new blog

As a number of my recent posts here have indicated, I’ve come to see that the HIV/AIDS mistake is not an idiosyncratic aberration at a time when science including medical science remain generally trustworthy. Rather,  science and medicine overall have become less reliable as the mainstream consensus is many fields has become too dogmatic, unwilling or unable to change course in line with accumulating evidence showing the consensus to be flawed; see Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth. This realization reinforces my opinion that we cannot achieve a Rethinking of HIV/AIDS theory unless the conventional wisdom also recognizes that a mainstream consensus, no matter how firmly held and long-lasting, might nevertheless be wrong.
So I found myself wanting to write more about these general issues in science and medicine. But this blog, devoted specifically to HIV/AIDS, didn’t seem appropriate to this wider purpose, so I’ve just started a new blog, Skepticism about Science and Medicine. The first entry discusses global warming — or rather, human-caused global warming through emission of carbon dioxide. Why is it politically correct for political liberals to believe the mainstream consensus on this, while it is politically incorrect for conservatives to do so? Neither side apparently understands anything about the actual scientific evidence.

Other things being equal . . . .

“Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change” (New York Times, 20 November 2009; “Hacked e-mail is new fodder for climate dispute”, by Andrew C. Revkin).

Mutatis mutandis, the same story could be written about HIV/AIDS:

“The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate HIV/AIDS researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. . . . In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical ‘trick’ (and a computer model) in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend increase in HIV/AIDS. In another, a scientist refers to climate HIV/AIDS skeptics as “idiots.” . . .
Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them. The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming HIV as cause of AIDS is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists. In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, (any of Fauci, Gallo, etc.) and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature failures of vaccine trails, increasing death rate from side effects of HAART, and no sign of heterosexual HIV/AIDS epidemics outside Africa. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming findings that viral load, CD4 counts, and clinical progression are not correlated with one another . . . and it is a travesty that we can’t,”  . . . . The revelations are bound to inflame the public debate . . . .
Dr. Trenberth (you choose) said Friday that he was appalled at the release of the e-mail messages. But he added that he thought the revelations might backfire against climate HIV/AIDS skeptics. He said that he thought that the messages showed “the integrity of scientists.” Still, some of the comments might lend themselves to being interpreted as sinister. In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate HIV/AIDS patterns over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones (you choose), a longtime climate HIV/AIDS researcher . . . said he had used a ‘trick’ . . . to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures HIV and AIDS numbers. . . . Dr. Mann (you choose) . . . said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word ‘trick’ to refer to a good way to solve a problem, ‘and not something secret.’ . . . .
But several scientists whose names appear in the e-mail messages said they merely revealed that scientists were human, and did nothing to undercut the body of HIV/AIDS research on global warming.”
[Yes, it does. Since humans can make mistakes, and since scientists are now acknowledged to be human, therefore scientists can make mistakes and claims made by scientists may be wrong — especially when they have conspired for a decade or two or three to suppress data that contradicts the theory they have been peddling.]

“At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some of the science of the global warming consensus, his instinct was to ignore the correspondence as ‘just the way scientists talk.’
But . . . after reading more deeply, he felt that some exchanges reflected an effort to block the release of data for independent review. He said some messages mused about discrediting him by challenging the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by claiming he knew his research was wrong. ‘This shows these are people (John P. Moore, Mark Wainberg, et al.) willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways,’ he said.”

“Spencer R. Weart, a physicist and historian who is charting the course of research on global warming, said the hacked material would serve as ‘great material for historians.’”
So will the files of Peter Duesberg, John Lauritsen, Neville Hodgkinson, Joan Shenton, Gordon Stewart, and the many other courageous fighters for the integrity of HIV/AIDS research.