Defeating HIV = AIDS

There is zero evidence that “HIV” causes AIDS. Incidence of the two doesn’t correlate. “HIV” tests don’t detect viral infection. There are no published articles establishing that “HIV” causes AIDS. “HIV” virions have never been isolated and characterized in pure form, and when they are synthesized by cloning purported HIV genomes they are not infectious and they self-destruct within days (see PMID: 1386485). “AIDS” has been defined as requiring presence of “HIV” and has been expanded over the years to include an increasing number of conditions in which “HIV” tests deliver (false) positives.

The science is quite clear. Experience has shown that this does not influence the mainstream. Those who have suggested anything approaching disbelief in HIV/AIDS theory have been excluded from publication, denied research grants, and personally vilified. Not only is there no incentive for medical scientists or practicing physicians to question the dogma, the penalties for doing so are steep and well known. So how then can this horrific mistake be rectified?

In the very long run, it might just wither away; or perhaps be explained away by some sort of sleight of facts after increasingly widespread distribution of antiretroviral drugs in Africa is seen to be accompanied by increased mortality. But one would prefer not to wait that long. At the Rethinking AIDS Conference in Oakland I suggested these possibilities:

— Politicians might begin to ask, what are we getting for $20 billion annually?
— African Americans might begin to protest that they are not 10-20 times more promiscuous than Asian Americans; Africans might begin to ponder why they are supposed to be 10-100 times more promiscuous than others.
—The media might begin to take up those points.
— A court case or series of them might do the job.

That last possibility may bear fruit sooner than I had thought possible, owing to initiatives being taken by Clark Baker through the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice and its HIV Innocence Project. The aims and rationale of those initiatives are described in this must-read essay posted on 15th October.

Baker draws intriguing parallels between people charged with transmitting or potentially transmitting HIV and people charged with driving under the influence: defense attorneys can cross-examine expert witnesses about technical aspects of the purported data, in particular how valid or reliable the data are — or how unreliable.

Many if not most doctors accept a laboratory report of a positive “HIV” test, especially if accompanied by a CD4 count below 200, as diagnosing infection, even though the tests have not been approved for diagnosis and only the United States regards the CD4 count as a criterion, and even though authoritative sources emphasize that the tests can only be an aid in diagnosis. How would a doctor fare in cross-examination if unaware of those points?
Or unaware that Western Blot is not a confirmatory test but merely a supplemental one?
Or unaware that “positive” in low-risk people is very likely to be a false positive for purely statistical reasons (and not only with “HIV” tests)?
(For details of those see “’HIV’ tests are self-fulfilling prophecies”.)

The questions, “Who proved that HIV attacks cells and causes AIDS? How? Where was this published?”, are routinely evaded by defenders of the orthodoxy; but they could not evade them in court. How could even the most expert witness respond? — “the most rigorous peer review . . . comes from cross-examination . . . in the courtroom” (Sheldon Krimsky, “Protecting scientific integrity”, Chemical Heritage, 27 [#1, Spring 2009] 42-3). Could Fauci or Gallo be reduced to pleading the Fifth, not answering for fear of self-incrimination?  8)

As Clark Baker points out, that so many individuals have been convicted of spreading or potentially spreading HIV is owing to the inexperience of attorneys in such cases, their ignorance of the technical issues and how vulnerable the orthodox theory is to cross-examination. Defendants suffer from the same ignorance — and in the rare case that they didn’t, they were not able to get competent legal representation, as Kim Bannon found.

Nowadays competent representation is available with the help of the HIV Innocence Project and OMSJ. But it is crucial that defendants and their lawyers take advantage of that help before the first substantive arguments in court. After a guilty verdict has been delivered, appeals may fail purely for reasons of legal technicalities; that may have been a critical factor in the Parenzee case in Australia.

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That doctors don’t know beans about HIV tests should not be surprising. Practicing physicians don’t have time to read research literature, they have to work on the basis of the information fed to them, and that comes from the mainstream during their training and is heavily influenced by drug companies in the “continuing medical education” they are offered later (see, for example, Marcia Angell’s The Truth about the Drug Companies).
That researchers don’t query the basic axioms on which their work is based is not unusual either. It is a mistaken view of science, entrenched by popular dissemination of the myth of the scientific method,  that researchers are continually engaged in setting up hypotheses and testing them. Most science is just routine filling in or cleaning up by standard techniques to produce results that are rarely of any special interest to others — upwards of 90% of research articles are never cited by anyone beside the author (Cole & Cole, Social Stratification in Science, University of Chicago Press 1973: 228; Menard, Science: Growth and Change, Harvard University Press, 1971: 99; Price, Little Science, Big Science . . . And Beyond, Columbia University Press, 1963/1986: Chapter 2).

So the HIV/AIDS “research” industry is no different in essence from any other. Most of the researchers are pursuing esoteric details of the unending array of strains and hybrid strains of “HIV”, or trying to find some clue to what might make a useful vaccine, or synthesizing possible new antiretroviral drugs, and so on. Nothing they do throws light, or is even intended to throw light on the fundamental questions of HIV/AIDS theory. HIV/AIDS researchers are not designing experiments to test the hypothesis that HIV is really the cause of illness. Routine work along standard lines simply accepting the orthodox view is judged worthwhile by those who administer grant funds and those who edit journals and those who review manuscripts for journals. There is simply no incentive to re-examine the basics. The bandwagon has momentum and inertia impervious to attacks from the inside.

What may be rather different in the HIV/AIDS case is that the gurus, those who got the bandwagon rolling, are just as uninterested as their camp followers in looking continually at the basic axioms in hopes of getting a better understanding and resolving the increasing number of apparent conundrums. Gallo is an enigma: Does he really believe HIV has been shown to cause AIDS? If so, why does he believe it? Does he not know of the lack of correlation between “HIV” and “AIDS”? Does he not know that idiopathic CD4-T-cell lymphopenia is HIV-negative AIDS? Does he not know that Kaposi’s sarcoma, once the iconic AIDS disease, is not caused by HIV? Does he not wonder why it is that no one has been able to discover how HIV causes depletion of CD4 cells? Has not the failure of 25 years of efforts to find a vaccine led him to reconsider the basic evidence? Why not?

Human cancers (≥20% of them) are caused by viruses!

— at least so says Robert Gallo, co-non-discoverer of the non-AIDS-causing “HIV”.

In “HAART, heart disease, & lying with statistics” (2010/01/19)  I pointed out that Lo et al. (2010) claim statistical significance for an association between coronary disease and “HIV” without benefit of the proper control group, “HIV-positive” people who had never been fed antiretroviral drugs.

One of the earliest instances of the “bait and switch” tactic of ascribing to “HIV” what is actually caused by “treatment” against “HIV” was with lipodystrophy, which became prominent only upon introduction of protease inhibitors (PIs), a fact that doesn’t prevent mainstreamers from talking about “HIV-associated” lipodystrophy instead of PI-associated lipodystrophy. This attempted legerdemain of ascribing to “HIV” what is caused by antiretroviral drugs is widespread and will continue to be so, since an increasing proportion of “HIV-positive” people will suffer “treatment” as it is being extended to people with higher and higher CD4 counts, and is even proposed as prophylaxis in healthy, “HIV”-negative  people whose only “risk factor” is being an African woman. By the time every “HIV-positive” person is on antiretroviral drugs, every “side” effect of the drugs can be asserted to be “HIV-associated”.

Robert Gallo is engaged in an analogous attempted legerdemain by ascribing to viruses, without benefit of evidence, certain human cancers. According to Gallo, history teaches that the importance of infectious agents has been discounted for a century or so, despite periodic reminders: Spanish flu, polio, HIV: “ ‘I arrived in the National Cancer Institute in 1965 and there was a serious search for viruses involved in human cancer and a serious respect for infectious disease as potentially new epidemic disorders . . . . By 1975 the virus cancer programme had been killed and people had come to the conclusion that no virus was involved in human cancer and almost certainly would never be.’” Yet a few years later, those biases had been smashed. “Viruses are now known to be involved in about 20 per cent of all human cancers, maybe more, and we now have one of the great epidemics of all time in our face: HIV” (emphases added; “Keeping focused on eradicating a life-long and killer disease”).

Actually the virus-cancer program was not killed, it self-destructed because no human-cancer-causing viruses had been discovered, despite a mistaken claim by Gallo followed by his continuing insistence that HTLV is a retrovirus that causes leukemia — even as he writes that HTLV “tended to be transmitted within families and to stay within families for generations” (p. 114, Gallo 1991). To most people, even medical scientists and perhaps even virologists, something that stays within families for generations is a heritable genetic factor and not an infectious disease. But Gallo is quite ready to re-write medicine and science just as he feels entitled to re-write history: he ascribes medical advances from the beginning of the 20th century to “an increased understanding of and reliance upon the scientific method” (p. 2); and “over the last fifty years, I see few examples in which the scientific-medical establishment arrived at an important conclusion about a disease and was later shown to be wrong” (p. 297; maybe only “few”, but they’ve been fairly significant, like prions mistakenly thought to be lentiviruses, or bacterially caused ulcers ascribed to psychological stress, or shock treatments and lobotomies); and he describes interferon and cytokines as “non-chemical” (p. 301), as though Wöhler had not destroyed the basis for such distinctions in 1828.

Just a few weeks ago, before I had seen this latest Gallo emission, I’d commented that “ ‘HIV’ has infected virology with cancer-causing viruses” (2010/01/08)  in connection with XMRV, the allegedly “xenotropic” (species-jumping) mouse virus allegedly involved in prostate cancer because SOME prostate cancers can yield bits of “non-chemical” substances that might be interpretable as originating in a virus related to XMRV: HIV/AIDS has provided the precedent for regarding something as a cause just because bits of what might be from it can be found in some proportion of cases. Of course, if there’s a “statistically significant” correlation at the p<0.05 level, calculated by use of a ready-made statistics software package, that proves it scientifically, because in HIV-virology correlation proves causation. After all, the fact that a couple of strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) are correlated with genital warts is clear proof that HPV cause the cancers that are sometimes correlated with such warts.

Gallo is anything but shy, though his memory may be conveniently short. Twenty-five years ago he assured the Secretary for Health and Human Services that an anti-“HIV” vaccine would likely to be ready in a couple of years. Now, more than two decades of nothing but failed vaccine trials later, he interprets the latest failure of such a vaccine quite positively: “ ‘It worked, but all the positive data are in the first six months and after that there’s no protection. So whatever worked stopped working, and we have a good idea of what that might be . . . . I think it’s down to a special category of antibodies that were induced, and it fits with some ideas that we are working on.’ Gallo is understandably reserved about predicting the outcome of research in train, but he believes it could produce interesting results.”  He would obviously make a champion seller of Brooklyn Bridges, not to speak of snake oil; perhaps I should say, he has already shown himself to be such a champion.

The State of California has just added AZT to its list of recognized carcinogens. AZT was administered for more than two decades to “HIV-positive” individuals, and during this time an association was noticed between certain cancers — for example, cervical cancer — and “HIV-positive”. Should not Gallo point out to Governor Schwarzenegger that it isn’t the AZT that causes cancer, it’s the HIV against which the AZT is administered?

But Gallo’s (unsupported and unsupportable) claim that ≥20% of human cancers are virus-caused is far too modest. He unaccountably failed to realize that “HIV” can be indicted for an even more widespread condition that negatively affects human beings, namely, aging. The logic is simply the increasingly common syllogism by which HAART-associated equals “HIV”-associated:

Aging is caused in some part, perhaps very large part, by accumulation of mitochondrial mutations and increasingly poor mitochondrial function (Linnane et al. 1989).
Antiretroviral drugs cause mitochondrial damage.
“HIV-positive” people consume antiretroviral drugs.
QED: “HIV-positive” is associated with mitochondrial damage which leads to aging.

This is not a purely theoretical deduction, moreover: it has been noticed that “HIV-positive” individuals often seem to age very prematurely: “A striking number of HIV patients are living longer but getting older faster — showing early signs of dementia and bone weakness usually seen in the elderly” (David France, “Another kind of AIDS crisis”, New York Magazine, 1 November 2009):
“patients who contracted the virus just a few years back are showing signs of what’s being called premature or accelerated aging. Early senility turns out to be an increasingly common problem . . . . One large-scale multi-city study released its latest findings this summer that over half of the HIV-positive population is suffering some form of cognitive impairment. Doctors are also reporting a constellation of ailments in middle-aged patients that are more typically seen at geriatric practices, in patients 80 and older. They range from bone loss to organ failure to arthritis. Making matters worse, HIV patients are registering higher rates of insulin resistance and cholesterol imbalances, and they suffer elevated rates of melanoma and kidney cancers and seven times the rate of other non-HIV-related cancers. Whether this is a result of the drugs or the disease itself, or some combination, is still an open question . . . .”

It’s an open question only for people who don’t remember the past. Whether “non-HIV-related cancers” are a result of “HIV” is not an open question, it’s an attempt to obfuscate. Under HIV/AIDS theory, the average time from “HIV-positive” to any symptoms of illness is 10 years. Now, “patients who contracted the virus just a few years back are showing signs of what’s being called premature or accelerated aging” [emphasis added].

The determined defenders of the orthodox faith speak in hand-waving fashion which ignores that chronology (among other things). The official line is that the life-saving drugs are enabling HIV/AIDS patients to live longer than ever before, and so to become prone to ailments of old age. What that attempted explaining-away does not explain is that the ailments “of old age” are affecting people in middle age; HAART-treated individuals are not living into old age and getting those ailments. Moreover, in the past, in the early days of actual AIDS, people died from opportunistic infections, not from cancers or other typically old-age conditions.

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SOURCES:
Gallo 1991: “Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery”, BasicBooks

Linnane 1989: Linnane AW, Marzuki S, Ozawa T, Tanaka M. “Mitochondrial DNA mutations as an important contributor to ageing and degenerative diseases”, Lancet 25 (8639) 642-5

Lo et al.: Janet Lo, Suhny Abbara, Leon Shturman, Anand Soni, Jeffrey Wei, Jose A. Rocha-Filho, Khurram Nasir, and Steven K. Grinspoon, “Increased prevalence of subclinical coronary atherosclerosis detected by coronary computed tomography angiography in HIV-infected men” AIDS 24 [2010] 243-53

Important legal win

I don’t want to “bury” in the Comments section this important and highly encouraging news, discussed in detail by Clark Baker:

Eneydi Torres, 42, faced up to fifteen years in prison for allegedly exposing four men to HIV.  However, defending attorney Baron Coleman demanded prosecutors provide proof of hearsay that Torres had been HIV-positive for years, and, best of all, said he would call such experts as Gallo, Moore, Padian to explain and defend HIV/AIDS theory under oath.

Prosecutors reduced their initial offer of fifteen years in state prison
to essentially five days of unsupervised probation

Please broadcast this information widely.

Believing and disbelieving

(This is a long post. HERE is a pdf for those who prefer to read it that way).

“How could anyone believe that?” is a natural question whenever someone believes what is contrary to the conventional wisdom, say, that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that Loch Ness monsters are real animals.

Since the role of unorthodox views in and out of science has been the focus of my academic interests for several decades, I had to think about that question in a variety of contexts. My conclusion long ago was that this is the wrong question, the very opposite of the right question, which is,

“How does anyone ever come to believe differently than others do?” (1)

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It’s a widespread illusion that we believe things because they’re true. It’s an illusion that we all tend to harbor about ourselves. Of course I believe what’s true! My beliefs aren’t wrong! It’s the others who are wrong.

However, we don’t acquire beliefs because they’re true, we acquire them through being taught that they’re true. For the first half-a-dozen or a dozen years of our lives, before we have begun to learn how to think truly for ourselves, as babies and children we almost always believe what parents and teachers tell us. Surely that has helped the species to survive. But no matter what the reason might be, there’s ample empirical evidence for it. For instance, many people during their whole lifetime stick to the religion that they imbibed almost with mother’s milk; those who reject that religion do so at earliest in adolescence.

That habit of believing parents and teachers tends to become ingrained. Society’s “experts”  — scientists and doctors, surrogate parents and teachers — tend to be believed as a matter of habit.

So how do some people ever come to believe other than what they’ve been taught and what the experts say?

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I was prompted to this train of thought by receiving yet again some comments intended for this blog and which were directed at minor details, from people whom I had asked, long ago, to cut through this underbrush and address the chief point at issue: “What is the proof that HIV causes AIDS?”

Whenever I’ve asked this of commentators like Fulano-etc.-de-Tal, or Chris Noble, or Snout, or others who want to argue incessantly about ancillary details, the exchange has come to an end. They’ve simply never addressed that central issue.

And it’s not only these camp followers. The same holds for the actual HIV/AIDS gurus, the Montagniers and Gallos and Faucis. Fauci threatens journalists who don’t toe the orthodox line. Gallo hangs up on Gary Null when asked for citations to the work that made him famous.

Why can’t these people cite the work on which their belief is supposedly based?

Finally it hit me: Because their belief wasn’t formed that way. They didn’t come to believe because of the evidence.
The Faucis and Gallos came to believe because they wanted to, because a virus-caused AIDS would be in their professional bailiwick, and they were more than happy to take an imperfect correlation as proof of causation.
The camp followers came to believe simply because they were happy to believe what the experts say and what “everyone else” believes. Who are they to question the authority of scientific experts and scientific institutions?

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To question “what everyone knows”, there has to be some decisive incentive or some serendipitous conjunction. I’ll illustrate that by describing how I came to believe some things that “everyone else” believes and some things that “everyone else” does not believe.

The first unorthodox opinion I acquired was that Loch Ness monsters are probably real living animals of some unidentified species. How did I come to that conclusion?
Serendipity set the stage. Reading has been my lifelong pleasure. I used to browse in the local library among books that had just been returned and not yet reshelved, assuming that these would be the most interesting ones. Around 1961, I picked from that pile a book titled Loch Ness Monster, by Tim Dinsdale. I recall my mental sneer, for I knew like everyone else that this was a mythical creature and a tangible tourist attraction invented by those canny Scots. But I thumbed the pages, and saw a set of glossy photos: claimed stills from a film! If these were genuine . . . . So I borrowed the book. Having read it, I couldn’t make up my mind. The author seemed genuine, but also very naïve. Yet his film had been developed by Kodak and pronounced genuine. Could it be that Nessies are real?
I was unable to find a satisfactory discussion in the scientific literature. So I read whatever other books and articles I could find about it. I also became a member of the Loch Ness Investigation, a group that was exploring at Loch Ness during the summers, and I followed their work via their newsletters — I couldn’t participate personally since I then lived in Australia.
A dozen years later, on sabbatical leave in England, I took a vacation trip to Loch Ness. More serendipity: there I encountered Dinsdale. Later I arranged lecture tours for him in the USA (where I had migrated in 1965). Coming to know Dinsdale, coming to trust his integrity, seeing a 35mm copy of his film umpteen times during his talks, brought conviction.
It had taken me 12-15 years of looking at all the available evidence before I felt convinced.

The unorthodox view that underwrites this blog is that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. How did I come by that belief in something that “everyone else” does not believe?
More serendipity. Having concluded in the early 1970s that Nessies were probably real, I became curious why there hadn’t been proper scientific investigations despite the huge amount of publicity over several decades. That led eventually to my change of academic field from chemistry to science studies, with special interest in heterodoxies. So I was always on the lookout for scientific anomalies and heresies to study. In the mid-1990s, I came across the book by Ellison and Duesberg, Why We Will Never Win the War on AIDS (interesting info about this here ; other Ellison-Duesberg articles here).
Just as with Dinsdale’s book, I couldn’t make up my mind. The arguments seemed sound, but I didn’t feel competent to judge the technicalities. So, again, I looked for other HIV/AIDS-dissenting books, and wrote reviews of a number of them. Around 2005, that led me to read Harvey Bialy’s scientific autobiography of Duesberg. For months thereafter, I periodically reminded myself that I wanted to check a citation Bialy had given, for an assertion that obviously couldn’t be true, namely, that positive HIV-tests in the mid-1980s among teenage potential military recruits from all across the United States had come equally among the girls as among the boys. The consequences of checking that reference are described in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory.
As with Nessie, it had taken me more than ten years of looking into the available evidence to become convinced of the correctness of something that “everyone else” does not believe.

So am I saying that I always sift evidence for a decade before making up my mind?
Of course not. I did that only on matters that were outside my professional expertise.

Studying chemistry, I didn’t question what the instructors and the textbooks had to say. I surely asked for explanations on some points, and might well have raised quibbles on details, but I didn’t question the periodic table or the theory of chemical bonding or the laws of thermodynamics or any other basic tenet.

That, I suggest, is quite typical. Those of us who go into research in a science don’t begin by questioning our field’s basic tenets. Furthermore, most of us never have occasion to question those tenets later on. Most scientific research is, in Kuhn’s words (2), puzzle-solving. In every field there are all sorts of little problems to be solved; not little in the sense of easy, but in the sense of not impinging on any basic theoretical issues. One can spend many lifetimes in chemical research without ever questioning the Second Law of thermodynamics, say, or quantum-mechanical calculations of electron energies, and so on and so forth.

So: Immunologists and virologists and pharmacologists and others who came to do research on HIV/AIDS from the mid-1980s onwards have been engaged in trying to solve all sorts of puzzles. They’ve had no reason to question the accepted view that HIV causes AIDS, because their work doesn’t raise that question in any obvious way; they’re working on very specialized, very detailed matters — designing new antiretroviral drugs, say; or trying to make sense of the infinite variety of “HIV” strains and permutations and recombinations; or looking for new strategies that might lead to a useful vaccine; and so on and so forth. Many tens of thousands of published articles illustrate that there are no end of mysterious puzzles about “HIV/AIDS” waiting to be solved.

The various people who became activist camp followers, like the non-scientist vigilantes among the AIDStruth gang, didn’t begin by trying to convince themselves, by looking into the primary evidence, that the mainstream view is correct: they simply believed it, jumped on the very visible bandwagon, took for granted that the conventional view promulgated by official scientific institutions is true.

It is perfectly natural, in other words, for scientists and non-scientists to believe without question that HIV causes AIDS even though they have never seen or looked for the proof.

What is not natural is to question that, and the relatively small number of individuals who became HIV/AIDS dissidents, AIDS Rethinkers, HIV Skeptics, did so because of idiosyncratic and specific reasons. Women like Christine Maggiore, Noreen Martin, Maria Papagiannidou, Karri Stokely, and others had the strongest personal reasons to wonder about what they were being told: since they had not put themselves at risk in the way “HIV” is supposedly acquired, and since they were finding the “side” effects of antiretroviral drugs intolerable, the incentive was strong to think for themselves and look at the evidence for themselves.
Many gay men have had similar reason to question the mainstream view, and some unknown but undoubtedly large number of gay men are living in a perpetual mental and emotional turmoil: on one hand much empirical evidence of what the antiretroviral drugs have done to their friends, on the other hand their own doctors expressing with apparent confidence the mainstream view. So only a visible minority of gay men have yet recognized the failings of HIV/AIDS theory.
One of the first to do so, John Lauritsen, was brought to question the mainstream view for the idiosyncratic personal reason that, as a survey research analyst, he could see that the CDC’s classification scheme was invalid.
Among scientists, Peter Duesberg recognized some of the errors of HIV/AIDS theory because he understood so much about retroviruses and because he had not himself been caught up in the feverish chase for an infectious cause of AIDS. Robert Root-Bernstein, too, with expertise in immunology , could recognize clearly from outside the HIV/AIDS-research establishment the fallacy of taking immunedeficiency as some new phenomenon. Other biologists, too, who were not involved in HIV/AIDS work, could see things wrong with HIV/AIDS theory: Charles A. Thomas, Jr., Harvey Bialy, Walter Gilbert, Kary Mullis, Harry Rubin, Gordon Stewart, Richard Strohman, and many others who have put their names to the letter asking for a reconsideration.

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To summarize:

Mainstream researchers rarely if ever question the basis for the contemporary beliefs in their field. It’s not unique to HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS researchers and camp followers never cite the publications that are supposed to prove that HIV causes AIDS for the reason that they never looked for such proof, they simply took it for granted on the say-so of the press-conference announcement and subsequent “mainstream consensus”.

The people who did look for such proof, and realized that it doesn’t exist, were:
—  journalists covering “HIV/AIDS” stories (among those who wrote books about it are Jad Adams, Elinor Burkett, John Crewdson, Celia Farber, Neville Hodgkinson, Evan Lambrou, Michael Leitner, Joan Shenton);
—  directly affected, said-to-be-HIV-positive people, largely gay men and also women like those mentioned above;
—  individuals for a variety of individual reasons, as illustrated above for John Lauritsen and myself;
—  scientists in closely related fields who were not working directly on HIV/AIDS.

That last point is pertinent to the refrain from defenders of HIV/AIDS orthodoxy that highly qualified scientists like Duesberg or Mullis are not equipped to comment because they have never themselves done any research on HIV or AIDS. But that’s precisely why they were able to see that this HIV/AIDS Emperor has no clothes — scientists working directly on the many puzzles generated by this wrong theory have no incentive, no inclination, no reason to question the hypothesis; indeed, the psychological mechanism of cognitive dissonance makes it highly unlikely that scientists with careers vested in HIV/AIDS orthodoxy will be able to recognize the evidence against their belief.
More generally, this is the reason why the history of science contains so many cases of breakthroughs being made by outsiders to a particular specialty: coming to it afresh, they are not blinded by the insider dogmas.

So there is nothing unique about the fact that the failings of HIV/AIDS theory have been discerned by outsiders and not by insiders, and that the insiders are not even familiar with the supposed proofs underlying their belief. Nor is it unique that the dogma has many camp followers who never bothered to look for the supposed proofs of the mainstream belief. What is unique to HIV/AIDS theory is the enormous damage it has caused, by making ill or actually killing hundreds of thousands (at least). The annals of modern medicine have no precedent for this, which is another reason why thoughtless supporters of HIV/AIDS orthodoxy may feel comfortable with it despite never having sought evidence for it.

So here’s the question to put to everyone who insists that HIV causes AIDS:

HOW  DID  YOU  COME  TO  BELIEVE  THAT?
WHAT  CONVINCED  YOU?

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Cited:
(1) Henry H. Bauer, Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy, University of Illinois Press, 1984; chapter 11, “Motives for believing”.
(2) Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed., enlarged; 1st ed. 1962)

Impersonation is a crime, even on the Internet

“Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau today announced the arrest of a 49-year-old man for creating multiple aliases to engage in a campaign of impersonation and harassment . . . . The defendant, RAPHAEL HAIM GOLB, was arrested on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. . . . [perpetrated] in order to influence and affect debate . . . and in order to harass . . .  scholars who disagree with his viewpoint. GOLB used computers at New York University (NYU) in an attempt to mask his true identity when conducting this Internet scheme. . . .
GOLB is charged with Identity Theft in the Second Degree, a class E felony, which is punishable by up to 1⅓ to 4 years in prison; Identity Theft in the Third Degree, Criminal Impersonation in the Second Degree, Forgery in the Third Degree and Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree, all class A misdemeanors, which are each punishable by up to 1 year in prison”
(News Release, New York County District Attorney, 5 March 2009).

The disputed issues concern the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the legal and other circumstances make the case of some interest to AIDS Rethinkers and HIV Skeptics, who have become quite familiar with harassment and impersonation practiced by HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes.

Golb apparently began his campaign in reaction to a museum exhibit featuring work by Robert Cargill. Cargill had set Google Alerts to track material about the Dead Sea Scrolls and noticed suspiciously similar comments coming from an apparent variety of sources. His 2-year investigation, which included tracking IP addresses, is described on the website, “Who is Charles Gadda?”

“Prosecutors said Mr. Golb opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, the New York University professor who disagreed with Mr. Golb’s father. He sent messages in Professor Schiffman’s name to various people . . ., fabricating an admission by Professor Schiffman that he had plagiarized some of Professor Golb’s work . . . . Raphael Golb also set up blogs under various names that accused Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism . . . . ‘It’s very easy to open an account using any name you want on the Internet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But when you start using another person’s true identity for some purpose, you’re crossing the line into a possible identity theft crime or impersonation crime’. . . . ‘We debated the theories,’ Dr. Schiffman said . . . , referring to Mr. Golb’s father. ‘I thought that’s what scholarship is about. You don’t have to impersonate me’” (“Identity-theft arrest in dispute over Dead Sea Scrolls”).

“’I can’t believe this would happen,’ . . . [Schiffman] said. ‘We are supposed to be doing scholarly interchange’” (“U. of C. scholar’s son charged with identity theft, harassment”)

“Schiffman issued a statement after Golb’s arrest: ‘. . . . Reasoned intellectual discourse relies on integrity. When an individual, in seeking to advance a particular view, engages in impersonation and falsehood, he or she undermines the precepts of higher inquiry’” (“The arrest of Raphael Golb”).

“’I don’t know what caused the transition from the proper intellectual discourse,’ Prof. Schiffman said . . . . ‘Usually these things happen because someone hates their ex-wife. But this? Who would do this?’ . . . . ‘It’s the nature of academic life that you have scholars in disagreement. They tend to debate in academic publications such as books and peer-reviewed journal articles, and sometimes at academic conferences,’ Prof. Levitt Kohn said” (“Curse of the scrolls”)

Why the underhanded roundabout rigmarole?
“Mr. Schiffman said that if Raphael Golb had knocked on his office door saying, ‘I think my father’s right, and I think you’re wrong, and is it OK if I come to some conference and bring the reasons why?’, he would have had no objection. ‘The guy could have been a big friend of ours. That’s what’s so stupid about all this’” (Steve Kolowich, “The fall of an academic cyberbully”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 March 2009, A1, 8-11).

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Raphael Golb is a lawyer, not an academic. But some academics, too, behave just like that: attempting anonymity, attempting character assassination, being anything but honest, open, straightforward.

Just like Golb, all that the HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes would have to do to make their case and demolish their opposition is to cite the published articles that prove HIV to be the cause of AIDS.
Instead of spending countless time in attacking persons and spewing vitriol and making fools of themselves and disgracing their professions, all that the HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes would have to do is just cite the articles that prove HIV as the cause of AIDS.
Just cite the articles, and all we AIDS Rethinkers and HIV Skeptics will stop being such annoying thorns in your sides and hair.

So why are those articles not cited?
Because they don’t exist.
The people who should most know are the co-discoverers of “HIV”.
Montagnier, for his part, has consistently denied knowledge of such publications, and has consistently gone further to say that HIV alone does not cause AIDS, that it requires co-factors and a pre-weakened immune system. Indeed, more than 15 years ago, articles from his laboratory showed that “HIV” in the presence of antibiotics does not kill T-cells whereas in absence of antibiotics “it” does, proving that some bacterial type of agent in “HIV” “isolates” is the killer.
Gallo, for his part, has consistently refused to answer requests for the pertinent citations, most recently on the Gary Null radio program, where he offered the consensus of official organizations as proof. Testifying in the Parenzee case, he had even claimed that purification of “HIV” ”isolates” was unnecessary.
All the researchers and groupies who took up “HIV/AIDS” after the Gallo-Montagnier “discovery” have simply taken the matter on faith. They can’t cite the pertinent proofs because they never looked for them. They can’t engage in rational discourse now because of cognitive dissonance: They cannot admit to themselves that they accepted on faith, and built their careers on, a mistaken view that was without proof when they adopted the belief as their own without first looking into its merits.