Bulletin #101 from the Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
Frequently Asked Questions about the CDC Scientists whose misjudgments created the corrupted hard drive of AIDS Research
Didn't Randy Shilts consider Don Francis a hero in his book, And The Band Played On?
Didn't Randy Shilts consider Don Francis a hero in his book, And The Band Played On?
Yes, in many ways, Donald Francis, the
epidemiological superstar of Shilts's book is also the star of the titanic HIV
mistake that led to the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe. Shilts’s unfortunate hero
worship begins with this description of the man: "Although he was only
thirty-eight, Dr. Don Francis was one of the most eminent experts on epidemics
at the CDC, having been among the handful of epidemiologists who literally
wiped smallpox off the face of the earth in the 1970s." (ATBPO
p.73) Harvard retrovirologist Myron Essex thought Francis "had gained an
international reputation for singular brilliance.” (ATBPO p.73) The early
days among the crew that crafted the official AIDS paradigm in the early 80s
was off to a great start as a rather grandiose mutual admiration society. That
might have been an early telltale sign of a groupthink catastrophe in the
making.
Donald Francis had worked with Essex at
Harvard on feline leukemia. No more precise nucleus of the tragic HIV mistake
can be found than the moment when Francis (according to Shilts) decided that
Gay Related Immunodeficiency (GRID, as it was known early on) was feline
leukemia in people because both diseases were marked by weakened immune systems
and opportunistic infections. Feline leukemia is not the only animal disease
to behave that way, but Francis's myopic familiarity with feline leukemia
would tragically keep all other more likely possibilities at bay while he
pursued his pet theory under the guidance of his Harvard mentor and future
Harvard AIDS millionaire.
A sure recipe for hubristic mischief could
be found in the fact that Francis seemed so very sure of himself and his
intuitions. He was also very sure that other people with their competing ideas
for the aetiology of the mysterious epidemic were dead wrong. According to
Shilts, "Francis didn't think the gay health problems were being caused by
cytomegalovirus or the other familiar viruses under discussion. They had been
around for years and hadn't killed anybody. It was something new; it could even
be a retrovirus, Francis said." (ATBPO p.73) Saying it “could be a
retrovirus” was disingenuous because other possible causes that were not
retroviral were not welcome at the table. Ironically and tragically, Shilts
foolishly celebrates this determined rush to judgment: "Francis was
already convinced. He quickly became the leading CDC proponent of the notion
that a new virus that could be spread sexually was causing immune deficiencies
in gay men." (ATBPO p.74) Both epidemiology and virology were
rather quickly being carved into stone with horrific consequences.
Donald Francis was the human embodiment of
a stern, uncompromising public health message that can be heard constantly
playing over the P.A. system in And the Band Played On. The questionable
behavior of all other scientists at the time and what Shilts perceives as the
self-destructive dithering of gay leaders is judged harshly against what Shilts
considers the courageous, take-no-prisoners approach that Francis had
supposedly taken during epidemics he had worked on. "Years of stamping out
epidemics in the Third World had also instructed Francis on how to stop a new
disease. You find the source of contagion, surround it, and make sure it
doesn't spread." (ATBPO p.107) Couldn't be any simpler than that.
But nobody, Shilts included, was stopping to ask if Francis was fighting the
last epidemiological war rather than the new one.
Francis had a no-nonsense approach, a
manly approach, one Shilts clearly admires. While Francis will be the voice of
moral testosterone throughout Band, according to Shilts’s black and
white schema, it falls to the gay community to play the role of denial ridden,
weak-kneed, self-destructive imbeciles. In the dark days of the early epidemic
only the wise-beyond-his-years Francis sees the light and knows what to do. The
Francis buzz word is "control." Dr. Donald Francis knew how to
"control" epidemics. If only the dopes at the top of the nation’s
AIDS effort, and the epidemics uncooperative gay victims had let him take
control.
Francis's African experiences were
epidemiologically formative. He had worked on Ebola Fever in Africa in 1976 and
he will now look at this new disease through Ebola-colored glasses: " . .
. the disease [Ebola] was a bloodborne virus, wickedly spreading both through
sexual intercourse, because infected lymphocytes were in victims' semen, and
through the sharing of needles in local bush hospitals.” (ATBPO p.118)
Shilts also looks at "AIDS" and public health itself through
Francis’s Ebola glasses: "When it became obvious that the disease was
spreading through autopsies and ritual contact with corpses during the funerary
process, Dr. Don Francis, on loan to the World Health Organization from the
CDC, had simply banned local rituals and unceremoniously buried the corpses.
Infected survivors were removed from the community and quarantined until it was
clear that they could no longer spread the fever. Within weeks, the disease
disappeared as mysteriously as it had come. The tribespeople were furious that
their millennia-old rituals had been forbidden by these arrogant young doctors
from other continents. The wounded anger twisted their faces." (ATBPO
p.118) This passage is a key to understanding the moral of And the
Band Played On, and the theme Shilts also promulgated in his publicity
campaign for his bestselling book. It becomes the schtick he will hector his own
community with. For “tribespeople” fill in the word “gays.“ If only the
government had acted, had done something, anything, sooner. But what? Clearly
Shilts wanted the country, under Dr. Francis—as a kind of extra-political AIDS
Czar—to go into the same emergency mode reflected in the kind of ritual-banning
measures he took toward the benighted tribespeople in Africa. In a manner of
speaking, in a perfect Donald Francis public health universe gay rituals (i.e.
sex) would be banned, infected people would be removed from the community and
quarantined. Whenever anyone will talk about the government not doing enough
after Band, what will always be disingenously unsaid is what a
heavy-handed government could have done if it had wanted to. In the name of
doing something—anything—involving a not much loved minority, things could have
gotten extremely dicey in the inconvenient Bill of Rights sense, and there is
nothing about what one detects in the character of either Francis or Shilts in
the book to suggest that they would have done anything other than cheer such a
development on. Gay men performed many foolish, politically self-defeating acts
throughout the epidemic, but applauding Shilt's silly message about the
heterosexist government of a heterosexist country not doing enough, with
all its dark unconsidered implications of what draconian things might have been
done in the name of dealing with a public health emergency, is surely one of
the most foolish. Anything done under the biased auspices of Don Francis during
the early days of the epidemic, can now be appreciated as an example of an
incompetent government with questionable motives doing too much too fast and
using poor judgment.
The impatient Dr. Francis considered the
ideas of those at the National Institutes of Health who were looking at
alternative theories like amyl nitrite or sperm as the cause of AIDS to be
"ludicrous." (ATBPO p.119) Instead of suffering these fools,
Francis set up his own laboratories and went to work to lay down the foundation
for what would turn out to be the CDC’s greatest mistake in its history. As for
gay people, like the indigenous people of Francis’s African epidemics,
"Customs and rituals would have to be dramatically changed, and he knew
from his hepatitis work in the gay community that customs involving sex were
the most implacable behaviors to try to alter." (ATBPO p.119) Yeah,
changing gay customs is like herding cats.
Shilts portrays Francis as a man of
destiny: "Don Francis viewed his life as an accumulation of chance
decision that had put him in the right place at the right time.” (ATBPO
p. 128) In retrospect, perhaps destiny had brought together exactly the wrong
man, the wrong institution, the wrong epidemic at the wrong time to create the
most perfect coalescence of misbegotten epidemiology and virology in history.
Shilts swoons over the synchronicities of the Donald Francis life journey thus
far: "By chance after chance, Don Francis felt he had been delivered to
this moment in early March 1982, when it all fit together. The retrovirology,
the cat leukemia, the experience with African epidemics, and the long work with
the gay community—it all let him see something very clearly." (ATBPO
p.128) Oy vey.
Francis looked through the world through
the retroviral lenses of Myron Essex. Francis had completed his
doctorate on retroviruses and he was like the hammer that sees the world in
terms of nails. It is a curious factoid of history that originally Francis
thought that AIDS was co-factorial: Shilts reports he said, "Combine these
two diseases—feline leukemia and hepatitis—and you have the immune
deficiency." (ATBPO p.129) If Francis had only kept his
co-factorial notion alive, there would have at least been a small chance that
the HIV mistake might have corrected itself quickly rather than rolling out
thirty years of hell on earth. Co-factors might have kept minds from closing
To Francis, the conclusions were painfully
obvious, and it was also clear what needed to be done. The Center for Disease
Control needed "to launch some educational campaigns among gays to prevent
the disease.” (ATBPO p.129) The Great White Doctor had arrived among the
ignorant, indigenous gays of America. The gay "implacable" behaviors
had to change. Cut to the gay versions of "twisted faces" and
"wounded anger" Shilts described in Africa.
Often when a detective makes a major wrong
turn, the suspect is right there in front of him. In Francis's attempts to
fulfill the destiny of his retroviral dissertation, he overlooked the most
obvious viral suspect of all, the one the size of a barn that was just staring
at the CDC researchers, begging to be discovered. Francis memorialized this
Missed Opportunity when he himself wrote in one of the very first books on the
epidemic (a collection of essays on AIDS edited by Kevin Cahill) "Blood
sampling of the intravenous drug users also revealed that although many were
infected with cytomegalovirus, the viral strains were different. This was
strong evidence that this herpes virus, which many scientists considered a
strong candidate for a causative agent, had not developed some new virulent
strain.” (Cahill Book p.??) No single strain emerged, lending
further weight to Don Francis's hypothesis that a new virus, not CMV was at
work. If only he had wondered if there was some new DNA virus that
resembled CMV in some way that was hidden in the mix, the retroviral obsession
might not have ultimately ruled the day. And then of course the HHV-6 spectrum
pandemic and what should be cal'ed "Holocaust II" might never have happened.
Anyone who disagreed with Francis during
this early period of the epidemic was considered stupid or stubborn. (This is
how eras of abnormal and totalitarian science get their start in putative
democracies.) We're constantly told throughout Shilts's book that Francis hoped
"somebody would see how catastrophic the epidemic would become.” (ATBPO
p.147) Ironic, when you consider that indeed an apocalyptic catastrophe was
coming and Francis himself was actually inadvertently taking a leadership role
in making the key mistakes that would help to make it happen.
An amusing note is struck when Shilts
points out that Francis wanted more labs to work on "AIDS" research
because "they might get off on a bum lead and retard research at a time
when people were dying." (ATBPO p.151) Francis, as it turns out,
might live to see his name become synonymous with bum leads, and as far as
dying is concerned, the show had only just begun.
There is no place that Shiltsian worship
of Francis wouldn't go. He even followed Francis to bed: "The dream came
to Don Francis often during those long, frustrating nights in the gathering
darkness of 1982. Just beyond his reach, a faint orange light was suspended,
shimmering with promise. It was The Answer, the solution to the puzzle. He
reached for it, stretching so he could draw the light toward him. But it
drifted farther and farther out. The answer was always there before him,
tantalizingly close, and still beyond his grasp. Don's wife usually awoke him
at that point. His mournful groaning would disturb the kids." (ATBPO
p.159) Or, perhaps, in retrospect, it was just indigestion.
Our dreamer-scientist is portrayed as the
solitary man of reason in an obstinate, irrational world: "The logical
science of GRID demanded that logical steps be taken . . . or people would die
needlessly. However, as would be the case with just about every policy aspect
of the epidemic, logic would not be the prevailing modus operandi." (ATBPO
p.170) “The logical science of GRID” is perhaps the most oxymoronic phrase in
the history of phrases. In what sounds now like ironic chutzpah, Shilts had the
nerve to write "Science was not working at its best, accepting new
information with an unbiased eye and beginning appropriate
investigations." (ATBPO p.171) From a Kuhnian promontory,
one must ask whose unbiased eye it is, who decides what is
appropriate? But why even bother accepting new or contradictory information if
you're being beamed up to “the Answer” by an orange light?
By January 1983, Don Francis is pounding
his fists on tables. He is enraged at the blood banks. No one was doing enough
to "control" the disease. There were fools full of denial everywhere
and people shortsighted enough to express concerns about trifles like civil
liberties in the face of the mounting death toll. Shilts, as usual, opined that
the “problem, of course, was that such considerations constantly overshadowed
concerns of medicine and public health." (ATBPO p.224) Public
health logic is inexorable and very useful for those in the emotional blackmail
game. Only Francis knew exactly what needed to be done. "In his windowless
office in Phoenix, he began laying out his own long-range plans for getting
ahead of the epidemic." (ATBPO p.232) He wanted an outside advisory
group of immunologists and retrovirologists to guide the CDC. New-fangled
retrovirologists—not old fashioned virologists.
With his retroviral thinking cap on,
Francis wanted to hone in on implacable retrovirus-spreading sexual behaviors
of the gays: One of his almost salivating tough love memo's said, "I feel
that to control AIDS we are obligated to try and do something to modify sexual
activity. No doubt neither the fear of gonorrhea nor syphilis nor hepatitis B
has decreased the number of sexual partners among homosexual men. But fear
of AIDS might. [Emphasis mine] It seems mandatory for CDC to spread word of
AIDS to all areas of the country. We have the network of VD clinics by which
this word can be spread. Why not try?"(ATBPO p.233) Word certainly
had no trouble spreading—and turning everything in its path into "Holocaust II."
Thus a biased, gay-obsessed presumption about the nature of AIDS was seamlessly
stitched into the thinking and public health message right from the get-go.
Every time the nature of the epidemic would be discussed, it would send a clear
anti-gay message. Every time a public health warning about the epidemic would
be given, it would repeat the biased conventional homodemiological wisdom. If
it was not consciously a big lie, it was a Big Mistake being promoted with the
same effective propagandistic techniques. And over time the Big Mistake would
evolve smoothly and inexorably into the Big Self-deception and the Big Lie.
Francis was so committed to his retroviral
explanation of AIDS that he could not let any anomalous or contradictory data
get in the way of his retroviral, venereal and gay paradigm. He had created
what Hannah Arendt might have called an “epidemiological image.” He began to
build an empire around his AIDS paradigm, firing off memos insisting that
"as part of CDC's continuing pursuit of the cause of AIDS, a laboratory with
retrovirus capabilities is necessary at CDC." (ATBPO p.266) He
moved to Atlanta and assumed the title of "Lab Director for the AIDS
Activities Office." A great time was about to be had by all.
The CDC bureaucracy that Francis had to
deal with is portrayed in the Shilts book as unenlightened and slow to respond
to the AIDS mensch. Historians will have to do some homework here and figure
out if maybe there were some unsung heroes of insurgency at the CDC who
actually took the correct measure of Francis and acted appropriately. Sabotage
of the Francis agenda might in retrospect have been the work of unrecognized
saints. Shilts portrays Francis as someone who was heroically willing to go
outside legal channels to achieve his worthy (in his own visionary mind) goals.
Francis was willing to spend money without congressional authorization. (Yes,
AIDS now had its own Oliver North.) Francis was often so busy with his
"AIDS activities" that he didn't have time to write up findings for
publications. Why write up findings for publications when people were dying?
This was an implacable gay behavior emergency. Not bothering to write things up
is a chronically disturbing meme in the abnormal science of AIDS as we shall
see in the forthcoming chapter on the HIV/AIDS shenanigans up at the National
Cancer Institute.
Francis is characterized as the voice of
sanity compared to Shilts's portrayal of Robert Gallo, the scientist who will
claim—with guns blazing—to have discovered the true AIDS retrovirus. There was
a curious meeting in July, 1983 (two years after the first formal newspaper
reporting of the sighting of the epidemic) at the CDC which "had been
called to try to coordinate the search for the retrovirus responsible for
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome." (ATBPO p.349) Historians who
like to know what people knew and when they knew it will chomp at the bit to
figure out the prescience of knowing it was a retrovirus before they had
found it. There will always be the whiff of phoniness about the search for a
predetermined cause and that phoniness will certainly give birth to all kinds
of conspiracy theories as historians excavate this somewhat hazy period at the
CDC.
Shilts’s depiction of Gallo's vainglory
and hair-trigger temper serve only to increase the number of halos floating
above Don Francis's head. When Francis tries to recruit one of Gallo's
assistants (also known as flunkies), Gallo goes ballistic, which is not
surprising as the story about what really goes on in Gallo's lab will reveal
later in the decade. The skeletons in that scientific closet are a
Halloween unto themselves. The Gallo assistant who jumps ship receives the
usual Gallo going-away gift for such an occasion: "I will destroy
you," Gallo says to the man, according to Shilts. (ATBPO p.368)
Without understanding the disturbing
implications, Shilts haplessly does a decent job of providing a snapshot of the
political pressure that the CDC was under to name something (perhaps
anything—and this retrovirus fit that bill) as the cause of AIDS:
"James Mason, the CDC director, had a blunt directive for Don Francis on
March 21 [1984] 'Get it done,' he instructed. In his scientific notebook, Don
Francis wrote PRESSURE and underlined the word twice. The heat was on to
resolve the ‘AIDS’ mystery, and Francis didn't have any doubts that the
proximity of the presidential election motivated the unusual administrative
concern." (ATBPO p.434)
Historians will have to ask themselves if
the roots of the titanic mistake made on HIV, AIDS and HHV-6 was actually just
driven by the politics of a presidential election year. Was it just that
tragically simple? Did the dynamics of one presidential race give birth to the
era of mistaken, abnormal science that will refuse to correct itself for three
decades? Did “Get it done!” lead, as night follows day, to "Holocaust II"?
Francis played pivotal role in the CDC's
ultimately disastrous judgment that LAV, the retrovirus discovered by the
French in AIDS patients, was the cause of AIDS. The bums-rush speed with which
Francis moved from deciding it was the cause to creating inexorable public
health policies based on it was stunning. Within a very short time frame there
was an action agenda from Francis, and according to Shilts, "With the
cause of AIDS found, scientists could now get on with the business of
controlling the spread of the epidemic and finding a vaccine." (ATBPO
p.409) Indeed. Given that the CDC could control the information about
the spread of the epidemic (the Arendtian image, so to speak), they could certainly
give the appearance of controlling the actual epidemic. That’s how abnormal,
totalitarian and ultimately psychotic science, works.
Ironically, maybe one of the most
important inadvertent contributions that Don Francis made to ultimately undermining
the HIV/AIDS paradigm was his inability to create a model for
"AIDS" by infecting monkeys with the retrovirus supposedly discovered
by the French and Robert Gallo. This helped give birth to the first
whistleblower of AIDS, retrovirologist Peter Duesberg, who used the failure to
create an animal model as one of the arguments bolstering his growing doubts
that the retrovirus was the real cause of AIDS. The health of those monkeys may
have serendipitously saved all the people who heeded Duesberg’s warnings about
HIV.
Shilts portrays Francis as an earnest man
committed only to furthering the interests of public health, the perfect foil
to Robert Gallo. As Gallo appeared at a press conference with Secretary of
Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, to claim that the cause of AIDS
had been found, Saint Francis watched in horror: "After years of
frustration, the announcement of the HTLV-III discovery deserved elation, Don
Francis thought as he watched the live Cable News Network coverage of the Heckler
press conference in the CDC's television studio with other members of the AIDS
Activities Office. Instead, he felt burdened by the conflicts he saw ahead. The
French were being cheated of their recognition and the U.S. government had
taken a sleazy path, claiming credit for something that had been done by others
a year before. Francis was embarrassed by a government more concerned with
election-year politics than with honesty. Moreover, he could see that suspicion
would play greater, not a lesser role in the coming ‘AIDS’ research.
Competition often made for good science, Francis knew, lending an edge of
excitement to research. Dishonesty, however, muddied the field, taking the fun
out of science and retarding future cooperation." (ATBPO p.451)
Sleazy paths? Dishonesty? Suspicion? The world hadn’t seen anything yet.
Luckily for the health and civil liberties
of the American people, Donald Francis, sooner rather than later "was
beginning to feel beaten down." (ATBPO p.462 ) While others focused
on a search for a treatment for "AIDS," Francis was itching to take
it to the gay tribespeople and to “implement widespread voluntary testing for
gay men."(ATBPO p.469 ) And gay men just couldn’t wait until
he got his hands on them. The “voluntary testing,” of course, was based on his
heterosexist notions of the epidemiology and virology of the disease. Francis
penned a visionary nine-page program called "Operation AIDS Control"
and his plan "employed the only two weapons with which health authorities
could find the epidemic—blood testing and education." (ATBPO p.524)
Luckily for the gay community, he never completely succeeded in getting the CDC
into the full monty "control modality." But the early work of Francis
succeeded in creating a paradigm that would help steer the AIDS agenda for
three psychotic decades, one that implied that the only way to control the
epidemic was to find ways to intervene medically and social-engineeringly in
the lives of gay people. If liberation and privacy had been spoils of gay liberation,
they were now under direct threat from the public health vision presented by
Francis and his colleagues. According to Shilts, "Francis drew his two
circles. One circle represented men infected with the AIDS virus; the other men
who weren't. The point of AIDS control efforts, he said should be to make sure
that everybody knows into which circle they fit." (ATBPO p.549)
Dante couldn’t have drawn better circles for the gay community.
To their credit, not all gay men were
eager to split their community up into Don Francis’s two circles. Some wondered
whether these circles were a way of dividing and conquering the gay community. But
for the majority of the gay community, who began to live their lives in the
shadow of the two fraudulent circles, trusting in Francis’s vision proved a
huge mistake. By 2010, one study of gay men showed that the big circle had not
been protected from the real epidemic by avoiding contact with the smaller
circle. One study showed that 60% of all gay men were testing positive for
HHV-8 the so-called Kaposi‘s sarcoma virus, originally a marker for AIDS.
Believing in HIV had not saved them from the real epidemic. (Note to come.)
Even his boss, James Curran, was not quite
willing to turn over the epidemic to the gung-ho Donald Francis. A disgruntled
Francis eventually left the CDC to go work in the San Francisco Health
Department. Shilts leaves us with the impression that the proactive Don Francis
could have saved the world if only the system hadn't gotten in his way. Francis
had warned the world but he "had only been beaten by the system, and
because of that the disease had won." (ATBPO p.600)
A disease had definitely won, but not the
one Francis thought he had been fighting while wearing his venereal and
retroviral glasses—the ones with the heterosexist frames.
What role did Jim Curran play in the creation of the corrupted hard drive of AIDS research?
The Centers for Disease Control’s James
Curran was one of the chief architects of the original AIDS paradigm. Curran
had the perfect medical background for laying down the formative
heterosexually-biased interpretations of the early data that epidemiologists
gathered about the sick gay men who were thought to be the patients zero of a
new supposedly gay epidemic. Jacob Levinsen described Curran in The Story of
AIDS and Black America: “ . . . Jim Curran, the Chief of the CDC’s Venereal
Disease Control Division was tapped to head up a Kaposi’s Sarcoma and
Opportunistic Infection Task Force. Despite being short staffed and
underfunded, the Task Force managed to bring together experts from diverse
fields like virology, cancer, and parasitic diseases in addition to a small
team of epidemiological intelligence officers, who were the agency’s foot
soldiers for disease prevention. . . . He had done quite a bit of work on
hepatitis B with gay men in the 1970s, and he almost immediately suspected that
the had a similar sexually transmitted and blood borne disease on their hands.”
( The Story of AIDS and Black America, p.??) And that suspicion paved
the way for one of the biggest conceptual mistakes in the history of
epidemiology.
According to Shilts’s Band, when
Curran saw the first reports on PCP in gay men, he wrote an odd note to one of
his colleagues saying “Hot stuff. Hot stuff.” (ATBPO p.67) Shilts also
described a rather revealing meeting at a subsequent CDC conference at which
Curran was briefed on the sexual behavior of gay men by a gay physician named
David Ostrow. According to Shilts, “Ostrow mused on the years he had spent
getting Curran and Dr. Jaffe [Curran’s CDC colleague] acculturated to the
gritty details of gay sexual habits. . . . Curran had seemed uptight at the
start, Ostrow thought, but he buckled down to his work. Both Jaffe and Curran
were unusual in that federal officials rarely had any kind of contact with
gays, and the few who did rarely wanted to hear detailed gymnastics of gay sex.”
(ATBPO p. 68) They clearly buckled down to their work a little too
well. With their heterosexual sense of noblesse oblige (venereal division),
these high-level clap doctors gone wild, set out to understand what the
mysterious new gay epidemic was all about. Gay men would have run for the hills
or hidden in basements if they had known what would result from the efforts of
these two quick learners about “the gymnastics of gay sex” who were headed
their way. Again, I must point out, if only the CDC had recognized the 1980
DuBois CFS cases as the actual beginning of the AIDS/CFS/autism pandemic of
HHV-6, the two quick learners might never have gotten their mitts on the “hot
stuff’ that was happening in the gay community. They never would have become
experts on the joy of gay sex.
Curran was married and the father of two
children. Three days into what he thought was the sexually transmitted epidemic
he was examining gay patients and, already, according to Shilts, he “was struck
by how identifiably gay all the patients seemed to be (ATBPO p.70) These
gays were apparently really gay, not the plainclothes kind who could
pass. According to Shilts, these gays “hadn’t just peeked out of the closet
yesterday.” (ATBPO p.71) It may have been the perceived intense gayness
of the first patients—the really gay ones—that resulted in Curran’s huge,
consequential mistake of erecting a mostly gay venereal epidemiological
paradigm that would become the virtual thirty year hate crime against all gays,
both the ones who could pass and the ones who were really gay. It wasn’t
just the patients who were strange. The strangeness of the people who had the
disease would inspire a strange new kind of science, epidemiology and virology
that was in essence “homodemiology.” It was destined to make everything worse
for gays and everyone else who had the bad luck of getting caught up in the
CDC’s paradigm. And that would ultimately even include members of the
heterosexual general population.
Shilts tried to capture Curran’s thought
process when he wrote, “It was strange because diseases tended not to strike
people on the basis of social group.” (ATBPO p.71) He added that “To Curran’s recollection . . .
No epidemic had chosen victims on the basis of how they identified themselves
in social terms, much less on the basis of sexual lifestyle. Yet, this
identification and a propensity for venereal diseases were the only things the
patients from three cities—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—appeared to
share. There had to be something within this milieu that was hazardous to these
people’s health. (ATBPO p. 71) Well, there certainly was something about to
enter this “milieu” that would be extremely hazardous to these people’s health,
and that was Curran himself and his merry band of gay-sex-obsessed groupthinking
epidemiologists who were about to hang the albatross of the venereal AIDS
paradigm around the neck of the entire gay community.
When Shilts discussed Curran confronting
“sociological issues” that were involved in the mysterious illness, it escaped
Shilts that Curran and his associates were themselves sociological (and
political) issues as they plopped themselves in the middle of the gay
community (at a time when the community was most vulnerable and nearly
hysterical) with all of their own peculiar heterosexual and heterosexist
baggage. According to Shilts, “About a dozen staffers from all the disciplines
potentially involved with the diseases volunteered for the working group. They
included specialists in immunology, venereology, virology, cancer epidemiology,
toxicology and sociology. Because the outbreak might be linked to the Gay Bowel
Syndrome, parasitologists were called in. (ATBPO p. 71) The fact that
any illness was labeled “Gay” should probably have been a red flag for the kind
of heterosexist thinking that would soon be rolling across the gay community
like a tsunami.
Once the guiding gay-obsessed premise (an
example of a Arendtian “image“) was set, it was a matter of gay epidemiological
garbage in and gay epidemiological garbage out. Questions with mistaken
premises were about to lead the researchers and their medical victims down a
deadly primrose path. Shilts summed up the basic direction of the inquiry:
“Researchers also sought to determine whether the disease was indeed
geographically isolated in the three gay urban centers. Did the detection of
cases in the three centers make the patients appear to be only fast-lane gays
because gay life tended toward the fast track in those cities? Was the disease
all over gay America but in such low numbers that it had not been detected?” (ATBPO
p. 81) Now we know, of course that there was indeed something else out
there, but not just “all over gay America.” Something wasn’t playing by the
rules of the CDC’s gay-obsessed epidemiology. Something was making even the
heterosexual DuBois Atlanta cases of 1980 ill, and those non-fast-lane, non-gay
cases represented what was going on all over straight general population
America in a whole spectrum of ways. Biased epidemiological premises
have consequences.
There is something almost laughable about
the notion of Curran’s CDC working group going out into the gay world and
asking themselves “What new element might have sparked this catastrophe.” (ATBPO
p.82) One brand new element in the gay community that actually was the most
significant spark for the coming catastrophe that was about to unfold was the
CDC’s own incompetence and heterosexist epidemiology.
Given the way AIDS would evolve into the
kind of abnormal science that doesn’t even require the usual rules of evidence,
common sense and logic associated with real science, it is interesting that
Curran did apply those old-fashioned rules early on when they were needed to
build the venereal AIDS paradigm. Shilts wrote, “To prove an infectious
disease, Curran knew, one had to establish Koch’s postulate. According to this
century-old paradigm, you must take an infectious agent from one animal, put it
into another, who becomes ill, and then take the infectious agent from the
second and inject it into still a third subject, who becomes ill with the same
disease.” (ATBPO p.105) Curran certainly tried to apply some semblance
of the paradigm—or the logic of it anyway—when, by finding people who had AIDS
often had slept with people who also had the disorder, he saw the links as a
kind of epidemiological proof of transmission even though they weren’t strictly
speaking the fulfillment of the animal experimentation inherent in Koch’s
postulate. At least Curran knew the basic rules of science. Unfortunately these
very same rules would subsequently be thrown out the window to maintain the belief
that the retrovirus eventually linked to AIDS was the one true cause of AIDS.
Had those Koch’s postulates been adhered to faithfully throughout the epidemic
we might be calling HHV-6 the virus of acquired immunodeficiency today and
there might have been no "Holocaust II" to write about.
The CDC, in an evolving and de facto
manner, conducted something that could be called “the Atlanta AIDS/CFS/autism
public relations experiment” at the expense of everyone‘s health. What I mean
by that coinage is a kind of postmodern public health political experiment in
which rather than truly controlling an epidemic by being truthful and effective
and scientific, the public health institutions of the CDC and the NIH tried to
control and manipulate everything the public knew about the epidemic of
AIDS/CFS/autism. It may have been quasi-innocent and simply the product of
unrecognized sexual bias and old-fashioned self-deception when it started, but
it evolved into something far more sinister and destructive. In the early days
of AIDS, as described by Shilts, Curran was seemingly the embodiment of
good-egg innocence when it came to the realization that it would be necessary
for him to figure out some way to get the media’s attention in order to
increase public pressure for providing the funding the CDC needed for AIDS
research. Unfortunately, the manipulation of the media by scientists or public
health officials can—and did—have grave consequences for scientific, medical
and epidemiological truth. In AIDS it became a kind of cancer.
In 1982 Curran appeared before a group of
gay physicians in New York and told them “It’s likely we’ll be working on this
most of our lives.” (ATBPO p. 134) Historians one day will want to probe
deeply into whether he knew anything that everyone else didn’t know at that
point. At the very least, it was as though he was an inadvertent prophet. He
and his colleagues were indeed in the process of screwing things up for many
generations to come. Curran’s mistakes assured that his grandchildren’s grandchildren
will probably still be working on this problem. If they’re not autistic.
Shilts, in another moment of ironic
journalistic naiveté, wrote this about Curran: “As a federal employee Curran
had a thin line to walk between honesty and loyalty” (ATBPO p. 144) when
he was describing the AIDS situation to Congress. Shilts notes that Curran
could not ask Congress for money when he testified, “but he could nudge facts
toward logical conclusions.” (ATBPO p. 144) The nudging of facts would
become an art form at the CDC over the next three decades and sometimes the
facts that had to be nudged were so large they virtually had to be moved with
bulldozers and the conclusions they were nudged towards were always more
political than logical. One could almost faint from the irony of Curran telling
Congress in 1982 (two years after those first Atlanta DuBois cases of immune
dysfunction, “The epidemic may extend much further than currently described and
may include other cancers as well as thousands of persons with immune defects.”
(ATBPO p. 144) Had he or his colleagues at the CDC recognized the DuBois
1980 Atlanta cases as the canaries in the HHV-6 mine, he would have been
talking about millions (if not billions) of cases and he would not have had to
play games with words to get Congress and the White House to do the right thing
financially. One disturbing aspect of his manner of thinking was reflected in
how Shilts summed up his testimony: “With death rates soaring to 75 percent
among people diagnosed with GRID for two years, the specter of 100 percent
fatality from the syndrome loomed ahead, he added.” (ATBPO p.144) It
would be nearly impossible to dial back on the distorted image of the epidemic
he was presenting and frankly, dialing back on anything was something that the
CDC (like the NIH) would turn out to be constitutionally unable to do. That, as
we have said, is another sign that we are living in a period of totalitarian
abnormal science.
Curran’s peculiar attitude towards gays
surfaced revealingly again when Shilts described his refusal to meet Gaetan
Dugas, the unfortunate gay man who would be eternally scapegoated in the echo
chambers of the media as the “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic because he had
supposedly slept with a number of the original AIDS cases: “Jim Curran passed
up the opportunity to meet Gaetan, the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary.
Curran had heard about the flamboyant [flight] attendant and frankly found
every story about his sexual braggadocio to be offensive. Stereotypical gays
irritated Curran in much the same way that he was uncomfortable watching Amos
n’ Andy movies.” (ATBPO p.158) One doesn’t know quite where to begin on
this one, except to note that Curran would be able to use his clap-doctor and
gay-obsessed epidemiology to act on his feelings and beliefs about both
stereotypical and non-stereotypical gays, and every other kind of gay in
between. The way that Shilts described Gaetan Dugas should have been a warning
to the whole gay community of what kind of medical and social treatment was in
store for them: “Gaetan Dugas later complained to friends that the CDC had
treated him like a laboratory rat during his stay in Atlanta, with little
groups of doctors going in and out of his hospital room. He’d had his skin
cancer for two years now, he said, and he was sick of being a guinea pig for
doctors who didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing.” (ATBPO
p.158) Of course when those doctors eventually thought they had figured
out what they were doing—that was precisely when they really didn’t really have
a clue about what they were doing. The "Holocaust II" era of the gay guinea pig
had only just begun. The CDC’s epidemiology would create a whole new gay
stereotype. Curran’s difficulty in getting researchers to come into the field
was the fallout of the gay and sexual way the frightening disease had been
framed for the public—something that might never have happened if the DuBois
1980 wholesome heterosexual Atlanta cases had been the epidemiological and
virological template for the epidemic rather than the kind of Amos n’ Andy gay
people that made Curran so jiggy with embarrassment that he wouldn’t even meet
with them.
It’s amazing how many people seem to have
been assigned credit (by different sources) for bringing (dragging?) Robert
Gallo into AIDS research. Shilts has Curran on that Washington-slept-here list
too, noting that he said to Gallo when he was receiving an award at a medical
conference in 1982, “You’ve won one award. You should come back when you win
another award for working on AIDS.” (ATBPO p. 201) Bringing Gallo into
the field was like putting a pair of retrovirus-obsessed eyeglasses over a pair
of gay VD-obsessed eyeglasses and expecting to see the epidemic for what it
was. Otherwise known as the blind recruiting the blind.
One of the more grimly amusing passages in
Shilts’s book concerns Curran’s thought about the fears in the gay community
that AIDS would result in gays being put into concentration camps: “Curran
thought the train of thought was curious. After all, nobody had suggested or
even hinted that gays should be in any way quarantined for AIDS. The right-wing
loonies who might propose such a ‘final solution’ were not paying enough
attention to the disease to construct the Dachau scenario. Still, it was
virtually an article of faith among homosexuals that they should end up in
concentration camps.” (ATBPO p. 228) Silly gays. Frankly, who needed
concentration camps or “the Dachau scenario” when you had CDC epidemiology. CDC
epidemiology saved the country a load of money on barbed wire. And Holocaust I,
where gays actually were made to wear pink triangles in real concentration
camps—that was so 1940s.
One of the most unfortunate and tragically
wrongheaded things about Curran is that, according to Shilts, he held his
colleague Donald Francis “in awe, given Francis’s international reputation for
smallpox control.” (ATBPO p.262) As one looks back at the circle jerk
that also got Holocaust I going, one might hypothesize that all holocausts
begin in passionate mutual admirations societies.
Something began to surface during James
Curran’s reign over AIDS at the CDC that bears close scrutiny by any
enterprising historian interested in identifying the institutional roots of
"Holocaust II." In 1983, when Susan Steinmetz, an aide to Congressman Ted Weiss,
visited the CDC in an oversight capacity, she was prevented from seeing files
she automatically should have been able to audit as a representative of a
Congressional Committee that had oversight responsibilities on health and the
environment. According to Shilts, she was told by the then CDC Director William
Foege, “she would not have access to any CDC files, and she could not talk to
any CDC researchers without having management personnel in the room to monitor
the conversations. The agency also needed a written, detailed list of specific
documents and files Steinmetz wanted to see.” (ATBPO p.292) Shilts
reported that “Steinmetz was flabbergasted. What did they think oversight
committees did? Their work routinely involved poring through government files
to determine the truth of what the high-muck-a-mucks denied, and then privately
talking to employees who, without the prying eyes of their bosses, could tell
the truth. This was understood, she thought.” (ATBPO p.292) What she
didn’t realize was that the CDC’s de facto little counterrevolution against
science and the ideal of transparency in democratic processes had begun before
her unassuming eyes and this would become business as usual at the clandestine
CDC for the next three decades. The shroud of secrecy (de rigueur in all
abnormal science) that would enable "Holocaust II" and the cover-up of the CFS,
autism and Morgellons epidemics was descending on the CDC in Atlanta.
While Steinmetz was just trying to find
memos that would contradict the CDC’s public posture that it had enough money
to research the emerging epidemic of AIDS, without realizing it, she had
stumbled onto the fact that the CDC had begun acting more like a government
intelligence agency with vital national secrets—possibly even embarrassing
ones—to keep, than a public health organization that was committed to truthful
science and was accountable to the American people. In essence the CDC was
showing that it wasn’t above any of the legerdemain that any other part of the
government was capable of. It was showing us that it was very much cut from the
same cloth as the government gremlins that gave us Watergate and Vietnam.
Steinmetz wanted to see files that
pertained to budgets and planning, but she was bizarrely told that she couldn’t
see the files because they had patients names in them and that violated patient
confidentiality. It strained credulity to argue that patients names were involved
in organization budgets and planning. and in retrospect, it was a very lame
excuse. This wouldn’t be the first time in "Holocaust II" that a dishonest
explanation with a fake concern and compassion for patients’ welfare would be
used by those in authority to stonewall the very people who were actually
trying to do something about the welfare of patients. The CDC was
already in a paranoid circle-the-wagons mode that characterizes abnormal and
totalitarian science. According to Shilts, “The CDC personnel, who struck
Steinmetz as peculiarly contentious, wanted to conduct their own review of the
files before letting Steinmetz see them . . .” (ATBPO p. 292) And “as
another demand, the CDC insisted that before any interviews with CDC staff took
place, the agency would screen questions that Susan Steinmetz put to
scientists.” (ATBPO p.292) On the eve of the HHV-6 catastrophe and
"Holocaust II," government science was going into the lockdown of abnormal
science. Shilts wrote, “This is getting pretty strange, Steinmetz thought.” (ATBPO
p.292) Strangeness was but a puppy at that point.
This new emerging opposite world of public
health and scientific duplicity and defensiveness didn’t make sense to
Steinmetz’s colleagues back in D.C.: “On the phone, other oversight committee
staffers in Washington confided that they had never heard of an agency so
recalcitrant to Congress . . .” (ATBPO p.292) It got even worse for
Steinmetz at the CDC in Atlanta when, on the second day of her oversight visit,
she was told by the CDC manager who was handling her visit that her “presence
would no longer be permitted in the CDC building and that no agency personnel
would be allowed to speak to her.” (ATBPO p. 293) The stonewalling and
the lockdown were not confined to the CDC in Atlanta. Shilts reported that
Steinmetz also faced new obstacles in her path when “The National Cancer
Institute officials issued a memo demanding that all interviews with
researchers be monitored by the agency’s congressional liaison. At first the
National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease was cooperative, but
then, in an apparent NIH-wide clampdown, information became difficult to
excavate there as well.” (ATBPO p.293) Science and public health in
America were about to play the same kinds of political games that are played in
totalitarian countries. Public health information was about to be totally
controlled by the government.
Curran can himself take a great deal of
personal credit for the HIV mistake. Shilts writes that “During the summer of
1983, Dr. James Curran had grown fond of citing the ‘Willie Sutton Law’ as
evidence that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus. The notorious bank bandit Willie
Sutton was asked once why he robbed banks, to which he replied, “Because that’s
where the money is.” Curran, according to Shilts, would ask “’Where should we
[at the CDC] put our money? . . . ‘Where would Willie Sutton go? He would go
with retroviruses, I think right now.’” (ATBPO p. 331) There is a
revealing amount of cockiness and arrogance in Curran that remind one that
pride goeth before a fall. But one Willie Suttonish thing was certainly true:
retroviruses turned out to be exactly where the big money was for a number of
dishonest and incompetent retrovirologists
It is fascinating to see Shilts catching
Curran red-handed as he lies about the inadequate funding for AIDS. Publicly
Curran would say “we have everything we need,” (ARBPO p.331) but Shilts
was able to use the Freedom of Information Act to locate documents that
“revealed that things were not so rosy at the CDC, and Curran knew it. Even
while he reassured gay doctors in San Francisco, he was writing memos to his
superiors begging for more money.” (ATBPO p. 331) For anymore cognizant
of the overwhelming mendacity that characterized just about everything
concerning "Holocaust II," it is especially disturbing to read Shilts’s account
of Curran’s excuse: “‘It’s hard to explain to people outside the system,’ he
said. ‘It’s two different things to work within the system for a goal and
talking to the people outside the system for that goal,’ he said.” (ATBPO
p. 332) Curran was basically making the anti-transparency excuses people inside
of the government always make for talking out of both sides of their mouths.
It’s too bad Shilts didn’t consider the possibility that this character trait
was also reflected in the basic science and epidemiology of AIDS that was being
churned out by the CDC. It would turn out over the next few decades that indeed
government science spoke out of both sides of its mouth.
Curran got the venereal HIV/AIDS paradigm
he and his colleagues wanted, the one that could be expected to materialize
given his background. It wasn’t surprising then, that he said in 1984,
according to Shilts, “Gay men need to know that if they’re going to have
promiscuous sex, they’ll have the life expectancies of people in the developing
world.” (ATBPO p.416) Actually, given the crazy treatments some gay men
were going to be medically assaulted with, he was a true visionary.
As could be predicted, according to
Shilts, “Jim Curran also viewed testing as essential to any long term strategy
in fighting AIDS.” And so the Pink Triangle medical apartheid agenda of testing
and stigmatizing gays as HIV positive (or as an HIV risk group) began in earnest.
And the gay community got specially tailored forms of communication from
Curran. According to Shilts, “Curran was always cautious when he talked to
newspaper reporters, fearful that his observations on the future of the AIDS
epidemic might be fashioned into the stuff of sensational headlines, but he
felt no inhibition with the gay community. Instead he felt his mission was to
constantly stress the gravity of the unfolding epidemic.” (ATBPO p.483)
Of course, while he was giving the gay community the tough love, behind his
epidemiological back was the looming HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe, a situation
which was exponentially worse than anything his little team of clap doctors and
pseudo-epidemiologists could possibly have imagined. Given that it was the CDC’s
AIDS paradigm that in essence scapegoated the gay community for what would turn
out to be everyone’s HHV-6 problem, it is the epitome of irony that according
to Shilts, Curran thought that “the question was not if there would be a
backlash against gays, but when. It might come soon. ‘You should get ready for
it,’ he said.” (ATBPO p.484) How does one prepare for a backlash against
gays? Buy extra canned goods? Bake an extra quiche? It was certainly nice of
him to give the gay community a heads up, but in truth, the pseudoscience, the
incompetent fact-gathering implicit in ignoring the DuBois 1980 Atlanta cases,
and the homodemiology of the CDC, constituted a kind of epidemiological backlash before the
backlash. Curran and his team needed only look in the mirror to see the kind of
anti-gay values that could do far more mischief to the gay community than an
army of right wing loons.
Journalist David Black caught some of the
underlying psychological problems at the CDC in his book The Plague Years.
He wrote, “In fact the CDC, like many physicians and scientists, seemed
embarrassed by the gayness of the disease.” (TPY p.57) We now know only
too well in retrospect is that the best science and epidemiology can not be
conducted in an atmosphere of gay-sex-related embarrassment. Black quoted one
CDC researcher as saying to a visiting gay activist, “This never would have
happened if you guys had gotten married.” (TPY p.57) When the activist
asked if the researcher meant to each other, the researcher said, “To women.” (TPY
p.58) The CDC researchers conducted their epidemiology and science in an
awkward atmosphere of antipathy to gays, surely not a fertile field for
objectivity. According to Black, when he asked Curran to explain exactly what
he means by “‘intimate contact’ [between men] the phrase researchers kept using
to describe the conditions under which the syndrome spread, he seemed
uncomfortable, squeamish. He stammered and glanced anxiously around the room.”
(TPY p.58) If some of Jim Curran’s best friends were gay, they had
clearly done very little to make him comfortable with their sex lives. One
suspects that most of Jim Curran’s best friends were not gay.
One absolutely show-stopping moment in
Black’s rich little book is a criticism that was leveled at Curran: “He started
making up these ‘facts’ from the data as he interpreted it,’ said one unnamed
gay critic of Curran.” Who was that astute gay critic? Please stand up now,
take your bow.
What about Mary Guinan's role in the creation of the corrupted hard drive of AIDS research?
Historians who want to trace the series of
missteps that led to the HHV-6 pandemic and "Holocaust II" may benefit from
taking a close look at a little known researcher at the CDC who played a
curious role in both of the supposedly separate AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome
epidemics. Her surprising inability to see an obvious link between the two
syndromes may be one of the important seeds of the whole HHV-6 disaster. She is
mentioned in both the Shilts history of the early AIDS epidemic and Hillary
Johnson’s journalistic account of the CDC’s bungling of the epidemic of
facetiously-labeled chronic fatigue syndrome.
According to Shilts, Mary Guinan worked
for James Curran in the CDC’s venereal disease division. She was the person who
sent James Curran the first ill-fated report on the first cases of what would
eventually be called “AIDS” in “homosexuals.” With fellow VD chasers Harrold
Jaffee and Curran, she shared the CDC AIDS Task Force’s preoccupation with venereal diseases
epidemiology. She helped impose the CDC heterosexist venereal groupthink on the
emerging data of what would eventually be gayified epidemiologically into “Gay
Related Immunodeficiency (GRID).”
Ironically, considering what turned out to
be the role of HHV-6 in AIDS, Shilts reported that in 1981, “on a hunch, Guinan
called a drug company that manufactured medicine for severe herpes infections.
They told her about a New York City doctor who had been seeing . . . dreadful
herpes infections in gay men.” (ATBPO p.72) Shilts wrote that “Guinan
was shaken by her investigation. She was accustomed to dealing with venereal
diseases, ailments for which you receive an injection and are cured. This was
different. She couldn’t get the idea out of her head: There’s something out
there that’s killing people. That was when Mary Guinan hoped against hope that
they would find something environmental to link these cases together. God help
us, she thought, if there’s a new contagion spreading such death.” (ATBPO
p.72) One way that God certainly wasn’t helping was by having a VD-obsessed
doctor and her colleagues trying to comprehend a pandemic that wasn’t, strictly
speaking, venereal.
In Shilts’s account of Guinan, seeing the
epidemic through gay-obsessed lenses was a given. He wrote about one of her
days in 1981: “It had been another typical day of gay cancer studies for Mary
Guinan. She had wakened at 6 a.m to breakfast with gay doctors and community
leaders and asked again and again, ‘What’s new in the community?’ What new
element might have sparked this catastrophe.” (ATBPO p.82) It was just
gay, gay, gay—24/7—for the AIDS Task Force. They simply couldn’t wash the gay
out of their hair. It was one of those times when every gay person should have
checked to see whether they still had their wallets. Someone was about to sell
them a gay epidemiological bridge.
As Shilts sympathetically presents Guinan,
he inadvertently nails the whole CDC psychological and sociological bias
problem: “Guinan felt helpless and frightened. This was the meanest disease she
had ever encountered. She strained to consider every possible nuance of these
peoples’ lives.” (ATBPO p.83) What she really meant was gay nuances of
gay lives. It is supremely ironic that Shilts wrote, “The CDC, she knew, needed
to work every hypothesis imaginable into the case-control study.” (ATBPO
p.83) Every hypothesis imaginable? Not by a long shot. How about the
hypothesis that these cases were just extreme versions of the DuBois 1980
Atlanta cases that the CDC had been informed about? The un-gay cases.
The process of identifying the emergence
of the epidemic in nongay drug users, as described in Shilts’s book, makes it
clear how gaycentric the thinking of the pioneers of the AIDS epidemiological
paradigm was: “At the CDC there was a reluctance to believe that intravenous
drug users might be wrapped into the epidemic, and the New York physicians also
seemed obsessed with the gay angle, Guinan thought. ‘He’s said he’s not
homosexual but he must be,’ doctors would confide in her.” (ATBPO p.83)
Everybody was becoming an expert on gayness in those days. Given the reluctance
to even see connections in those cases of nongay drug-using outcasts, it should
come as no surprise when years later anyone saw the obvious connections between
the epidemics of AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome they were treated like they
were strictly out to lunch. The AIDS paradigm was fatefully and messily
intertwined with all the psychological baggage of sexual titillation and
repulsion. If the CDC was unprepared psychologically to see drug users “wrapped
into the epidemic,” how about all the good clean living white heterosexuals
with the AIDS-like permutations of the immune system that characterize chronic
fatigue syndrome?
Guinan’s San Francisco trip with Harold
Jaffe to interview AIDS patients and heterosexual controls also revealed the
CDC mindset: “The CDC staffers could tell gay from straight controls by the way
they reacted to the questions about every aspect of their intimate sexual
lives. Heterosexuals seemed offended at queries about the preferred sexual
techniques, while gay interviewees chatted endlessly about them.” (ATBPO p.96)
Oh those gays! A herd of chatty Cathies if ever there was one. Given the
bias-laden epidemiology that this chattiness was about to imprison the gay
community in, one is tempted to say that loose gay lips sank a proverbial
legion of gay ships. If one were watching this on a screen in a movie theater,
one would want to scream out to the clueless gay interviewees for their own
sake, “For Heaven’s sake, shut up!”
Guinan was one of the CDC researchers
credited by Shilts with recognizing that hemophiliacs and blood transfusion
recipients might ultimately also become victims of “gay pneumonia.” She also
was one of the first to worry about the AIDS infection possibilities of “semen
depositors.” (ATBPO p.132) Guinan cast a wide net: “No sooner had she
convinced the CDC that intravenous drug users were indeed a category of GRID
cases separate from gay men, then her field of investigations discovered the
first reported GRID cases among prisoners and prostitutes.” (ATBPO
p.132) Unfortunately epidemiological net wasn’t wide enough to catch the 1980
DuBois Atlanta Cases of immune dysfunction. Also unfortunately for her, she
helped create the very consequential epidemiological urban myth of Patient
Zero. She was the first person to come in contact with Gaetan Dugas the
so-called gay Typhoid Mary who the CDC would turn into the “Patient Zero” or
more appropriately, “Scapegoat Zero,” of the epidemic depending on your point
of view. He would become an icon for all the venereal gaycentric thinking down
at the CDC.
In one of those amazing moments in
"Holocaust II" in which a scientist comes so face-to-face with the truth but
fails to see what is right before their eyes, Shilts reports that when Guinan
was studying drug users, “blood sampling of the intravenous drug users also
revealed that, although many were infected with cytomegalovirus, the viral
strains were all different. This was strong evidence that the herpes virus had
not developed some new virulent strain. No single strain emerged, lending
further weight to Don Francis’s hypothesis that a new virus, not CMV was a
work.” (ATBPO p.133) The CDC, in retrospect, was most likely eyeballing
strains of an undiscovered virus that would be called HBLV when Gallo’s scientists
supposedly “discovered” it in 1986. It was subsequently named HHV-6. In
retrospect it is pretty obvious that the CDC was looking at HHV-6 but thinking
it was only CMV. (And those who wanted to see a retrovirus would have been
especially predisposed not to see a new DNA virus like HBLV/HHV-6.)
It is interesting and perhaps revealing
that Guinan and her colleagues could deal with the fact that the disease or
syndrome manifested itself differently in gay men and drug
users—presumably for reasons that would ultimately be figured out. But God
forbid that anyone would subsequently suggest that even though there were
differences in the manifestations of chronic fatigue syndrome and AIDS that
they were essentially manifestations of the same agent and the same pandemic.
Distinctions were not turned into differences where drug users and gays were
concerned, but where the gays with AIDS and the middle-class straights with
chronic fatigue syndrome were concerned, every distinction,—even the
teeny-tiniest or most irrelevant kind—was immediately considered a dramatic
how-dare-you-compare-these-apples-and-oranges difference. Such bogus thinking
would be at the heart of the “chronic fatigue syndrome is not AIDS” paradigm
which would guide public health through the next three decades.
For all her good work Guinan was
eventually rewarded with the position of assistant CDC director. Unfortunately
for all the victims of HHV-6, what she did do at the CDC didn’t have as much
impact on the well being of the world as what she did not do. It was
Guinan in 1985 who got a call from Dan Peterson, a former colleague and one of
the two doctors who are credited with recognizing an outbreak of the absurdly
named “chronic fatigue syndrome” in their Lake Tahoe practice. According to
Hillary Johnson, “The two had become friends during a shared stint at the at
the University of Utah hospital in Salt lake City in 1976.” (OW p.31)
Also, according to Johnson, “Peterson had frequently sought her counsel on
different infectious disease cases; he had also struck her as a gifted
diagnostician.’ (OW. P.31)
Johnson reported that “Guinan listened as
her former colleague described his Tahoe patients, her curiosity aroused by the
possibility that this ailment, which three recent medical papers had described,
was occurring in epidemic form. Previously, researchers had described it as a
sporadic illness. She remembered too, that Atlanta clinician Richard DuBois had
made a presentation to agency staff on the malady early in 1983, even proposing
that the new mono-like syndrome might be a second epidemic of immune
dysfunction rising concurrently with AIDS.” (OW p.31)
Did this lead Guinan serendipitously into
a more complicated epidemiological vision of a variable epidemic that included
both what was called “AIDS” and “chronic fatigue syndrome”? Not on your life.
These first CFS patients were not gay and not drug users. They were from
medical practices that could be described as being devoted to folks who ride in
the middle and front part of society’s bus. Such stark social differences would
make it of no consequence or interest that study after study would show one
immunological and neurological similarity after another between AIDS and
chronic fatigue syndrome. Guinan had helped build a paradigm that was so gay,
gay, gay and so socially radioactive that the links between AIDS and CFS would
be willfully ignored, buried alive by denial, and through a kind of determined
public health radio silence, for all intents and purposes, be covered-up big
time.
Ignoring the obvious, Guinan sent the
future “CFS” patients of America on one of the greatest medical wild goose
chases in history. According to Johnson, she passed the Peterson cases on to
Larry Shonberger, chief of the CDC’s epidemiology within the Division of Viral
and Ricketsial Diseases. Not surprisingly, Johnson reports that “Schonberger
and his staff of epidemiologists had a mandate to monitor and occasionally
investigate outbreaks of viral diseases, with the exception of AIDS, which by
1985 had been awarded a separate division and staff and more than half of the
federal agency’s entire annual research budget.” (OW p.32) And so,
because of Guinan’s phone call and her very questionable judgment, CFS research
headed down exactly the wrong road
Had Guinan wisely directed the Lake Tahoe
cases in the direction of the CDC’s AIDS division back in 1985, there was still
a chance that the political and medical apartheid of the “chronic fatigue
syndrome is not AIDS’ paradigm and "Holocaust II" might not have been able to
fully materialize. But AIDS had been so gayified and turned into such a sexual
bogeyman and scarlet letter syndrome, that Guinan and everyone else at the CDC
couldn’t for the life of them admit that average (i.e. heterosexual) Americans
were coming down with any similar or related form of acquired immunodeficiency.
Instead those people were given the whitewash of a diagnosis of chronic fatigue
syndrome. Those good country people, to borrow a term from Flannery O’Connor,
couldn’t in a million years be suffering from something that had at one time or
another been called Gay Cancer, Gay Pneumonia, and Gay Related
Immunodeficiency. After all, they weren’t gay.
Wasn't James Mason in charge of these Keystone Cops at the CDC?
In its dark hours of 1983, the gay
community needed nothing more than to have added to its tribulations the
appointment of Dr. James Mason, a devout Mormon, to the office of Director of
the Centers for Disease Control. They probably should have just counted their
lucky stars that a member of the John Birch Society or Lyndon LaRouche himself
wasn’t appointed. According to Randy Shilts, “Until recently, he had served as
state public health director for Utah. It was his friendship with conservative
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, the Chair of the Senate committee in charge of HHS,
that had netted him the job as CDC director.” (ATBPO p.399)
As we have already noted, James Mason
uttered the fateful words (“Get it done!”) that captured the whole pressure
cooker environment that everyone working on AIDS operated in the first few
years of the epidemic—both in and out of the government.
One useful thing that Mason did do was
create an “AIDS Review Committee” to determine whether there were adequate
resources for AIDS. According to Shilts, what the group discovered was that
resources were being directed from other programs for AIDS: “Some 70 percent of
the CDC’s AIDS staffers were people diverted from other programs and not funded
by federal AIDS appropriations.” (ATBPO p.444) While the study
ostensibly pointed to the need for more money for AIDS research, it also
inadvertently showed how easily the CDC could override the will of Congress in
terms of what actually got funded and therefore what actually got done. It was
another disquieting bit of evidence that suggested something about the rogueish
way the CDC did its own clandestine thing throughout the epidemic. What
happened during "Holocaust II" shows that in some ways the CDC operates in some
weird extralegal zone outside of the United States government and abides by its
own rules.
Mason seems to have been prone to the same
kind of squeamishness toward all things gay as James Curran. Shilts reported
that “Even Dr. James Mason was heard complaining that since he had become CDC
director, he found himself talking to complete strangers about sexual acts he
would not discuss with his wife even in the privacy of his own home.” (ATBPO
p.586) Time didn’t seem to mellow or loosen up the good doctor because in 2009,
according to a report by writer Jake Crosby on the Age of Autism website, James
Mason was a member of the board of trustees for Evergreen International.
According to Cosby, “Its mission is to help homosexuals ‘diminish same-sex
attractions and overcome homosexual behavior,’ by the faith of Jesus.” That a
person with those kinds of beliefs played a key role in the development and
implementation of the HIV/AIDS paradigm which launched and maintained "Holocaust
II" should come as no surprise to anyone.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about the International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard November 9-11, 2015
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Art, Cartoons, and Posters for the International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
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Bulletins from The Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in At Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
The Harvard Declaration of the HHV-6 Rights of Man
1. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in AIDS.
2. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
3. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Autism.
4.The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Multiple Sclerosis.
5. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Brain Cancer.
6. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Heart Disease.
7. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalitis.
8. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cognitive Dysfunction.
9. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Drug Hypersensitivity Syndrome.
10. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Bone Marrow Suppression.
11. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Lymphadenopathy.
12. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Colitis.
13. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Endocrine Disorders.
14. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Liver Disease.
15. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
16. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Glioma.
17. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cervical Cancer.
18. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hypogammaglobulinemia.
19. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Optic Neuritis.
20. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Microangiopathy.
21. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Mononucleosis.
22. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Uveitis.
23. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.
24. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Rhomboencephalitis.
25. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Limbic Encephalitis.
26. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalomyelitis
27. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pneumonitis.
28. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in GVHD.
29. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Ideopathic Pneumonia.
30. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pediatric Adrenocortical Tumors
31. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in the reactivation of endogenous retroviruses.
32. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on T-Cells.
33. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on B-Cells
34. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on Epithelial Cells.
35. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Natural Killer Cells.
36. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Dendritic Cells.
37. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the brain.
38. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the liver.
39. The right not to be lied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect cytokine production.
40. The right not to be lied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect Aortic and Heart Microvascular Endothelial cells.
41.
The right not to be lied to about the role of an HHV-6 cover-up in a
massive HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme that in a number of ways resembles the
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and Nazi medicine.
