Bulletin #128 from the Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
Serge Lang: The Mathematician Who Took a Long Hard Look at the HIV Theory of AIDS and Realized that the Science was Abnormal.
Serge Lang (1927-2005) was one of the most
distinguished elder academic statesman in the group intellectuals and
scientists that challenged the science of HIV. A mathematician known for his
accomplishments in number theory and as the author of numerous graduate level
mathematics text books, he taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia
University. He was Professor Emeritus at Yale University at the time of his
death. He was very active in the Vietnam anti-war movement and spent a great
deal of time challenging the misuse of science and mathematics and identifying
the spread of misinformation on a number of issues. Lang was rewarded for his
interest in the Duesbergian criticism of HIV and for speaking out on the
questionable scientific procedures of the HIV establishment, by having his
distinguished career in mathematics framed by the same dirty little Orwellian
trick used on other HIV critics: he was labeled an “AIDS denialist,” by that
paragon of sober objectivity, Wikipedia.
As Lang surveyed the manner in which AIDS
research was being conducted and the outrageous way that Duesberg was being
treated, he was appalled and feared for the integrity of science itself. In
1984, his long critique of the HIV/AIDS theory was published in the Fall issue
of Yale Scientific. He opened his piece by pointing out the sleight of
hand involved in the naming of the virus only associated with AIDS which
was called “Human Immunodeficiency Virus” before adequate evidence had been
gathered to show that it actually deserved that title. Which, of course it
didn’t. Lang’s critical vision of what was transpiring in AIDS was quite
damming: “ . . . to an extent that undermines classical standards of science,
some purported scientific results concerning ‘HIV’ and ‘AIDS’ have been handled
by press releases, by misinformation, manipulating the media and people at
large.” Much of Lang’s analysis of AIDS science supports this book’s contention
that AIDS could best be described as science at its most abnormal. But he
stayed away from the matter of the motivation behind the breakdown of science,
asserting “I am not here concerned with intent but with scientific standards,
especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a
hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.” Even though Lang steered clear of
digging into the bigotry that motivated and unified the whole pseudoscientific
enterprise, he did make it abundantly clear that there was something not
kosher about the field of HIV/AIDS research. He argued that there wasn’t
even a proper definition of “AIDS” and “thus a morass about HIV and AIDS has
been created.” Lang called the established view of AIDS “dogma” and he was
horrified by the way people who dared to challenge the “dogma” were being
treated, noting that critics were unfairly being maligned by being called
“flatearthers” or told that by just asking questions or being skeptical they
were themselves threats to the public health. He was very sensitive to the
emotional blackmail that was a staple in the AIDS establishment’s psychological
armamentarium.
In the Yale Scientific piece Lang
argued that “the public at large are not properly informed” and in order for
them to know what was really happening, people had to turn to sources outside
of the official scientific media. He thought that the way AIDS misinformation
was being spread was itself an important issue that needed a focused study. He
charged that the official scientific press had failed miserably by obstructing
legitimate dissent and that not only would the public lose “trust in the
scientific establishment,” but people would not be “warned of practices which
may be dangerous to their health.” As we now know, he was only seeing the tip
of the pseudoscientific iceberg.
Lang reiterated the Mullis contention that
there were no papers that provided proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS, and no
serious HIV animal model for the disease. He was very concerned about the
unreliable tests for HIV: “The blood test for HIV does not determine directly
the presence of the virus.” The test cross-reacted with numerous other
diseases. He argued that the AIDS numbers coming out of Africa were based on
faulty testing. In terms of the HHV-6 catastrophe that everyone was willfully
blind to at the time, it is interesting to note Lang’s argument that “there
exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV
negative.” Had he said millions, we might be calling him a prophet of the HHV-6
spectrum catastrophe. The argument for HIV was made even worse by the fact that
there were “hundreds of thousands who test HIV positive but have not developed
AIDS-defining diseases.” He accused the CDC of playing games with numbers to
support their official image of the epidemic. He was also critical of the CDC’s
circular definition of AIDS that made it look like there was a 100% correlation
between HIV and AIDS in the public’s mind. He argued that HIV positivity might
“be merely a marker rather than a cause for whatever disease is involved.” He
was intrigued by the Duesbergian recreational drug hypothesis, but remained
open-minded. He wrote, “I have no definitive answer. I merely question the line
upheld up to now by the biomedical establishment, and repeated uncritically in
the press, that ‘HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.’” He felt that because most
scientists treated HIV=AIDS as a given, “some scientists try to fit
experimental data into this postulate, actually without success.” They succeed
even when they fail: when the so-called AIDS virus doesn’t meet expectations, Lang
notes that it is then called “enigmatic” without anyone going back to basics
and questioning the science and logic that form its foundation upon which it
stands.
Lang was troubled by the unwillingness of
the establishment to fund research into alternative hypotheses about AIDS
causation—particularly Duesberg’s recreational drug hypothesis. He felt that
the evidence that the recreational inhalant, “poppers” (amyl nitrite), played a
role in AIDS via the development of Kaposi’s sarcoma, was compelling enough
that it didn’t deserve the cold financial shoulder it was consistently getting
from those in charge of the governmental funding of AIDS research
In the Yale Scientific piece Lang
also criticized “establishment scientists who have tried, so far mostly
successfully, to keep reports questioning the establishment dogma about HIV out
of the mainstream press.” The Pacific Division of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science organized a symposium for June 21, 1994 called “The
Role of HIV in AIDS: Why There is Still a Controversy.” Lang reported that the AAAS “has come under
fire from U.S. AIDS researchers and public health officials” and the symposium
was almost cancelled. An article about the symposium in the journal, Nature,
quoted a professor from Harvard as saying that the people involved were
“fringe” people. David Baltimore was quoted as saying, “This is a group of
people who have denied the scientific facts. There is no question at all that
HIV is the cause of AIDS. Anyone who gets up publicly and says the opposite is
encouraging people to risk their lives.” Again the emotional blackmail of what
today would be called the “concern trolls of HIV/AIDS.”
Lang reported that while the symposium was
finally held, Nature made a point of not covering it. Lang
sharply noted that “Nature’s readers are not given evidence on which to
base an informed or independent judgment. Thus does Nature manipulate
its readers.” And thus did that esteemed journal help enable the abnormal
science of Holocaust II.
Lang captures the manner in which the
media was manipulated during the AIDS era in his description of a study meant
to demolish Duesberg’s drug hypothesis: “A piece ‘Does drug use cause AIDS?’ by
M.S. Ascher, H.W. Shepherd., W. Winkelstein Jr. and E. Vittinghoff was
published in the Nature issue of 11 March 1993. This piece was published
as a ‘Commentary.’ About a week before publication, nature issued a press
release concerning this piece headlined: ‘DRUG USE DOES NOT CAUSE AIDS.’ The
press release concluded: ‘These findings seriously undermine the argument put
forward by Dr. Peter Duesberg, of the University of California at Berkley, that
drug consumption causes AIDS. . . .’” Lang noted that Duesberg was blind-sided
because the press was notified and was asking him for a response even before
he had even had a chance to see the forthcoming piece. Lang wrote bitterly,
“Thus Nature and the authors of the article use the media to manipulate
public opinion before their article had been submitted to scientific scrutiny
by other scientists (other than possible referees), and especially by Duesberg
who is principally concerned.”
Lang attacked the press release, writing
that it made several misrepresentations including the manner in which the sample
of men studied was gathered: “ . . . the press release suppressed the
additional information that the sampling came from a definite segment of San
Francisco households.” Lang’s analysis of what the Ascher group called “a
rigorously controlled epidemiological model for the evaluation of aetiological
hypotheses” pointed to numerous flaws that made the study look like a bad
joke—which was par for the course in the world of AIDS science. He notes that
predictably, The New York Times which, with the help of Lawrence Altman,
a reporter who was a former CDC employee, was the world’s most prestigious echo
chamber for the government’s AIDS research, ran with the ball. In an article by
Gina Kolata called “Debunking doubts that H.I.V. causes AIDS,” propagated “the misinformation
of the [Nature] press release and of the ‘Commentary.’”
Lang’s sense of scientific standards was
offended by the whole picture of AIDS science that he saw: “I take no position
here on the relative merits of the AIDS virus hypothesis or the AIDS drug
hypothesis (in whatever form they may be formulated). I do take a position
against the announcement of purported scientific results via superficial and
defective press releases, and before scientists at large have had a chance to
evaluate the scientific merits of such results are purportedly based.” What
Lang didn’t fully understand was that this kind of propagandistic manipulation
of truth was actually business as usual in the abnormal, totalitarian science of
"Holocaust II."
One of the more amusingly outrageous
aspects of Ascher’s ‘Commentary’ in Nature, appears at the end of the
piece: “The energies of Duesberg and his followers could be better applied to
unraveling the enigmatic mechanism of the HIV pathogenesis of AIDS.” To this
patronizing bum's rush, Lang responded, “I find it presumptuous and objectionable
for scientists to tell others where energies ‘could better be applied.’
Scientific standards as I have known them since I was a freshman at Caltech
require that some energies be applied to scrutinize data on which experiments
are based, in documenting the accuracy of the data, its significance, its
completeness, and to determine whether conclusions allegedly based on these
data are legitimate or not.” Lang didn’t realize that Ascher was part of a
political bandwagon driven by social forces which Lang, as brilliant as he was,
was not interested in or perhaps even capable of fully fathoming.
In his piece in Yale Scientific,
Lang also raised the issue of the role of other viruses in AIDS, stating that
“No hypothesis can be dismissed a priori. It is still a possibility that some
viruses other than HIV sometimes cause some of the diseases listed under the
“AIDS” umbrella by the CDC.” One of those he mentions in the piece is HHV-6. He
clearly was intrigued by the paradox of a supposedly ubiquitous and usually (or
also supposedly) harmless virus also being associated with pneumonitis in
compromised hosts. He inadvertently went right to the heart of the political
and scientific problems that HHV-6 would be entangled with in the years ahead
when he wrote, “Here we meet typical examples of rising questions: whether
there is merely an ‘association’ between a virus and some disease, or whether a
virus is a cause, and if so how. It is then a problem to make experiments to
determine whether a given virus is merely a passenger virus, whether it lies
dormant, and if it is awakened (how?). Whether it merely shows its presence by
testing positive in various ways (antibodies?), or whether it is or becomes
harmful (how?), under certain circumstances (which?).” He had unknowingly
stumbled into the tragic intellectual fog of the HHV-6 catastrophe, the
biomedical tragedy that the Orwellian propaganda about HIV was obscuring.
One of the more curious episodes in the
struggles of the Duesbergian camp concerns Serge Lang’s encounter with Richard
Horton, the then youngish editor of The Lancet who was pretty much in
the bag for the HIV establishment. It is described in Challenges, Lang’s
book of essays. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the slovenliness of
the intellectual community during Holocaust II. Horton had written a 9,000 word
review article, “Truth and Heresy about AIDS” which was critical of Duesberg
and published in the New York Review of Books (May 23, 1996). In
response, Lang submitted a letter as long as Horton’s book review itself to NYBR
but it was rejected. Lang’s unpublished letter charged that Horton’s review
gave “a false impression of scientific scholarship” and did not convey to the
readers the complexity of the debate about HIV and AIDS. Horton had reviewed
two books by Duesberg and one book which was a collection of 27 articles called
AIDS: Virus—or Drug Induced?, which included two articles by Lang.
Horton completely ignored the more important of Lang’s two articles—the one we
just discussed that was reprinted from Yale Scientific. Not only did
Horton ignore Lang’s detailed critique of HIV, but he also ignored everyone
published in the collection except Duesberg, contributing to the image
of Duesberg that the HIV establishment had cleverly manufactured and marketed,
namely the fringy lone gunman: Lang wrote, “Horton mentioned Duesberg
repeatedly as a critic of the established view, but by not referring to the multiple
articles in the . . . collection he made it appear as if Duesberg is more
isolated than he actually is in raising objections.” In addition to criticizing
Horton for personalizing the issue rather than engaging in scientific
discussion, Lang criticized Horton for not informing his readers about
misinformation the government had put out about AIDS and for ignoring
legitimate questions about the reliability or credibility of the HIV test. He
suggested that Horton had fudged “the issue about relationships between AIDS
(whatever it is), HIV and other viruses such as a persistent herpes virus.”
(The truth about the looming HHV-6 catastrophe was so close to Lang that it
could have bitten him.)
Lang pointed out that Duesberg was getting
the silent treatment from Horton’s own publication, The Lancet,
where he “has not been allowed to publish longer pieces, [other than letters]
either as a scientific article, or as a ‘Viewpoint.’” Lang also attacked Horton
for resorting to what we have called emotional public health blackmail when he
pointed to the fact that Horton wrote in his review that “Duesberg’s arguments
take him into dangerous territory. For if HIV is not the cause of AIDS, then
every public health injunction about the need for safe sex becomes meaningless.
. . .” Dangerous territory? (Certainly dangerous territory for those behind the
Potemkin HIV paradigm.) Lang held that Horton’s warning “bypasses the specific
objections and questions, and draws an invalid extreme conclusion.” As was
typical throughout Holocaust II, every time anyone asked a critical question
about HIV it was as though they had taken a bullhorn and were shouting out
encouragements to the public to run wild and naked in the street without
condoms. It often came across as a veiled, patronizing, heterosexist assault
against the dignity and intelligence of the gay community. Remarks like those
made AIDS look like a public health campaign that was more concerned about
behavioral control than truth—which in many ways it was.
New York Review of Books published
an exchange of letters between Duesberg and Horton on August 8, 1996. Among a
number of things Lang was critical of in Horton’s letter, he was especially
incensed by Horton’s challenge that “If Duesberg seriously believes there is
nothing to fear from HIV, he can easily prove it. If Duesberg seriously
believes that HIV is harmless, let him inject himself with a suspension of the
virus.” Lang asserted, “Horton’s logic is deficient on several counts. First,
self-experimentation by Duesberg would not ‘prove’ (let alone ‘easily prove’)
anything about a virus which is supposed to take ten years to achieve is
pathogenic effects. Second, the negation of one extreme is not the extreme of
opposite type. Here may be something to fear from poppers (amyl nitrites) or
AZT, as well as HIV.” Lang honed in on the very peculiar debating style that
characterized Holocaust II when he wrote, “Horton’s reply with the above
challenge to Duesberg pushed the discussion to extremes in an unscientific and ad
hominem manner. He turns the discussion to considerations of beliefs, rather
than facts (‘If Duesberg seriously believes . . .’). But it is not a question
what ‘Duesberg believes.’ What’s involved scientifically are, among other
things: the possibility of making certain experiments (some of them on
animals); whether certain data (epidemiological or laboratory) are valid (e.g.
properly gathered and reported); whether interpretations of the data are valid;
the extent to which certain hypotheses are compatible with the data; and
whether scientific objections to specific scientific articles are legitimately
or substantially answered, if answered at all.”
Lang pointed out in his letter that “On 2
August 1996, I submitted a letter to the editors of the New York Review,
about 500 words long.” The letter was rejected. There was a second exchange
between Horton and Duesberg in NYRB. According to Lang, “Horton devoted
the greater part of his second reply to the ad hominem challenge, and some
history of self-experimentation. Thus Horton compounded the problems raised by
his ad hominem attack. Self-experimentation is something which a scientist may
offer unprompted, as has sometimes been done in the past. Whether to do so or
not is for each scientist to decide individually. I object to other scientists
putting pressure for self-experimentation especially in a journalistic
context.” Lang was so disturbed by Horton’s unprofessional suggestion of
self-experimentation that he submitted his rejected letter as a half-page advertisement
to New York Review with a check for $3,500 to cover the cost. The editor
returned the check and agreed to publish the letter.
Lang was incensed that NYRB had not
published several other letters from scientists defending Duesberg. The New
York Review’s behavior shocked Lang who had been both a contributor and an
admirer of the publication’s integrity and intellectual legacy. He summarized
its importance: “With its world-wide circulation of 120,000, it is very
influential in the academic and intellectual community. Members of these
communities rely on the New York Review for information they cannot get
easily elsewhere. Flaws in the New York Review editorial judgment are
therefore very serious.” (Lang would live to see the New York Review betray
its ideal even more egregiously years later when they attacked South Africa’s
brave HIV critic, Thabo Mbeki.)
Lang wrote about the pseudoscience of
HIV/AIDS like someone whose scientific heart was breaking. In the Horton/NYRB
piece he wistfully quotes Richard Feynman who called for scientists to have “a
kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that
corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For
example, it you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other
causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that
you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure
the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw
doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know anything at all wrong,
or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and
advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that
disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. In summary, the idea is
to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your
contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular
direction or another.”
Feynman’s good faith vision of
science operating at its best was like the opposite world of the
HHV-6/AIDS/CFS/autism era and "Holocaust II." Richard Horton was one of the powerful
little princes of that opposite world and the very principled Serge Lang’s
unflappable, stubborn and inspiring confrontation with Richard Horton on the
intellectual world stage during the depressing days of "Holocaust II" reminds one
of what Hannah Arendt wrote about Karl Jaspers in Men in Dark Times: “It
was self-evident that he would remain firm in the midst of catastrophe. . . .
There is something fascinating about a man’s being inviolable, untemptable,
unswayable.” (Men in Dark Times p.76) But even the inviolable,
untemptable, and unswayable Serge Lang could not stop the catastrophe of
"Holocaust II."
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.
