Bulletin #129 from the Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
Rebecca Culshaw: The Young Intellectual Who Blew the Whistle on the Corrupt
AIDS Establishment.
Hopefully, when filmmakers finally start
to realize how many rich narrative possibilities there are in the real history
of "Holocaust II," Rebecca’s Culshaw’s dramatic awakening to the dark nature of
HIV/AIDS science or pseudoscience will be recognized as a compelling story that
deserves to be a movie by itself. Culshaw received her Ph.D. in 2002 for work
constructing mathematical models of HIV infection, a field of study she had
entered in 1996. In an essay, “Why I Quite HIV,” (published online) she said
that her entire adolescence and adult life “has been overshadowed by the belief
in a deadly, sexually transmittable pathogen and the attendant fear of intimacy
and lack of trust that belief engenders.” During her work on AIDS she came to
realize “that there is good evidence that the entire basis for this theory is
wrong. AIDS, it seems is not a disease so much as a sociopolitical construct
that few people understand and even fewer question.”
At one point earlier in her life she was
led to believe that she herself had contracted “AIDS” and she took an HIV test.
She spent two weeks waiting for the results, convinced she was going to die and
blaming herself for whatever she might have done to cause the development. She
tested negative and “vowed not to take more risks.”
Ten years later when she was a graduate
student analyzing models of HIV and the immune system, she was surprised to
discover that virtually every mathematical model of HIV infection she studied
was unrealistic. She concluded that the “biological assumptions on which the
models were based varied from author to author.” She was also puzzled by the
stories of long-term survivors of AIDS and the fact that all of them seemed to
have one thing in common—very healthy life styles. It made her suspect that
“being HIV-positive didn’t necessarily mean you would ever get AIDS.”
When she ran across the writing of one of
Peter Duesberg’s supporters, David Rasnick, it all began to make more sense to
her. Rasnick had written an article on AIDS and the corruption of modern
science which resonated with her own troubling academic experience. She found a
soul mate when she read Rasnick’s assertion that the more he “examined HIV, the
less it made sense that this largely inactive, barely detectable virus could
cause such devastation.” Culshaw continued to work on HIV, however, and
published four papers on HIV from a mathematical modeling perspective. She
wrote that “I justified my contributions to a theory I wasn’t convinced of by
telling myself these were purely theoretical, mathematical constructs, never to
be applied to the real world. I supposed, in some sense also, I wanted to keep
an open mind.” But eventually she reached a breaking point on HIV.
She had been taught early in her career
that clear definitions were important and as far as she could tell, the
definition of AIDS was anything but. AIDS was not “even a consistent entity.”
She was concerned that the definition of AIDS in the early 1980s was a
surveillance tool that bore no resemblance to the AIDS of the current time. She
was troubled by the fact that the CDC constantly changed the definition, that
people could be diagnosed when there was no evidence of clinical disease and
the fact that the leading cause of death of HIV positives was from liver
failure caused by the AIDS treatments (protease inhibitors) themselves.
The epidemiology completely puzzled her.
The fact that the number of HIV positives in the U.S. “has remained constant at
one million” seemed to make no sense. She wrote that “It is deeply confusing
that a virus thought to have been brought to the AIDS epicenters of New York,
San Francisco and Los Angeles in the early 1970s could possibly have spread so
rapidly at first, yet have stopped spreading as soon as testing began.” She had
entered the gates of the opposite world of totalitarian, Orwellian abnormal
science where the numbers of positives could remain constant because their
origins were political and not based on factuality.
She also thought that the theories about
how HIV destroyed t-cells didn’t add up and was disturbed that after so many
years of study there was still no “biological consensus” about the manner in
which HIV did its dirty work. Culshaw was frustrated by the fact that “there
are no data to support the hypothesis that HIV kills cells. It doesn’t in the
test tube. It mostly just sits there, as it does in people—if it can be found
at all.” The shocking fact that Gallo had originally only found the virus in
26 of 72 AIDS patients was also a dramatic strike against the notion that
it was the cause of AIDS.
Culshaw found further support for her
growing skepticism in the testing for HIV which relies on antibody tests rather
than searching for the virus itself because “there exists no test for the
actual virus.” The fact that so-called viral load tests relied on sophisticated
PCR techniques that had never actually been tested against a gold standard of
HIV itself made the whole enterprise of HIV testing look like a cruel and
dangerous farce. The fact that the criteria for a positive result for the
antibody varied from country to country also undermined the credibility of the
HIV tests. Culshaw concluded, “I have come to sincerely believe that the HIV
tests do immeasurably more harm than good, due to their astounding lack of
specificity and standardization. . . . A negative test may not be accurate
(whatever that means), but a positive one can create utter havoc and
destruction in a person’s life—all for a virus that most likely does absolutely
nothing. I do not feel it is going too far to say that these tests ought to be
banned for diagnostic purposes.”
She indicted thousands of her intellectual
and professional colleagues when she wrote “After ten years involved in the
academic side of HIV research, as well as in the academic world at large, I
truly believe that the blame for the universal, unconditional, faith-based
acceptance of such a flawed theory fall on those among us who have actively
endorsed a completely unproven hypothesis in the interests of furthering our
careers.”
Culshaw summed up her thoughts on AIDS in
a brief but brilliant book, Science Sold Out, which was published two
years later by North Atlantic Books. The book is so tautly written and sizzles
with so much moral outrage that one could say that she was the Thomas Paine (or
one of them) of "Holocaust II." She opens the book with an anecdotal challenge to
HIV from her personal life: “The boyfriend of a woman I work with died suddenly
this year from a raging infection. He became very ill, and his immune system
collapsed, unable to handle the infection, and he died. He was not
HIV-positive, but if he had been he would have been an AIDS case.” (SSO p.viii)
While most of the Duesbergians focused mainly on what was diagnosed
mistakenly as AIDS—diagnoses they disagreed with, it is interesting that she
begins her little masterpiece with a case that might inadvertently have pointed
to a far darker implication of the CDC and the AIDS establishment’s misguided
epidemiology: that they were missing the real epidemic and as a result an
unknown number of people were dying mysteriously.
None of the arguments in her book were
completely new, but her presentation was a tour de force. It was full of the
most righteous indignation of any of the critical books on HIV and AIDS, with
the possible exception of the work of John Lauritsen. She also brought an astute
political and sociological analysis to the table that helped make what we’ve
called Holocaust II more understandable as a historic event: “AIDS has become
so mired in emotion, hysteria and politics that it is no longer primarily a
health issue. AIDS has been transported out of the realm of public and personal
health and into a strange new world in which pronouncements by powerful
governmental officials are taken as gospel, and no one remembers when, a few
years later, these pronouncements turn out to be false.” (SSO p.4) That
the scientific establishment had been so quick to accept the HIV theory was
shocking. The willingness of the public to trust proclamations from the
government on the issue was also unsettling. She made it her job to try and
sort out the sociological reasons for the rush to judgment and the bizarre and
stubborn anti-scientific refusal to entertain second and third opinions on the
matter.
As Culshaw looked back at the history of
AIDS, she saw a disturbing pattern that made it appear as if scientists were
making everything up haphazardly and illogically as they went along: “Science,
of course, is meant to be self-correcting, but it seems to be endemic in HIV
research that, rather than continuously building an accumulating body of secure
knowledge with only occasional missteps, the bulk of the structure gets knocked
down every three to four years, replaced by yet another hypothesis, standard of
care, or definition of what exactly, AIDS really is. This new structure
eventually gets knocked down in the same fashion.” (SSO p.11)
Inadvertently, she was actually sensing the totalitarian, abnormal, deviant, ad
hoc, a posteriori nature of criminal, scientific opposite world she had
stumbled into. She could grasp the hypocritical and dishonest nature of the
infernal game that was being played in the name of science when she wrote,
“Even more disturbing is the fact that HIV researchers continuously claim that
certain papers’ results are out of date, yet have absolutely no hesitation in
citing the entire body of scientific research on HIV as massive overwhelming
evidence in favor of HIV. They can’t have it both ways, yet this is what they
try to do.” (SSO p.12) In the opposite world of AIDS science meant
having everything every-which-way all the time.
As Culshaw wrestles with the question of
why so many scientists could be so wrong for so long, she points out that,
contrary to the HIV establishment’s propaganda, a significant number of
scientists actually did join Duesberg in his skepticism and dissent. One of the
more interesting scientists she mentions is Rodney Richards, “a chemist who
worked for the company Amgen developing the first HIV antibody tests [who]
contends that the antibody tests are at best measuring a condition called
hypergammaglobulinemia . . . a word that simply means too many antibodies to
too many things.” (SSO p.13) (This—unknown to Culshaw—may have been the
major clue that CFS and AIDS were manifestations of the same
hypergammaglobulinemia epidemic, and explain why both groups, in addition to
testing positive for HHV-6 also tested positive for retroviral activity due to
the hypergammaglobulinemia.)
Culsaw agreed with the HIV/AIDS critic
David Rasnick, that a contributing factor in the reign of scientific error was
an “epidemic of low standards that is infecting all of academic scientific
research.” (SSO p.13) She argued that “it was almost inevitable that a
very significant scientific mistake was going to be made.” (SSO p.15)
Culshaw was very critical of the AIDS establishment’s refusal to publicly
discuss and defend its science: “If the AIDS establishment is so convinced of
the validity of what they say, they should have no fear of a public,
adjudicated debate between the major orthodox and dissenting scientists, and
the scrutiny of such a debate by the scientific community.” (SSO p.17)
Scrutiny to AIDS researchers was like sunlight to vampires.
Culshaw was just as flabbergasted at the
very strange moment that HTLV-III was transformed politically into the “AIDS
virus” as the rest of the Duesbergians: “It was sometime in 1985 that HIV
conspicuously went from ‘the virus associated with AIDS’ to the ‘virus that
causes AIDS,’ squelching debate in the scientific arena. What changed? What
happened to make scientists come to such certainty? If you look at the actual
papers you’ll see quite clearly that the answer is nothing.” (SSO p.19)
In other words, this life-and-death matter was settled by politics and public
relations rather than anything resembling Kuhnian normal science. HIV/AIDS,
according to Culshaw, then became a “machine” that kept moving despite all
efforts at dissent. It had a pernicious life of its own.
Culshaw focuses on the protease inhibitor
part of the tragedy of Holocaust II by walking her readers through the
chronology of the questionable science that the so-called “cocktails” were
based on. Papers by David Ho (Time’s Man of the Year) and Xiping Wei
that were published in Nature inspired an approach to treating AIDS of
“Hit hard, hit early,” that was to turn the hoodwinked and cheering gay
community into one big deadly iatrogenic AIDS cocktail party. The only problem
with the cocktails, according to Culshaw, was that “few people are aware that
the conclusions” that supported the approach “were based on very poorly
constructed mathematical models,” and “to make matters worse, the statistical
analysis were poorly done and the graphs were presented in such a way as to
lead the reader to believe something different from what the data supported.”
(SSO p.20) Deceptive, abnormal science was alive and well during the David Ho
HIV/AIDS cocktail era. Ho’s slovenly work was called “groundbreaking” by Sir
John Maddox of Nature who said that it provided a compelling reason that
the critics of HIV (especially Peter Duesberg) should “recant.” (SSO
p.20) A perfect word for the AIDS Inquisition.
Culshaw saw the circular logic game of
molding data to fit the theory being played out in AIDS in the
mathematics-based papers that were used to justify the protease inhibitor era,
noting that “such tactics by definition, are excellent at maintaining a façade
of near-perfect correlation between HIV and AIDS and of providing seeming
convincing explanations of HIV pathogenesis.” (SSO p.21) Once again the
public relations needs of the HIV/AIDS paradigm were being serviced by the
fancy footwork of abnormal science. The inexorable evil of Holocaust II is
captured in the fact that even though “the Ho/Wei papers have been debunked by
both establishment and dissenting researchers on biological as well as
mathematical grounds,” the therapies that were concoctions based on that
discredited science “are used to this day.” (SSO p.21) The reader stares
in helpless horror at the atrocities of the HIV/AIDS era as Culshaw reiterates
that “ . . . a large population of
people have been, and continue to be, treated on the basis of a theory that is
unsupportable.” (SSO p.21) Culshaw’s moral outrage is riveting: “You
might imagine that people might feel an urge to discuss the manner in which the
papers got published and whether other such mistakes have happened since that
time. You might imagine that the failure of the peer-review process to detect
such patently inept research would send off alarm bells within the HIV-research
community. You would be wrong.” (SSO p.21) Standard operating procedure
in "Holocaust II."
Without calling it virtual iatrogenic
genocide (iatrogenocide), she indicts a whole generation of clinicians who continued to base
their treatment of patients on Ho and Wei: “HIV researchers know the Ho/Wei
papers are wrong, yet they continue along the clinical path charted by the
papers. They know that the quantitative use of PCR has never been validated,
yet they continue to use viral load to make clinical decisions.” (SSO
p.21) As we have said, it took a village of professionals to create Holocaust
II.
One thinks about the proverbial story of
the drunk looking for his car keys in the parking lot under a light far from
his actual car because that’s the only place there is light—when one reads this
analysis from Culshaw about a scientist’s discovery in the first so-called AIDS
patients: “Upon measuring their t-cells, a subset of the immune system, he
found that in all five men they were depleted. What is quite curious about this
discovery is that the technology to count t-cells had only just been
perfected.”(SSO p.23) This is yet
another way of saying that epidemics never get a second chance to make a first
impression.
Culshaw gets to the crux of the AIDS
establishment’s mistake by noting that they rushed to judgment on HIV and then
were then trapped and had to trim data and cook the books (like the frantic
maintainers of a threatened Ponzi scheme) in order to fit their stubborn
theories to match disparities in the growing number of people they were
designating as having AIDS: “As the definition expanded and as it became more
and more clear that HIV did not do at all what it was purported to do—that is,
kill CD4 t-cells by any detectable method—researchers began to invent more and
more convoluted explanations for why their theory was correct.” (SSO
p.24) Good money was constantly thrown after bad. Of course, had they also expanded the definition so much as to include the
chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic, things might have miraculously straightened
themselves out and HHV-6’s role in the hypergammaglobinemia epidemic might have
become painfully obvious.
Channeling Thomas Kuhn, Culshaw is all too
old fashioned and normal-science-ish when she so reasonably writes, “The
logical scientific thing to have done would have been to notice their original
disease designation did not accurately identify the causative agent or agents,
rather than changing the syndrome, throw out the supposed causative agents and
find one that explained the observations better. As we know, this has not
happened.” (SSO p.24)
Culshaw decried the bogus logic behind the
universal celebration of protease inhibitors, noting that “ . . . the
proportion of AIDS cases that resulted in death experienced a large drop in
1993-1994, which orthodoxy and the mass media were more than happy to portray
as decreased mortality thanks to protease inhibitors. However, protease
inhibitors were not even generally available to AIDS patients until 1996, over
two years after the decline in the death rate began.” (SSO p.27) She
challenged the notion that they had been proved to extend life and argued that
one only had to look at the packet inserts to see that they could “cause
debilitating side effects, some of which are indistinguishable from the
symptoms of AIDS itself.” (SSO p.27)
She was horrified by the insane logic of
HIV drug manufacturers who would insist “that since someone who was healthy
when they started therapy happened to stay healthy for some time on the drugs,
that is some sort of credit to the medications.” (SSO p.28) She warned that “there is no evidence to say
that they would not have remained healthy even if they never took any
medication at all.” (SSO p.28) She noted that the HIV establishment had
basically gamed the system by never using placebo-controls so that it could not
be determined if nothing was actually better than the AIDS drugs. “Do no
harm” was a quaint joke from the distant past. As far as the reports of the
supposedly positive effects upon very sick people who took the drugs, she
pointed out, as others had, that reverse transcriptase inhibitors are
non-specific cell-killers an in addition to harming healthy cells, could be
attacking “those cells that are dividing fastest,” (SSO p.28) such as
the opportunistic bacteria and fungi that were the cause of acute illnesses in
AIDS patients. In other words, their reputation was based on the mistaken
impression that it was their effect on HIV rather than the other infections involved
in the syndrome. She noted that protease inhibitors had been shown to control
two of the more important infections associated with AIDS: candida and
pneumocystis. (SSO p.28)
Culshaw came down hard on the absurd
Orwellian invention of the term “Immune Restitution Syndrome” which was used to
explain away the development of opportunistic infections that occurred when
people were taking the miraculous protease inhibitors. The convenient ad
hoc explanation was that the immune system of AIDS patients was getting
“confused” as it was getting stronger. She slapped that one down, writing that
“In reality, it seems to be just another attempt to explain away the fact that
clearly the medications are nor working as they were intended. . . .” (SSO
p.29) She zeroed in on one of the disturbing consequences of all this, one that
supports our notion that the whole era should be called "Holocaust II": “Consider
also that the leading cause of death among medicated HIV-positives is no longer
even an AIDS-defining disease at all, but liver failure, a well-documented
effect of protease inhibitors.” (SSO p.30)
Throughout Holocaust II, where there was AIDS
there was also state coercion (the social and political face of totalitarian
science) sponsored by the inexorable public health logic of the HIV/AIDS
establishment. Culshaw noted that “Infants born to HIV-positive mothers are in
many states forced to undergo anti-retroviral therapy and since only a few
drugs have been approved for children, the drugs administered are the most
toxic, AZT and nevirapine being foremost. Oftentimes this drug regimen begins
before the baby is born, in certain cases against the wishes of the mother, and
continues throughout childhood.” (SSO p.30) And the tragedy was cruelly
compounded by the fact that half of HIV-positive babies revert to negative in
any case. Unforgivable iatrogenic scars from this age of medical atrocities
were everywhere. (Hopefully historians will do a good job one day of
documenting them all for posterity.)
In terms of the real underlying pandemic
of HHV-6, it is interesting that Culshaw zeroed in on the politically motivated
nature of concocting a definition of AIDS as a disease characterized mainly by
the decline in CD4+ cells: “But what was known from the beginning of
AIDS—though bizarrely, not investigated to nearly the extent that CD4+ cells
have been investigated—was that AIDS patients suffered disruptions in many
subsets of their blood cells. Virtually all of these
patients had elevated levels of many different types of antibodies, indicating
that something had gone wrong with the “anti-body-arm of the immune system.” (SSO
p.33) (God forbid that they had looked at what was going on in the “anti-body
arm of the immune system” of the CFS patients and the rest of the general
population.)
In her book, as she had done in her
previous essay, she emphasized that the HIV tests themselves were an unreliable
technical mess and was horrified at how diagnostics that were “some of the
worst tests ever manufactured in terms of standardization, specificity, and
reproducibility” (SSO p.35) were being used “as a weapon of
discrimination ever since testing began.” (SSO p.35) Everything about
the way viral proteins were identified as belonging to HIV she found
questionable. She described one of the common tests (the ELISA): “ . . . the
proteins are present in a mixture and the serum reacts with the proteins in
such a way as to cause a color change. The color change is not discrete—meaning
that everyone has varying degrees of reaction.” (SSO p.39) It gets
totally Alice-in-Wonderlandish as she notes that “there are varying degrees of
the color change, and a cutoff value has been established, above which the
sample is considered reactive or ‘positive’ and below which it is considered
‘negative.’ Clearly, this language is absurd, since positive and negative
are polarities and not positions on a sliding scale.” (SSO p.39) Such
was the crazy way medical tests were conducted in the reign of abnormal, totalitrian science
that was "Holocaust II."
Culshaw also noted that everyone could
test positive for HIV, depending on how the serum was diluted when the tests
were run. She was inadvertently saying more about the catastrophic effects of
HHV-6 on the body when she pointed out that the tests were actually detecting
the previously mentioned condition of hypergammaglobinemia, or “having too many
antibodies to too many things.” (SSO p.44) Again it must be pointed out
that, unknown to her and her colleagues in AIDS dissent, the biomedical face of
the complex HHV-6 catastrophe was simultaneously revealing itself in the
widespread chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic in the form of people “having too
many antibodies to too many things.”
The other thing which she pointed out that
connected with the oft-detected evidence of retroviral activity in CFS was the
possibility that the HIV test was simply detecting endogenous retroviral
activity, hence just an artifact (or epiphenomenon) of the biological chaos
that was going on in the bodies of AIDS patients. The retroviral activity could
be “Simply a marker for cell decay and/or division.” (SSO p.44) (And, in
the case of HHV-6’s devastation, we know there was and is a lot of that
going on.) And the fact that the HIV tests had never been “validated against
the gold standard of HIV isolation” (SSO p.45) decimated their
credibility. Or should have
Culshaw could see that the slovenly and
shady science of HIV had led America and the rest of the world intro a sinister
ethical quagmire: “Since the diagnosis HIV-positive carries with it such a
stigma and the potential for outrageous denial of human rights, it is only
humane that doctors, AIDS researchers, and test manufacturers would want to
make absolutely certain that the tests they are promoting are completely
verifiable in the best possible way. This is not happening.” (SSO p.45)
Like some of the other HIV critics, she pointed out that the retrovirus had
never been unquestionably isolated in an irrefutable way in the first
place—and still hadn’t been, potentially making AIDS one of the biggest
scientific mistakes and scandals in history. She reinforced the point, writing,
“You might think that with hundreds of billions of dollars spent so far on HIV,
there would have been by now a scientific attempt to demonstrate HIV isolation
by publication of proper electron micrographs. The fact that there has not
indicates quite strongly that no one has been able to do it.” (SSO p.46)
In addition to the HIV test not working
reliably, she also questioned the viral load test, which is used “to estimate
the health status of those already diagnosed HIV-positive” because “there is
good reason to believe it does not work at all.” (SSO p.46) She pointed
to a paper that indicated “fully one-half of . . . patients with detectable
viral loads had no evidence of virus by culture.” (SSO p.47) It was as
if the Three Stooges were in charge of every aspect of HIV testing. Culshaw was
uniquely sensitive to the ugly political nature of all this and perceptively
saw how the HIV tests “are used essentially as weapons of terror.” (SSO
p.48) She writes, “This medical terrorism reached new heights in June, 2006
with the CDC’s new HIV testing guidelines, which recommended that everyone
between the ages of thirteen and sixty-five be tested for antibodies to HIV.” (SSO
p.48)
Culshaw was outraged that the faulty test
for a virus not proven to cause AIDS could force perfectly healthy people “into
undergoing a regimen that will inevitably cause long-term toxic effects (and
even death), a more sinister complication is the violation in human rights that
occurs following a positive HIV test. Every state in the U.S. and every
province in Canada maintain a list of ‘HIV carriers’ in that region.”(SSO
p.49) That was just one more aspect of "Holocaust II" that made it seem a little
like Holocaust I.
Culshaw could see the heavy political
hands that were keeping the hellish paradigm and draconian public health agenda
in place. When they were confronted by criticism grounded in logic and reason,
“The AIDS orthodoxy’s only counters to the points made and the questions raised
consist of ad hominem attacks including use of the term ‘denialist’ as well as
stating that dissenting views have ‘long since been discredited’ without any
reference to exactly where these views have been discredited.
Unfortunately, words are powerful and personal attacks are very effective at
silencing people.” (SSO p.60) She felt that it was a campaign of “fear,
discrimination, and terror that has been waged aggressively by a powerful group
of people whose sole motivation was and is behavior control.” (SSO p.60)
Of course, those would be the lucky ones. The dead ones would have no
behavioral issues.
More than any other AIDS dissident or
critic, she came the closest to seeing the heterosexist and racist
underpinnings of the whole sinister game: “To understand the sociological
motivations behind the HIV/AIDS paradigm, one must understand the racism and
homophobia that has persisted in society for centuries. It is only very
recently in the timeline of history that gays and blacks have been accorded
equal rights under the law. . . .” (SSO p.61) Her thinking supported
this book’s contention that what the law can give gays and blacks with one
hand, epidemiology in the form of "homodemiology" and "Afrodemiology" can take
away with the other.
Culshaw came breathtakingly close to
seeing both the forest and the trees insofar as she called it a rush to
judgment at the beginning of the epidemic when the first cases of AIDS were
assumed to be sexually transmitted even though the original gay men with it
had no contact with each other. She was onto the heterosexist or
"homodemiological" lens through which the original ground zero data was being
observed by the VD and gay-obsessed pioneers of the HIV/AIDS paradigm. And she
recognized that the assumption of sexual transmission was not easily dialed
back or reconsidered. In terms of the HHV-6 catastrophe it is of interest that
she recognized that “Despite the fact the other viruses (cytomegalovirus and
herpes virus, to give two examples) were far more prevalent in AIDS patients
than HIV ever was, the HIV train started rolling and hasn’t lost momentum
since. Would this have happened if the first AIDS patients had been
heterosexuals in the prime of their lives?” (SSO p.62)
One of the most admirable things about
Rebecca Culshaw is the fact that she was not afraid to use the fierce polemical
language of moral indignation when confronting the reign of pseudoscientific
evil: “Many of the biggest crimes committed by the AIDS orthodoxy are
psychosocial and not medical at all.” (SSO p.62) What the charlatans of
AIDS in their white coats were doing to humanity was not something she—unlike
most of her fellow scientists and intellectuals—could look away from: “The discrimination
leveled against those given the HIV-positive diagnosis has reached a level not
seen since leprosy was common . . . HIV-positives are the modern equivalent of
lepers (and in Cuba, where they are quarantined, are even treated as such) . .
.” (SSO p.63) The enforcers of the paradigm were “vultures who will stop
at nothing to prop up their paradigm.” (SSO p.65) While Culshaw,
unfortunately, didn’t see the full nature of "Holocaust II" as clearly as she
might have, she came closer than many, and what she did see she translated into
an historically important outcry: “The HIV theory has never been about science
but rather about behavioral modification primarily, and to a lesser extent,
about money, power and prestige. Language surrounding HIV and AIDS is infected
with a sort of pious moralism that is completely inappropriate in science. . .
.”(SSO p.69) Maybe inappropriate for normal science, but it is the theme
song constantly playing in the background of the abnormal, totalitarian science of "Holocaust
II."
Culshaw could see that, tragically, there
was no turning back, because “First of all, there are tremendous financial and
social interests involved. Billions of dollars in research funding, stock
options, and activist budgets are predicated on the assumptions that HIV causes
AIDS. Entire industries of pharmaceutical drugs, diagnostic testing and
activist causes would have no reason to exist.” (SSO p.70) If that
doesn’t sound like an empire of evil worthy of being called "Holocaust II," what does?
Few saw the costs and consequences of the
HIV theory being wrong and articulated them as dramatically as Culshaw. It
wasn’t a small inconsequential scientific matter, a minor wrong turn that could
be easily forgiven or forgotten: “. . . the scientific and medical communities
have a great deal of face to lose. It is not much of an exaggeration to state
that when the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is finally recognized as wrong, the entire
institution of science will lose the public’s trust, and science itself will
experience fundamental, profound and long-lasting changes. The ‘scientific
community’ has risked its credibility by standing by the HIV theory so long.
This is why doubting the HIV hypothesis is now tantamount to doubting science
itself, and this is why dissidents face excommunication.” (SSO p.70) And
she wasn’t even aware that the fiasco included among it’s consequences, HHV-6 related chronic
fatigue syndrome, autism and Morgellons, just to name a few.
Culshaw is fairly unique among the
Duesbergians and other HIV critics, dissidents, resistance intellectuals,
whatever one wants to call them. Not only was she patently not
heterosexist, not only did she not spin her own alternative alternative gay lifestyle theory of AIDS, but she
actually went in the opposite direction and argued that heterosexism,
side-by-side with racism, was the driving force for the biomedical dystopia
that was created by the pseudoscientific HIV/AIDS paradigm. And, in a near
miss, Rebecca Culshaw almost got it right when she wrote that “powerful
psychological forces are at work. It is simply easier for most people to
project our neglect of disenfranchised groups—gay men, drug users, blacks, the
poor and so on—onto a virus and accept those “infected” as sacrificial victims,
than to recognize that there is no bug. For society, the latter would
require acceptance of those disenfranchised groups as equal participants in
mainstream society and culture.” (SSO p.70) She would have won the
“understanding Holocaust II lottery” if only she had written, “It is simply
easier for most people to project our neglect of disenfranchised groups—gay
men, drugs users, blacks, the poor and so on (and ignore the threat to our own
health)—onto the wrong, politically and fraudulently framed virus and
accept those labeled and scapegoated as “AIDS infected” and as sacrificial
victims, than to recognize that we are all at risk for the real cause of
this epidemic.” But it was not to be. She certainly got the business about the
bigoted politics right, but there was a virus, a very serious and deadly
virus, but not a retrovirus. It was a DNA virus, one that was, even as she
wrote her wonderful book, having its pathological way with both franchised and
disenfranchised groups all over the world.
If one were to ask all the Duesbergian
critics—including Culshaw—if the egregious errors of the AIDS medical
establishment had put the heterosexual general population in more danger of
becoming immune-compromised, they all would probably have said a resounding
“No!” The fact that they would have been absolutely wrong (considering the
HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe in the general population that was masked by the HIV
mistake) shows that their critical brilliance and their unique ethical bravery
went only so far in the search for the ultimate truth about the epidemic. They
failed to stop the forces of heterosexism and racism that crystallized into
Holocaust II, but without all of them, a very dark time would have been even
darker.
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.
