How can any AIDS research be ethical if it is all based on the premises of the Montagnier-Agut HIV-Fraud Ponzi Scheme and HHV-6 Cover-up?
Medical Research: The Dangers to the Human Subjects
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/nov/19/medical-research-dangers-human-subjects/
1. HIV is a massive scientific fraud. Something akin to a Ponzi scheme. Scientists who challenged the HIV theory of AIDS (the ones who have been thuggishly censored and silenced) turn out to be on the money.
2. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Autism (and many other so-called HHV-6 related mysterious epidemics) are part of the so-called AIDS epidemic. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Autism both are clearly the results of the ravages of HHV-6.
3. AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has been artificially and politically separated into two epidemics. We are living in a period of CFS/AIDS apartheid. So-called AIDS patients have to sit in the back of the HHV-6 epidemic bus while the befuddled HHV-6/CFS patients and HHV-6/Autism victims sit up front. Nobody is well-served.
4. AIDS is not a sexually transmitted disease. That paradigm has set a scapegoating and antigay agenda in place that the public thinks is solidly based on science. It is only based on homophobic and racist nosology, epidemiology and virology. The scientists behind the paradigm are charlatans and crooks.
5. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Pasteur Institute in Paris have a great deal in common with the institutions of Nazi medicine. For Blacks, everything these institutions have done in the name of AIDS really constitutes a second Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
Elements of a Scientific Ponzi Scheme like the Montagnier-Agut HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme and HHV-6 Cover-up
A
scientific Ponzi scheme begins with a central seminal or foundational
scientific fraud and is sometimes built on an infrastructure of smaller
scientific frauds. Like the fake dividends issued in a strictly
financial Ponzi scheme, a scientific Ponzi scheme issues fake dividends
in the form of ongoing fraud-based research often framed as
"breakthroughs" and bogus extrapolations which make it look like
everything is above board and that what, in reality, is scientific
fraud, appears to the rest of the scientific community and the public as
good faith progress.
A classic scientific Ponzi scheme like the Montgnier-Agut HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme and HHV-6 Cover-up include elements like these:
1. Nosological fraud.
2. Epidemiological fraud.
3. Virological fraud.
4. Treatment fraud.
5. Public health policy fraud.
6. Concealment of negative scientific data and paradigm-challenging anomalies.
7. Use of an elite network of "old boys" and pseudo-activist provocateurs to censor critics and whistleblowers.
8. Chronic obscurantism.
9.
If necessary, vigilantism and witch-hunts against any intellectuals,
scientists, or citizens who constitute any form of resistance to the
Ponzi scheme.
10. A subservient scientific press that is used as a conveyor belt for the Ponzi scheme's propaganda.
It's time to recognize that HHV-6A, HHV-6B, HHV-7 and HHV-8 all belong in a viral category of their own. Leaving them in the herpesvirus family trivializes their impact on public health and turns them into some kind of biomedical joke.
Here are the proposed new names for HHV-6A, HHV-6B, HHV-7 and HHV-8:
The AIDS Spectrum Viruses
HHV-6A should be called AIDS Spectrum Virus 1 (ARV-1)
HHV-6B should be called AIDS Spectrum Virus 2 (ARV-2)
HHV-7 should be called AIDS Spectrum Virus 3 (ARV-3)
The name of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome should be changed to AIDS Spectrum Virus Syndrome
(AIDS Virus Syndrome or ASVS.)
Black Lives Matter.
Gay Lives Matter.
The Truth about
HHV-6 Matters.
Please send an email to Dr. Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health.
Francis S. Collins
Director of the National Institutes of Health
9000 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, Maryland 20892
Dear Dr. Collins:
It's time that the public knew about all the diseases HHV-6 is causing in our society. The days of using the fraudulent HIV paradigm of AIDS to cover up the HHV-6 pandemic must come to an end!
You shouldn't try to control panic about HHV-6 by lying to the public.
It's time that the public knew about all the diseases HHV-6 is causing in our society. The days of using the fraudulent HIV paradigm of AIDS to cover up the HHV-6 pandemic must come to an end!
You shouldn't try to control panic about HHV-6 by lying to the public.
I urge you to support the goals of International HHV-6
Protests and Teach-ins that will be taking place at universities all over the
world during the next several years.
Those goals include the support of freedom of thought, speech and
dissent in science in general and in research of HHV-6-related diseases in
particular. HHV-6-releated diseases include so-called "AIDS" and
"Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," but are by no means limited to them. I
also urge you to declare your support of the Harvard Declaration of the HHV-6
Rights of Man.
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 belied 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.
Sincerely,
The Historic Three Days of Teach-ins at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)
Day One
Teach-in #1
Why does anyone trust anything Robert Gallo says about HHV-6?
Teach-in #2
Did Ablashi and Gallo steal Credit from John Beldekas and Jane Teas for the discovery of HHV-6?
Teach-in #3
Is Anthony Fauci the Bernie Madoff behind the HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme and he HHV-6 Cover-up?
Teach-in #4
Should Myron Essex be asked to resign from Harvard?
Teach-in #1
Why does anyone trust anything Robert Gallo says about HHV-6?
Why does anyone trust anything Robert Gallo says about HHV-6?
The Pulitzer Prize Winner and Robert Gallo's
Little Lab of Horrors
What the world didn't know, of course, is how much Gallo had done to create the image of an obsessed [Chicago Tribune reporter—and chronicler of Robert Gallo's misdeeds—John] Crewdson. Only Crewdson, who recorded the defamation of his character with the same diligence and care that he recorded everything else, knew. He knew it from having to answer when his sons asked why the police were coming to the door at dinner time [after Gallo suggested to police that Crewdson might have broken into his house]. And he knew it from the rumors he kept catalogued in a file at home. Only one of those, he says, truly bothered him, because it reflected on his family. It was that Crewdson had divorced his wife to join a gay commune in San Francisco, and had then "set up housekeeping with his boyfriends" in Bethesda. Though it was unclear if this tale, like the others, had originated with Gallo, Gallo had often tried to label his critics in AIDS as being gay; the story seemed to bear his stamp."I've caused problems for other people in my career," says Crewdson, understating the damage he helped unleash upon the Nixon White House, the FBI and the CIA, all of which were known to retaliate against journalists for less. "But I don't ever remember a government official engaging in a sustained personal attack on me or any other reporter." That Gallo is a physician, sworn to compassion, seems to make the situation all the more unusual. —Barry Werth, “By AIDS Obsessed,” GQ, August, 1991"Gallo was certainly committing open and blatant scientific fraud," Sonnabend says. "But the point is not to focus on Gallo. It's us—all of us in the scientific community, we let him get away with it. None of this was hidden. It was all out in the open but nobody would say a word against Gallo. It had a lot to do with patriotism—the idea that this great discovery was made by an American." —Celia Farber, “Fatal Distraction,” Spin, June 1992
Robert Gallo was a sine qua non of
what should be called "Holocaust II." It is unimaginable without him at the very core of its deadly
insanity. He wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill scientific villain. He was larger
than life, someone you would expect to see in a Batman movie. One where Batman
dies. The world owes a great debt of gratitude to John Crewdson, the Pulitzer
Prize winning Chicago Tribune journalist who mastered the irritating
minutiae of retrovirology (and pseudoretrovirology) in order to capture Gallo in all of his exasperating
and pathological glory.
In Science Fictions, the
under-appreciated book of microscopic reporting, John Crewdson piles up detail
after detail of Gallo’s career like a skilled novelist, determined to sear
Gallo’s essence into our consciousness and to leave us in a state of shock
about what actually took place behind trusted laboratory doors while people
were dying horrific AIDS deaths all over the world. When Crewdson is done with
his awesome dissection of Gallo, and we have seen the innards of the world’s
most amazing pathological liar laid out on the autopsy table, no reasonable
observer should take anything Gallo said about AIDS seriously. Yet
Crewdson himself seems to have ultimately had no qualms about leaving Gallo’s
theory of HIV-causes-AIDS standing totally hegemonic and unchallenged amid all
the shocking evidence of Gallo’s chronic perfidiousness. It’s a real
puzzlement.
According to Crewdson, the early career of
Robert C. Gallo, the world’s most famous AIDS researcher at the National Cancer
Institute, got off to a precocious start as a lab chief at the age of
twenty-seven. But it was subsequently unsuccessful and frustrated until Gallo
accomplished what appeared to some scientists at the time to have been his
first viral theft. That may have involved stealing credit from the Japanese who
discovered a virus named ATLV by renaming the same virus HTLV. Regardless of
whether Gallo did steal credit for that virus, the questionable fog of
its discovery certainly fit the funky pattern of what occurred in his lab
during the 1980s when Gallo sank his teeth into the search for the cause of
AIDS. And even beyond that. Crewdson establishes early in his lengthy book that
Gallo is a man of great manipulative schtick. Gallo’s mythological song and
dance about himself and his origins is a somewhat revealing Dickensian story
about the source of his professional drive and his great destiny: Crewdson
writes, “In newspaper and magazine articles, Gallo’s single-mindedness was
frequently attributed to the death of his five-year old sister, Judith from
childhood leukemia, an event Gallo recalled as the most traumatic of his young
life, and which had transformed the Gallo household into a grim and joyless
place without music or laughter where Thanksgiving and Christmas was no longer
observed.” (SF p.15) How could anyone question a man of such noble
motives? (Actually, how could anyone not?)
In Science Fictions, Crewdson
presents a Gallo who is a loud, crass braggart who people either loved in a
toadying manner or, if they were streetwise, considered him to be what one
scientist once described as a “black hole” that destroyed everything in
its vicinity. Crewdson describes a period of early disgrace at the NCI during
which Gallo had supposedly discovered the first evidence of reverse
transcriptase “in human leukemia cells” which subsequently turned out to be
irreproducible when another scientist tried to replicate the finding. (SF
p.14) Bad luck struck again when Gallo was celebrated on the front page of The
Washington Post only to have his discovery, a virus called HL23,
undermined by one of his enemies who proved that what Gallo had was not a human
retrovirus “but a melange of three animal viruses—a woolly monkey virus, a
gibbon ape virus and a baboon virus—jumbled together in a retroviral cocktail.”
(SF p. 19) A humiliating retraction was made subsequently in Nature.
Unfortunately, this kind of failure in the life of a character like Gallo only
made the man more determined to vindicate himself at all costs as a
great scientist. The whole world would pay a terrible price for his
extraordinary determination.
There is something about Robert Gallo—if
you’ve ever met him in person or seen him on television or talked to him on the
phone—that makes you wonder what planet or species he is from. Crewdson
captures his uncanny strangeness when he notes that, “Gallo’s conversations
often sounded as though a tape recording were being played back at faster than
normal speed, and his syntax frequently lent the impression of someone whose
first language was not English.” (SF p.19) By the time Crewdson is done
with him 600 pages later, one is convinced that Gallo’s first language is
falsehood.
Crewdson presents Gallo’s lab in its early
days as a place where things were always mysteriously going wrong. It wasn’t
just that the scientific findings the lab produced couldn’t be replicated, but
there were also odd break-ins and very peculiar acts of sabotage. But the best
was yet to come.
Unfortunately, as Gallo’s desperation for
a big discovery grew, so had the budget of the National Cancer Institute as the
nation committed itself to the desperate hunt for the viral origins of cancer.
Richard Nixon cancer initiative was the wind beneath Gallo‘s wings. However,
things got off to a disappointing start for many years and, in a moment of
political bad timing, Gallo’s HL23 scientific embarrassment happened shortly
after there had already been numerous viral dead ends at NCI and the whole
program was losing its luster and in real jeopardy of being cut back.
That the HL23 virus turned out to be a
laboratory contaminant rather than a new virus after it had been touted in
the press, even before its publication in a scientific journal became a
familiar pattern in Gallo’s scientific lifestyle (and may have been adopted by
some of his underlings). Also to be repeated throughout his career was his
inability to admit he was wrong about this HL23 until it couldn’t seriously be
denied. (SF p.19) The fact that the contaminant looked like it had to
have been a deliberate act of sabotage by somebody suggested that even darker
things were going on at the National Cancer Institute around Gallo, things that
even super sleuth John Crewdson may have been unable to nail down. This dark
possibility of an even bigger missed story is a cloud that hovers over all the
events in the Crewdson’s narrative.
According to Crewdson, the only reason
that Gallo’s career didn’t go down the tubes over the HL23 debacle was because
he had a protector at NCI, his boss Vincent DeVita, someone who would come to
Gallo’s rescue more than once during his troubled tenure at the Institute. (SF
p.20) According to Crewdson, DeVita was one of a number of people who held the
opinion that Gallo was basically a genius who was also a handful. This was a
tragic flaw in DeVita’s judgment that would have terrible consequences for the
legacy of American biomedical science and the health of every person on this
planet.
Crewdson portrays Gallo as a man obsessed
with winning a Nobel Prize (SF p.20) He was ready to do whatever needed
to be done and to elbow out everyone who got in his way. He had no qualms about
cheating his subordinates out of appropriate credit for their (sometimes
questionable) discoveries. He was also happy to reward achievement of
subordinates by unceremoniously getting rid of them when they threatened to
outshine him. (SF p.23) Gallo’s bizarre, paranoid laboratory was the object
of suspicion from other scientific quarters. When his lab supposedly discovered
HTLV, Gallo refused to let samples of that virus leave his lab and Crewdson
quotes a colleague of Gallo’s as saying there was “a feeling around the N.I.H.
that there was something, ah, wrong with HTLV.” (SF p.31) Gallo may have
realized early in his career that if you didn’t want people to find anything
wrong with your work the best thing to do is to not share your viruses—or
anything else—with them.
The funny thing about Gallo, surely one of
the most paranoid people to ever call himself a scientist, is that he was
always accusing others of paranoia and baseless suspicion—toward him and
his eminently questionable motives. When it seemed to some scientists that
Gallo’s lab had switched the Japanese virus, ATLV, with the Gallo lab’s
supposed version of the same virus (the soon-to-be celebrated HTLV), he argued
that it was paranoid for anyone to even dare to think that way. (SF
p.32) For Gallo, there was always something structurally wrong with the brains
of the people who witnessed his crimes. They were always crazy, and he was
always sane. You could say that Gallo was from the blame the victim school of
scientific fraud.
Adding insult to injury, after what looked
like a viral theft of ATLV from the Japanese, he barely gave them any credit at
all for their research into the very virus his lab seems to have taken
advantage of. And he mocked the work of the Japanese on ATLV several times (SF
p.36) The Crewdson picture of Gallo throughout the book is of a man with
absolutely no shame.
Two of Gallo’s subordinates, the so-called
hands-on discoverers of the suspiciously discovered HTLV, Bernard Poiesz and
Francis Ruscetti, got the usual treatment that putatively successful people (or
co-virus-lifters) got in Gallo’s lab. Ruscetti went on “the endangered list”
and was never cited in the award Gallo was given for the discovery of HTLV.
Poiesz was betrayed by Gallo in the form of receiving a lukewarm endorsement
from Gallo when he applied for a grant. Crewdson quotes Poiesz as saying about
Gallo’s credit-grab for the discovery of HTLV that it was “like saying that
Queen Isabella discovered America after Columbus came home told her about it.”
(SF p.37)
Unfortunately, in terms of the world’s
biomedical safety, Gallo was in the wrong place at the wrong time when AIDS
occurred and initially he had the wrong virus at the ready: HTLV, of course,
because that’s what he was working on. Just the adoption of the idea that HTLV
might be the cause of AIDS (an idea supposedly given to Gallo by others) was
patently absurd and raises questions about Gallo’s scientific judgment. It may
have been purely driven by the prurient fact that the Japanese, according to Crewdson,
“had shown that HTLV was transmitted by sexual intercourse.” (SF p.39)
The fact that the CDC had given him a gay-obsessed and sexual epidemiological
paradigm to work with didn’t help matters. One feels a sense of dread at the
prospect of Gallo getting involved in anything with a sexual angle when
Crewdson quotes the CDC’s Cy Cabradillo talking about Gallo: “He [Gallo] didn’t
seem that interested. . . . I don’t think he wanted to get involved with a gay
disease. What turned him around was Max [Essex].” (SF p. 41) One almost
wishes that Gallo’s homophobia or gay-antipathy had been even more pronounced
and that Essex had weaker powers of persuasion and that Gallo had blown off
requests to get involved in AIDS. It would have saved the gay community and the
rest of the world from decades of grief. (And one in fifty or so kids right now
might not be on the HHV-6/autism spectrum.)
What was so intellectually challenged
about Gallo’s notion that HTLV could even remotely be the cause of AIDS was the
fact that, as most retrovirologists knew, “quite apart from killing T-cells,”
HTLV “transformed them into leukemic cells.” (SF p.44) But that didn’t
stop Gallo once it became his idée fixe. Gallo was always light-years ahead of
his data—imaginary and real.
While Gallo was promoting the silly notion
that HTLV was the cause of AIDS, French researchers at the Pasteur Institute in
Paris discovered a retrovirus they called “LAV” in the lymph nodes of AIDS
patients. Gallo pulled off one of his many fast ones when he offered to submit
Pasteur’s LAV paper on the discovery to Science. When they took him up
on the offer, he noticed the Pasteur scientists had failed to write an
abstract, in a moment of fake generosity he called Luc Montagnier and said he
would be willing to write the abstract (SF p.56) One should always
beware of Gallos bearing gifts. According to Crewdson, “To his everlasting
regret, Montagnier agreed.” (SF p.56) What Crewdson described at this
early point in his account of Gallo is so egregiously crooked that it boggles
the mind that anyone subsequently ever took at face value any of the science
that came out of that NCI den of biomedical iniquity. Gallo completely
distorted the meaning of the Pasteur paper in the abstract he concocted, an
intellectual act of dishonesty so in-your-face that it takes one’s breath away.
In the true spirit of the opposite world of abnormal science, Gallo twisted the
whole meaning of the Pasteur paper to point towards his own birdbrained notion
that their AIDS related virus was actually HTLV. According to Crewdson,
“As summarized by Gallo . . . the French manuscript appeared to be reporting,
if not the isolation of HTLV itself, then a very closely related virus.” (SF
p.56) And to add humor to injury, Gallo ran the abstract by the French on the
phone, reading it so quickly that, according to Crewdson, they didn’t even
understand it. It didn’t stop there. Robert Gallo also altered some of the text
of the French paper, again in the direction of making it sound like the French
retrovirus was from the same viral family as his own misguided HTLV. Montagnier
had deliberately called it a “lymphotrophic virus” to make sure it was not
confused with the members of the HTLV family. Montagnier criticized Gallo’s
obsession with HTLV, insisting “Gallo didn’t believe there could be more than
one kind of human retrovirus. He was fully convinced that HTLV was the right
one, that there was only one human retrovirus involved in AIDS.” (SF
p.57) As was typical in the self-dealing abnormal, totalitarian science of AIDS, the reviewer
for the paper turned out to be the paper’s re-writer himself, Robert Gallo. Not
surprisingly, he gave the French paper that he himself altered “his
enthusiastic endorsement.” (SF p.57) And for good measure he basically
misled again in his letter to Science with the paper, telling the editor
that Montagnier agreed with it all. (SF p.57)
Curiously, in terms of the underlying
HHV-6 truth about AIDS, Crewdson notes the fact that at that point Gallo’s
boss, Vince DeVita, thought that HTLV, the virus Gallo was pushing, was
actually a passenger virus.
Gallo’s HTLV baloney gained credibility
when his Harvard pal, Myron Essex, published a very questionable report that
“between a quarter and a third of the AIDS patients he tested had antibodies to
HTLV.” (SF p.58) The publication made Essex an instant millionaire the
day after its publication because Essex owned stock in a company that
manufactured tests for HTLV, the virus that ultimately would turn out to have
nothing to do with AIDS. (SF p.58) He wasn’t the only one to get rich
peddling bogus science during Holocaust II.
What could have been a cautionary note
about the herd-of-sheep psyche of the abnormal, totalitarian world of AIDS research in general can be
found in Crewdson’s amusing passage about other scientists’ ostrich-like
inattention to the total lack of logic in blaming a leukemia causing virus for
a disease that involved the killing of t-cells. Instead of questioning Gallo
and Essex’s bizarre HTLV logic, according to Crewdson, potential critics and
people who should have known better doubted themselves. He quotes one of
the deferential self-doubters: “ ‘I didn’t consider myself capable of
questioning Max Essex,’ one researcher recalled. ‘Max Essex was a person at
Harvard. That meant that Max Essex would probably be right. The likelihood that
he needed me to re-evaluate his data was zero.’ ” (SF p.59) This was
Myron “FOCMA” Essex he was talking about. In the abnormal scientific community
of AIDS research your data wasn’t the issue. The school you were associated
with was all that mattered. (If historians ever wake up and there is any justice in the world, one day, thanks to Essex, the word "Harvard" will be a metaphor for scientific fraud. Maybe one day it will be even used as a verb, as in "to Harvard the data" or "to Harvard the books.")
Much like Gallo, Essex always had a reason
why he was always right and others were always wrong. According to Crewdson,
“asked why if [HTLV] was the cause of AIDS, he had only found antibodies
in fewer than half the AIDS patients he tested, Essex replied that his test probably
wasn’t sensitive enough.” (SF p.59) When Gallo was asked the same
question about his own study that found HTLV in only four of three dozen AIDS
patients Crewdson notes that “Gallo suggested that the virus was difficult to
find when the number of remaining T-cells was small.” (SF p.59) And
Crewdson reports that Gallo even had a Galloesque answer for why there was
virtually no AIDS in Japan where there was a great deal of HTLV: “Gallo replied
that AIDS simply hadn’t been noticed in Japan or maybe the Japanese responded
differently to HTLV than Africans or Americans.” (SF p.59) Anyone who
lived through the early days of what was called “AIDS” knows that it was kind
of hard not to notice.
Gallo’s prestidigitations were very
successful at making the media and the public think the French researchers were
barking up the same HTLV retroviral tree he was. He highhandedly went so far as
to suggest the French should actually stop working on their virus if it
wasn’t the same as HTLV. And Gallo did everything he could do to encourage
other scientists not to take the French discovery seriously. Crewdson artfully
captures Gallo constantly talking out of both sides of mouth about the
relationship—or lack of one—between the French virus and his beloved HTLV. Crewdson
reports that Gallo’s own staff had in fact done the necessary research
to determine that they were different viruses and according to Crewdson,
“Whatever Gallo was saying in public, in private he agreed with his staff.” (SF
p.63) One could always count on there being two sets of books in the abnormal
science of AIDS, especially in Gallo’s laboratory.
The French were in a vulnerable position
where Gallo was concerned because, according to Crewdson, they were afraid that
he might cut off their access to scientific publication. (SF p.71) Gallo
was a serious power broker in the world of science and that certainly should
have been more of a warning sign to the scientific community that the very
essence of AIDS science was mired in hardball politics. Gallo even had enough
power to be able to threaten the Centers for Disease Control. When the CDC
dared to complain that Gallo was not sharing his HTLV probes, according to
Crewdson, Gallo sniffily threatened to not cooperate with the organization. (SF
p.74) “There was a fight,” one scientist told Crewdson, “between the CDC and
Gallo over who was supposed to be gathering data from research. Gallo felt they
should be gathering data, and he should be doing the science.” (SF p.74)
Whatever that means. Gallo didn’t realize what a perfect match his kind of
virology actually made for the CDC’s kind of epidemiology. Scientifically speaking, it was like the mafia families of two major cities joining forces.
One crossed Gallo at one’s great peril.
According to Crewdson, when a scientist named David Purtillo began to finds
serious evidence that not a single AIDS patient in his study was positive for
HTLV, he found that Science magazine “wasn’t
interested in undercutting its high-visibility articles.” (SF p.75) When
Joseph Sonnabend, a New York AIDS doctor who was the first editor of AIDS Research,
a small journal, dared to publish the Gallo-challenging Purtillo findings,
according to Crewdson, “the publisher of AIDS Research replaced
Sonnabend with [Gallo crony] Dani Bolognesi, who promptly installed Gallo on
the journal’s editorial board.” (SF p.75) That’s how scientific
publishing worked during "Holocaust II." You scratch my back and I’ll destroy
your enemies.
As evidence piled up showing that the
French had found the so-called AIDS retrovirus, Gallo imperiously dug in his
heels for his HTLV. So did his Harvard pal Myron Essex who had spent his
formative years with his buddy Gallo just trying to convince the scientific
community that retroviruses do really cause cancer. Together they did
their best to dampen the world’s enthusiasm for the French virus as the
probable cause of AIDS. It was one of the great examples of teamwork in science.
Gallo saw his HTLV dream start to fade
when Montagnier showed up at a scientific meeting that was focused on Gallo’s
own candidate for AIDS virus. Montagnier presented evidence that patients who
were positive for the French retrovirus were not positive for Gallo’s
HTLV. (SF p.81) And even worse, according to Crewdson, he “pointed out
the similarities between LAV and the Equine Infectious Anemia Virus rather than
HTLV.” (SF p.81) And most threatening of all to Gallo’s dreams of a
Nobel Prize was the fact that Montagnier had found LAV in “63 percent of
pre-AIDS patients and 20 percent of those with AIDS but less than 2 percent of
the general population.” (SF p.81) At the meeting at which Montagnier
made his dramatic presentation, Crewdson wrote that Gallo did his best to cast
aspersions on the research, bizarrely “questioning the reality of the reverse
transcriptase activity.” (SF p.81) According to one scientist at the
meeting who is quoted by Crewdson, “[Gallo] insulted Montagnier. It was a
disgusting display, absolutely disgusting. He told him it was terrible science,
that there was no way it could be true. He ranted and raved for eight or ten
minutes.” (SF p.81) And of course, while Gallo was publicly humiliating
Montagnier, privately he was asking for more samples of the French
virus. (SF p.81)
The French discovery made it clear that
Gallo had led the whole scientific community into a retroviral cul-de-sac, but
at a later conference in Paris, he was at it again, playing the same tiresome
duplicitous game, pushing bogus HTLV while evidence was clearly accumulating
against it. Gallo could feign and bully like nobody else in the history of
science. One scientist described to Crewdson a fight Gallo had with Montagnier:
“ . . . during that fight one had the impression Montagnier was a little boy
and Gallo was a genius. Because Montagnier didn’t argue well.” (SF p.87)
Gallo wore his opposition down with over-the-top verbal displays.
Gallo changed gears from the deadender
HTLV to a virus that he could get away with calling the cause of AIDS the old
fashioned way: he stole it. The complicated manner in which that was obfuscated
and outrageously covered up makes up the main investigative feast in Crewdson’s
book. Gallo’s decade of gymnastic AIDS mendacities might have been lost to
history without the laser vision and crystal clear exposition of John Crewdson. If not for New York Native and John "Javert" Crewdson, Gallo would have gotten away with murder. Make that "genocide."
Even when Gallo’s lab was pursuing a new
virus like the one the French had, Gallo kept up the public pretense that HTLV
was the very best candidate for the cause of AIDS. His laboratory was secretly
and frantically playing a game of catch-up with the French. They had received
samples of the French virus and were not honest about what they were doing with
them. Gallo’s subordinates privately confirmed that the French virus could be
found in AIDS patients, but it would never be admitted publicly. Adding insult
to deception, because Gallo had so polluted the scientific community with his
stubborn, delusional notion that HTLV had to be the only possible cause, the
French had trouble getting their growing body of research on LAV published. Science
turned down an important paper that made it clear once and for all that the
French LAV was not the Gallo HTLV. (SF p. 98) Gallo was dismissing their
discovery with one hand and appropriating it with the other.
At a conference in Park City, Utah in late
1983, Gallo played his familiar game of asking disingenuous and disparaging
questions publicly after a Pasteur presentation on LAV. Meanwhile, Gallo
ignored doubts about his own HTLV by scientists like Jay Levy, “who wanted to
know why, if HTLV caused AIDS, AIDS patients didn’t have T-cell leukemia.” (SF
p.99) According to Crewdson, the obdurate Dr.Gallo insisted to Levy that “HTLV
itself . . . could still cause AIDS.” (SF p.99)
Luckily for the French, scientists at the
CDC, home of the "impeccable" original AIDS nosology and epidemiology, had growing doubts
themselves about HTLV, and even Myron Essex’s old protege, AIDS researcher and
retrovirus aficionado, Donald Francis, was ready to jump ship. Crewdson
captures one of many ironic moments in Holocaust II when he quotes Francis as
saying, “It had become clear . . . that we had made a very big mistake.” (SF
p.100) Unfortunately, Francis didn’t have a clue that he and his associates at
the CDC and NIH were about to make an exponentially even bigger virological
mistake that would threaten the whole world’s health.
Thanks to the fact that his staff was
working with the retrovirus foolishly supplied by the gullible French
scientists, Gallo was finally seeing some interesting numbers of AIDS patients
testing positive—and given what he was working with why wouldn’t he? After he
developed his own blood test for his purloined retrovirus, the CDC tried to
determine if the French or Gallo had the best test for detecting an AIDS case.
The Pasteur test did slightly better in a competition between the two country’s
tests and lest things be done on the up and up, according to Crewdson, Gallo
wanted the CDC to alter the results so as to reflect a better score for
Gallo’s version of the test—another typical moment in the abnormal science of
Holocaust II. To his eternal discredit, Jim Curran, the top AIDS researcher at
the CDC, actually agreed to Gallo’s
ridiculous request to alter the results. To do otherwise would have been to
commit normal science. Giving Gallo that unholy advantage was just one more
enabling act that helped Gallo become the top spokesman for the infernal
HIV/AIDS paradigm throughout "Holocaust II."
The minute that the CDC gave Gallo the
word that his test for the so-called AIDS retrovirus was as good as the Pasteur
one (or sort of as good), Gallo went into extreme Gallo mode, crowing to
the world about his supposed achievement, and even more charmingly, according
to Crewdson, he began “denigrating the work in Paris.” (SF p.109) He
told people he was “far ahead of the French.” (SF p.109)
Gallo subsequently submitted data on his
retroviral “discovery” in four papers to Science. The papers never said
where the virus actually came from because they didn’t dare. Mika Popovic, the
unlucky scientist in Gallo’s lab who did most of the bench work on the virus
Gallo stole, watched as his manuscripts about the so-called discovery of the
AIDS virus were methodically altered by Gallo. According to Crewdson, “entire
sentences, even whole paragraphs had been excised, replaced with Gallo‘s
scrawled additions. Crossed out altogether was the paragraph in which Popovic
acknowledged the Pasteur’s discovery of LAV and explained here that the French
virus was ‘described here’ as HTLV-3.” (SF p.111) From the scientific
documents that would change the world forever, Gallo had taken out any
acknowledgement of the Pasteur discovery. (SF p.111) In one of the most
notorious notations of Gallo’s whole wackadoodle career, next to a passage in
which Popovic wrote something about LAV, Gallo scribbled, “Mika, are you
crazy?” (SF p.111) (Screamed the pot to the kettle.)
One of the most important of the four
seminal Science papers contained the egregious falsehood that Gallo’s
virus, which he called HTLV-3, had been isolated from 48 patients. Gallo also
made sure, according to Crewdson, that the only reference to the French virus
in the paper “sounded as though the French had the wrong virus.” (SF p.111)
Even though Gallo had basically used LAV to “discover” HTLV-3, he kept
disingenuously insisting that LAV and HTLV-3 were different viruses. And even
though the French had provided Gallo with LAV, and Gallo’s staff knew all too
well that they were not different in the least, Gallo lied to the French when
they asked why he had not compared HTLV-3 to LAV and reported on it in the
seminal science papers. One of Gallo’s biggest lies to the French was “that
Popovic hadn’t been able to grow enough LAV to make comparisons.” (SF
p.118)
As Gallo was preparing to present the
world premiere of the so-called virus that causes AIDS he at first offered to
include the French in the announcement to the world about the “discovery” of
the virus and to cut the CDC—which had also played a role in the process—out of
the deal. He then turned around and offered to make the announcement with the
CDC and cut the French out of the deal. (SF p.119) Polyamory in the Gallo universe consisted of everyone having a chance
to screw other people with Gallo before they themselves got screwed.
A sign of Gallo’s enormous power in the
intellectually challenged world of abnormal, totalitarian AIDS science was the fact that his
“manuscripts were accepted by Science nineteen days after their
submission.” (SF p.123) A suggestion from Science that four
papers were too many got the Gallo threat that he could easily take his papers
elsewhere. (SF p.123) The original papers had needed pictures of the
virus that Gallo had supposedly discovered, and Gallo had them: they were
pictures of the French virus relabeled as Gallo’s HTLV-3. At least Gallo was
consistent.
Crewdson’s book doesn’t just focus on the
fact that Gallo’s historic AIDS papers in Science were full of purloined
credit he didn’t deserve. In terms of the thesis that much of AIDS science was
the work of pseudoscientific sloppiness, it is important to point out that
Crewdson also wrote that “An astute reader might have noticed that Gallo’s
condition for labeling a virus HTLV-3 were so ambiguous that nearly any
retrovirus, animal, or human, would have qualified.” (SF p.124) In the opposite world of abnormal science here are no rules
to keep science from becoming a big Alice-in-Wonderland mess. About the
original papers Crewdson said something that only increased the irony and
tragedy of Crewdson ultimately himself accepting the HIV/AIDS paradigm: “. . .
a perceptive reviewer might even have questioned Gallo’s claim to have found
the presumptive cause of AIDS.” (SF p.124) (If only Crewdson had jumped
in for the sake of the whole world and done with his acute journalistic skills
what a perceptive reviewer should
have done. Two frauds were passing in the night.)
A strange incident that occurred just
prior to the publication of the big four papers in Science, one that
captures Gallo in all his zany treacherousness. Gallo had voluntarily given a
European reporter copies of his forthcoming Science papers, and when the
reporter published a story about them—under the reasonable impression that he
wasn’t breaking any embargo—Gallo accused the reporter “of having stolen the
four Science manuscripts from his office while Gallo’s back was turned.”
(SF p.126)
The theft of the French virus was not just
a theft of credit from the French. It was also a theft of money in the form of
lost royalties for the tests that would be developed from the purloined virus
thought to be the cause of AIDS. Gallo’s lab had essentially pulled off an
unarmed scientific robbery; the French were destined by Gallo’s shenanigans to
lose millions of dollars. The matter was made even ethically worse (if one
believed the virus actually was the true cause of AIDS) by the fact that the test
Gallo’s people developed using the stolen virus was inferior to the test
developed by the Pasteur Institute. (SF p.128)
As previously noted, some in the American
government knew from the start that Gallo was pulling off a scientific heist.
On the eve of the announcement by HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler, NIH Director
Ed Brant received a phone call from James Curran and Donald Francis of the CDC
warning him “that Heckler was about to make a huge mistake: the French, not
Gallo, had been the first to find the cause of AIDS.” (SF p.130)
Unfortunately, the duplicitous train had left the station and the American
government’s scientific establishment was about to apply several layers of egg
to its face. (And that didn’t even involve the fact that the stolen, supposedly exogenous, retrovirus
wasn’t even the cause of AIDS.) During the April 23, 1984 announcement debacle
Gallo even went out of his way to make sure that absolutely no credit
was given to the French for their role in the discovery. As if it wasn’t absurd
enough that the Secretary of HHS was celebrating a stolen discovery, she also
confidently announced “We hope to have . . . a vaccine ready for testing in
about two years.” (SF p. 135) She seems to have been off by, well, like
forever.
The credulous media fell for the Gallo
scam, generally downplaying the French contribution and the Pasteur scientists
were appropriately apoplectic. Predictably, Gallo, according to Crewdson, “set
about expunging the evidence that he had spent two years chasing the wrong
virus. (SF p.144). Not only could Gallo do viral theft, but he was also
one of science’s greatest expungers and time travelers. He rewrote the remarks
he had given at past scientific conferences to make it look like he was on the
trail of the AIDS virus (which he called HTLV-3) all along when in actuality he
had aggressively been pushing the lost cause, HTLV. In abnormal, totalitarian science the
past is carved in sand.
After Gallo’s big splash in Science,
he often bragged about things that were not even in the papers, findings that had
actually never even been accomplished in his lab. He also violated one of the
collegial rules of science by refusing to share his viruses or cell lines with
other scientists unless they agreed to certain bizarre and highly suspect
preconditions. (SF p.149) According to Crewdson, for some scientists
“Gallo tried to impose conditions on which experiments they could perform and
which they could not.” (SF p.149) Gallo forced one scientist to sign an
agreement not to compare Gallo’s virus to other viruses. (SF p.150) One
either played by the rules of abnormal, totalitarian science or one did not play at all.
Gallo wanted to control what people said about his virus and who they shared it
with. He knew what was at stake if the truth ever came out.
Even the powerful Centers for Disease
Control could not get Gallo to cooperate by sharing his cell lines. When noises
started to be made in Paris and down in Atlanta at the CDC that Gallo had not
really discovered the “AIDS retrovirus,” Gallo went grandiosely ballistic, saying
strange things like “We started the field. We predicted AIDS.” (SF
p.153) He accused anyone who tried to tell the truth about the matter of
spreading “plot and innuendo.” (SF p.156) The husband of Flossie
Wong-Stahl, a woman who worked closely (actually, more than closely) with Gallo in his lab astutely described
Gallo and his milieu to Crewdson: “The whole business has the ethics of a used-car lot. It’s what you can get away
with. The older-style scientists are falling by the wayside. To be a success in
science these days, you need a big operation. . . . It’s become an
entrepreneurial business and Gallo’s good at that . . . He was one of the first
big-time laboratory operators.” (SF p.158) One could say that "Holocaust
II" was partly born in a used-car lot.
The world fell easily for Robert Gallo and
his stolen virus and his questionable science. According to Crewdson, Gallo
received a major honor from “the Italian-American Foundation . . . that
compared Gallo to Galileo.” (SF p.158) If that wasn’t enough, both his
boss and the future Director of the NIH would compare him to Mozart. To the
rest of the world he would be the great man who had discovered the cause of
AIDS.
When his luck did start to change and
people spoke more openly and brazenly about the virus-lifting, Gallo
predictably tried to turn the tables and actually suggested that the French had
made the mistake as a result of a contamination by his virus, which was
patently ridiculous, as Crewdson shows in his book with detailed chronology of
the actual events. All the evidence pointed to a contamination in Gallo’s
lab—at best. (SF p.162)
Unfortunately for the future scientific
credibility of the American government, Crewdson points out that “The National
Cancer Institute preferred Gallo’s version of events.” (SF p.162) It’s
interesting that the NIH uncharacteristically tried to silence Gallo when he
actually may have been inadvertently tried to tell the truth about the nature
of the real epidemic. Crewdson writes that the Director of NIH “tried to muzzle
[Gallo]” when he “speculated publicly on the risk of transmitting AIDS to women
via heterosexual contact.” (SF p.163) But, Crewdson writes, “Gallo
wouldn’t stay quiet. After Jerry Groopman and Zaki Salahuddin reported
detecting the AIDS virus in the saliva of nearly half of pre-AIDS patients,
Gallo warned the American people that direct contact with saliva ‘should be
avoided,’ setting off alarms about the safety of oral sex, water fountains, restaurant
cutlery, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.” (SF p.163) That wasn’t
exactly how the government wanted to frame the epidemiological image of the
AIDS epidemic. Very interesting, in retrospect.
Even after it was clear that HTLV-3 (as
Gallo renamed LAV) was not a member of the HTLV family of retroviruses, Gallo
stubbornly and perversely continued to promote the bogus notion. He even
published data trying to fudge the issue. (SF p.163) And as could be
expected, according to Crewdson, he continued his two-faced act: “Whatever
Gallo was saying in print, in private he was far from certain that the AIDS
virus had anything in common with the HTLVs.” (SF p.163)
One of the more bizarre things about the
so-called discovery of the AIDS virus in Gallo’s lab was the fact that early
on, according to Crewdson, “Gallo hadn’t said a word about the patient in whom
Popovic had found it.” (SF p.164) It turned out that it hadn’t even been
found in an individual patient but it had “been isolated from the T-cells of
several AIDS patients, whose cultured cells Popovic had pooled together.” (SF
p.164) As was typical of the kind of science and reporting that underlay the
HIV/AIDS paradigm, this Frankenstein of a “patient pool” was not mentioned in
the seminal, history-changing paper published in Science, the
cornerstone of the HIV/AIDS paradigm. According to Crewdson, Donald Francis of
the CDC “thought it odd still that Popovic had pooled patient material in the
first place, something Francis viewed as a certain way not to know which
patient was the source.” (SF p.164) Not really knowing where a virus had
come from was the characteristic way science was done in the opposite world of
AIDS research.
Like many of Gallo’s lies, the LAV lie was
not without its dark humor. Not only was the virus Gallo worked with the
same virus that the French had discovered, but most damning, it even turned
out originally to be from the exact same patient. ( SF p.165) A
scientist named Murray Gardner confronted Gallo about this malarkey and
according to Crewdson, Gardner said, “Bob browbeat me, in his way, for about an
hour. . . . He questioned my patriotism, He asked me, ‘Are you French or are
you American? Aren’t you an American?’” (SF p.167) If nothing else, the
pseudoscience was patriotic.
At a time when Gallo should have been
bathing in the glow of being the discoverer of the so-called AIDS virus,
according to Crewdson, “Most of his energy was being devoted to fending off
suspicions that his discovery was really somebody else’s discovery.” (SF
p.177) It was becoming clearer to the world that “the virus discovered in Paris
in 1983 was the same virus Gallo claimed to have discovered in 1984.” (SF
p.178)
Even
after the discovery issue was on its way to being resolved in the favor of the
French scientists, Gallo, without one single qualm, bizarrely insisted in
retaining his HTLV-3 name for the virus. It mattered not to Gallo that the
virus was obviously not a member of the HTLV family. And just as
absurdly, he performed all kinds of silly mental acrobatics to try and explain
why his virus was exactly like the French virus, suggesting that his virus came
from someone who must have gotten infected at the same place and the same time
as the French AIDS victim from whom the French had isolated their virus.
According to Crewdson, “The French dismissed Gallo’s explanation as balderdash.
(SF p. 180)
What was it like to be a part of the Gallo
team during those heady days when the French virus was stolen and the
pseudoscientific foundation of "Holocaust II" was laid down? Omar Sattaur, a
journalist who covered Gallo for the publication New Scientist,
recounted to Crewdson that one of Gallo’s subordinates told him “that everybody
in Gallo’s lab felt paranoid in some way and that it was quite an awful place
to work. Because it was very high-pressure and he ran it like an autocrat. They
were his minions.” (SF p.183) Nobody messed with Captain Hook.
The New Scientist reporter was one
of the first people to nail the details of the Gallo theft in print. The piece
resulted in one of Gallo’s biggest critics, Oxford scientist Abraham Karpas
referring to the affair as “Gallogate.” (SF p.184) Karpas was on the
money in more ways than he realized. But the real “Gallogate” went way beyond
the stealing of a retrovirus. Unbeknownst to Karpas and Sattaur, it was ultimately
about something that would cause a potential consequences for every member of
the human race. Gallo’s world class narcissism manifest itself in the fact that
he told Sattaur that he was of a mind to have the government start a libel
action against him. What is even more absurd is that given the government’s
bizarre (and not fully-fathomed in Crewdson’s book) relationship with Gallo,
one could almost imagine that actually happening. Sattaur astutely captured the
Gallo psyche when he said to Crewdson, “Gallo has this ability to just absorb
everything . . . He’s wonderful at it. He’s so good at manipulating things that
I’m pretty sure that unconsciously he’s doing it most of the time. If you talk
to him about other people’s work, he’ll say, ‘Well, he worked in my lab for six
weeks. I taught him everything he knew.’ He’s a real megalomaniac.” (SF
p.185) There was something uncanny about Gallo that, unfortunately, seemed to
bemuse people at the same time that it disturbed them, so that even some of the
most sober minds that came into his outrageous orbit somehow missed that fact
that they were in the presence of a very unique kind of monster, a human whose
actions and statements, from his victim’s and history’s point of view, heralded
from a psychic netherworld located somewhere in the vortex of clownishness,
sociopathy and downright evil. Once can’t help but speculate that because the
marginalized people whose lives hung in the balance were “gay,”—or “very gay,”
as the CDC's James Curran would say—that extreme moral outrage on the part of most
heterosexual scientists (and some gay ones too, unfortunately) often took a
vacation in Gallo’s presence. Gallo wasn’t playing his infernal games with
breast cancer, prostate cancer, or heart disease. No matter what lip service
people gave to broaden the perceived social spectrum of this particular
disease, from the extant scientific community’s perspective (and the public’s) it
was gay through and through.
As previously pointed out, Gallo’s crime against the
French was not just the intangible one of falsely claiming primacy of
discovery. The theft was also a major financial crime in that he was also
stealing the Pasteur’s rightful royalties from the test for the so-called AIDS
retrovirus. The American government’s patents had all been hurriedly filed
under the false pretenses that Gallo had created them with a virus that he had
actually discovered. And to make matters even crazier, in terms of testing for
the retrovirus virus that was now considered to be the cause of AIDS, his
fraud-based test didn’t even work as well as the French test. (SF.
p.188) Gallo’s rushed filing for the AIDS test patent, according to Crewdson,
“had been approved in near-record time,” (SF p.191) another indication
that the government was in bed with Gallo. Crewdson reported that “The French
application had fallen between the cracks, and nobody at the patent office
seemed to have noticed.” (SF p.192)
One of the
zanier details of the Gallo biography is the fact that he had a baby with one
of the married scientists who worked with him, Flossie-Wong Stahl, which was
awkward for the rest of his staff—and for Wong-Stahl’s husband. According to
Crewdson, the messy affair resulted in Gallo “being put in the hands of a
psychiatrist for a while.” (SF p.194) In terms of Gallo’s impact on the
world, it may be a shame that it was only for “a while.” (The catastrophic HHV-6 pandemic might have been nipped in the bud if the whole Gallo lab had been put
in the hands of a psychiatrist.)
When journalists all over the world
started to wake up to the fact that Gallo had stolen credit for discovering the
AIDS virus, Gallo became a Whirling Dervish. One science reporter told Crewdson
that “Bob Gallo would write to every journalist in the world who would publish
an article that wouldn’t be completely in favor with his point of view. He
would explode. He would immediately conclude that the journalist who had
written the article that was not in favor of his genius was prejudiced, was
poorly informed, was a friend of Pasteur or something like that.” (SF
p.196)
Ever proactive, Gallo went to Paris and
got Jean Claude Chermann, (one of the members of the Pasteur’s LAV team) drunk
and had him sign a phony, Gallo-friendly re-write of the history of the
discovery of the so-called AIDS virus. (SF p.198) According to Crewdson,
“Gallo promised the document would never see the light of the day. Back in the
United States, however, Gallo sent a copy to Jim Weingarten [the Director of
NIH].” (SF p.198) And when the incorrigible Gallo sent documents to a
French journalist in order to bolster his claims that he had not stolen the
virus from the French, he included an old letter from Chermann which had been
doctored in classic Gallo style. Chermann happened to see the doctored letter
and according to Crewdson, “When Chermann compared the letter sent by Gallo to
the original in his files, he saw that someone had cut out his signature and
posted it at the end of the third paragraph, transforming what had been a
scathing two-page critique of Gallo’s behavior into a one-page testimonial. (SF
p.199) This is not exactly what Thomas Kuhn would call "normal science."
It will forever be a dark blemish on the
integrity of the top people in the American government’s scientific establishment that
the Health and Human Services elite went to bat for this scientific shyster.
The Pasteur Institute could not believe the institutional support that the
Gallo was getting, but now they were not about to be intimidated. They were ready
to sue their way to the truth about the discovery in the American courts and to
secure their just rewards from the AIDS test patent. What is really disturbing
in the Crewdson account of the affair is that the government gradually did
start to realize that Gallo’s discovery claim was bogus, but the authorities
shamefully continued to push on with Gallo‘s defense. And, in keeping with the
Gallo habit of leaving no supportive deed unpunished, he turned around and
blamed the American government itself for filing the patent that had enriched
him and had enhanced his reputation. Even more outrageous was the fact that he
was telling people that he made no money from the patent, about which one
government official said to Crewdson, “Well I didn’t see him turn his checks
down when they came to him.” (SF p.204) According to Crewdson, “ . . .
with the AIDS test earning millions—both Gallo and Popovic qualified for the
maximum payment—$100,000 a year during the lifetime of the patent, a total of
$1.5 million a piece over fifteen years. The AIDS test had made them
millionaires.”(SF p.278)
One of the most stunning revelations in
Crewdson’s book, as we have already pointed out, is that Gallo’s lab wasn’t
just mendacious, but at the same time it also seems to have been surprisingly
sloppy and disorganized which is just what one wants to hear about the place
that helped lay down the foundation of the AIDS paradigm. The Pasteur
Institute, on the other hand, (at least on the surface) seems to have been a
model of fastidiousness. Crewdson describes their record keeping: “Pasteur
scientists kept the records of their experiments in the European style, in
sequential hardbound volumes that made it impossible to insert or remove pages
of what had transpired in their labs.” (SF p.206) In the opposite world
of Gallo’s lab, Mika Popovic, who did much of the work on the discovery or
rediscovery of the AIDS virus “didn’t have any notebooks.” (SF p.206) Gallo is quoted as saying, about Popovic’s record keeping, “We
were finding stuff in drawers, pieces of paper . . . I mean we pulled out stuff
that Mika didn’t even know he had. And there it was. You know, old stuff, old
archaic papers with scribbles on them.” (SF p.206) Crewdson reported
that “the scraps proved to be the only records Popovic could produce of what
the government now counted a landmark achievement.” (SF p.206) Given
what the landmark “achievement” would actually turn out to be, it shouldn’t
surprise anyone that it was arrived at in such a ramshackle “scientific” style.
Popovic was quite generous with his scraps of paper once under investigation.
According to Crewdson, when investigators came to look at his records he said
“Take whatever I have. I don’t want to go to jail.” (SF p.207)
It was convenient for Popovic’s records to
be that sloppy because the Humpty-Dumpty pieces of evidence almost made it impossible
to reconstruct a credible narrative of exactly how Gallo had succeeded in using
the French virus to pretend he had discovered his own. (Lesson to fraudlent scientists everywhere: sloppiness creates plausible deniability.) But Crewdson, the master
detective, worked his way patiently though the devious trails of disorganized
paper to make Gallo’s theft of credit for the discovery painfully obvious. In
the process, Crewdson found evidence that Gallo altered memos to reflect
fraudulent dates for when important experiments were done. (SF p.208)
Gallo stonewalled when Health and Human
Services tried to find out what happened in his laboratory in order to put
together a defense for Gallo’s claims in court. As Gallo tried to rewrite the
past, Crewdson reports that all kinds of discrepancies emerged. There was a
clear record that he had been pursuing HTLV-1 as the cause in the period that
he now was disingenuously trying to convince the world that he was actually
pursuing HTLV-3, which of course turned out to be the LAV which the French had
provided his lab with.
The smoking gun moment that destroyed
Gallo’s credibility for all eternity came when it was discovered that the
so-called AIDS virus was incredibly changeable and every isolate was
dramatically different from every other isolate. When it was discovered that
there was virtually no difference between Gallo’s isolate of HTLV-3 and
the French isolate of LAV, it was obvious that Gallo had indeed been working
with the Pasteur’s isolate, not an isolate that he had discovered.
As Gallo’s luck would have it, his test
for the AIDS virus, which was based on the stolen French virus, was not very
reliable. The French test was supposedly much better but the Gallo test had won
the licensing race politically and was often failing to detect blood that was
supposedly infected. Gallo’s test not only had a high rate of false negatives,
but it also had false positives. Gallo’s incompetent test ended up ruining a
number of people’s lives. (SF p. 228) (Of course the real problem with
the testing for the retrovirus by either the French or American test was that
it begged the larger theoretical question of whether either test was really the
test for the true cause of so-called AIDS.)
Gallo exceeded his usual standard for
craziness in the fight over the name of the virus he had stolen from the
French. How dare the French want to name the virus they discovered! According
to Crewdson, “When Gallo discovered the French were using the term LAV alone,
he sent Montagnier a peevish letter.” (SF p. 235) In the end the French
were only half-screwed when the Gallo name of HTLV-3 did not prevail and the
virus was labeled “Human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.” (SF p.236) The
fact that the new name was a kind of Orwellian way of disingenuously
establishing that the virus was the cause of AIDS without the inconvenience of
further debate was lost on most people. The lesson of this episode of abnormal, totalitaran
science is that if you want to prove that a virus is the cause of a disease,
just give it a name that implies that it is the cause. With “Human
immunodeficiency virus or HIV” that mission was brilliantly accomplished. A fun
bit of trivia about the voting on the name change is that the only person to
support Gallo’s preference of HTLV-3 was—guess who?—Myron Essex. (SF.
p.236) (The name of the virus was "Harvarded" into history.)
One of the most embarrassing moments in
the Gallo affair was the point at which it was discovered that the photographs
that Gallo’s lab had submitted to Science as being photos of their
virus turned out to actually be photos of the French virus. According to
Crewdson, “the revelation dealt a major blow to the [National Cancer
Institute’s] credibility. (SF p.240) Gallo himself had a copy of the
photo of the purloined virus in a framed collage on his office wall and
Crewdson reports that “When Gallo found out the virus in the collage was LAV,
Salahuddin [his subordinate] recalled ‘he took it down from the wall and threw
it on the floor, smashing glass everywhere.’” (SF p.241) One can only
assume that like every other Gallo mess, someone else in his lab cleaned it up.
The fake photo caper was one of the things that according to Crewdson, helped
turn Gallo’s boss, Vince DeVita, against him. Crewdson wrote that “DeVita was
determined that Gallo would correct the record.” (SF p.241)
What is mind-boggling about Gallo is that
even while under investigation for the LAV fraud, he and his staff still
continued to churn out more fraud. A letter from the Gallo folks published in Nature
in May of 1986, meant to exonerate Gallo, contained brand new fibs. Gallo
claimed to have isolated HTLV-3 from a patient he hadn’t even been looking for
the virus in at the time that was clearly impossible because it was the same
period in which all the evidence showed he was still obsessed with HTLV-1.
Gallo reconstructed a fictional past in the letter and included a picture that
had just happened to have both HTLV-1 and LAV/HTLV-3 in it. According to
Crewdson, he pretended to have discovered HTLV-3 earlier than he really did
just by the happenstance of it being in the same photo. (SF p.244) One
could call it a classic Gallo scientific discovery. Once again it was as if Gallo had a
time machine that allowed him to go back into the past and fashion history more to his liking.
Crewdson describes NCI scientist Berge Hampar’s reaction to the new photo caper
that appeared in Nature: “ ‘When we saw Nature, we laughed,’
Hampar said. ‘We said, “Is this the only photograph they got? They’re staking
all their claims on one photograph with two particles in it.” That’s when I
said to myself, ‘These people are crazy.’”(SF p.245) It’s too bad that
the NCI scientist didn’t do more than just say truthful things to himself
because these crazy people helped give us "Holocaust II."
Gallo still wouldn’t back down in the
spring of 1986 when, at an AIDS conference, according to Crewdson, he referred
to “the Pasteur’s contribution to the search for the cause of AIDS as
inconsequential.” (SF p.246) The Pasteur scientists gave as good as the
got. One of their lawyers, Jim Swire, according to Crewdson, “upped the ante by
accusing someone in Gallo’s lab of having stolen LAV. ‘They simply studied it,’
Swire said ‘concluded we were correct, renamed it, and claimed it as their
own.’” (SF p.247) Otherwise known as the classic Gallo Hokey Pokey.
The person in Gallo’s lab who would
ultimately get hung out to dry for the handling of the fake discovery of
HTLV-3, Mika Popovic, was eager to give investigators the impression that if
anything untoward had happened, it was just an innocent mix-up. But according
to Crewdson, the French were just not having any of that. (SF p.248) The
bottom line for the French was that they wanted their “share of the patent
royalties.”(SF p.249) After all, Gallo had used their supposedly exogenous retrrovirus to make his lousy test.
Things got even more sinister in this
story when the lawyer for the Pasteur Institute used the Freedom of Information
Act to try and obtain documents from Gallo’s lab that would support the French
case against Gallo’s claims. According to Crewdson, “the memos that would have
been most helpful to the Pasteur’s case—and most detrimental to the
government’s—were withheld, in some cases without any indication that they even
existed.” (SF p.259) One of the withheld documents which Crewdson
ultimately obtained, made it clear that Gallo had lied about when he had
isolates of his so-called AIDS virus. (SF p.260) According to Crewdson,
the most damning document that was withheld was a memo from Gallo about growing
the French virus at a time that he later insisted he had not been growing
it. (SF p.260) The only documents that seem to have been withheld
were ones that supported the unavoidable conclusion, that Gallo was one of
science’s greatest pathological liars.
Joanne Belk, the government’s person in
charge of providing the documents requested under the Freedom of Information
Act, described her interaction with Gallo to Crewdson: “I didn’t know how rude
he was . . . . This man called me and started blasting me on the phone. ‘Who
the hell do you think you are?’ He was terribly profane. Nobody ever talked to
me like that. That was my introduction to this so-called eminent scientist.” (SF
p.260) Gallo was totally uncooperative. Interestingly, in terms of the basic
quality of Gallo’s science, Belk’s overall impression of his lab from a visit
was that it was “impressively messy.” (SF p.261) When Gallo finally did
comply with the F.O.I.A. request, Belk got a call that she could pick them up
at “Biotech Research laboratories in Rockville which Beck thought surpassingly
odd.” (SF p.262) One wonders, like so many other parts of this sometimes
mysterious story, what was that about?
The documents that were turned over to
Belk were very much in the Gallo lab’s signature style. According to Crewdson,
“. . . none of Popovic’s pages was signed. Neither were any of the pages
evidently kept by others in Gallo’s lab.’ (SF p.262) Most shockingly
considering his pivotal role in creating the scientific paradigm at the heart
of "Holocaust II," “Popovic’s notes, written in an unmistakable middle-European
hand, resembled a diary or a journal, filled with retrospective observations
and abbreviated descriptions of each day’s work, but scarcely any experimental
protocols or new data.” (SF p.262) The lawyer for the Pasteur Institute
is quoted by Crewdson as saying that the notes looked like they had been “shuffled
like a deck of cards,” and when he “tried to assemble the notes in
chronological order, he found that the follow-up results for one experiment
were dated three weeks before the experiment.” (SF p.262) This was the
orderliness of the abnormal, totalitarian science of HIV/AIDS at its very best. According to
Crewdson, one Popovic page “dated Jan 19, 1984 was continued on a page Nov 7,
1983.” (SF p.262) The Mad Hatter would have been at home in a white coat
at a workbench in this laboratory. Best of all, according to Crewdson, “Several
of Popovic’s pages weren’t dated at all.” (SF p.262) As was typical for
a laboratory skilled at rewriting the past, Crewdson reports that several of
the Popovic pages “were whited out.” and “In a sequential log of laboratory
specimens, the year ‘84’ had been crossed out and replaced by ‘83.’” (SF
p.262) That describes what they found, but according to Crewdson, once again
the scarier thing was what the lawyers did not find: “In the notes that
did exist, Swire and Weinberg could find no support for many of the experiments
described in Popovic’s Science article.” (SF p.262) Swire could
find no evidence of the isolation of the so-called virus from patients that
Gallo had written about in his letter to Nature which was meant to
exculpate him. (SF p.262) Most importantly, in terms of the French
lawsuit, important documents reflecting the Gallo lab’s work with the French
retrovirus were missing, and one of Gallo’s subordinates told Crewdson that the
staff had been told to leave them out. Crewdson wrote that “to Swire, it
looked as if somebody had systematically tried to replace the evidence of
Popovic’s work with LAV [the French virus] with something that would appear
innocuous to the Pasteur’s lawyers.” (SF p.265) There was also evidence
that the French virus had gone through a process of renaming in the documents in
order to obscure the origin of the virus the Gallo lab worked with. (SF
p.265)
None of this came as a surprise to Gallo’s
close observer and arch enemy in England, scientist Abraham Karpas, who watched
all of this unfold in an “I told you so” mode. He told Crewdson, “Dr. Gallo
still believes that in this age of communication and science he can get away
with not only saying, but even writing, that black is white and vice versa.” (SF
p.269) If only people like Karpas, who seemed to astutely recognize that Gallo
lived psychologically in some kind of scientific opposite world, had gone a
step or two further and realized that when Gallo said that HIV was the
indisputable cause of AIDS that “killed like a truck,” he was also saying
something akin to “black is white and vice versa.”
As the noose tightened, Gallo went into
advanced paranoia, suggesting that the lawyer for the French was “hiring people
to come to restaurants to sit where I go to eat, to try and hear what I say.” (SF
p.271) Crewdson quotes one rant that makes Gallo sound like he had completely
lost it: “I look at the French capitalizing on their food industry from some
places where my ancestors came from . . . I think they do great in getting
credit for nothing half the time, more than any people I’ve ever seen. That’s
the bias I would have against France . . . They helped us get into Vietnam.” (SF
p.273)
One of the more revealing Freudian moments
in Crewdson’s portrait occurs when he quotes Gallo telling the editors of Nature
in an unpublished interview that Montagnier “hasn’t a single collaborator left,
because no one trusts him. I find him extremely political, always not sure what
he believes. People who are full of distrust and see the world scheming to
screw them. That’s the way I look at the guy . . . Montagnier’s an example of a
small guy who stumbled into shit. And he got famous. More than he deserves. He
can’t handle it, sees everybody as plotting against him.” (SF p.273)
This from the most paranoid man in science, the man who was always accusing
everyone of being out to get him. The real tragedy of "Holocaust II" was
that the world was not and is not out to get him. At least not yet.
In the unpublished Nature interview, Gallo contradicted things that had been published in that very
publication. According to Crewdson, “Nature had previously assured its
readers that Gallo had grown LAV for one week only and in small quantity. Now
Gallo admitted that LAV had grown for at least three months and there had been
plenty of virus.” (SF p.275) The fact that this vital information was
never published is consistent with what we have said about the manner in which
information is managed in the world of abnormal, totalitarian science. Crewdson writes, “Had
the Gallo interview been reported, it would have dramatically changed the face
of the dispute with Pasteur. But Nature never published a word of what
Gallo had said—or anything else about its investigation.” (SF p.275)
Gallo could even count on international protection for his kind of science.
As the Gallo dispute with the Pasteur
Institute got more cantankerous, the scientific community began to fear the
collateral damage it was doing to the image of science itself. Legendary scientist Jonas
Salk sought to lower the temperature of the conflict and according to Crewdson,
he “spent the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987 shuttling between Robert
Gallo and Luc Montagnier in search of a shared version of history.” (SF
p.293) These scientists seem to have had a very abnormal idea of what history
actually is. It is not the difference you split between two warring scientists,
especially when one of the scientists is a pathological liar. Eventually,
according to Crewdson, “Jonas Salk had nearly given up hope of working out a
history acceptable to both Gallo and Montagnier. ‘Insanity afloat,’ was the way
Salk described the process to Don Francis.” (SF p.295) “Insanity
afloat,” unbeknownst to Jonas Salk, was the best way to describe the all of the
science and epidemiology of "Holocaust II."
Eventually, worn down, Montagnier stupidly
agreed to a publication of a joint chronology of the discovery of the so-called
AIDS virus with Gallo in Nature. As is typical of abnormal, totalitarian science, it
was published without any peer review which, according to Crewdson, “may
explain why it contains a number of factual mistakes, why several names were
misspelled and why portions of the text read as if they had been translated
from Chinese.” (SF p.296) And Crewdson notes that the chronology’s
preamble began with a real mutually-agreed-upon whopper: “Both sides wish it
known that from the beginning there has been a spirit of scientific cooperation
and a free exchange of ideas, biological materials and personnel between Dr.
Gallo’s and Dr. Montagnier’s laboratories. The spirit has never ceased despite
the legal problems and will be the basis of a renewed mutual cooperation in the
future.” (SF p.296) Beyond enjoying the hilarious “WTF” absurdity of this
big lie one also starts wondering about the integrity of the French discoverers
of the so-called AIDS virus. Note to future historians: Gallo apparently wasn’t
the only one willing to cut corners.
Crewdson reports that despite whatever
peace Gallo got from the pile of revisionist lies published in Nature,
he was soon disturbed by a new investigative piece in New Scientist written
by Steve Conner. The article began, “In the war against AIDS scientific truth
was among the first casualties. No one listened when Luc Montagnier at the
Pasteur Institute in Paris said that he had found the virus that causes AIDS.
Scientific journals and scientists preferred to hear what Gallo was saying from
The National Cancer Institute in the U.S.” (SF p.298) The article
included Gallo’s photos which had been misrepresented as HTLV-3 as well as the
accusation that Gallo’s outrageously dishonest behavior had cost many lives.
Gallo’s protectors didn’t waste time coming to his rescue. Crewdson reported
that one of Gallo’s cronies, Dani Bolognesi, wrote a letter to his colleagues
urging them to respond to the article. (SF p.299) And even the Reagan
administration got involved in trying to get the French AIDS officials to join
Health and Human Services in condemning the article, even though, as Crewdson
points out, “no one could say what inaccuracies Connor’s article contained.” (SF
p.299) Such awesome power can only make one wonder what Gallo had on the
government that made the authorities so ready and willing to always come to his
rescue.
When a settlement agreement was finally
signed by the French—so that they could at least get their royalties for the
AIDS test—they had to agree to renounce “any statements, press releases,
charges, allegations or other published or unpublished utterances that overtly
or by influence indicated any improper, illegal, unethical or other such
conduct or practice by any scientists employed by HHS, NIH, or NCI.” (SF
p.299) The royalties the French would receive had officially become hush money.
Crewdson notes that, “With the stroke of a pen, the accusations and contentions
of the past two years had been erased.” (SF p.299) More importantly for
the larger issue and the real history of Holocaust II, the French agreed not
to tell the whole truth about the history of AIDS, again making them in
some ways not all that different from their American counterpart.
In the Gallo tradition of biting the hand
that had saved him, Gallo, according to Crewdson, threatened the White House if
they dared to try and take any credit for the mendacious agreement. (SF
p.300) Who the hell did the American government think it was? After the
bizarre, egregiously dishonest agreement with the French was signed, in a
statement that should have made everyone who died of AIDS roll over in their
graves, Gallo said, according to Crewdson, “Now, instead of being distracted by
all the legal business, I’ll be able to return full time to trying to do
something about this disease.” (SF p.301) In other words, the bad luck
of the gay community (and the black community) was about to get much worse.
The agreement rankled the Pasteur team who
felt that French politicians like President Chirac who had put pressure on
Pasteur to sign the agreement had betrayed them. According to Crewdson,
“Jean-Claude Chermann couldn’t comprehend why someone who had chased the wrong
virus for so many months was now being anointed in the press as the
co-discoverer of the right virus.” (SF p.302) Of course the whole
situation was even wackier than Monsieur Chermann realized.
One of the absolute worst things that
happened to the world as a result of the Gallo crime was that Gallo became the
go-to spokesperson for AIDS science. According to Crewdson, “The settlement not
withstanding, the newspapers and magazines continued to laud Gallo as the
discoverer of the AIDS virus while rarely mentioning Montagnier” and “whatever
Gallo said was likely to make news.” (SF p.310) He had become the
spokes-scientist for AIDS based on false pretenses. Even David Remnick, The
Washington Post reporter who would
years later become the editor of The New Yorker, had a warm shoulder for
Gallo to whine on: Gallo complained to him that the settlement with the French
had failed to end the “accusations” and “hatred” from some of his scientific
colleagues. (SF p.310) In a hyper-ironic candid confession, Gallo said
to Remnick, “I’m telling you, there are days when I wake up in the morning and
feel like the Archangel Gabriel. By the time I go to bed at night, I feel like
Lucifer. What’s going on? Please tell me why they do this to me. Why do they
say these terrible things about me? Do you know? Do you?” (SF p.310) Is
it possible that deep down Gallo may have known himself that the questionable
science of the HIV/AIDS paradigm was crafted in part by a Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde?
Gallo’s propensity for boiler plate
homophobia kicked in a bit when Randy Shilts’s book, And the Band Played On came
out. Crewdson quotes Gallo as saying, “It never ceases to me to be a source of
great wonder . . . How people such as a gay young man on the West Coast think
they know more when they’re stimulated [sic] by the same two people over and
over again. Namely Don Francis and what I would regard as a psychotic who lives
in Cambridge.” (SF p.311) In the heterosexist world of abnormal,
totalitarian, "homodemiological" science that characterized AIDS, there was nothing more
threatening than a "stimulated" gay reporter, especially one who had been
"stimulated" by a psychotic. As for Gallo’s ludicrous charge of psychosis clearly
directed at his critic Abraham Karpas who was at Oxford, well, let's just say that science's largest glass house had rocks flying in every direction.
Gallo was so angry at the things that
Randy Shilts quoted the CDC’s Donald Francis saying about him that he penned a
letter of retraction and he demanded Francis sign it. He told Francis that if
he didn’t (according to Crewdson), he had a “plan of action against Don
Francis, which included evidence like letters and tape recordings, that would
show financial impropriety in Francis’s relationship with Randy Shilts.” (SF
p.313) One wonders: What, no gay sex? But wait. According to Crewdson, he also
threatened to expose things from Don Francis’s personal life. (SF p.313)
Gallo was the J.Edgar Hoover of science with a real or imagined dossier on
everyone. The long arms of this vindictive scientist are reflected in the fact
that, according to Crewdson, “When it became clear Francis had no intention of
signing Gallo’s letter, word reached Berkeley [where he was happily working]
that he was being transferred back to CDC headquarters in Atlanta—to work not
on AIDS, but on tuberculosis.” (SF p.313) It was the career equivalent
of sleeping with the fishes.
Eventually, even Gallo’s boss, Vince
DeVita, tired of his antics. He told Crewdson, “there was always some crisis
with Bob Gallo . . . He has an arrogance about him, that he felt he could talk
to you and persuade you to his way of thinking. And he almost always failed.” (SF
p.314) Crewdson reports that Gallo, as per usual, refused to share his “AIDS” viruses
and his cell lines which prompted people like Nobel Laureate David Baltimore to
join another scientist, Howard Temin, “in worrying that Bob’s way of handling
himself does significant harm to both himself and to the national AIDS effort.”
(SF p.310) Baltimore and Temin were only aware of the tip of the
iceberg. (Of course Baltimore himself wasn’t exactly the Mother Teresa of science.)
Gallo exhibited the censorious style
typical of abnormal, totalitarian science when a book which was critical of him
by Michael Koch was published in Europe. Koch’s book contained entertaining
sentences about Gallo like, “He was so fond of his own ideas that he saw
evidence where there was no evidence.” (SF p.320) Koch in due course got
the Gallo treatment. According to Crewdson, when Koch ran into Gallo at a
scientific conference, Gallo told him, “Here is a five-step program to destroy
you. You, your job, your position, your damned Carnegie Institute in
Stockholm.” (SF p.320) One thing you could say about Gallo is that even
his rants had power points. (SF 320) One thing Gallo said about
Koch underlines the danger of ceding absolute power to scientific elites.
According to Crewdson, Gallo insisted “I do not feel he was qualified to write
such a book. Moreover, Koch has no experience in retrovirology . . .” (SF
p.321) Perhaps the only person qualified to write about Robert Gallo was Myron
Essex or Gallo himself.
After Gallo’s administrative assistant,
Howard Streicher, wrote a threatening letter to Cambridge University Press, the
firm that was going to publish the English language edition of the Koch book
which had been first published in Germany, the book was cancelled. Streicher
wrote in his letter that the book was “both maliciously damaging and likely to
be scientifically, historically and medically unsound.” (SF p.322)
Translation: the book told the truth.
On the heels of the settlement with the
French, a new Gallo scandal emerged. It turned out that the cell line Gallo’s
lab had supposedly created to grow the stolen French AIDS virus was also
basically, well, stolen. Gallo had used his familiar modus operandi; he
just changed the name of the cell line which had actually been created by a scientist
named Adi Gardner and—Presto! Chango!—it was Gallo’s. According to Crewdson,
“When Gazdar told a Public Health Service lawyer he thought Gallo and Popovic
had appropriated his discovery, he was advised not to pursue the matter. (SF
p.333) Some scientists are said to have green thumbs because they are so good
at growing things like viruses and creating cell lines. Gallo didn’t need a
green thumb. He had sticky fingers.
The idea that this character seriously
thought he would win a Nobel Prize by operating in the manner he did challenges
all definitions of sanity. Scientist Sam Waksal (who went to jail for the
insider trading financial scandal that involved Martha Stewart) described a
special night with Gallo in which “Gallo was drunk, and he had a tear in his
eye, and he said, ‘You know, I would do anything—anything—to win the Nobel Prize.’
I always thought it was the most telling thing about him. Because in the world
of science the goal is the pleasantry of the discovery and he could never find
as much satisfaction in the discovery as he could in the limelight.” (SF
p.336)
There was still more public humiliation in
store for Gallo when sophisticated genetic analysis of Gallo’s so-called HTLV-3
made it painfully, embarrassingly clear that it was LAV and that whatever
happened in terms of contamination or theft, it had definitely all happened
in Gallo’s lab. (SF p.341) And then the darkest moment of Gallo’s
travails happened on November 19, 1989 when John Crewdson’s 55,000 word piece
with all the details of his pseudo-discovery of the AIDS virus was published in
The Chicago Tribune. The piece’s conclusion was that “What happened in
Robert Gallo’s lab during the winter of 1983-84 is a mystery that may never be
solved. But the evidence is compelling that it was either an accident or a
theft.” (SF p.343) The Chicago Tribune piece aired all of Gallo’s
dirty laundry, exposing him making bogus claim after bogus claim; it showed him
perpetually rewriting history, and the article displayed his
stealing-and-renaming habit as well as his penchant for deliberately altering
scientific documents. As was typical of this master double-talker, according to
Crewdson, in an interview about The Chicago Tribune piece,
“Though [Gallo] claimed not to have read the Tribune, Gallo nonetheless
took umbrage at a number of the quotes it contained.” (SF p.344) What
Crewdson had done in his amazing Tribune piece (and subsequently in his
book) was to show the dark side of science: “The reality that scientists often
engaged in the same kind of back stabbing and throat-cutting as politicians and
businessmen had remained behind laboratory doors.”(SF p.347)
As Congress began to wake up to the
general issue of fraud in science, the NIH had been guilt-tripped into creating
“a new agency, the Office of Scientific Integrity” which was responsible for
“investigating and deciding cases of suspected plagiarism, falsification, or
other scientific misconduct.” (SF p.349) In other words, all the dishes
that could be found in the Gallo buffet. After reading the Crewdson article on
Gallo, the acting director of the new Office of Scientific Integrity decided
that the Gallo affair deserved to be investigated.” (SF p.351)
Even as the Gallo investigation was
getting underway, he was out in the public serving up more scientific baloney.
According to Crewdson, he “was at Fordham University in the Bronx where he
announced a breakthrough discovery—a cure for Kaposi’s sarcoma, the malignant
lesions that account for about one in five deaths among AIDS patients.” (SF
p.354) The only problem, according to Crewdson, was that “Gallo hadn’t
published any such results, and he hadn’t presented any data at Fordham to back
up his claims.” (SF p.354) In other words, for Gallo it was business as
usual. When a desperate AIDS patient contacted one of the scientists in Gallo’s
lab he was treated badly. The man subsequently wrote a letter to the scientist
and Crewdson quotes it: “You have probably forgotten our conversation . . . But
I have not and I will not forget it in a long time. I have never in my life
been talked to in such a demeaning, condescending, rude and abrupt manner by
anyone let alone an alleged health care professional on the public payroll. I
am dying from AIDS and in particular Kaposi’s sarcoma . . . Which is what
motivated me to call Dr. Gallo’s office in the first place . . . How cruel it
is to publicly talk about a cure and then refuse the information to the
public.” (SF p.354) Demeaning? Condescending? Rude? Cruel? What the man
with AIDS tragically didn’t realize was that the very epidemiological paradigm
he was trapped in (and probably died in) was all of that and more. When Gallo’s
boss heard about the exchange, he ordered Gallo to apologize to the man, and,
according to Crewdson, “to explain that he didn’t have a cure for Kaposi’s
sarcoma after all.” (SF p.354) It was one of the few times that being
Robert Gallo didn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry.
As the full-scale investigation of the
Gallo affair by the Office of Science Integrity got under way, Gallo was fully
cooperative. Not. Crewdson reports that “It had been early January of 1990 when
Suzanne Hadley requested the originals of the Gallo lab’s notebooks, but by
mid-March she still didn’t have them.” (SF p.355)
Because of both Crewdson’s Tribune
piece and the OSI investigation, Monagnier felt emboldened to ignore the
agreement to “ferme la bouche” and he admitted to Le Monde that there
was a real possibility that Gallo had stolen LAV. (SF p.356) Gallo was
furious and once again ran to the sympathetic Washington Post with his
bogus version of the story. (SF p.357) (This was clearly not the same
paper it had been during the Woodward and Bernstein era.) Gallo also hired a
P.R. firm and a lawyer but, according to Crewdson, told his staff that “It should
not be obvious that we are using a P.R. firm or a lawyer.” (SF p.358)
Abnormal science can not be conducted without a P.R. firm and a lawyer that
agree to keep a low profile.
The list of property crimes committed by
Gallo’s gang expanded while he was under investigation by OSI when it was
discovered that Zaki Salahuddin, the Gallo subordinate who was supposedly the
co-discoverer of HBLV (eventually called HHV-6) had set up a company called
PanData in order to funnel money into his own bank account by selling medical
supplies to the National Cancer Institute—supplies which he himself ordered. (SF
p.322) (At least he wasn’t out stealing viruses, although, when the whole story of HHV-6 is told, that might not exactly be the case.) According to Crewdson,
Congress got wind of the scam and John Dingel eventually called it “‘a gross
conflict of interest . . . on the part of a prominent AIDS researcher at the
National Institutes of Health’ who had hidden his ‘improper financial interest
in a biomedical firm doing substantial business with his own laboratory at
NIH.’” (SF p.362) According to Crewdson, Gallo told the General
Accounting Office that he knew about the Salahuddin company only three months
before the investigation, but he told The Washington Post he had
known about it for a year. (SF p.362) Crewdson reports that Salahuddin
was also selling viruses and cell lines derived from Gallo’s lab. One could say
that abnormal science and abnormal commerce are bosom buddies.
Salahuddin was ultimately investigated by
a Grand Jury. During his tribulations, Salahuddin said an all too true and
disturbing thing about Gallo, “Here’s Gallo, they provide him double coverage,
internal investigation and so forth, all this moral turpitude he is accused for
such a long period of time. No one ever talks of suspending him. In my case
they go immediately for the knife and throw me to the wolves.” (SF
p.363) Salahuddin was eventually “formally accused of violating
conflict-of-interest statues and accepting illegal gratuities in the PanData
case.” (SF p.375) As part of his punishment the was supposed to perform
community service by researching HHV-6, the virus he purportedly discovered,
which was a little like sentencing Bernie Madoff to selling stocks.
During the OSI investigation more
mindblowing information surfaced. Mika Popovic provided a shocking description
of his period in Gallo’s lab: “When I came here nobody gave me whatsoever any
instructions how we should write out notes or anything else. And when the
litigation started, suddenly I was asked for notes.” (SF p.364) (That
anyone in any way trusted the basic science that came out of this scientific
pig pen is unbelievable.) The OSI investigation identified new
misrepresentations that Popovic had made in the Science papers that had
supposedly nailed HIV down as the cause of AIDS. According to Crewdson, Popovic
didn’t have data to back up statements in the signature AIDS papers about
patients he had described as showing evidence of reverse transcriptase. (SF
p.364)
According to Crewdson, in the course of
the OSI investigation, Gallo’s testimony
basically revealed that he had misrepresented the truth during the
period in which the government was aggressively and groundlessly defending him
against the French lawsuit. (SF p.371) He admitted he had no AIDS virus
before his lab got its hands on the French virus. (SF p.371) He also
confessed he didn’t have the isolates of the AIDS virus that he had bragged
about at the time of his Science paper appeared. (SF p.371) It
had all been just the usual Gallo malarkey. According to Crewdson, Gallo told
the OSI that he had made the false claim about the isolates because “to be
quite frank, I was nervous.” (SF p.371) Crewdson points out that if
Gallo had been as honest during the French lawsuit, Pasteur would have walked
away with complete ownership of the patent of the so-called AIDS blood
test. (SF p.372) And reporters might not have been calling up Gallo and
hanging on to his every word of wisdom about AIDS.
A panel drawn from the Academy of Science
that was called in to oversee the OSI investigation voted to move the OSI
investigation from an inquiry to “a formal misconduct investigation of Gallo
and Mika Popovic.” (SF p.373) They were shocked by “the apparent lack of
supporting data for Popovic’s key experiments.” (SF p.373) The Academy
of Science panel didn’t realize that they were conducting an investigation in
the opposite world of abnormal, totalitarian science. One of the panelists noted—about the
basic work on the AIDS virus done in Gallo’s lab—that “It may not be that you
will be able to find a written record of all the data that are in print.” (SF
p.374) One could say that the data that helped build the HIV/AIDS paradigm of
"Holocaust II" wasn’t worth the paper it was not written on.
Gallo kicked and screamed when OSI went so
far as to requisition materials that had been used in the original AIDS
experiments. When Suzanne Hadley arrived to collect those materials, according
to Crewdson, she “felt like the vampire surrounded by angry villagers.” (SF
p.375) She told Crewdson, “His whole lab, they just worship Gallo and will not
challenge him. Anybody who gets a bunch of people around him who gets a mindset
that he can do no wrong and that everybody else is wrong and wants to get him,
you know that’s a prescription for disaster. Because nobody is asking the tough
questions on the inside.” (SF p.375) Gallo’s own description of his gang
in Crewdson’s book is quite revealing: “About seventy-five percent of the
people with me are from foreign countries, their salaries are twenty to thirty
thousand dollars, they’re M.D.-PH.D.s, they work day and night, they work seven
days a week.” (SF p.385) It would appear that the virological fraud that
helped created "Holocaust II" may have been crafted in what could be deemed a
scientific sweatshop. What Zaki Salahuddin said about Gallo’s rosy prospects
during the investigation deserves close scrutiny by anyone trying to understand
the nature of Gallo’s political power: “Nothing will come out of it. No one
wants America to go down. They just rally around the flag. NIH and Gallo are
inseparable right now. If he goes down, NIH goes down.” (SF p.376)
One of the more amusing moments in the
Crewdson book concerns an NPR radio show on which Business Week reporter
and author Bruce Nussbaum was being interviewed during the promotion for his
book on AIDS, according to Crewdson, which purported “to show that Wall Street
and NIH had conspired to slow the approval of potential AIDS drugs.” (SF
p.384) One of the people calling into the radio show attacked Gallo by name,
saying that he had “‘done a disservice to research in general.’”(SF
p.384) Gallo just happened to be listening to the radio and he angrily called
the show. When Gallo started going on and on about how he and his associates
had risked their lives doing AIDS research and basically suggested that
Nussbaum didn’t have “a depth of understanding of science,” (SF p.385)
Nussbaum responded, “I think you’re expressing the type of attitude which is
part of the problem. . . . You simply dismiss anyone who is criticizing NIH in
any way.” (SF p.385) He also said, “Your attitude is one of incredible
arrogance . . . . I think you’re really expressing the type of attitude that is
really at the core of the problem of the NIH . . . . And you’re not open to
criticism . . . . Even if that criticism is valid. You simply dismiss all
criticism as invalid.” (SF p.386)
Popovic’s defense of himself during the
OSI investigation continued to provide evidence that Gallo’s lab had the
rigorous organization of a town dump. According to Crewdson, he told
investigators that he had been “working under a great deal of pressure, under
very difficult conditions, and without technical support,” and he complained
that the equipment was of “poor quality.” (SF p.387) Unfortunately, we
now know that the science that came out of that equipment was of the same quality.
He complained that the seminal AIDS virus articles in Science had been
written in his bad English very quickly because of intense pressure from Gallo.
(SF p.387) And the world would live with the tragic effects of that bad
English and that rush job for many decades.
The Office of Scientific Integrity wasn’t
buying anything Popovic was selling. The committee was especially concerned
about a key falsehood in the original Science papers which was that the
French virus LAV hadn’t been growing in the Gallo lab at the time the so-called
Gallo virus, HTLV-3 had been discovered. Popovic betrayed the boss by saying
that he wasn’t the one who wrote the offending sentence in the Science
paper and according to Crewdson, that basically left Gallo as the chief suspect.
(SF p.389) Popovic had dared to be honest about the matter. He is quoted
by Crewdson as telling OSI, “I am sure that originally I had referenced the LAV
in my very rough draft. Even I think I insisted on it. I thought that we should
include the LAV data in the paper . . . . Then it was changed in the editing .
. . LAV was put to the end of the manuscript, in the end, and I think it was
Dr. Gallo’s decision not to include LAV.” (SF p.389)
While this investigation was underway,
another scandal broke out in the Gallo lab. Gallo’s deputy lab chief, Prem
Sarin, had taken money under false pretenses from a company that wanted Gallo’s
lab to test a potential AIDS drug called AL-721. (SF p.390) Sarin,
according to Crewdson, was convicted “of embezzlement and making false
statements to the NIH” and he “got two months in a halfway house in Baltimore.”
(SF p.391) While he had been under investigation, his fellow financial
felon in the Gallo lab, Zaki Salahuddin, had urged Sarin to avoid going to jail
by spilling some beans on Gallo, but given Gallo’s psychological and
professional iron grip on his staff that would never happen. (SF
p.391) It will fall to future historians to determine the nature of the beans
that were never spilled and what bearing they might have on the true and
complete narrative of the AIDS era.
Peter Stockton, an aide to Congressman
John Dingell, was amazed to see Gallo get off while his subordinate was nailed.
(SF p.399) When Dingell’s committee staff interviewed Gallo about his
responsibility for all the financial misbehavior in his lab, Stockton,
according to Crewdson, said that Gallo excused himself by saying, “‘Hey, come
on, it’s not my job to be doing that kind of thing. I’m a scientist and I’m
trying to cure AIDS, and I can’t be bothered with this kind of crap.’” (SF
p.392) And Stockton’s committee basically said back to Gallo, according
Crewdson, “Somebody’s got to be concerned about this. You just don’t turn
laboratories over to felons to run wild. You’ve got to keep some control over
what’s going on.” (SF p.392) What Stockton didn’t realize was that AIDS
research in general had been turned “over to felons to run wild.” Gallo was an
iconic role model for everyone in that field. He was their Fagin.
The Pasteur Institute eventually published
a paper in Science that settled the matter genetically and established
conclusively that LAV and Gallo’s supposed discovery were the same virus and
that everything Gallo had said about the matter was a crock. It was the
beginning of the end of Gallo at N.C.I. He had embarrassed the whole NIH. (SF
p.402-403) But with Gallo there was always time for one more scandal and the
next one may have been his ugliest one yet because it involved the deaths of
human guinea pigs. Gallo had gotten involved with French researcher named
Daniel Zagury in a research project that involved testing experimental vaccines
on Africans. And not just any Africans—the test subjects were children. In the
course on testing the vaccine, there were three deaths. Gallo and “Zagury had
failed to mention that in the report on the vaccine.” (SF p.406)
One of the most fascinating revelations in
Crewdson’s book is the fact that while using LAV in his experiments, Popovic
was so afraid that Gallo might screw the French that he had given his sister in
Czechoslovakia “the early drafts of the Science article for safe
keeping” because, according to Popovic, “I believed that sometimes in the
future I might need them as evidence to prove that I gave fair credit to Dr.
Montagnier’s group.” (SF p.411) According to Crewdson, “the hidden
manuscripts suggests that Gallo was guilty for his rewriting of Popovic’s
paper.” (SF p.411) Popovic clearly knew all too well what Gallo was
capable of.
The OSI report which was drafted by
Suzanne Hadley stated that both Gallo and Popovic were guilty of scientific
misconduct. (SF p.414) But when the higher ups saw it, they balked and wanted
the guilty verdict against Gallo erased. (SF p.414) Gallo once again
ducked the bullet thanks to what looks like just an old fashioned act of
looking the other way by the government. But Gallo didn’t go completely
unscathed. According to Crewdson, the OSI report “said that Gallo’s behavior
‘had fallen well short of the conduct required by a responsible senior scientist
and laboratory chief.’ Gallo had ‘acquiesced in Dr. Popovic’s wrong doing.’ He
‘may even have tacitly encouraged, and at a minimum, he did not discourage, the
conditions that fostered the misconduct.’” (SF p.418) What was actually
fostered in those conditions was far worse than anyone could have imagined.
Suzanne Hadley, according to Crewdson,
felt that the conclusions of OSI supported the perception that Gallo had lied
under oath during the dispute with the French over the AIDS virus patent. (SF
p.419) She was upset when her superior, NIH Director Bernadine Healy, wanted
her to rewrite her report. (SF p.420) She asked Healy to make the
request for a change in writing and warned that it would compromise “the OSI
independence from NIH.” (SF p.420) Healy then backed down. But Hadley
would pay a price for standing up to her boss. She was told she was being
“reined in” and would make no more “decisions in the Gallo case.” (SF
p.421) Crewdson notes that previous to her involvement with the Gallo case,
Hadley “had been one of the NIH’s rising stars.” (SF p.420) But given
her perception of Healy’s power and temperament, Hadley completely withdrew
from OSI’s Gallo case, saying, according to Crewdson, “The hell with it, I just
want to get rid of it. I don’t need this shit anymore. . . . I never wanted
anything out of this . . . except to do it right. But I certainly never wanted
to get just absolutely destroyed. I would have been demolished by Bernadine.
She absolutely would have destroyed me.” (SF p.422) That’s what happens
in abnormal, totalitarian science in general when one tries to tell the truth or do the right
thing.
When the OSI report was released, Gallo
got the kind of cover he often received from an uncritical press. According to
Crewdson, “The Associated Press declared Gallo’s vindication,” and said nothing
about the Popovic misconduct verdict. (SF p.422) Crewdson reports that
all that Healy did to Gallo was issue a directive ordering him to “‘familiarize
himself with all HHS and NIH regulations relevant to his job, including
standards of conduct for federal employees and the rules governing medical
experiments on human subjects.’”(SF p.423) Gallo was also, according to
Crewdson, ordered “to review ‘all primary data’ produced by any scientist under
his supervision before the data was submitted for publication, and to ensure
that his assistants maintained ‘written laboratory notebooks and records
sufficient to permit scientific peers and supervisors to adequately interpret
and duplicate the work.’” (SF p.424) If such rules had been in place for
Gallo—and followed—before he got his mitts on AIDS research, HIV may
never have become the central fraud of "Holocaust II."
Gallo decided to set the record “straight”
in his inimitable style by writing a book called Virus Hunting, which
was as flattering to himself as one would expect, and according to Crewdson,
was a project in which he didn’t even get Montagnier’s first name correct. (SF
p.429) According to Crewdson, “Buttressed by scant documentation, Gallo’s book
was drawn mainly from his own recollections and those of his staff. Perhaps for
that reason, it frequently left the impression that some insight or discovery
occurred sooner than it did.” (SF p.429) It was interesting that
according to Crewdson’s account at least one member of the French team seemed
to also be capable of playing the kind of games that Gallo played. Crewdson
writes that “a preface by Jean-Claude Chermann recounting the discovery of LAV
. . . read as though Chermann had done it single-handedly.” (SF p.430)
One begins to wonder if any leading scientist during the AIDS era got enough
love and attention as a child.
According to Crewdson, when the OSI report
came out, the “publicity in Paris” inspired the Pasteur Institute to consider
“the possibility that the 1987 agreement [with Gallo] would have to be
renegotiated.” (SF p.430)
Looking back on her work on the Gallo OSI
investigation, Suzanne Hadley, according to Crewdson, was most “dismayed” by
her failure “to get an early handle on the full compass of the case—to see how
some of the entries in Mika Popovic’s notes, or some of the phrases in his Science
article, while seemingly disconnected might have implications in a larger
context for the patent, the blood test, the veracity of the Reagan
administration, and the settlement with the French.” (SF p.434) Crewdson
reports that she said, “It was so much bigger than we imagined. Once I began to
get my wits together, it was too late.” (SF p.434) Crewdson summed up
the dilemma: “So broad was the scope of the Gallo case that it seemed ludicrous
in retrospect, to have attempted to fit it into the narrow framework of a
scientific investigation, which typically focused on the misreporting of an
experiment in a published article. Even more than whatever had happened in
Gallo’s lab, Hadley was appalled by the government’s behavior, in and out of
court.” (SF p.434) Hadley told Crewdson, “Whatever one thinks about
Gallo . . . he had support all the way up the line. They had data back in 1984
showing they were the same virus . . . There never was an iota of a chance that
HHS would do an honest thing. Before anything had even happened the die was
cast, the decision was made. After that it was simply a matter of crafting a
litigation strategy.” (SF p.434) Hadley deserves great honor for doing
the right thing but even her intense epiphany about Gallo and the realization
about what she was actually staring at was just scratching the surface of the
main event. Beneath the mendacities by Gallo and the Reagan administration
concerning who discovered the so-called AIDS retrovirus lay far more
catastrophic secrets and lies that would ultimately blossom into a world of
HHV-6 related immune dysfunction.
When the scientific community saw the
watered down OSI report—which Crewdson described as almost completely changed
from the Suzanne Hadley version (SF p.436)—with its main misconduct
charge focused on Popovic, and Gallo once again ducking the main bullet, many
were horrified. But The Washington Post, once again played the role of
Gallo enabler and declared Gallo vindicated. (SF p.436) One scientist,
Gene Myers, when he heard Gallo was still not willing to admit that his
discovery was actually the French retrovirus, is quoted by Crewdson as
comparing Gallo to Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov. (SF p.436)
When Bernadine Healy met with the panel
that was overseeing the final watered-down OSI report, one of the members
described what she said to them and it was chilling and ironic. Crewdson quotes
Alfred Gillman’s account of Healy’s remarks: “What she wanted to know . . . is
does Gallo have no redeeming qualities at all? Is this guy the scum of the
earth? Or is there a spark of genius there that ought to be nourished? Or is he
mentally ill?” (SF p.438) One can reasonably guess that the victims of
"Holocaust II," voting from their graves, would probably vote “no” on redeeming
qualities, “yes” on scum of the earth, “not so much” on spark of genius and
“absolutely yes” on mentally ill.
While The Washington Post bent over
backwards to help Gallo, ABC’s Sam Donaldson went in the other direction when
he took up the story. Donaldson’s TV report began, “It may be the greatest
scientific fraud of the twentieth century.” He also warned that “important
elements of the United States government seem reluctant to have all the facts
revealed.” (SF p.442) If he only knew. Donaldson was just one more
reporter who didn’t see the even more important issue lurking beneath the
surface of the LAV story.
One of the most disturbing moments in the
government’s peculiar protection of Gallo, and one that should be pondered and
investigated by historians of "Holocaust II" for many decades to come happened
when Congressman John Dingell’s office began their investigation of the Gallo
affair. Dingell brought the beleaguered Suzanne Hadley into his congressional investigation
of Gallo because she knew where all the Gallo bodies were buried. But when the
committee requested the files from the preceding OSI investigation she herself
had conducted, it turned out that notebooks from the investigation had been
shredded by Hadley’s replacement at OSI. (SF p.461) Gallo was a cat
with more than nine lives. Abnrmal and totalitarian science had abnormal and totalitarian oversight.
For anyone who believes that some kind of
bizarre group psychosis characterized the whole enterprise of AIDS research, it
is of interest that when Peter Stockton talked to famous Nobel Prize winning
scientist James Watson during this period about Gallo, according to his account
in Crewdson’s book, Watson’s “big point was that Gallo is a manic depressive.
He thinks the subcommittee should back down because Gallo’s crazy. He thinks we
should talk to Gallo’s shrink.” (SF p.473) One could say that to
comprehend all the pseudoscientific underpinnings of AIDS or "Holocaust II" one must talk
to Gallo’s shrink.
As could be expected in the arbitrary and
opposite world of AIDS science, OSI itself was changed into the Office of
Research Integrity and the rules were changed even while the Gallo
investigation was ongoing—just like the rules of science were altered by bogus
AIDS research. Instead of simply finding scientists guilty of publishing
fabricated scientific results, under the new rules the committee had to show
that the scientists who was charged had intended to do so. (SF
p.466-475) That ridiculous new standard made it nearly impossible to find any
scientist guilty because, according to Crewdson, the scientist “could simply
claim he hadn’t intended to deceive anybody.” (SF p.454) Gallo’s most
powerful Guardian Angel had arrived on the scene in the form of this crazy new
rule. Another dark legacy of AIDS and "Holocaust II" would be that the
government’s process of trying to defend Gallo would make it easier for all
American scientists to commit fraud and get away with it. Gallo was truly an historic figure in that he paved the way for many more years of plausibly deniable scientific fraud. It is a breathtaking legacy.
Even with the rules of evidence loosened
in Gallo’s favor, he continued to behave like a cornered Mafioso as he told
scientists who were expected to testify before the new committee that if they
testified it might not turn out too well for them. (SF p.499) He told
one scientists that he might “spill the beans on him.” (SF p.480) Gallo
was a virtual Boston of spillable beans.
The final OSI report on the Gallo affair
was basically a whitewash, a true blue cover-up. Suzanne Hadley described it as
a “version of history” that “parroted the government’s arguments years before
in defense of the blood-test patent.” (SF p.503) She told Crewdson,
“There’s too much pseudoscience in the opinion. They got it from somewhere.” (SF
p.503) Again, what Hadley didn’t grasp was how catastrophically deep the
pseudoscience laid out before her actually was.
When an appeals board reversed the verdict
of the ORI, Gallo was elated. According to Crewdson, Gallo said, “I will now be
able to redouble efforts in the fight against AIDS and cancers. There are
several hopeful new avenues of AIDS research that my laboratory is pursuing.” (SF
p.505) The business of Holocaust II could continue in earnest. The New
York Times reporter, Nicholas Wade, one of the AIDS paradigm’s truest
believers, wrote that Gallo was “the one scientific hero who has yet emerged in
the fight against AIDS.” (SF p.505) With heroes like that, gays, blacks
and anyone suffering on the HHV-6 spectrum illnesses didn’t need enemies.
But John Dingell wasn’t done with Gallo.
His staff attempted to get prosecutors to charge Gallo and Popovic with making
false statements under oath, but between complications involving the statute of
limitations for the crime and problems of involving the jurisdiction the crimes
took place in, that never happened. (SF p.510) Bullet ducked again.
All of this mishegas took its toll on
Gallo’s new boss, Sam Broder, who had succeeded Vincent DeVita. According to
Crewdson, “Since replacing Vince DeVita, Sam Broder had defended and protected
Gallo. Now there were indications Broder, like DeVita before him, was growing
disillusioned. Reportedly, horrified by Daniel Zagury’s use of Zairian children
in his AIDS vaccine research, Broder had ordered Gallo’s name removed from the
pending HHS patent on Zagury’s vaccine. When Suzanne Hadley showed Broder
Gallo’s outrageous statement that the patent had been initiated by Broder
himself, Broder exploded, ‘He said, “That’s bullshit!” Hadley recalled.” As if
that wasn’t enough, according to Crewdson, Hadley used the same meeting with
Broder to tell him that her investigation “had turned up evidence that several
of Gallo’s subsequent articles also contained false statements.” (SF
p.514) Hadley told Broder about a paper Gallo published in 1985 which contained
false statements about the AIDS virus isolates he had in 1982. According to
Crewdson, “The paper was a political exercise, a pollution of the scientific
literature intended to help lay the groundwork for a defense against the
French.” (SF p.515) Crewdson reports that Sam Broder told Gallo that if
he didn’t retire he would order a new NCI investigation of him. (SF p.515)
Suzanne Hadley is quoted by Crewdson as remembering that Broder said to her, “I
told Bob, ‘You’ve degraded the institute, you’ve degraded the public and you’ve
degraded reporters by lying to them . . . . We owe things to the people of
another time. They need to know what things were really like during the era of
AIDS research.’ One of Bob’s biggest sins is his overdriven compulsion to claim
all the credit and to trace it all to his great intellect.” (SF p.515)
As true as Broder’s words were, he was still missing the sin beneath the sin, not
the sin of stealing credit, but the sin of egotistically leading the world down
a deadly misbegotten path, manipulating science and the public into thinking he
had delivered the truth about AIDS to the world. And as far as that sin
was concerned, Broder himself was joined at the hip with Gallo.
As quoted by Crewdson, something else
Hadley remembered Broder saying sizzles with irony: “He was confused out of his
mind. Bob was so thoroughly wrong. The AIDS virus had to fit the retroviruses
as he knew them, and he was wrong. He needed to listen to his data, and he did
not want to do that . . . Bob writes all these historical things that have no
relationship to the way it really was. I told Bob, ‘I have not forgiven you for
this. People are dying of real diseases, and this is not a game.’ . . . Frankly
Suzanne, it was a Nobel Prize run. You guys don’t talk about that, but I was
there, and I know. And frankly he almost got it. And if he had gotten it, he
would have been truly invincible.” (SF p.516) Where to begin? Well,
first of all Gallo’s word of choice for the people this science involved, at
least on occasion (as reported by New York Native), was “fag” which may have had a little something to do with
the level of moral seriousness with which Gallo dealt with the AIDS issue.
Second of all, who is Broder to talk? He was the scientific genius behind the
aggressive pushing of AZT into the bodies of AIDS patients, something akin to
pouring gasoline on a fire.
In 1994 there was a revised settlement
with the French which Crewdson described as “a clear victory for the French.” (SF
p.585) Suzanne Hadley, working for the Dingell Committee, wrote a 267-page
account of the whole matter that according to Crewdson “spared no one” in
assigning culpability “starting with the Department of Health and Human
Services.” (SF p.526) Crewdson writes that the report said that “HHS did
its best to cover up the wrongdoing” and “meanwhile the failure of the entire
scientific establishment to take any meaningful action left the disposition of
scientific truth to bureaucrats and lawyers, with neither the expertise nor the
will essential to the task. Because of the continuing HHS cover-up it was not
until the Subcommittee investigation that the true facts were known, and the
breadth and depth of the cover-up was revealed. . . . One of the most
remarkable and regrettable aspects of the institutional response to the defense
of Gallo et. al. is how readily public service and science apparently
were subverted into defending the indefensible.” (SF p.527) As profound
and disturbing as the report was, it was naively focused on the tail of a far
bigger unseen monster, namely the HIV-is-the-cause-of-AIDS mistake itself and
the entrenched world of abnormal, totalitarian science that it represented. The report was
clueless about the psychotic and deeply biased paradigm at the very center of
Holocaust II. It was commendable for Dingell, Hadley and Stockton to nail Gallo
on the viral theft from the French, but relatively speaking, it was in essence
a successful prosecution of a misdemeanor that missed the exponentially more
important underlying medical and scientific crime against mankind.
To say that Gallo landed on his feet after
this disgrace is an understatement. When he left NCI he had to rough it at the
brand new, built-just-for-him, multi-million dollar research Institute of Human
Virology in Baltimore financed by the state of Maryland. And as one could
expect in the opposite world of Robert Gallo, one of the people he invited to
come work for him at the spiffy new institute was the paragon of great science,
Mika Popovic, a man who will probably take some of Gallo’s juiciest secrets to
the grave with him. Gallo’s ability to either discover things or steal them,
depending upon how you looked at his career, seems to have diminished in
Baltimore. According to Crewdson, “During its first five years of life the
Institute for Human Virology hadn’t come up with any marketable discoveries.” (SF
p.537) AIDS patients were clearly safer with Gallo out of NCI and eating crab
cakes in Baltimore.
Near the end of his account of the Gallo
affair, Crewdson writes his most chilling sentence: “The Popovic-Gallo Science
paper, among the most-cited scientific articles of all time, is laden with
untruths that have never been retracted or corrected.” (SF p.539) In
other words, the very foundation of "Holocaust II" is laden with untruths that
“have never been retracted or corrected.” Every living scientist and doctor
should hand their head in shame. They are the apathetic, compliant “ordinary
Germans” of this period in history. And anyone who describes Science as
a prestigious publication worthy of any kind of reverence at all should put on
a pair of clown shoes.
Crewdson closes his awesome dissection of
Gallo’s deeds and character on a philosophical note: “Being wrong in science is
hardly a sin. Scientists are wrong every day, and their mistakes are what
pushes science forward. What set Gallo apart, was his profound disinclination
to acknowledge his mistakes, preferring instead to ignore them, insist they
hadn’t occurred, blame someone else, or propagate outlandish explanations and
outright fictions that only confused science further and slowed its forward
march . . . . In the end, the most compelling question was one only Gallo could
answer: Had he somehow convinced himself that all the lies were true? Or had he
known better all along?” (SF p.540) Actually, a more fundamental and
philosophical questions would be whether Gallo was capable of honestly
answering that question or even understanding it. Was Gallo a true sociopath?
And that leads to the larger historical question about the degree to which a kind of enabling group psychosis went way beyond Gallo and underwrote all of
"Holocaust II." It may have taken a whole psychotic village to empower a Gallo.
While the world owes journalistic genius John Crewdson a debt of
gratitude for laying bare the mind-numbing complexities of Gallo’s scientific
fraud regarding the discovery of the so-called AIDS virus, the larger story
that Crewdson missed, the one he failed to see beneath all the masks that he
did rip off, was the game-changing story that the so-called stolen AIDS virus wasn’t
even the cause of AIDS. While Crewdson was writing his masterpiece, which
was ultimately published in 2002, evidence was accumulating that the other
virus that Gallo claimed to have discovered, HHV-6, actually did play a
major role in AIDS. In fact, the major role. The virus was not an
unimportant pathogen as portrayed by Crewdson in Science Fictions.
The New York Native, the little gay
newspaper that pioneered the Gallo story even before Crewdson got to it,
followed the HHV-6 trail that led to a far bigger and more disturbing story
about AIDS than just Gallo’s appropriation of LAV. While covering HHV-6 the New
York Native broke one of the biggest AIDS stories of all, the breakout of
acquired immune deficiency in the general population which the CDC and the NIH
hid behind the ridiculous euphemism of “chronic fatigue syndrome.” The New
York Native’s reporter, Neenyah Ostrom covered chronic fatigue
syndrome, AIDS and their relationship to HHV-6 from 1988 until the paper went
out of business at the end of 1996.
The parent company of New York Native published
three books on Ostrom’s reporting about the relationship between HHV-6, AIDS
and chronic fatigue syndrome. The first book, What Really Killed GildaRadner? Frontline Reports on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, was
published in 1991. In the book’s introduction, Ostrom wrote “For whatever
reasons—like reluctance to admit the presence of another AIDS-like epidemic
sweeping the nation in the shadow of (and linked to) the official AIDS
epidemic, simple incompetence, or more sinister reasons—health authorities have
tried to deny the very existence of the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic in
the U.S., have tried to prove that the illness of immune dysfunction is caused
by ‘psychoneurosis,’ [and] have delayed for years determining how many cases
actually exist in the country . . . .” (WRKGR p. 10) The next Ostrom
book, 50 Things You Should Know About the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic was
published in 1992. In its introduction, she wrote, “America is facing a health
crisis of unprecedented proportions, a crisis that has been misleadingly
labeled chronic fatigue syndrome. This health crisis has been bungled by
government health officials from the very beginning: It has been ignored,
misrepresented, and investigated ineptly until, as I write this in January,
1992, untold millions of Americans already have contracted this potentially
disabling, AIDS-like illness. . . . CFS is clearly an AIDS-related illness that
puts the entire population at risk.” (P.13-14) The final Ostrom book, America’sBiggest Cover-up, which was published in 1994 was even more uncompromising
in its conclusions. Ostrom attempted to explain why officials refused to admit
a link between AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome: “AIDS patients, and people
who test HIV-positive (whatever that actually turns out to mean), have been so
badly treated, so discriminated against, so scapegoated and demonized that it
is not surprising that there is an almost reflexive recoiling from the
possibility that AIDS is not the narrowly-defined illness that it has been
portrayed as being.” (ABC xvi) She asserted that “Until the denial among
medical professionals about the relationship between the AIDS and chronic
fatigue syndrome epidemics is overcome, however, it is difficult to imagine how
either epidemic can be ended.” (ABC xvi) Had John Crewdson not just taken the
lead on Gallos’s theft of HIV from New York Native, but also followed
the trail of Ostrom’s reporting on chronic fatigue syndrome and HHV-6, he might
have broken a bigger and far more important story.
Two years before Crewdson’s book on Gallo
hit the bookstores, Nicholas Regush’s book on HHV-6, The Virus Within: AComing Epidemic was published. Regush had been a reporter for the Montreal
Gazette as well as an award-winning and Emmy-nominated medical and science
journalist at ABC News, where he produced segments for World News Tonight with
Peter Jennings. Regush’s book covers the history of HHV-6 from its discovery
through a succession of shocking discoveries made by two researchers at the
University of Wisconsin, Konnie Knox and Donald Carrigan. Regush’s picture of
HHV-6 bears little resemblance to the failed Gallo co-factor of Crewdson’s
book.
The HHV-6 that emerges from Regush’s book
should have made the scientific community’s collective head spin. In a series
of experiments on a variety of patients, the two relatively young Wisconsin
researchers showed, without even fully admitting it or shouting it out to the
world, that HHV-6 was the real villain in AIDS. They showed that HHV-6 is
capable of wreaking havoc in both the central nervous system (TVW p.9)
and the immune system itself. Prior research by R.G. Downing had shown that
HHV-6 was capable of destroying T-cells (curiously, the only so-called herpes
virus to do so) which was something that the AIDS establishment insisted on
blaming HIV alone for doing indirectly even though HHV-6 destroyed the cells
dramatically, directly and unambiguously. As Regush pointed out, “Here was a
herpes virus that could destroy T-4 lymphocytes at least in the test tube more
powerfully than HIV.” (TVW p.54) Had Crewdson dug deeper on the HHV-6
story, he would have learned that there are supposedly two strains of HHV-6, an
A and a B strain. And he would have found out that HHV-6A was indeed starting
to look more and more like the significant co-factor in AIDS or even more
surprisingly, like the chief viral
culprit itself. Gallo wasn’t lying about the power of HHV-6. According to
Regush, “In November 1993, Robert Gallo’s lab published data gleaned from
autopsies of five people who had died of AIDS, demonstrating an abundance of
HHV-6 infection. Footprints of the virus were found in areas such as the
cerebral cortex, brain stem, cerebellum, spinal cord, tonsil, lymph nodes,
spleen, bone marrow, salivary glands, esophagus, bronchial tree, lung, skeletal
muscle, myocardium, aorta, liver, kidney, adrenal glands, pancreas and
thyroid.” (TVW p.84) If anything, Gallo was underestimating the power of HHV-6 in order
to keep his beloved stolen virus HIV alive. Ironically, one of the reasons
Gallo didn’t do more work on HHV-6 during the 80s was because he was busy
fending off investigations from Congress and journalists like Crewdson (and
pesky newspapers like New York Native.)
One of the early HHV-6 research projects
conducted by the Wisconsin researchers showed that HHV-6 is a major lung
pathogen in AIDS, a fact that tragically had been largely ignored in the
treatment of AIDS. And one of the most important findings on HHV-6 that could
have an impact on everyone’s health was Carrigan and Knox’s determination that
“Direct infection of the [bone] marrow by HHV-6” was possible (TVW p.62)
According to Regush, their research showed “that HHV-6 could infect—and
suppress—bone-marrow cells.” (TVW p.64)
While Konnie Knox was focusing on HHV-6’s
relationship to HIV, her research actually began the shocking process of
pulling the rug out from under HIV itself. Her work with Carrigan showed that
HHV-6 could also seriously dysregulate monocytes and macrophages, making it a
very creative and dangerous pathogen. (TVW p.68) She made HHV-6 the
subject of her doctoral thesis and Regush reports that she wondered if she was
“throwing herself into the hurly burly of Big Science politics.” (TVW p.69)
Actually, she was throwing herself into the hurly burly of Big Abnormal Science
politics.
Knox started sealing the deal for HHV-6’s
role in AIDS when she studied tissue samples of a group of people who had died
of AIDS. According to Regush, “The results of her experiments gave her a jolt:
all 34 tissue samples of lung, lymph node, liver kidney and spleen revealed
that at the time of death there was active HHV-6 infection as opposed to merely
a biological sign that the virus was ‘latent’ (embedded in tissue).” (TVW p.83)
Her experiment also showed that one of the big AIDS showstoppers, CMV, wasn’t
even as important because she found it active in only nine of the 34 tissue
samples. (TVW p.84) Most alarmingly in terms of the way lung issues had
been treated in AIDS was the fact that she found evidence in some of the
patients that HHV-6 as probably responsible for the destruction of the lungs. (TVW
p.84)
Knox, not knowing the real nature of AIDS
politics, told Regush that she was “amazed that so little HHV-6 research had
actually been done on AIDS patients . . . . It didn’t make much sense.” (TVW
p.85) She was another scientist who had found her way into HIV/AIDS Wonderland.
She didn’t have the right compass for the science of opposite world or the
nasty retroviral and heterosexist politics that had laid its foundation.
The profile of HHV-6 as a virus capable of
destroying the immune system was dramatically increased when, according to
Regush, “various labs exposed HHV-6 as” capable of targeting T-8 cells and when
scientists at the National Cancer Institute showed that “HHV-6 infects and
kills natural-killer cells. These are the immune cells that destroy abnormal
cells in the body, particularly those that are infected by viruses. HHV-6 is
the first virus known to be capable of targeting and seriously damaging such a
vital element of the immune system’s antiviral defenses.” (TVW p. 87)
(The fact HHV-6 was capable of killing natural-killer cells should have alerted
the whole scientific community to the link between AIDS and chronic fatigue
syndrome which are both low natural-killer cell syndromes.)
Knox found that HHV-6 “could cause major
damage during the early development of AIDS,” (TVW p.89) and didn’t
need HIV to do it. According to Regush, “Her autopsy-tissue study had
already shown that macrophages were often depleted in the lungs of HIV-infected
AIDS patients,” and she was determined “to know how HHV-6 was capable of
knocking out those cells . . . . Her tests showed that, besides destroying
macrophages, HHV-6 interfered with the normal functioning of the scavenger
cells by blocking the release of a type of oxidant, a substance that cells
normally generate to attack microbes. Knox noted that HIV was not known to be
capable of this specific type of action.” (TVW p.95) She concluded that
HHV-6 had the potential to destroy the macrophages in the lungs without HIV,
a totally sacrilegious idea in the abnormal science of AIDS. According to
Regush, she dared to wonder heretically if HIV was “doing any killing in the
body, or was HHV-6 the lone assassin?” (TVW p.96)
Knox
also found that HHV-6 was capable of causing brain infection or encephalitis
without any signs that HIV was involved. (TVW p.97) And the same no-show
behavior on the part of HIV occurred in the case of the bone marrow in AIDS:
“Knox’s lab studies demonstrated that HHV-6-infected marrow cells—not the HIV
infected ones—blocked the ability of the marrow to produce mature,
differentiated cells.” (TVW p.97) The same scenario was manifest when
she looked at the brain damage in AIDS patients. Regush writes that “When Knox
studied the brains of six people who died of AIDS and found extensive damage in
four to their nerve fiber sheathe she also detected active HHV-6 infection. The
infected cells were only in areas where the damage had occurred and never unhealthy
tissue. The damaged tissue tested negative for signs of HIV, CMV, and other
microbes. Again, their was only HHV-6.” (TVW p.101) Again, according to
Regush, all of this inspired the very dangerous doubt in Carrigan and Knox
about whether “HIV was even necessary for AIDS to occur.” (TVW p.101)
The pièce de résistance of the Knox and
Carrigan research involved the lymph nodes of AIDS patients. According to
Regush, “the development of AIDS has largely been viewed as a progressive
destruction of the networks of lymphocytes and fibers known as the lymphoid
tissue. AIDS scientists, however, have been unable to associate the presence of
HIV in the lymph nodes with any damage to the tissue.” (TVW p.98) While
the conventional wisdom was that HIV was hiding in the lymph nodes and
destroying them, what Knox and Carrigan found turned the conventional wisdom
upside down. In perhaps their most important study they found that “16
lymph-node biopsies from HIV-positive patients all contained cells actively
infected with HHV-6A. Twelve of 16 patients who had been diagnosed with
progressive disease had more dense infection that the four patients who had
been diagnosed as having a stable condition. Knox and Carrigan also found more
dense infection in areas where the lymph nodes were losing lymphocytes than in
areas free of destructive change or where normal tissue in the nodes was
already being replaced by the formation of scar tissue. HHV-6 was the apparent
cause of the destruction of lymphoid tissue that occurred in these HIV positive
people.” (TVW p.114) Regush didn’t mince words about the implications: “HHV-6
was not only at the scene of the crime, but it appears to have committed the
crime as well.” (TVW p.114) Regush describes Knox and Carrigan as wondering if
they had found a “smoking gun” because “there were no convincing studies
demonstrating that HIV could cause similar pathology.”(TVW p.114) They
submitted their research to The Lancet, but as could be expected,
it was not accepted. It was ever thus during "Holocaust II."
In the world of Kuhnian normal science
Carrigan and Knox would have had their Nobels by now for showing that HHV-6 was
the real AIDS virus and was even more important than just that as other
research began to connect it to many other diseases that would turn out to be
part of an HHV-6 spectrum of disorders. But not in the opposite world of
abnormal, totalitarian science that was dominated by the heterosexist HIV/AIDS paradigm.
HHV-6 threatened the whole epidemiological house of cards the CDC and the NIH
had presented to the world. Good luck to future HHV-6 scientists all over the world when they try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
In an interview with Robert Gallo, Regush
asked him about Knox and Carrigan. Regush reported that “Gallo spoke very
generously about what Knox and Carrigan had accomplished, but he also
emphasized that they work in too much obscurity to obtain any funding. ‘They
have clearly shown that HHV-6 is a powerful pathogen,”’ Gallo said. ‘If they
were headliners at a major university, it would make a huge difference.’” (TVW
p.223) How two scientists who were essentially doing a controlled demolition on
the HIV/AIDS paradigm would ever even hope to be allowed positions of
prominence in a scientific world dominated by people like Gallo requires a huge
stretch of the imagination. As Regush concluded, their research “suggests that
HIV may not always be necessary as a companion to HHV-6 when the herpes virus
is destroying tissue. But even suggesting that in writing would raise the
hackles of HIV researchers. In fact, some AIDS scientists compare any
questioning of the HIV hypothesis as it currently stands, to denial of the
Holocaust. With such emotions running strong in AIDS science, why take a chance
of boldly presenting alternative hypotheses?” (TVW p.224) Unfortunately
for the world, Regush reported that Knox and Carrigan didn’t have the stomach
to go more public with their story or to join forces with the AIDS critics and
dissidents: “Knox and Carrigan, while aware of the issues, want no active part
of this often hostile debate.” (TVW p.224)
It was very unfortunate that the brilliant, tireless
John Crewdson never found his way into this shocking HHV-6 part of the AIDS
story. His expose of Gallo and the purloined retrovirus had caught the eye of
the NIH’s investigative body and Congress itself. Had Crewdson found his way to
the Knox and Carrigan laboratory at the University of Wisconsin and done the
same kind of Pit Bull due diligence on the primary role of HHV-6 in AIDS, he
might have helped bring "Holocaust II" to an early end and everything would have
been different for people on the HHV-6 spectrum. And knowing how Gallo had stolen
HIV, Crewdson might have eventually looked into the allegations that he also
stole credit for discovering HHV-6, which is another story. And just as creepy.
Teach-in #2
Did Ablashi and Gallo steal Credit from John Beldekas and Jane Teas for the discovery of HHV-6?
Did Ablashi and Gallo steal Credit from John Beldekas and Jane Teas for the discovery of HHV-6?
Teach-in #3
Is Anthony Fauci the Bernie Madoff behind the HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme and he HHV-6 Cover-up?
November
2, 1984 was an especially tragic day in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/AIDS epidemic. That was the day Anthony
Fauci became the Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases. (NIAID). (Good Intentions p.128) It was the day a
thin-skinned, physically ultra-diminutive man with a legendary Napoleonic
attitude was positioned by destiny to become the de facto AIDS Czar. In the fog
of culpability that constitutes what could be called "Holocaust II" one thing is clear: the HIV/AIDS
buck, on its way to the very top of the government, at least pauses at the
megalomaniac desk of Anthony Fauci.
In his book, Good Intentions, Bruce
Nussbaum writes, “Fauci looked as if he had just stepped out of a limousine.
Trim and athletic, Fauci’s tailored suits, cuff-linked shirts, and aviator
glasses set him far apart from the rest of the scientists and administrators at
the NIH.” (GI p.128) Fauci had risen quickly at NIH. According to
Nussbaum, he began work at NIH in 1968 after his residency and “by 1977 he was
deputy clinical director of NIAID.” (GI p.128) Nussbaum describes Fauci
as “an aggressive administrator,” not a “details man,” “a big picture kind of
guy.” (GI p.128) Nussbaum reports that “Fauci saw AIDS as a dreadful disease—and
an opportunity for NIAID to grow into a much bigger, more powerful institute.
AIDS was his big chance. He wasn’t known as a brilliant scientist, and he had
little background in managing a big bureaucracy; but Fauci did have ambition
and drive to spare. This lackluster scientist was about to find his true
vocation—empire building.” (GI p.128) Unfortunately, the empire his
extreme ambition would build was "Holocaust II." If the mantra during Watergate
was “follow the money,” the mantra for uncovering the crimes of "Holocaust II"
(other than “follow the heterosexism”) could be “follow the empire building.”
And one of the morals of the story is that “lackluster” can have extreme
consequences.
According to Nussbaum, in order to make
his dreams come true, Fauci had to fight “for a bigger piece of the AIDS
research pie” which he succeeded at by getting a sizable amount of the funds
that Congress appropriated for AIDS research. (GI p.129) Fauci also had
to fight to get AIDS out of the claws of the National Cancer Institute where
the virus that was believed to be the cause of AIDS had been discovered (or,
more accurately, stolen). Fauci argued that it was his institute’s right to
take on the lion’s share of the research because, although AIDS did involve cancer
(Kaposi’s sarcoma), it was, after all, an infectious disease. Fauci got his way
and his success is reflected in the evolving financial numbers Nussbaum
provides: “A growing budget for AIDS research, like a rising tide, lifted Tony
Fauci’s profile considerably on the NIH campus. In 1982, NIAID received
$297,000 in AIDS funding. In 1986 it received $63 million. In 1987, the sum
reached $146 million. By 1990, NIAID’s annual AIDS funding was pushing half a
billion dollars. Tony Fauci’s ship had come in.” (GI p.132)
Fauci’s ship coming in meant the gay
community’s would be sinking fast. It would fall to Anthony Fauci to be the
Enforcer-in-Chief of the "homodemiological" (and "Afrodemiological") HIV/AIDS and
“chronic fatigue syndrome is not AIDS” paradigms of Holocaust II. No one can
argue that he didn’t do a spectacular job of paradigm enforcement for three
dreadful decades.
Starting in the mid 1980s an organization
called the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) played a multifaceted
role of raising money for HIV research and enlisting celebrities in a glamorous
and ultimately shameful HIV propaganda campaign that made the putatively private
organization essentially a de facto arm of the government’s HIV/AIDS
establishment. If one considers the HIV theory of AIDS a Potemkin biomedical
village that gays were forced to live in, then amfAR as one of its leading real
estate agents. John Lauritsen, in his book, The AIDS War, writes
that “[amfAR] was founded as an alternative to the AIDS establishment, to
provide funding for research that was not predicated on the ‘AIDS virus’
hypothesis. It didn’t last long. . . . I am not aware that even a penny has
ever been given to a researcher who publicly expressed doubts as to the
etiological role of HIV or the benefits of the nucleoside analogues.” (AW
p.437)
In addition to becoming one of the leading
private promoters of the government’s HIV/AIDS paradigm propaganda, amfAR
played a disturbing role in squelching serious scientific criticism of the HIV
hypothesis and in helping turn the entire field of AIDS into a world of
heterosexist, totalitarian, abnormal science. Lauritsen describes an
historically important amfAR moment in the AIDS disaster in his first book Poison
by Prescription: “A ‘Scientific Forum on the Etiology of AIDS,’ sponsored
by the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), was held on 9 April 1988
at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the words of the amfAR
‘fact sheet’, the forum was convened to critically examine the evidence that
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or other agents give rise to the disease
complex known as AIDS.” (PBP p.143)
According to Lauritsen, it was supposedly
an opportunity for Peter Duesberg, the University of California at Berkeley
retrovirologist who first challenged the HIV theory of AIDS “to confront
members of the ‘AIDS Establishment’ over their hypothesis.” (PBP p.143)
He reports, however, that “Despite these praiseworthy intentions, the forum
appears to have had a hidden agenda; to discredit Duesberg.” (PBP p.143)
Lauritsen characterized the forum as a “Kangaroo Court.” The forum would make
great scene in a play about the nasty, zany world of AIDS and HIV
pseudoscience. It was anything but an honest, open collegial discussion about
the nature of AIDS. Scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn Kuhn would roll over in his grave if anyone called it
genuinely scientific. By Kuhn’s standards, some of the leading voices at the
forum may have even demonstrated that they should not even have been considered
real scientists. Politicians, yes, scientists not so much. Even the HIV
theory’s ardent acolyte, Michael Specter, the reporter from The Washington
Post (and future New Yorker writer) who was among the 17
journalists at the Forum, saw through the charade, noting that the meeting “was
billed as a scientific forum on the cause of AIDS but was really an attempt to
put Duesberg’s theories to rest.” (PBP p.144) It was more like they
wanted to put Duesberg himself permanently to rest.
The meeting had the tone and style that was
endemic to HIV/AIDS research and characteristic of abnormal science. Lauritsen
reported that “While no blows were struck, some of the HIV protagonists fell
below the standards of civility that are expected in scholarly debate . . . .
At all times Duesberg retained good manners and a sense of humor, in the face
of invective, insults, and clowning from his opponents.” (PBP p.144)
One of the signs that AIDS in general was
being conducted in the opposite world of what culd be called abnormal, totalitarian science was the
uncanny willingness of the scientists to abandon the traditional rules of
evidence known as Koch’s postulates. Instead, AIDS researchers, including the
ones at the amfAR forum, were willing to “revise Koch’s in a more permissive
direction: it would no longer be necessary to find the microbe in all cases of
the disease. Mere correlations between microbial antibodies and the
progression of the disease would be sufficient. HIV could be proved
‘epidemiologically’ to be the cause of AIDS.” (PBP p.145) Given the unrecognized
sexual politics of the science that was operative among this crowd, they were
basically saying, without realizing it, that causation could be established "homodemiologically."
The presumptions of heterosexist and political epidemiology would trump the
traditional rules of evidence. And those rules could basically be summed up as
“Heads I win and tails you lose.” “You” basically being gays and eventually
blacks.
Lauritsen caught the powerful HIV
advocates in the act of doublespeak that is common to abnormal, totalitarian science:
“Actually, the HIV advocates talked out of both sides of their mouths with
regard to Koch’s postulates. On the one hand, they disparaged them as in need
of ‘modification’ (read abandonment); on the other hand, they were doing their best
to come up with data that would satisfy at least the first postulate.” (PBP
p.145)
Duesberg’s opponents at the forum included
a living, breathing example of scientific conflict of interest, William
Haseltine, a scientist who was in the process of making a lot of money from HIV
testing, and Anthony Fauci, the empire-building Director of NIAID.
At the amfAR Forum, Fauci and others
played a curious unfair game with Duesberg. Hypocritically they accused
Duesberg of citing research that was out of date even though it was basically the
same research quoted at that time by the AIDS establishment. On the other
hand, when Duesberg would ask Fauci and others for actual references to support
their statements at the amfAR forum, he was “rudely rebuffed,” and
according to Lauritsen, they tried to shore up their viewpoint about HIV with
unpublished data, or “their own private facts.” (PBP p.147) “Private
facts” not on the public record are another sure sign that AIDS was a
manifestation of the opposite world of abnormal science. Unfortunately their
private facts about AIDS were also connected to each other by a private
scientific logic.
The 800-pound gorilla at the amfAR forum
was the fact that evidence of HIV could not be found in all AIDS patients,
which should have been strong—damning even—evidence that HIV couldn’t possibly
be the cause of AIDS, that is, if Kuhnian normal science was being practiced.
As scientist Marcel Beluda pointed out at the meeting, “sometimes even a single
exception is sufficient to disprove a theory.” . . . This is the crux of the
matter. The virus cannot be found in all cases of AIDS.” (PBP p.151) One
could say that still believing that HIV is the cause of AIDS in the face of
evidence that it could not be found in all patients is Exhibit A that delusion
and denial were running the show.
Fauci’s answer belongs in a beginner’s
textbook on the card tricks of abnormal science: “Fauci responded to Beluda by
saying that a good lab was able to isolate the virus in 90-100% of the cases,
that there was ‘no question about it.’ Fauci did not provide a reference to
published data, nor did he indicate what the ‘good labs’ were, or how exactly
they differed from the not-so-good labs.” (PBP p.151) References belong
to the abandoned Kuhnian world of normal science.
Duesberg made a number of arguments, based
on his years as one of the celebrated deans of retroviral research, about why
HIV could not possibly be the cause of AIDS.
Lauritsen wrote that Fauci’s presentation
“while aspiring to be a point-by-point rebuttal to Duesberg, consisted mainly
of disconnected assertions, delivered in a tone of petulant indignation.
Epidemiological studies conducted in San Francisco and unpublished laboratory
reports seemed to be the basis of most of his statements. So far as I could
tell, he understood none of Duesberg’s arguments . . . .” (PBP p.155)
The role of the AIDS politics of
epidemiology in AIDS research showed itself dramatically at the forum.
According to Lauritsen, “In the question period, Beluda asked if the evidence
were sufficient that HIV is necessary for the development of AIDS, Fauci
replied that he hoped the epidemiologists would answer that question.” (PBP
p.157) (Given the political and heterosexist nature of AIDS epidemiology, one
could guess how that was going to turn out.)
The most shocking and downright hilarious
episode at the forum occurred when Harvard Medical School’s William Haseltine
spoke. Lauritsen reported that “His presentation was devoted largely to
personal attacks on Duesberg.” (PBP p.157) Ironically, he
accused Duesberg of resorting to
personal attacks. In another telltale moment of abnormal science, Lauritsen
caught Haseltine trying to explain away the anomalies about the evidence of
AIDS in men and women in America: “He attacked Duesberg’s ‘paradox,’ that the
AIDS virus seemed to be able to discriminate between boys and girls, by saying
that this was not true outside the U.S.—in Africa, about equal numbers of men
and women develop AIDS. (He seemed oblivious to the paradox that a microbe
should be able to discriminate in one country, but not in another.)” (PBP
p.158) In a memorable moment that perfectly captured the essence of the past
and future of AIDS research, Haseltine showed the audience a slide of a graph
that was meant to absolutely demolish Duesberg’s argument. The slide was
supposed to show a correlation between the rise in HIV titers with the decline
of T cells in the progression of AIDS. There was just one small problem:
Duesberg quickly noticed that there were no units on the vertical axis of
the slide. Haseltine was angry and flustered by the charge and had to ask
Dr. Robert Redfield, an AIDS researcher from the military, how the slide was
prepared. At the forum Redfield said “different measurements were used,” but
later that night at a post-forum party, according to Lauritsen’s report,
Redfield told Duesberg and other people at the gathering that “the graph had
been prepared to illustrate a theoretical possibility. It had no units on it
for the simple reason that it was not based on any data at all. In other
words the slide was a fake.” (PBP p.161) That’s the kind of
ideology-based data that was used to back up the HIV theory of AIDS which
changed the course of millions of lives and fostered the autism catastrophe.
In terms of the habitual use of political
epidemiology (or "homodemiology") rather than real science to deal with AIDS
during Holocaust II, the most disturbing talk was given by Warren Winkelstein,
Professor of Biomedical Environmental Health Sciences at U.C. Berkeley.
Essentially, he too suggested that AIDS would require a new kind of science.
According to Lauritsen, “the point of Winkelstein’s presentation is that Koch’s
postulates should be superseded by new standards for establishing the causal
relationship between microbes and disease, and that these standards should be
based upon ‘epidemiology’ or, as it were, correlations of various kinds.” (PBP
p.162) If this crowd had superseded traditional science anymore than they did,
we all would probably be dead. (But wait. There is still time.)
Most of the scientific world was not aware
of the degree to which this zany cast of characters was improvising a questionable
newfangled science as they went along. And it was being done in a Fauci-style
of “petulant indignation,” to reprise Lauritsen’s very apt phrase. That it was
all dependent on a loosey-goosey, all too subjective political “discipline”
like epidemiology should have disturbed Lauritsen’s sixteen journalistic
colleagues who were at the amfAR affair. But there was already a tragically
cozy relationship between the media and the abnormal scientists of Holocaust
II. For three decades as the HIV/AIDS paradigm held sway, most of the reporters
who covered AIDS were a self-satisfied, inattentive, group-thinking,
intellectually slothful bunch who wouldn’t know independent, journalistic due
diligence if it bit them.
Lauritsen’s eyewitness record of the forum
(originally published in New York Native) was an important contribution to the history of the flakey beginnings of the
science and politics of AIDS. His diligent and critical reporting is proof that
not every journalist was hoodwinked by these charlatans. He didn’t buy into
this new improvised epidemiological science that the AIDS establishment was
dumping on the public: “I do not accept the proposition that Koch’s postulates
should be abandoned in favor of epidemiological correlations. This would be a
step backward, a step away from scientific rigor, a step towards impressionism
and confusion.” (PBP p.162) Lauritsen didn’t acknowledge it, but it was
also a big heterosexist (and ultimately racist) step backwards.
Like many others, Lauritsen came face to
face with totalitarian, abnormal science. Unfortunately, even though he was
openly gay himself, he didn’t grasp the manner in which the infernal game was
being played—or what the game was actually concealing. He didn’t fully perceive
the homodemiological underpinnings of what was happening before his very eyes.
But he definitely grasped the fact that the science of the budding AIDS
Establishment was utterly bogus. He concluded his report by writing “I am more
convinced than ever that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. If the HIV advocates
were sure of their hypothesis, they would want to enlighten Duesberg and the
rest of us; they would want to publish their arguments in a proper scientific
journal complete with references. They would not need to resort to
stonewalling, deception, and personal abuse.” (PBP p.168)
The 1988 amfAR Forum was another one of
the tragic “What if?” moments in the dark history of AIDS. What if the reporters
had looked closer at Haseltine’s fake slide and realized that it was the tip of
the iceberg, a little like the scientific version of the Watergate break-in
that would have led them to a much bigger crime if they only followed the lies?
What if they had reported that AIDS science, as practiced by Anthony Fauci, was
simply out-to-lunch? What if they had been independent enough to notice that
epidemiology was overplaying its arrogant, biased hand and that, in reality, it
is actually a soft, subjective enterprise vulnerable to political manipulation?
Why was it beyond the pale to wonder if this petulant, hostile gathering was
actually the expression of some rather unsavory feelings and hostilities
directed at the so-called beneficiaries of this new kind of “science,” namely
the gay community? Maybe someone should have asked if there was something funky
about a group of hostile, petulant, white heterosexual mostly-male scientists performing
their jerry-built kind of seat-of-the-pants epidemiological science on gays. Wasn’t
that a formula for all kinds of prurient, heterosexist pseudoscientific mischief if ever there
was one? In terms of majorities doing their science on minorities, hadn’t
anyone ever heard of Nazi science or the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment? God only
knows what personal sexual issues were being acted out by this elite motley
crew under the cover of what has turned out to be high-falluting retroviral
claptrap. Why didn’t anyone other than Lauritsen notice the peculiar,
unscientific defensiveness of the whole affair, i.e. that the ladies had protested
too much? And most importantly for the main event, why was HHV-6, which had
been discovered in AIDS patients two years before that curious amfAR forum, not
put on the table for discussion?
Fauci believed in the kind of transparency
and communications with the public that are typical of abnormal science. He
laid out the draconian media policy that he would maintain for the nearly
thirty years he ran the totalitarian HIV/AIDS empire in a brief piece he wrote
for the AAAS Observer on September 1, 1989.
Fauci wrote, "When I first got
involved in AIDS research, I was reluctant to deal with the press. I thought it
was not dignified. But there was a lot of distortion by those who were speaking
to the press so I changed my mind." The "distortion" was, of
course, coming from those who didn't agree with the very dignified Fauci about
the etiology of AIDS. Fauci had his own idea of what the media's responsibility
is. He notes that his interpretation of what the media is supposed to do
"doesn't even jibe with what competent journalists think." He asserts
that the big dilemma for journalists is between what is "important"
and what is "newsworthy" and he notes that they sometimes "are
not the same." He whines about the fact that journalists are more
interested in the latest story of a cure than the "magnificent
science" involving the regulatory genes of HIV.
Fauci describes what he thinks is the
hierarchy of media. It ranges from The New York Times and The
Washington Post all the way down to publications that "care only
about sales or have axes to grind." (He had yet to face the unwashed
barbarians of the blogs and the commenters of the online forums.) One can
safely assume that the publications with axes to grind were the ones who didn't
agree with the axe that Fauci himself was grinding.
It is amusing that Fauci pontificated in 1989 that "the media are no place for amateurs, particularly when talking about a public health problem of the magnitude of AIDS." Especially when one considers the magnitude of the public health problem that this very self-reverential scientist (that Bruce Nussbaum described as "lackluster") himself helped create for the whole human race. While Fauci would make one think that the real problem in AIDS journalism was the clownish journalist who can’t spell "retrovirus" or one who didn’t listen carefully after asking questions, his real quarry in this peevish little piece is something far more serious. Fauci's real problem was journalists who not only could spell “retrovirus" but could also actually hear what he was saying all too well. The kind of journalists who also knew things about retroviruses and listened to what he was saying so closely and critically that they could make life unpleasant for Fauci and his powerful AIDS cronies by asking inconvenient questions.
It is amusing that Fauci pontificated in 1989 that "the media are no place for amateurs, particularly when talking about a public health problem of the magnitude of AIDS." Especially when one considers the magnitude of the public health problem that this very self-reverential scientist (that Bruce Nussbaum described as "lackluster") himself helped create for the whole human race. While Fauci would make one think that the real problem in AIDS journalism was the clownish journalist who can’t spell "retrovirus" or one who didn’t listen carefully after asking questions, his real quarry in this peevish little piece is something far more serious. Fauci's real problem was journalists who not only could spell “retrovirus" but could also actually hear what he was saying all too well. The kind of journalists who also knew things about retroviruses and listened to what he was saying so closely and critically that they could make life unpleasant for Fauci and his powerful AIDS cronies by asking inconvenient questions.
Fauci's nose should have grown several feet
when he wrote, "We know that reporters must consult more than a single
source and make room for dissenting opinions." What was yet to come in the
AAAS piece made that one of the biggest fibs in the history of American
science. Under the pretense of giving us a little lesson in the relationship
between science and the media and warning that people too often believe what
they read in the papers, Fauci reveals his real agenda: "One striking
example is Peter Duesberg's theory that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. I laughed
at that for a while, but it led to a lot of public concern that HIV was a hoax.
The theory had a great deal of credibility just on the basis of news
coverage." This was Fauci being intellectually dishonest on a couple of
counts. Duesberg never said it was a hoax. He said it was a mistake. A
hoax is a whole other ball of wax, and it is an example of using language politically
to deliberately misrepresent the opposition. Duesberg wasn't saying something
similar to those who say that the landing on the moon was just staged with
props and a camera. He was a Nobel caliber expert on retroviruses pointing out
the deficiencies of the HIV theory in AIDS using basic logic and analyzing the
available evidence. And blaming the media for the credibility given to
Duesberg's ideas ignored all the scientists, (eventually including two Nobel
Prize winners), who publicly supported Duesberg's skepticism
Fauci then introduces us to the smarter
member of his family, his sister: "My barometer of what the general public
is thinking is my sister Denise. My sister Denise is an intelligent woman who
reads avidly, listens to the radio, and watches television, but she is not a
scientist. When she calls me and questions my integrity as a scientist, there
really is a problem. Denise has called me at least ten times about Peter
Duesberg. She says, 'Anthony’—she is the only one who calls me Anthony, 'are
you sure he's wrong?' That's the power of putting someone on television or in
the press, although there is virtually nothing in his argument that makes any
scientific sense." This captures how touchy Fauci was. No one was
questioning his "integrity as a scientist.” His sister was simply asking
him if it was possible that he was wrong, and the answer that would have
shown some scientific integrity would have been "Yes, my dear Denise, it
is always possible that I'm wrong, although I think the evidence suggests I'm right."
The fact that Fauci took this soooooo personally speaks volumes about
the petulant chip-on-the-shoulder attitude problems of those in charge of AIDS. Fauci
put it all on the line. Questioning his so-called science was a threat to his
very being. It shouldn't surprise anyone that he was willing to viciously fight
for so long during Holocaust II to keep everyone from seeing what a house of
cards he had helped build. The funny thing is that in a number of ways this
very piece of his writing suggests he did have serious problems in the
integrity department. (Between the lines of the piece Freudian historians may
one day even find the glimmer of a guilty conscience.)
Fauci, like most of the crowd that gave us
"Holocaust II," knew only too well what normal science is supposed to look like:
“People are especially confused when they see divergent viewpoints about the
same thing. They do not understand that the beauty of science is that it is
self-corroborating and self-correcting, that it is important for scientists to
be wrong.” (If that’s really the case Fauci was indeed doing something
incredibly important with HIV.) It was actually Fauci who didn’t understand
that the whole process of self-corroboration and self-correction was being
short-circuited by the totalitarian hijinks of the petulant HIV/AIDS establishment that
was growing more dominant by the day. The very tone of Fauci’s piece, its
extraordinary imperiousness and presumptuousness about the stupidity of the
public, points to the fundamental problem for a society in which petulant elite
scientific communities have more and more power. Fauci would not only be the
judge and jury of what was true in science, but he also wanted to decide who
deserved to write about it and what they should write. He clearly left no room
for the possibility that the really good journalists would be the kind that
questioned what he had to say.
Fauci also made it pretty clear in the
piece that, try as they might, AIDS critics and dissidents would get absolutely
nowhere because he was permanently stacking the deck against them: “The lack of
clear-cut black-or-white answers plagues the biomedical sciences compared with
the physical sciences. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann said they had
achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. Other scientists tried, but they
could not reproduce it. Bingo it’s over. But because we cannot ethically do
clinical trials to establish that he is wrong, I am probably going to be
answering Peter Duesberg for the rest of my life.” Someone near him should have
tried to convince Fauci that it wasn’t all about him. One also loves the
presumption that he was going to control the official etiology of AIDS for
the rest of his life. Unfortunately he almost has. Beyond the breathtaking
megalomania of the statement is the stupidity that the only way to show HIV
wasn’t the cause of AIDS was to do clinical trials with patients. All it would
have taken would have been a few patients with AIDS who had no evidence of
HIV. The only people that would be hurt by the implications of that finding
would be the scientists, like Fauci, whose undeserved reputations and incomes
had depended upon the HIV theory. Those HIV-negative patients would be
forthcoming—in spades. In fact those patients were basically the very
immune-compromised chronic fatigue syndrome patients Richard DuBois had seen in
his Atlanta practice in 1980 before the
socio-epidemiological construction of the heterosexist and racist HIV/AIDS
paradigm.
Hillary Johnson reported on the DuBois
Atlanta cases in Osler’s Web Inside the Labyrinth of Chronic FatigueSyndrome Epidemic, her epic work of journalism detailing the CDC’s failure
to acknowledge the true nature of the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic. It is
now all too painfully obvious that the DuBois cases—with the telltale signs of
hypergammaglobulinemia, t-cell perturbations and persistent reactivated EBV and
CMV infections—were the beginning of the real AIDS/CFS/autism/HHV-6 disaster.
According to Johnson, in 1980 Richard DuBois “saw a thirteen-year old girl who
suffered from a seemingly endless case of mono. As the months passed, he
identified several more cases of the curious syndrome in his practice.” (OW
p.7) He wasn’t alone. According to
Johnson he was in touch with other clinicians who had seen similar cases and he
and his colleagues eventually had a research article published about it in the Southern
Medical Journal in 1984, the same year the big consequential government
mistake of certifying HIV as the official AIDS virus occurred. According to
Johnson, “they [DuBois and his colleagues] had believed that they were
describing a new syndrome, one that would have increasing importance and was
worthy of national attention.” (OW p.7) The DuBois patients morphed into the millions of chronic fatigue
syndrome and HHV-6 patients that Fauci and his organization (which was supposed
to handle infectious diseases) were willfully ignoring while building their
Potemkin AIDS empire.
At the end of Fauci's little AAAS piece comes the
shot across the media’s bow from the uberpetulant AIDS czar: “Scientists need to
get more sophisticated about expressing themselves. But the media have to do
their homework. They have got to learn the issues and the background. And they
should realize that their accuracy is noted by the scientific community.
Journalists who make too many mistakes, who are sloppy, are going to find that
their access to scientists may diminish.” In other words, the scientists that
journalists reported on were going to be the petulant final arbiters of what the public
knows about science. They could decide to cut off journalists they defined
as making mistakes and being sloppy, and one would assume that one of those
sloppy mistakes would probably entail giving any coverage to scientists like
Peter Duesberg, who raised serious questions about what was being called good
science by Fauci and the rest of the HIV/AIDS establishment. Fauci was
basically saying that he and his cronies would only be accountable to
themselves which is the hermetically-sealed, closed-community essence of should be called totalitarian, abnormal science.
If anyone ever makes a serious film about
"Holocaust II" it will have to include the shocking revelation that came to light
during the Eighth International Conference on AIDS in Amsterdam during July of
1992. Its historic importance rivals that of the Wannsee conference during
World War II or the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It was the moment of no turning
back, the moment a line was crossed, a life of virtual pseudoscientific crime against humanity was
virtually signed onto and those responsible for "Holocaust II" lost all forms of
plausible deniability. AIDS almost overnight became AIDSgate and a very unique
biomedical assault against humanity. And, ultimately, the man who stood at the
center of the developments that came out of Amsterdam was Anthony Fauci. Before
Amsterdam one might be able to say that Fauci wasn’t exactly the Bernie Madoff
of the Ponzi Scheme that maintained AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome and the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe. But not
after Amsterdam
Hillary Johnson provided a detailed
account of what happened at that Amsterdam conference in her book, Osler’sWeb. She recounts how the conference was electrified by news from a small
press conference that was held in California at which a scientist named “Subhir
Gupta, a University of California immunologist, reported he had isolated
particles of a previously unknown retrovirus from an HIV-negative, ailing
sixty-six-year-old woman, her symptomless daughter and six other patients.” (OW
p.600) According to Johnson, “Investigators and the lay press gathered in
Holland were riveted by Gupta’s announcement that the older woman suffered from
an ‘AIDS-like’ condition wherein a component of her immune system, a subset of
T-cells called CD4 cells, were severely depleted. In addition, she had suffered
a bout of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a so-called opportunistic
infection that afflicted many AIDS patients whose CD4 cells were depleted.” (OW
p.600)
That announcement was soon outdone by a
flurry of shocking revelations from additional scientists at the Amsterdam
conference who had “findings of retrovirus particles in HIV-negative patients
with AIDS-like symptoms.” (OW p.601) A near panic was almost set off
internationally by the possibility that there was a second previously unrecognized
AIDS epidemic on the horizon that was caused by a non-HIV agent. (OW
p.601)
According to Johnson, it turned out that
the Centers for Disease Control was already aware of such HIV-negative cases of
an AIDS-like illness. (OW p.601) Johnson reported that months before
Gupta’s press conference two CDC scientists had reported on “six cases of
non-HIV positive AIDS.” (OW p.601) Their conclusion was that “HIV may
not be the only infectious cause of immune deficiency.” (OW p.601)
The HIV-negative cases of AIDS-like
illness set off an explosion in the press, most notably from Lawrence Altman,
the reporter who guided The New York Times dreadful, sycophantic reporting on
AIDS throughout "Holocaust II." In the Times Altman wrote that the CDC’s
embarrassment was “huge because the agency had lost control over the
dissemination of new information in the field of AIDS.” (OW p.602) (That
anyone at the Times could stress the importance of a government agency controlling
information with a straight face is pretty amazing. And revealing)
According to Johnson, the CFS research
community was especially fascinated by the fact that the Gupta HIV-negative
AIDS-like cases were chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers. (OW p.604) And for anyone following
the bizarre scientific politics of AIDS, it was interesting that Gupta’s
colleague, the man who supposedly isolated the new retrovirus was none other
than Zaki Salahuddin, the scientist who had worked for Robert Gallo and had
faced criminal charges for creating a company that garnered illegal self-dealt
income from his position at the National Cancer Institute. Johnson reported
that when Salahuddin was asked whether HIV-negative AIDS might be chronic
fatigue syndrome, he said, “It’s a fair statement. But I’m not a prophet. Time
and money [are] required for this.” (OW p.604) Johnson also reported
that “Salahuddin confirmed that he and Gupta, who had a cohort of CFS patients
in his clinical practice and who had presented papers on the immunology of CFS
at medical conferences on the disease, had discussed the possibility that CFS
and non-HIV positive AIDS were the same disease.” (OW p.604) Also,
according to Johnson, the non-HIV positive AIDS cases caught the attention of
Paul Cheney, one of the two pioneering Lake Tahoe chronic fatigue syndrome
researchers. Johnson reported that “For years he had observed that some CFS
patients met the government’s defining criteria for AIDS on every count except
infection with human immunodeficiency virus.” (OW p.604) He also told
Johnson that “It was hardly unheard of . . . to diagnose the kinds of
opportunistic infections that torment AIDS victims—maladies like thrush,
candida and pneumonia—in CFS.” (OW p.604)
The AIDS conference in 1992 should have
been one of those great moments in normal science as described by Thomas Kuhn.
It could have been a moment when “anomalies” should have attracted the
“attention of a scientific community.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions p.ix) But this would not be
a moment for AIDS research that “the profession can no longer evade anomalies
that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice” which would “begin
the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set
of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science.” (SSR p.6) This
would not be one of those eureka moments in science characterized by “the
community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another
incompatible with it.” (SSR p.6) There would be no “transformation of
the world within which science was done.” (SSR p.6) There would be no
“change in the rules governing the prior practice.” (SSR p.7) As a
result of what happened in Amsterdam, scientists would not alter their
“conception of entities with which [they] had long been familiar.” (SSR
p.7) Amsterdam would not cause the AIDS researchers’ worlds to be “qualitatively
transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of
either fact or theory.” (SSR p.7) After the revelations of HIV-negative
AIDS cases, the researchers would still not give up their “shared paradigm.” (SSR
p.11) No new AIDS (or chronic fatigue syndrome = AIDS) paradigm was allowed to
reveal itself in Amsterdam and subsequently be fairly examined and debated. The
HIV-negative cases of AIDS would not be recognized as an important scientific
surprise that would lead scientists “to see nature in a different way.” (SSR
p.53) The scientific world of AIDS researchers did not change “in an instant” (SSR
p.56) the way it might have if AIDS research was taking place in the world of
normal science. (And consequently, immune-system-destroying HHV-6 would remain locked in the basement of "science.")
Tragically, the HIV-negative AIDS cases
were not a wake-up call for the scientists that “something had gone wrong” and
hence the anomalous cases were not “a prelude to discovery.” (SSR p.57)
Even though the HIV-negative AIDS cases “violated deeply entrenched
expectations,” (SSR p.59) they were not allowed to change anything about
the AIDS paradigm. In Kuhn’s world of normal science the “traditional pursuit
prepares the way for it own change.’ (SSR p.65) Amsterdam showed
that
AIDS research was being conducted in normal science’s opposite world,one
that should be called "abnormal, totalitarian science." Even if
the HIV-negative AIDS cases could have ultimately led to a new paradigm
that
was “able to account for wider range of natural phenomena,” (SSR p.66)
they were dead on arrival. No “novel theory” about AIDS which was a “direct
response to crisis” (SSR p.75) was allowed to emerge because the
abnormal, totalitarian science of AIDS was politically invulnerable to crisis. At that conference there
was never any chance that the HIV/AIDS theory would be “declared invalid” even
though a new “CFS is a form of AIDS” paradigm was staring out at the conference
from the new anomalous data and was a perfectly credible “alternate candidate.”
(SSR p.77) Kuhn wrote that the decision to reject one paradigm is always
simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that
decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each
other.” (SSR p.77) The HIV-negative AIDS cases were not allowed to
catalyze that kind of intellectual process in Amsterdam. Kuhn would probably
argue that absent a new paradigm to examine and accept in Amsterdam, there was
no exit from the HIV/AIDS paradigm because “To reject one paradigm without
simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” (SSR
p.79) In a way, much of what happened at the AIDS conference was based on
appeals to something quite characteristic of the AIDS establishment and
abnormal science: authority. The petulant HIV/AIDS authorities basically said “Nothing
here, folks. Please move along.” And unfortunately the scientific community and
the media (with a few notable exceptions) did exactly that. Kuhnian anomaly
didn’t turn into Kuhnian crisis and that in turn did not explode into
Kuhnian scientific revolution as it should have. The HIV-negative cases
in Amsterdam should have led to a period of what Kuhn called “extraordinary
science” (SSR p.82) in which “the rules of normal science become increasingly
blurred.” (SSR p.83) (Although one could argue that the rules of AIDS
research already actually were a shocking mess.) Amsterdam would not be the
moment when “formerly standard solutions of solved problems are called into
question.” (SSR p.83) The conference should have been a fruitful time
when scientists were “terribly confused.” (SSR p.84) If things had gone
the way they should have at that conference, the assembled AIDS researchers
would have ultimately changed their view of “the field, its methods, and its
goals.” (SSR p.85)HHV-6 might have been allowed to reveal itself in all its viral glory.
Had the science of Amsterdam been normal,
both AIDS research and chronic fatigue syndrome research might have morphed into
one unified discipline. The dismantling of the “chronic fatigue syndrome isn’t
AIDS” paradigm should have begun in earnest. HHV-6 (and its spectrum or family)
might have emerged quickly as the unifying viral agent(s) of those two
epidemics which should have always been considered one in the first place. What
happened in Amsterdam was a virtual scientific crime. It was the deliberate
attempt to use sheer political force to make a legitimate scientific crisis
disappear. As a result, scientists would not turn to what Kuhn describes as a
“philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field.”
(SSR p.88) The crisis was not allowed to play itself out and would not
loosen what Kuhn calls the “stereotypes” and provide “the incremental data necessary
for a fundamental paradigm shift.” (SSR p.89) There would be no Kuhnian
“transition from normal to extraordinary research.” (SSR p.91) It should have
been painfully clear in Amsterdam “that an existing paradigm [had] ceased to
function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that
paradigm itself had previously led the way.“ (SSR p.92)
A potentially life-saving scientific revolution in AIDS research
was politically nipped in the bud in Amsterdam and in the months that followed.
No “new theory” was allowed to surface that would “permit predictions that are
different from those derived from its predecessor” (SSR p.97) Kuhn
asserted that “the price of significant scientific advance is a commitment that
runs the risk of being wrong.”(SSR p.101) Those in control of the
abnormal science of AIDS had no interest in engaging in any kind of
science that would prove them wrong. “Wrong” was not in their petulant
vocabulary. They had bet their white heterosexual malereputations and the credibility of American
science on their ridiculous and dangerous HIV/AIDS and “chronic fatigue
syndrome is not AIDS” paradigms. Fake dividends of their scientific Ponzi Scheme would be paid out for decades.
What happened in Amsterdam was the opening
and almost simultaneously closing of a Pandora’s Box of incredibly important
scientific questions. The person most responsible for keeping that box closed
then and for the next two decades was the de facto AIDS Czar, Anthony Fauci.
This may have been the last chance for Fauci and the HIV/AIDS establishment to
turn back from the precipice of the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe.
According to Hillary Johnson, “On August
15, federal scientists convened a meeting in Atlanta to discuss the emerging
health threat of non-HIV positive AIDS. In the three weeks since Sudhir Gupta’s
paper on his isolation of a new intracisternal retrovirus in a handful of
cases, the number of reported cases had risen from approximately thirty to
fifty. Nobel prize winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, CDC’s
AIDS administrators, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, formed a panel to query scientists Gupta,
David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Center in New York and Jeffrey Laurence, a
Cornell Medical College cancer and AIDS specialist and associate professor of
medicine, each of whom had been studying cases of the syndrome and discovered
evidence of retroviral infection in patients.” (OW p.606) It didn’t
matter how many brilliant scientists from different institutions were queried
at the meeting, because their mindsets about HIV were all the same. It was like
a mini-Woodstock of groupthink. There was no turning back from the HIV/AIDS and
“chronic fatigue syndrome isn‘t AIDS” paradigm. It was eight years old at that
point and the nation’s heterosexist and racist AIDS propaganda and public health policies had been
built around it. It was another moment in abnormal science in which the foxes
had formed a panel to investigate the henhouse. The homodemiological and
Afrodemiological HIV/AIDS and “CFS is not AIDS” paradigm was in very little
real danger.
The manner in which Fauci and his
colleagues basically covered up the shocking anomalies of HIV-negative AIDS was
relatively simple and Orwellian: they disingenuously gave the HIV-negative
cases an obfuscational new name (Idiopathic CD4 T lymphocytopenia or ICL) and
they insisted by fiat that they were not really AIDS cases. The HIV/AIDS elite
insisted that because there was no unifying geographic or chronological “risk
factor” (OW P.603) to be found in these ordinary Americans and they shared no
official AIDS risk factors, there was no HIV-negative AIDS or AIDS-like
epidemic covertly occurring in the general population.
Because the “chronic fatigue syndrome is
not AIDS” paradigm was not challenged by what happened at the Amsterdam
Conference in 1992, for at least another two more decades, the chronic fatigue
syndrome patients were locked into their pathetic heterosexist wild goose chase to find a
cause while constantly avoiding the obvious links between their medical issues
and AIDS. They had Tony Fauci’s blessing for that fool’s errand. His basic
attitude toward CFS was that people shouldn’t be ashamed of being told that
their problem was psychiatric, (OW p.334) which was how the disease was
deceptively framed by the government for nearly three decades. And of course
they were only the tip of the iceberg. Everyone suffering from multi-systemic
problems of the HHV-6 spectrum (like multiple sclerosis, autistic spectrum and even Morgellons
patients) would ultimately pay a heavy price for the intellectual dishonesty of
the 1992 AIDS conference.
Fauci and his colleagues told the public
that the HIV-negative cases of AIDS-like illness were rare, but of course it
all depended on deisease definitions and who was doing the defining and counting. Fauci
disingenuously sent out a call that summer asking that all HIV-negative cases
be reported immediately to him. An editorial in New York Native heeded his call: “Last week
Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
asked that all cases of HIV-negative AIDS be reported to him. We reported
thirteen million American cases. That’s the estimate of the number of cases of
chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction, a condition that research (if anyone
bothers to read it) suggests is essentially HIV-negative AIDS.” (OW
p.605)
The editorial had no impact on Anthony
Fauci and it would not be the only time he would ignore the New York Native during
Holocaust II.
One could ultimately say that Denise Fauci's petulant brother
himself represented one of the most significant paradigm shifts, one
that moved the whole world from normal to abnormal, totalitarian
science. During the Fauci years, The Age of Scientific Racketeering
began in earnest.
Should Myron Essex be asked to resign from Harvard?
FOCMA happened in the decade before the beginning of what could be called "Holocaust II" and the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe, but it was a scientific omen of things to come. One could say that the decline and fall of American biomedical science had a dry run in the FOCMA episode at Harvard.
FOCMA stands for “feline orcornavirus-associated
cell-membrane antigen,” and it was supposedly discovered in 1977 and named by
Myron T. “Max” Essex, a Harvard School of Public Health researcher. According
to Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson, Essex, when he was a post
doc, came up with the idea that ‘white blood cells from cats infected with the
feline leukemia virus also exhibited a unique protein on their surface, “ and
Essex “dubbed that protein “FOCMA.’” (Science Fictions p. 40)
In Crewdson’s book on the questionable
AIDS research of Robert Gallo, he notes that the importance of Essex’s putative
discovery was that “If FOCMA were a by-product of the cell’s infection with
feline leukemia virus, it might represent confirmation of a cellular defense
against cancer, at least in cats. . .” (SF p. 40) This would have been a
major scientific breakthrough, if true.
Unfortunately for a junior researcher who
decided to devote the early part of his career to the study of FOCMA, it turned
out not to be what Essex thought it was. The researcher, Wolf Prensky,
discovered—to the great detriment of his budding career—that FOCMA “was just a
viral protein and not a cellular antigen.” (SF p.41) According to
Crewdson, Prensky, with two other scientists, published a paper “that was a
definitive demonstration that the FOCMA protein was encoded by the feline
leukemia virus itself, not a cellular by-product of infection.” (SF
p.41) Crewdson notes that “The idea that cat blood cells had some built-in
defense against cancer evaporated overnight.” (SF p.41)
What happened next was a foreshadowing of
the totalitarian culture of abnormal science that would happen throughout the
three decades of the scientific shenanigans known as HIV/AIDS. And it would
involve some of the same characters. The head of the National Cancer Institute,
Vincent DeVita, “selected [Robert] Gallo, despite his co-authorship of a FOCMA
article with Essex two years before, to head an investigation of Prensky’s
claims.” (SF p.41) This is the kind of little game that would be known
throughout "Holocaust II" as “Henhouse, meet Fox.”
While the committee came to the conclusion
that neither undermined Essex or vindicated him, because, according to
Crewdson, Gallo claimed he didn’t understand FOCMA—something he had
co-authored a paper about, a pattern was set of old boys performing due
diligence on their own old boy networks. If this was the musical overture for
three decades of AIDS science, one could call the melody “sham peer review” and
“egregious conflict of interest.”
Prensky’s career was viciously sidetracked
for many years for daring to challenge Essex, and perhaps most importantly, for
getting anywhere near what some people eventually considered one of the most dangerous
black holes in science: Robert Gallo.
Crewdson, who paradoxically supported the
Gallo HIV theory of AIDS despite writing an epic expose of Gallo that makes
Gallo look like the greatest pathological liar in the history of science,
doesn’t dwell on the FOCMA matter much or with any great outrage, perhaps
because Essex’s subsequent career would eventually have what Crewdson
considered a happy scientific ending due to his peripheral early involvement
with HTLV-III, the virus that was officially declared by the government and the
AIDS establishment to be the real cause of AIDS in 1984. Crewdson writes that
“rather than withdrawing or correcting his FOCMA articles, Essex simply stopped
referring to them in his subsequent publications.” (SF p. 41) He
disappeared the episode. Crewdson doesn’t write a single word about the
tremendous damage done to Prensky’s career which was the price he paid for
telling the truth about one of Essex’s discoveries. Prensky’s fate foreshadowed
the fate of Peter Duesberg, the scientist who would eventually be severely
punished for basically saying that HIV was about as much the cause of AIDS as
FOCMA was a cellular protection against cancer.
Insofar as Essex just left his “discovery”
floating like the undead in the scientific literature without ever retracting
it, this little incident of uncorrected science was akin to the broken window
theory of crime, it that it may have led to bigger evasions of the truth with
far greater implications for mankind. And it also foreshadowed the degree to which
both Essex and Gallo would have amazing political and “scientific’ power that
would allow them to survive and even thrive during Holocaust II. FOCMA was the
grain of sand in which one could see the whole universe of HIV/AIDS fraud.
Journalist Barry Werth wrote about FOCMA
in an article called “The AIDS Windfall” in New England Monthly in June,
1988. He writes that “Dozens of scientists went off in pursuit of FOCMA. But no
one could prove that FOCMA existed. Essex abandoned the subject, and he refused
to pursue the criticism of those following it up, or to retract it. He simply
let FOCMA hang, and other scientists were understandably incensed. ‘We’d have
figured it out ten years earlier if Essex had only done his homework,’
complains one researcher.”
Essex was able to move on without ever
having to admit he had made a mistake. Werth notes that Essex was able to
conveniently change the subject from FOCMA to HTLV: “Essex’s work connecting
HTLV with AIDS was published in the spring of 1983.” The actual so-called AIDS
retrovirus, HTLV-III, was a year away from being declared the official cause of
AIDS, but Essex had helped pave the way to, depending on your point of view,
the Nobel-worthy notion or “Big Mistake” that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus.
Werth writes that “the AIDS virus was a retrovirus, just as Essex had said.
He’s been wrong in all the particulars, but right in general, and being half
right secured him the undisputed mantle as the prophet of AIDS.” Or as the
perpetually witty HIV critic Peter Duesberg might say, the prophet of the Hope
Diamond. Fortunately for Essex, his reward would not just come in heaven but he
would also profit financially in this world for the disastrous retroviral
theory of AIDS.
Given Essex’s financial and career
interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the notion that a retrovirus was the
cause of AIDS, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he played an intense
enforcement role during the next three decades by helping to elbow out anyone
or any that threatened the hegemony of the AIDS retrovirus. His willingness to
play power politics would be dramatically in evidence at the 1992 International
AIDS Conference in Amsterdam at which several scientists announced that they
had discovered cases of AIDS in which there was no evidence of HIV. It
didn’t take long for the HIV establishment to realize that such cases could
turn their retroviral empire into a falling house of cards overnight. In what
could be called one of the greatest games of scientific three-card monte, and
in the true spirit of abnormal, totalitarian science, the Centers for
Disease Control and the powerful HIV establishment effectively swept the
paradigm-challenging anomalies under the rug by giving the HIV-negative AIDS
cases a new category and a brand new complicated name, idiopathic CD4
T-lymphocytopenia (ICL).
Because the very embarrassing HIV-negative
cases were found outside the
so-called risk groups, they just couldn’t be AIDS. It was a classic instance of
circular homodemiological groupthink. If it wasn’t gay, it wasn’t AIDS.
Case closed. When researcher Subhir Gupta reported at the 1992 conference that
he had found evidence of a retrovirus other than HIV in a sixty-six year old
woman who had AIDS-like symptoms, but was negative for HIV, Essex stepped right
up to the plate. Gupta had published his findings in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science. The findings should have inspired an emergency
rethinking of AIDS epidemiology and virology. In Osler’s Web, Hillary
Johnson described the whole incident: “Max Essex, a Harvard AIDS researcher,
expressed skepticism bordering on ennui. ‘I’m not overwhelmed by it,’ he
commented after reading the paper. ‘I’d place the odds at five to ten percent
that this might lead to something.’” (OW p.601) (The odds, of course,
were nearly 100 percent that Essex would do what he could so that such an
outcome was achieved.) According to Johnson, “Both [David] Ho and Essex raised
the specter of laboratory contamination in the matter of Gupta’s findings.
Microbes such as Gupta described, they said, were notorious laboratory
contaminants and could easily have come from an animal cell line.” (OW.
p.601) The AIDS establishment’s findings always tended to be scientifically
unquestionable (and miraculously contaminant-free) and any findings that
challenged the HIV paradigm tended to be contaminants, artifacts, irrelevant
correlations. Only the inner circle’s labs were pristine and above suspicion.
The very threatened CDC stepped in and
quickly reassured the shocked world that there was not a new virus
causing another AIDS epidemic. (This was also at the same time they
were—by ignoring it—indirectly assuring the public that there wasn’t a
contagious immune-system compromising chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic in the
general population. In retrospect, and full of the irony that "Holocaust II" is
replete with, they were right. It wasn’t a new AIDS epidemic, it was part and
parcel of the old one, the one they had gotten the epidemiology and virology
wrong on.) When the CDC’s director of AIDS Research, James Curran, told the
press that the cases of HIV-negative AIDS like illness were not “AIDS caused by
something else,” he was just whistling in the dark while HHV-6 spectrum
pandemic was having its insidious way with the world and creating a disaster
that could not be seen by the abnormal science that was generated by the CDC’s
homodemiological vision of the epidemic.
From his position on the Mt. Olympus of
AIDS, Essex had done his part at that Amsterdam AIDS Conference to help the HIV
establishment avoid a crisis of confidence and keep a lid on the horrifying
truth about the real epidemic. He saved his reputation as the
prophet who knew
what kind of virus caused AIDS. The coming decades would be a
professional
dream come true for the man who discovered the nonexistent FOCMA.
"Holocaust II" and The Age of Totalitarian, Abnormal Science could not
have existed without Harvard's Myron Essex.
Day Two
Teach-in #1
How Don Francis Helped Corrupt the Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #2
How James Curran Helped Corrupt the Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #3
How Mary Guinan Helped Corrupt the Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #1
How Don Francis Helped Corrupt the Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Donald Francis, the epidemiological superstar of Shilts's book, And the Band Played On, 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 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.
Teach-in #2
How James Curran Helped Corrupt the 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.
Teach-in #3
How Mary Guinan Helped Corrupt the 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.
Day Three
Teach-in #1
The Story about AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Student Should Know by Heart
Teach-in #2
How Peter Duesberg Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #3
How Kary Mullis Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #4
How Robert Root-Bernstein Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #5
How Serge Lang Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #6
How Rebecca Culshaw Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Teach-in #1
The Story about AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Student Should Know by Heart
A story that Hans Christin Andersen wrote was recently unearthed and it totally clarifies the relationship between AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
The Emperor's New Diagnosis
Once
upon a time there lived a very vain
Emperor whose only worry in life was his health and his desire to live
forever.
He ate fresh fruits and vegetables and herbs all day long and loved to
brag about his vim and vigor and body fat percentages to everyone in his
court and
to show off his masculine robustness to his people.
Word of the Emperor's excellent health and
desire to live forever spread over his kingdom and beyond. Two scoundrel
physicians who had heard of the Emperor's obsession with his own precious
health and longevity decided to take advantage of it. They introduced
themselves at the gates of the palace as cutting-edge physicians with a
specialty in making healthy people even healthier so that they could live
forever—with a scheme in mind.
"We are two very good doctors and
after many years of clinical research we have invented an extraordinary medical
procedure to make healthy people even healthier, so healthy that they will
never die. As a matter of fact, it is a medical secret unknown to anyone, and
people are probably too ignorant and incompetent to appreciate its
quality."
The chief of the guards heard the
scoundrel doctors’ story and sent for the court chamberlain. The chamberlain
notified the prime minister, who ran to the Emperor and disclosed the
incredible news. The Emperor's curiosity got the better of him and he decided
to summon the two scoundrel doctors.
"Your Highness, if you wish, this
special medical treatment will be created in your kitchen by us especially for
you," declared one of the scoundrel doctors. The Emperor gave the two men
a bag of gold coins in exchange for their promise to begin preparing the
medical treatment that would make him even healthier than he already was and
enable him to escape death.
"Just tell us what you need to get
started and we'll give it to you," said the Emperor.
The two scoundrel doctors asked for
carrots, spinach, garlic, an enema device and then they pretended to begin
working. The Emperor thought he had spent his money quite well: in addition to
getting a new extraordinary cutting-edge medical treatment, he would discover
which of his subjects were ignorant and incompetent. A few days later, he
called the old and wise prime minister, who was considered by everyone to be a
man with great common sense.
"Go and see how the work is
proceeding," the Emperor told him, "and come back to let me
know."
The prime minister was welcomed by the two
scoundrel physicians.
"We're almost finished, but we need a
lot more carrots. Here, Excellency! Admire the unique colors, smell the power
of the medicine!" The old man bent over the concoction and tried to see
what was so special about the brew. He suddenly felt cold sweat on his
forehead.
"I can't detect anything special or
powerful," he thought. "If I observe nothing, that means I'm stupid!
Or, worse, incompetent!" If the prime minister admitted that he didn't
perceive anything special about the medicine, he would be discharged from his
office for stupidity and incompetence.
"What a marvelous medicine,” he then
said. "I'll certainly tell the Emperor." The two scoundrel doctors
rubbed their hands gleefully. They had almost achieved their goal. More spinach
and garlic were requested to finish their work.
Finally, the Emperor received the
announcement that the two doctors had come to give the Emperor a complete
physical before he received his medicine.
"Come in," the Emperor ordered.
As they bowed, the two scoundrel doctors winked at each other.
"Here it is your Highness, the result
of our intense scientific labors," one of the scoundrel doctors said.
"We have worked night and day but, at last, the most amazing
health-enhancing medical treatment in the world is ready for you. Look at the colors
of the liquid and smell how powerful the miraculous life-enhancing,
liver-renewing medicine is." Of course the Emperor did not see any special
color in the orangey brew with green spinach highlights and chunks of garlic
and could not smell anything all that different from his evening stew or the
palace’s vegetable garden. He panicked and felt like fainting. But luckily the
throne was right behind him and he sat down. But when he realized that no one
could know that he did not sense the miraculous cutting-edge life-enhancing
power of the brew, he felt better. Nobody would find out that he was ignorant
and incompetent. And the Emperor didn't know that everybody else around him
thought the very same thing.
The farce continued as the two scoundrel
doctors had foreseen it. Once they had pretended to thoroughly examine the
Emperor, the two began preparing the Emperor for his health-enhancing
liver-renewing enema.
"Your Highness, you'll have to take
off your clothes for your secret life-enhancing medical treatment." The
two scoundrels then gave the Emperor his enema. They had to bite their tongues
to keep from laughing. The Emperor was slightly embarrassed but he had high
hopes for the treatment.
"Yes, this is an amazing medical
breakthrough and it feels like it is having a powerful effect on me. My liver
feels twenty years younger," the Emperor said, trying to look comfortable.
"You've done a fine job."
When they saw him, everyone in the Emperor’s
entourage applauded and insisted that the Emperor looked healthier than he ever
had.
For the next few days the Emperor felt so
good that he declared the two doctors would be his private physicians for life
and ordered them to give themselves the life-enhancing enemas so they would
always be there to take care of him. And he gave them each three additional
bags of gold.
Wherever the Emperor went in the days
after the enema, all the members of his court told him he had never looked as
fabulous and that they were sure now that he would live forever. The Emperor
was very happy so everyone in his kingdom was, if not very happy, at least
relieved that the Emperor was.
This did not last very long however,
because an event occurred that brought great anxiety to the kingdom. One
morning one of the kingdom’s constables rushed to give the Emperor some very
frightening news. People were dying in the kingdom’s prison and nobody knew
why. There was a rather large prison because there were very many bad people in
the kingdom and the Emperor had many enemies who usually ended up there.
“I will send my personal physicians to
determine what is going on,” said the Emperor.
When they were summoned, the two scoundrel
physicians pretended to be quite pleased with their assignment. “We are honored
to be put in charge of this medical investigation, your Highness,” one of them
said. Privately, they were terrified of what was expected of them. They were
not the kind of doctors who really liked to be around sick and dying people all
that much. But they nervously headed off to the prison.
Inside the prison they were horrified by
what they saw. People were sick with all kinds of different symptoms. There
seemed to be degrees of illness, from slightly sick to very sick to dying. They
knew they were completely out of their depth but they would have to tell the
Emperor something that would make him think they were not ignorant and
incompetent. They had a feeling that if the Emperor ever thought that they were
ignorant and incompetent they would promptly be two dead scoundrel physicians.
“We’d better come up with something,” said
one of the doctors. “I have it,” said the other. “These prisoners all seem to
be suffering from the collapse of their immune systems. They have all kinds of
illnesses. Let’s give it a name. Let me think. Okay, I have it. We’ll say its
acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Yes, and we’ll call it ‘AIDS’ so it’s
easier for people to say.”
“Yes, sounds good,” said the other. “But
what should we tell the Emperor is the cause of AIDS?”
“It’s a virus. A virus that only infects
bad people who deserve it. The amazing virus has special powers of distinction
that no other virus has. It sees bad people and then bad people who are
infected give it to other bad people. Only bad people can get it and only bad
people can transmit it. End of story.”
“That’s brilliant,” said the other
scoundrel physician.
The
two scoundrel doctors returned to the castle where they told the Emperor about
the epidemic of AIDS that had broken out at the prison. The Emperor got quite
agitated and said, “But if it is a virus, will I catch it and get sick and
die?”
“It isn’t possible said one of the
physicians. We did the epidemiology—which is the most advanced form of science
that there is—and we determined that only bad people can contract this virus.”
“Well, that is a relief!” said the
Emperor. For their efforts the scoundrel physicians received several more bags
of gold.
When the townspeople learned that
prisoners were dying in the kingdom’s dungeons, they grew concerned. The
emperor had a proclamation read on every street in the kingdom, declaring that
the people had nothing to worry about. As long as they were good, they could
not contract the virus that caused AIDS. It was only transmitted from bad
people to other bad people.
The people all pretended to feel safe but
privately they were quite concerned. And they had reason to be. In a matter of
days several people around the kingdom started to get sick with what looked a
lot like the same AIDS that the prisoners were coming down with. It didn’t take
long for word to reach the Emperor who immediately summoned his personal
physicians.
“What is going on, doctors?” he asked,
with a threatening tone in his voice. “Why are some of the townspeople getting
sick. Did you make a mistake? Are you ignorant and incompetent?”
“But Sire, don’t you see?” said one of the
trembling physicians. “Nature has created a virus to assist you in ruling your
kingdom. The people who are getting sick people who are secretly doing bad
things. They’re closet bad people. You wouldn’t have known that fact
otherwise.”
“Of course, why didn’t I realize that?”
The Emperor immediately ordered that all people who were getting sick with AIDS
should be officially declared bad people who were no doubt guilty of secret
crimes and taken immediately to the prison with all the other victims of AIDS.
Soon everyone in the kingdom was afraid to
even appear to have a cold or a sniffle. If they coughed they said it was just
allergies to the flowers that grew around the kingdom. Many hid in their homes
when they were unwell.
Soon the prison was so packed with sick
people who had officially been declared bad that several people had to sleep in
every bed. And then something very troubling started happening. Some of the
Emperor’s best friends and favorite servants started getting sick with symptoms
that resembled the ones the prisoners had. And then worst of all, his beloved
daughter, the Princess, suddenly became so ill that she could not get out of
her royal bed. The Emperor had no intention of sending his daughter or his
friends and servants to prison, so he angrily summoned the scoundrel physicians
to demand some answers.
The two doctors were so frightened by what
was going on that some of their hair started turning white. They had to do some
fast thinking. When they appeared before the Emperor they were ready.
“Your Highness, not to worry,” said the
first physician. “We’ve done the epidemiology. We’ve even used a special new
kind of statistical modeling and the latest chi squares. These friends of yours
and your daughter are not sick. They are not bad people. They are good people.
This is caused by the stress of being too good. They are just tired because
they spend so much time every day being kind and just. That gives them fatigue.
We call it chronic fatigue syndrome. They worry about others too much. They are
too generous and selfless. They work too hard. They try and do too much for you
and your kingdom. If your Highness will only encourage them to do a little less
for others the chronic fatigue syndrome eventually will go away. Chronic
fatigue syndrome is not a transmissible disease. There is no AIDS virus
involved. Not even a virus like AIDS. It is something that happens
spontaneously because of too much goodness within a person.”
“What a relief,” said the Emperor. He was
glad he didn’t have to send his friends and his daughter off to prison where he
had been hearing that conditions were becoming more and more abominable. The
Emperor ordered that a special feast be given in honor of the physicians at
which he planned to award them the kingdom’s highest medal of honor, and he
also planned to make a speech urging his friends and his daughter to be a
little less selfless and generous so that their chronic fatigue syndrome would
go away.
And so for weeks after that, anyone who
was in the Emperor’s good graces or worked in the palace who showed any strange
signs of illness or fatigue was given the official court diagnosis of chronic
fatigue syndrome by the Emperor’s physicians. They were ordered by the
Emperor’s physicians to stop being so good and working so hard for the kingdom.
And unwell people that the Emperor didn’t know—or wasn’t particularly fond
of—were carted off to prison if they as much as sneezed.
But, unfortunately, that was not the end
of the story. Even though the Emperor had his weekly health-enhancing
liver-renewing carrot and spinach enemas, he started to feel feverish one day
and then was so tired he slept past noon. His balance was off and he had
trouble organizing his thoughts. And his stomach was doing all kinds of
unmentionable things. He immediately summoned his personal scoundrel physicians
who, upon hearing about the Emperor’s condition, at first thought that they
should immediately start making out their wills. But then they decided to be
diagnostically proactive.
As they rushed into the Emperor’s bedroom,
one of them cried, “Oh, Emperor, Emperor, Emperor! We knew this would happen. You have been working too hard for your
people and you have been too good! Your supreme internal goodness has caused
you to develop spontaneous chronic fatigue syndrome.”
“What should I do about this, doctors?”
responded the Emperor.
The second physician said, “You simply
have to be a little less good, a little less fair, a little less generous and
pretty soon there will be no more chronic fatigue syndrome. You’ll be good as
new. And just for good measure we also suggest a second weekly enema. It can’t
hurt.”
And so, the Emperor took their advice. In
order to be less good, less fair and less generous, he raised the kingdom’s
taxes and he stopped commuting death sentences.
But still the chronic fatigue syndrome did
not go away. However, everyone in the kingdom was so afraid of both the Emperor
and the uncanny power of the two scoundrel physicians, that they kept telling
the Emperor how unusually healthy he looked. He pretended to believe them, even
though he knew he didn’t feel good at all. He was too embarrassed to tell them
how he really felt, he didn’t want to appear ignorant and incompetent about his
own health to his subjects.
But there were rumors circulating that the
Emperor was not well, and that many of the people around him were also not
well, so he summoned the wise prime minister and his public relations minister
and asked what they could do to reassure the people that the Emperor was in
good health and that the chronic fatigue syndrome that was affecting him and
his daughter and many of the people in his court was nothing to worry about,
that it was just something that could be dealt with by being less good.
The public relations minister immediately
responded, “A procession. A procession to celebrate the fact that you and all
the others who have chronic fatigue syndrome. Your chronic fatigue syndrome is
a sign from heaven that you are all incredibly good people and the people of
your kingdom should celebrate and honor you and your goodness, as well as your
incredible hard work and your generosity.”
“Excellent,” said the Emperor. He ordered
that a procession in honor of all the good people with chronic fatigue syndrome
be conducted the next day with him at the lead. When all those in the kingdom
who had chronic fatigue syndrome were told that they had to get up before noon
and be in a parade in which they had to walk more than a block, they were not
thrilled, but they had no choice but to attend because nobody dared to defy the
Emperor.
As they prepared to leave the castle and
travel the mile of so of the procession route, the Emperor and his entourage of
friends and family who had chronic fatigue syndrome were quite a sight to
behold. None of them were standing up straight. Some of them looked like they
were half asleep. Some seemed kind of dizzy. Some had chronic coughs. Some
looked feverish. Some looked like they had recently gained a lot of weight and
other had recently lost a great deal of weight. And worst of all, as he got into
his carriage to lead the procession, the Emperor looked a little green or a
little yellow, depending on the way the sunlight was hitting him. It may not
have exactly been the image his public relations minister was aiming for, but
nevertheless, they were off.
A group of dignitaries walked at the very
front of the chronic fatigue syndrome procession and anxiously scrutinized the
anxious faces of the people in the street. All the people had gathered in the
main square, pushing and shoving to get a better look. Vigorous applause
welcomed the regal procession
Even though it was obvious that there was
something terribly wrong with every member of the Emperor’s chronic fatigue
syndrome procession, the townspeople were afraid to say anything that wasn’t celebratory
and positive.
“You look marvelous!” cried one
woman—loudly so everyone would hear her and know she was a good person.
“You haven’t aged a day,” another one
said
“Handsome as ever, Your Highness!” cried
one nervous man.
“And your complexion!” cried another.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
A child, however, who had no important job
in the kingdom, and who didn’t understand the politics of the kingdom, (but who
did know about the epidemic in the prison) could only see things as his eyes
showed them to him. The child went up to the Emperor‘s carriage—close enough so
everyone in the carriage and the entourage behind could hear him when he
screamed, “Chronic fatigue syndrome? Fuck that shit. The Emperor has AIDS,” he
cried. (The child, though basically very nice, had a foul mouth.”)
"Fool!" his father reprimanded,
running after him. "Don't talk nonsense!" He grabbed his child and
took him away. But the boy's remark, which had been heard by the bystanders,
was repeated over and over again until everyone who had heard the child cried:
"The boy is right! The Emperor has AIDS! The Emperor has AIDS! The Emperor
has AIDS! It's true!"
And then anyone who knows the history of
mankind knows what happened next. All the people who had screamed the word
“AIDS” at the Emperor were arrested along with the child and his father. The
next morning, after a miserable night in the dungeon, they were all—even the
child—taken outside the walls of the kingdom and hung without mercy from the
tallest trees.
And no one in that kingdom was heard to
even mutter the words “AIDS” and “chronic fatigue syndrome” in the same breath
ever again.
And while it would be going too far to say
that everyone subsequently lived happily ever after, that was that.
Teach-in #2
How Peter Duesberg Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
To say that the achievement of Peter Duesberg is a glass half full, should never be seen as damning with faint praise. Unflappable, imperfect Peter Duesberg heroically changed the course of the AIDS epidemic and history itself by his actions and part of his personal tragedy is that he could have changed it even more if he had looked deeper and been more critically attentive to the politics of the Centers for Disease Control’s heterosexist epidemiology.
In the introduction to his 1987 interview
with Duesberg, John Lauritsen wrote, “Peter Duesberg came to the United States
about 20 years ago from Germany. He is professor of Molecular Biology at the
University of California in Berkeley. It is because of his interest in
retroviruses, on which he is an authority, that he became involved in
questioning the ‘AIDS virus etiology.’” (The AIDS War p.47)
In that interview Duesberg argued that HIV
could not be the cause of AIDS because of “the consistent biochemical
inactivity of the virus.” (AW p.47) He told Lauritsen that “Even in
patients who were dying from disease, the virus is almost undetectable, while
RNA synthesis is essentially not detectable, (AW p.47) And Duesberg
said, “So that is one of the key arguments, and there is no exception to the
rule that pathogens in order to be pathogenic have to be active.” (AW
p.48) He also insisted that “very few potentially susceptible cells are ever
infected, and those that are infected don’t do anything. The virus just sits
here.” (AW p.48)
Duesberg also argued that the long latency
period of the disease was “a very suspicious signal that the virus is unlikely
to be solely the direct cause as they claim.” (AW p.48) He insisted that
retroviruses “are the most benign viruses that we know” and “they can remain in
the cell in latent form.” (AW p.49) And most damning of all to the HIV
hypothesis, according to Duesberg, was the fact that “When AIDS is diagnosed,
they say that now it’s possible for the disease—but the virus is not doing any
more than it had done before when there were no symptoms of the disease.” (AW
p.49) Duesberg concluded that the presence of antibodies to HIV was proof that
the virus had been neutralized and asserted that it was “a gross injustice to
discriminate against anyone on the basis of having antibodies.” (AW
p.50)
One
of the most noble aspects of Duesberg’s AIDS criticism and whistleblowing on
the HIV mistake (or fraud) issue was his extraordinary—almost
visionary—sensitivity to the damage it was going to do to the health and
liberties of those who were victimized by it. In general, the people he argued
with, those who benefited financially and professionally from the HIV
hypothesis, had a rather cold and cavalier attitude toward the effect their
brilliant ideas often had on the minorities who were affected. (They certainly
never seemed to ask themselves what the consequences would be if they
were wrong.)
Duesberg deserves credit for being one of
the first people to realize (without saying as much) that the HIV/AIDS theory
was an instance of what should be called “abnormal science.” One of the wittiest men
engaged in the AIDS issue, he could often find the humorous absurdities
implicit in the HIV theory. When HIV was called a “slow virus,” he said, “There
are no slow viruses, only slow scientists.” In public forums he always
presented his opinions in a collegial manner, but he was also always capable of
leaving his opponents hemorrhaging from a cutting sarcasm presented with deadly
charm. It may have been the fact that he verbally earned the role of the alpha
intellect in any professional gathering that inspired both envy and vengeance
from his HIV establishment opponents. They were often simply intellectually
outclassed, even if they held all the money and the political cards. Nothing
rattles totalitarian or abnormal science more than a clever and steadfast nontotalitarian
scientist.
If Duesberg suffered from any deficits in
the area of judgment, it may have been an inability to imagine a different AIDS
epidemic caused by a dynamic, multisystemic virus like HHV-6 (and its family)
which could manifest itself in a variety of surprising ways (like AIDS, chronic
fatigue syndrome, autism etc.) depending on a variety of factors. Duesberg told
Lauritsen “AIDS is a condition which includes so many parameters that it’s
almost inconceivable to define a simple pathogen as the cause, considering the
diverse patterns of the disease.” (AW p.52) Duesberg didn’t think
outside the box of the CDC’s epidemiology. He never considered the possibility
that the CDC had missed a whole world of undetected epidemiological data (like
the data from the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic) that would have completely
changed the picture of the disease’s patterns. And, unfortunately, the idea that there might be
something in the world that could be called a multisystemic virus like HHV-6
which could cause many different patterns of disease, was simply not on
his radar.
At the time that Lauritsen first
interviewed Duesberg—in 1987—Duesberg remained a bit of an agnostic on what was
actually causing AIDS, saying, “We haven’t excluded anything” and “I really
wonder what it could be.” (AW p.53) Compared to where he would end up,
he was a demure etiological virgin at that point. He was only beginning to
consider the role of recreational drugs as a possible cause saying, “I’m really
just guessing here, but I think this is where more research should be done.” (AW
p.53)
Unfortunately, as time went on Duesberg
seems to have been encouraged or even pressured by some of his colleagues to
take a stronger public stand on what he thought actually was the cause
of AIDS and he became far less tentative and open-minded, passionately adding
to his anti-HIV gospel a seemingly unshakable conviction that recreational
drugs explained AIDS in gay men. Regardless of its merits, such a position immediately
lost him the ready-made constituency of the gay community who seemed to have
been invited by Duesberg and his followers to be exonerated for a transmissible
infection only to be convicted as a group in an alternative heterosexist
fashion for having a unique gay (and—let’s not forget— criminal) drug-taking
lifestyle. With some notable exceptions, Duesberg walked into a big gay "thanks
but no thanks"; he had jumped the gay shark. It was a tragic development for
both parties, because politically Duesberg really needed an activist gay
community to help him challenge the mistaken HIV hypothesis, which he felt was
unfairly threatening the liberties and health of the gay community. He was the
enemy of the gay community’s determined CDC/NIH enemy but he wasn’t perceived
as its friend. By rejecting Duesberg’s half a glass of truth about the virus,
the gay community ended up in the open arms of the AIDS establishment and
crusading public health authorities complete with all the goodies they had in
store for their willing, eager and all too compliant patient population.
Peter Duesberg detailed his argument about
the nature of the AIDS epidemic and his struggle with the AIDS establishment in
his book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, which was published by Regnery Publishing
in 1996. In the publisher’s Preface, Alfred Regnery notes that “AIDS is the
first political disease.” In his acknowledgments, Duesberg wrote, “I extend my
gratitude to my most critical opponents in the AIDS debate, who have
unwittingly provided me the great volume of evidence by which I have disproved
the virus-AIDS hypothesis and exposed the political maneuverings behind the war
on AIDS.” (IAV p.x)
Duesberg’s book could be used as a primary
text if college courses are ever given on the politics, sociology and
psychology of abnormal science. He fleshes out many parts of his argument
against the HIV theory of AIDS causation already mentioned in his 1987
interview with Lauritsen. While Duesberg is often thought to be someone who
encouraged the rethinking of the AIDS issue, the book supports the notion
already mentioned that in reality he actually never went far enough,
never really did a true radical rethinking of AIDS because he works with a
tacit acceptance of the basic epidemiological premises and “facts” provided by
the CDC and the HIV/AIDS establishment. By leaving their paradigm’s “factual”
assumptions standing, he ultimately jeopardized his own analysis. Duesberg’s
critical tact was to take the “facts” as they were provided by the CDC and to
try and poke holes in their etiological logic by showing how they failed to
successfully make predictions about the course of the epidemic or by arguing
that the facts as given by the CDC contradicted other formally known (hence,
published) facts. The problem was that AIDS involved ground zero
epidemiological definitions of what an AIDS case actually was, and if that
definition had, at the very beginning of the epidemic, been distorted by
evidence that had been cherry-picked, or had been ignored because of political
blinders, then there was a good chance that Duesberg—even with his superb
skills of logic and reason—was trapped in an epidemiological funhouse of
“garbage in garbage out.” Saying the CDC mistakenly linked the wrong virus to
cases of AIDS begs a question: And what if the CDC completely got the
definition of AIDS cases wrong to begin with? What if they were correlating
apples with oranges? Or, more troubling, that what the CDC thought were
epidemiological apples and oranges were really all apples or all oranges?
Duesberg never illuminated all of the fundamental possibilities of what
could have gone wrong epidemiologically. Duesberg was in a Donald Rumsfeld
situation where he didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Duesberg worked with the epidemiological
predictions the AIDS authorities were giving him and tried to show that when
the predictions based on them did not work out, they reflected poorly on the
credibility of the HIV theory. He argued, “Officials have continually predicted
the explosion of AIDS into the general population through sexual transmission
of HIV, striking males and females equally, as well as homosexuals and
heterosexuals, to be followed by a corresponding increase in the rate of death.
. . . In short, the alleged viral disease does not seem to be spreading from
the 1 million HIV-positive Americans to the remaining 250 million.” (IAV
p.5)
Duesberg’s logic brilliantly skewered the
CDC’s notion that AIDS was an equal opportunity disease. But again one has to
note that the one caveat he didn’t acknowledge was that if the CDC’s definition
of what an AIDS case was turned out to be dead wrong, then all bets were
off about correlated and potentially causative factors. Just debunking the
logic behind the weak correlation of putative AIDS cases with HIV was not the
same as debunking the notion of some fundamentally different kind of AIDS
epidemic still occurring, not only in the gay community, but also in some
form in the general population. If, at the very basic level of defining what a
case is and what a case isn’t, profound mistakes had been made, then one
couldn’t really know where the disease was and where it wasn’t. And then the
issue of HIV not being the cause of what was being called AIDS would in that
case be totally beside the point. If anything, the HIV mistake should
have made people wonder if those in charge at the CDC had gotten something even
more profoundly wrong in the initial working definition of AIDS which
subsequently was carved in stone thanks to the abnormal, totalitarian scientific culture
that protected it.
Insofar as Duesberg recognized that it all
just didn’t add up, he graciously
performed a great humanitarian service over and over again by telling
the world that as long as the HIV establishment was in charge of AIDS we were
essentially trapped in a realm of unreliable and untrustworthy pseudoscience
where people were going to get hurt. And luckily, for three decades, at great
personal expense, Duesberg valiantly refused to shut up. Perplexed, Duesberg
wrote, “Something is wrong with this picture. How could the largest and most
sophisticated scientific establishment in history have failed so miserably in
saving lives and even in forecasting the epidemic’s toll?” (IAV
p.5) Ironically, given that Duesberg
himself was blind to what turned out to be the CFS epidemic and HHV-6 spectrum
catastrophe, the premise of his rhetorical question turned out to be a tragic
understatement.
Duesberg’s suggestion about what should be
done reinforces the notion that his call to a reassessment of AIDS and HIV just
wasn’t intellectually radical or fundamental enough. Duesberg’s prescription
for the problem was that “Faced with this medical debacle, scientists should
re-open a simple but most essential question: What causes AIDS?” (IAV
p.6) Again, it was not really a radical return to nosological and epidemiological ground zero.
A return to ground zero would have involved asking if the epidemiological
common immunological denominator that determined what a case actually was
itself needed to be audited by looking closely and in an immunologically
sophisticated manner at the entire population. Duesberg was like an
accountant who looks at the books for discrepancies, but never goes into the
warehouse to see if what’s there matches the inventory numbers. His due
diligence only went so far. Quasi-due-diligence is ultimately not helpful. The definition of AIDS was on the books and
unfortunately, taken at face value by Duesberg. It didn’t necessarily match
what was actually going on in doctor’s offices all over America and it didn’t
necessarily reflect the actual disaster that was occurring in the immune
systems of the entire American population. There was a whole immunologically
challenged world beyond the CDC’s published data and the peer-reviewed papers
Duesberg used to play “gotcha” with the CDC’s facts, logic and conclusions.
There was an interesting groupthink bias
in Duesberg and many of his followers, most of whom were heterosexual—some
emphatically so. Not surprisingly, their notion about what was wrong with AIDS
etiology was always biased in the direction of heterosexuals being less (or
not at all) at risk for AIDS as a result of the CDC’s scientific errors.
Sometimes one got the uncanny notion that Duesberg and his followers were
whistling heterosexually in the dark, engaged in trying to convince themselves
that they as a group were safe from the “gay lifestyle” epidemic.
Ironically, considering their apparent need for personal immunological safety,
though, is the fact that if the CDC was wrong then all bets about their
safely could have been off and the actual level of risk could have gone the
other way. They could have been in more, not less danger. But
that
possibility never seemed to dawn on them, and their AIDS dissident
movement in
all its forms seemed bent on making sure that it never did. They created
a kind
of dissident groupthink that made them odd bedfellows with the mostly
heterosexual HIV establishment who also could absolutely not let
themselves see
the connection between AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome, HHV-6, and
ultimately
the simmering autism disaster. (The fact that some "Duesbergians"
themselves are rumored to have chronic fatigue syndrome is a kind of Big
Bird of irony, but that is another story.)
Duesberg got a lot of things right and a
lot of things sort of right. He was right when he wrote that “Without going
back to check its underlying assumptions, the AIDS establishment will never
make sense of its mountain of data.” (IAV p.6) He didn’t quite get it
right when he concluded that “The single flaw that determined the destiny of
AIDS research since 1984 was the assumption that AIDS is infectious. After
taking this wrong turn scientists had to make bad assumptions upon which they
have built a huge artifice of mistaken ideas.” (IAV p.6) Duesberg very
simply failed to notice the fundamental wrong turn that was made before that
wrong turn. He never considered the possibility that if the nosological definition of AIDS
itself was wrong, and that the corrected definition just might support the
notion of an infectious epidemic and a virus-AIDS hypothesis, just not the
mistaken HIV one.
The great thing about Duesberg—for
students of what could be called called "homodemiology" or heterosexist epidemiology—is that
he criticized the logical absurdity of what I call GRID-think, (i.e.
heterosexist groupthink) which is in part the rather superstitious and bigoted
notion implicit in HIV epidemiology that viruses know intuitively who gays
are so they can choose to infect them and only them. Unfortunately, Duesberg
built his own quasi-GRID-think drug-and-lifestyle-paradigm on a similar
reality-challenged premise by saying that something non-infectious must explain
an epidemic confining itself mainly to a risk group. By pointing out the
logical absurdity of a virus limiting itself to one group of people, he opened
the way for a more radical critical political rethinking about what was going
on in the CDC’s epidemiology than he seemed prepared to do himself. He started
the job, but "homodemiological" and sociological analysis had to finish it.
Blaming lifestyle factors of gays was just another not-very-great correlation fingered
as causation, generating an alternative scapegoating epidemiology of blaming
the victims for what turned out to be the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe.
Unfortunately, Duesberg exposed one wild goose chase and started another one
when he wrote, “The only solution is to rethink the basic assumption that AIDS
is infectious and is caused by HIV.” (IAV p.7) The only solution? Well,
not exactly.
Duesberg’s book will always be an
important source for anyone who wants to understand the evolution of the AIDS
mistake, even if Duesberg’s own theory turned out to be wrong. Most
importantly, Duesberg details just how abnormal and nearly psychotic the whole
scientific process of AIDS was and his work supports the argument that
something with a totalitarian je ne sais quoi was unfolding in the name of AIDS
science.
The very manner in which the HIV was
announced in 1984 as the probable cause of AIDS, according to Duesberg’s
account, was scientifically deviant: “This announcement was made prior to the
publication of any scientific evidence confirming the virus theory. With this
unprecedented maneuver, Gallo’s discovery bypassed review by the scientific
community. Science by press conference was substituted for the unconventional
process of scientific validation, which is based on publications in the
professional literature. The ‘AIDS virus’ became instant national dogma, and
the tremendous weight of federal resources were diverted into just one race—the
race to study the AIDS virus . . . . The only questions to be studied from 1984
on were how HIV causes AIDS and what could be done about it.” (IAV p.8)
At that point in time, Duesberg noted that
“serious doubts are now surfacing about HIV, the so-called AIDS virus . . . . The
consensus on the virus hypothesis of AIDS is falling apart, as its opponents
grow in number.” (IAV p.8) At that moment Duesberg still seemed
optimistic, as AIDS seemed to be taking place in the good faith universe of
normal science which was open to change and paradigm shift. Unfortunately,
because he was blind to the heterosexist sociological issues underpinning AIDS,
he was incapable of perceiving the unmovable backstage anti-gay epidemiological
values that were controlling the public health agenda and infecting the
science. He couldn’t see that it wasn’t just a matter of the practitioners of
this deviant science were digging in professionally; the whole "homodemiological"
culture was dug in, which was far more formidable than anything Duesberg could
have imagined. The political consensus about the etiological nature of “AIDS”
was not a just stone in the road of scientific process. Peter Duesberg had
found his way into normal science’s opposite world of abnormal and totalitarian "scientific" shenanigans.
As a paradigm that was supposed to capture
people’s imagination and cause a major shift or Thomas Kuhn type of conversion—or visual
gestalt-shift—from one consensus to another, Duesberg’s paradigm was nearly
dead on arrival. If he had simply taken his stand as a Nobel-worthy dean of retrovirology
and just left the cause of AIDS up in the air and concentrated on demolishing
the HIV hypothesis once and for all, the HHV-6 catastrophe and the Holocaust II
might have been stopped in their tracks.
Duesberg charged that the CDC’s paradigm
was “ineffective” and that “public fear was being exploited.” (IAV p. 9)
From his perspective, the public was being told the problem was bigger than it
actually was. True, public fear was being shamelessly exploited, but not in
the way Duesberg and his ardent followers thought. By framing the epidemic in an anti-gay manner,
public fear of gays, society’s sexual outsiders, was being manipulated
to hide the painful truth about the public’s risk of developing a complex form
of immunodeficiency or dysfunction. The public was being provided with what
Daniel Goleman called “a vital lie.” A terrified public, to the great detriment
of its future health was getting the reassuring heterosexist pseudo-facts about
“AIDS” it wanted to hear with the gay community losing its epidemiological
human rights in the process. And again, ironically, Duesberg and the
Duesbergians had their own set of heterosexist concoctions that were even
more reassuring to the heterosexual general population. And wrong. Both the
CDC paradigm and the cockamamie Duesberg paradigm misled a clueless and anxious public.
Duesberg’s shock at the nature of what was
going on is exactly why a formal theory of abnormal, totalitarian science is required to
comprehend and illuminate the AIDS era, just as the concept of totalitarianism
was required to understand the Hitler and Stalin eras. Duesberg asks a big,
ugly, rhetorical question: “How could a whole new generation of more than a
hundred thousand AIDS experts, including medical doctors, virologists,
immunologists, cancer researchers, pharmacologists, and
epidemiologists—including more than half a dozen Nobel Laureates—be wrong? How
could a scientific world that so freely exchanged all information from every
corner of this planet have missed an alternative explanation for AIDS?” (IAV
p.9) Too bad he didn’t ask how the exact same crowd could not see the chronic
fatigue syndrome epidemic for what it was. Ditto for HHV-6 and its insidious
spectrum.
Again, Duesberg’s answer to his own
question was that AIDS had been misclassified as an infectious illness and his
theory rested on the notion that “the premature assumption of contagiousness
has many times in the past obstructed free investigation for the treatment and
prevention of a non-infectious disease—sometimes for years, at the cost of may
thousand of lives.” (IAV p.10) Duesberg was setting the terms of the
twenty-five year debate between the mainstream AIDS establishment and what
became popularly known as the AIDS dissidents, or the Duesbergians. This
unfortunate dichotomy set the course for the wrong kind of debate, a contest
between HIV and Duesberg’s non-infectious drug lifestyle hypothesis, leaving
out the possibility that there might be a dynamic infectious agent other
than HIV that did indeed fit the causation criteria of a redefined AIDS
epidemic. No space was left in the debate for something like a new
multisystemic virus such as HHV-6, which was capable of causing an epidemic of
a more broadly defined variable disease state. Dueberg asserted that HIV “could
be the most harmful of . . . fatal errors in the history of medicine if AIDS
proves to be not infectious. “ (IAV p.10) Of course, if AIDS was
mis-defined and a dynamic viral agent other than HIV was spreading silently
and exponentially while the false Duesbergian debate sucked up all of
intellectual and scientific oxygen in the debate on AIDS, the harm could have
been exponentially worse. And it was.
In order for abnormal, totalitarian science to hold sway
over a society for a long period of time, it must have ample cooperation from
both the scientific and media communities and the Duesberg story provides
evidence that such was the case in AIDS. To explain how the media was
continuously kept in its subservient place during the AIDS debacle, he quotes
reporter Elinor Burkett of The Miami Herald: “If you have an AIDS beat,
you’re a beat reporter, your job is every day to go out there, fill your
newspaper with what’s new about AIDS. You write a story that questions the
truth of the central AIDS hypothesis and what happened to me will happen to
you. Nobody’s going to talk to you. Now if nobody will talk to you, if nobody
at the CDC will ever return your phone call, you lose your competitive edge as
an AIDS reporter. So it always keeps you in the mainstream, because you need
those guys to be your buddies . . . .” (IAV p.388)
Duesberg insists that the very defensive
and insular AIDS scientific establishment was determined to “confine the debate
to scientific circles.” (IAV p.389) He quotes that rather shocking
threat from the de facto AIDS Czar, Anthony
Fauci, who said, “Journalists who make too many mistakes, or who are sloppy are
going to find that their access to scientists may diminish.”(IAV p.384)
In a totalitarian world of "homodemiology" and abnormal, totalitarin science the definition of
“sloppy” will be that which contradicts the powers that be. Question AIDS and
you will need to look for a new career. (Given the degree to which AIDS science
often looks like a big unmade bed, it’s amusing to hear Fauci say the word
“sloppy” with a straight face.)
Duesberg also quotes two of the powerful,
public-relations-savvy virologists who suggested another tactic for dealing
with Duesberg and the critics of the HIV establishment: “One approach would be
to refuse television confrontations with Duesberg, as Tony Fauci and one of us
managed to do at the opening of the VIIth International conference on AIDS in
Florence. One can’t spread misinformation without an audience.” (IAV
p.39) There’s nothing in Thomas Kuhn’s theories about the process of normal
science about deliberately denying one’s critics an audience, or denying the
public exposure to scientific second and third opinions. It was a new world.
One of the more outrageous moments in his
book occurs when Duesberg reports that “Based on an anonymous source, key
officials of the United States government specifically engineered a strategy
for suppressing the HIV debate in 1987 while Duesberg was still on leave at the
N.I.H. The operation began on April 28, less than a month after Duesberg’s
first paper on the HIV question appeared in Cancer Research, apparently
because several journalists and homosexual activists began raising questions.”
(IAV p.32) A memo about Duesberg’s critique of the HIV theory was sent
out from a staffer in the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services:
“This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy (If this isn’t
the virus, how do we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything
about transmission? How could you all be so stupid, and why should we ever
believe you again?) And we need to be prepared to respond. I have already asked
N.I.H. public affairs to start digging into this.” (IAV p.390) This is
an extremely important memo from the point of view of future
what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it histories that try to fathom all
the government‘s motivations throughout this scientific and political disaster.
It shows how clearly at least one person in the government could see the
potential dire consequences for the government of being wrong about HIV.
Somebody knew exactly what was stake.
In his book, Duesberg gives a number of
examples of the media seeming to have been pressured by the HIV establishment not
to cover the story of the controversy. According to Duesberg, “The MacNeil
Lehrer News hour sent camera crews to do a major segment on the controversy.
But when the . . . broadcast date arrived, the feature had been pulled.
Apparently AIDS officials had heard of its imminent airing and had intercepted
it.” (IAV p.392) Television shows on Duesberg involving Good Morning
America on ABC, CNN, Italian television, and Larry King Live met with a similar
fate.
According to Duesberg’s book, he “appeared
on major national television only twice. The first time was on March 28, 1993
on the ABC magazine program Day One. Even in this case, according to the
producer, Fauci tried to get the show canceled days before broadcast.’ (IAV
p.393) When Duesberg was interviewed for Nightline, he ended up only
being given a small amount of air time and Fauci showed up and was given the
lion’s share of the show to make the HIV establishment’s case. And Duesberg
fared no better overseas. The British medical and public health establishment
greeted a pro-Duesberg program with “stern condemnations” and subsequently the
British press “turned around and began criticizing the program.” (IAV
p.323)
One of the most interesting moments of
censorship occurred at the highest level of government when “Jim Warner, a
Reagan White House advisor critical of AIDS alarmism, heard about Duesberg and
arranged a White House debate in January 1988.” (IAV p.394) Duesberg
writes, “This would have forced the HIV issue into the public spotlight, but it
was abruptly canceled days ahead of time, on orders from above.” (IAV
p.394)
Duesberg didn’t fare much better with the
print media. He notes that The New York Times had written about him
only three times in the first seven years of the controversy and all of it was
negative. The same kind of treatment was doled out by The Washington
Post and “the San Francisco Chronicle intended to cover the story,
until it encountered opposition from scientists in the local AIDS
establishment.” (IAV p.394 ) Even the countercultural or alternative
press could not be counted on to give the controversy balanced or
independent-minded coverage. Duesberg reports that “In 1989 Rolling Stone had
commissioned a freelance writer from New York to write a Duesberg article, but
then canceled it during the interview with Duesberg in his lab.” (IAV
p.395) Both Harper’s and Esquire killed articles that had been
commissioned on Duesberg during the same period. The media was essentially
acting as an enabler of the culture of abnormal, totalitarian science.
Even more evidence that AIDS was a
manifestation of abnormal, totalitarian science can be found in the way that Duesberg
experienced censorship and blacklisting from formerly adoring
scientific circles and experienced roadblocks to having his ideas and
criticisms presented in the professional scientific literature. Duesberg writes
that “Robert Gallo and some other scientists began refusing . . . to attend
scientific conferences if Duesberg would be allowed to make a presentation.” (IAV
p.396) During the same period Duesberg rarely was “invited to retrovirus
meetings and virtually never to AIDS conferences, despite seminal contributions
to the field, including the isolation of the retroviral genome, the first
analysis of the order of retroviral genes, and the discovery of the first
retroviral cancer gene.” (IAV p.396)
Dueberg reports that his scientific papers
on AIDS “would constantly run into obstacles at every turn, from hostile peer
reviews to reluctant editors.”(IAV p.393) The rules mysteriously changed
for “the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where Academy
members such as Duesberg have an automatic right to publish papers without
standard peer review.” (IAV p.397) An editor rejected Duesberg’s unique
and provocative submission by bizarrely saying that it was not “original.” And,
supporting the case for AIDS research representing the arbitrary make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of
abnormal, totalitarian science, a subsequent replacement editor decided tradition had to be
completely ignored for this special case and the Duesberg paper had to be
peer-reviewed because it was “controversial.” (IAV p.397) It took
several months of hostile reviewers negotiating with Duesberg before the paper
was finally published. According to Duesberg, “Robert Gallo was asked to write
a rebuttal, but never did.” (IAV p.357) The strategic
silent treatment is part of the arsenal of abnormal, totalitarian science.
The punishments for anyone standing up to
totalitarian, abnormal science can be severe. Duesberg reports that “the AIDS
establishment made its most effective counterattack by going after Duesberg’s
funding, the lifeblood of any scientist’s laboratory. After coming out against
the HIV theory, Duesberg was denied continuation of an "N.I.H. Outstanding Grant"
by a group of scientists which included two who were proponents of the HIV
paradigm and three scientists who never even reviewed the grant. When a review
committee considered Duesberg’s grant proposal a few months later, “they did .
. . complain about Duesberg’s questioning attitude as the major obstacle to
funding him and singled out AIDS.” (IAV p.402) Subsequently, “every one
of his seventeen peer-reviewed grant applications to other federal state or
private agencies—whether for AIDS research, on AZT and other drugs, or for
cancer research—has been turned down.” (IAV p.403) Thus did Duesberg
come face to face with one of the telltale signs of abnormal and totalitarian
science: blacklisting. The long arms of HIV/AIDS politics reached into his life
at his university where “Several fellow professors” maneuvered “against
Duesberg in various ways. His promotions in pay were “blocked” and he was
denied “coveted graduate lecture courses.” (IAV p.404)
One of the most dramatic and creepiest
abnormal science moments in the Duesberg saga occurred in 1994 when a
high-ranking geneticist from the N.I.H. flew to California to present Duesberg
with an unpublished paper titled “HIV Causes AIDS: Koch’s Postulates Fulfilled.”
Duesberg was asked to be a third author on a paper he hadn‘t even
collaborated on. The paper had been commissioned by Nature editor
and HIV theory proponent, John Maddox. Duesberg was warned by his high-ranking
visitor that by continuing his opposition to the HIV theory he “would even risk
his credentials for having discovered cancer genes.” (IAV p.406) (The
willingness to “disappear” the past is another one of the telltale signs of
totalitarianism.) The geneticist told Duesberg that if he agreed to be an
author on the paper it would “open the doors for Duesberg’s reentry into the
establishment.” (IAV p 406) Duesberg made his polite "no thank you" in the
form of an offer to write something for Nature that said the direct
opposite of what that proposed unsigned paper posited.
A very thoughtful and philosophical man in
many ways, Duesberg sought to understand the recalcitrant system that was
making it so difficult for his ideas to be heard and tested, let alone prevail.
He blamed it on “command science” which by his analysis, derived its power from
three sources in the medical establishment: “(1) enforced consensus through
peer review, (2) enforced consensus through commercialization and (3) the fear
of disease, particularly infectious disease.” (IAV p.452)
Because all serious medical scientists in
America need grants from the NIH to survive, they often need to conform to the
establishment viewpoint. While the “peer-review system” is supposed to be like
an independent jury system, in reality, according to Duesberg, “a truly
independent jury system would be fatal to the establishment.” (IAV
p.452) The result is “the peers serve the orthodoxy by serving their own vested
interests.” (IAV p.452) Duesberg warned that “as long as a scientist’s
work is reviewed only by competitors within his own field, peer review will
crush genuine science.” (IAV p.454)
Ominously for AIDS patients and the myriad
victims of the HHV-6 catastrophe, Duesberg concluded that “Through peer review
the federal government has attained a near-monopoly on science.” (IAV
p.454) Abnormal, totalitarian science loves the absolute power of
monopolies. HIV became hegemonic because “a handful of federal agencies,
primarily the NIH, dominate research policies and effectively dictate the official
dogma . . . . By declaring the virus the cause of AIDS at a press conference
sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH researcher Robert
Gallo swung the entire medical establishment and even the rest of the world,
behind his hypothesis. Once such a definitive statement is made, the difficulty
of retracting it only increases with time.”(IAV p.454)
Duesberg criticized the huge conflict of
interest in science that is caused by its commercialization. He argued that the
FDA, by essentially banning competing therapies, often helps the pharmaceutical
industry develop monopolies. Profits from products approved by the FDA often
find their way back to scientists who sat in judgment on fellow scientists “in
the form of patent royalties, consultantships, paid board positions, and stock
ownership.” (IAV p.455) In addition, “in order for a research product to
find a market, the underlying hypothesis for the product must be accepted by a
majority of the practitioners in the field.” (IAV p.455) In the case of
AIDS “commercial success can be achieved only by consensus. For example, an
AIDS hypothesis would not be approved unless it miraculously cured AIDS
overnight.” (IAV p.455) Thus Gallo’s royalties from an HIV patent as
well as William Haseltine and Myron Essex’s financial interest in HIV tests
indicate that they may not be the most disinterested parties to make important
decisions about the direction of AIDS research. And yet they were among the
powerful inner circle of AIDS research. No wonder Duesberg often experienced
forms of petulance and hostility from such characters rather than open-minded
collegiality. In essence, by telling an inconvenient truth he was a threat to
their lifestyles.
The
third arm of the “command science”
which Duesberg discusses goes in the opposite direction of of what was
really happening in the HHV-6 catastrophe which Duesberg was tragically
blind to. Duesberg writes, “Traditionally, the power of medical
science has been based on the fear of disease, particularly infectious
disease.
The HIV-AIDS establishment has exploited this instrument of power to its
limit.” (IAV p.456) Once again, Duesberg assumes that an infectious epidemic has essentially been invented out
of whole cloth by incompetent epidemiology. His book would have been more
accurately titled “Inventing the AIDS Epidemic.” Duesberg accuses the CDC of
delusional epidemiology driven by opportunism and hysteria. The manipulated
paradigm of an infectious AIDS epidemic was used to create a “stampede,” to
create “irrational” fear in the public, to cynically manipulate, to mislead.
And most importantly, from the Duesberg perspective, to build a lucrative new
empire for the CDC.
The truth about HHV-6 pandemic turns the Duesbergian thesis on its head. Duesberg sees a devastating,
apocalyptic epidemic being cynically and opportunistically imagined, while in reality, it existed big time. Other than
HIV not being the cause of AIDS, the other major thing Duesberg
fundamentally got right is the undeniable fact that the AIDS establishment was not really doing
science as we expect it to be done. Duesberg might even agree with the premise
that the science of AIDS was abnormal, totalitarian and even psychotic.
There is one other thing that Duesberg got
very right that deserves special mention. Duesberg performed an heroic
whistle-blowing act during dark hours of the epidemic: his fearless adoption of
a principled stand against the administration of AZT to AIDS patients. In a
chapter of his book aptly titled, “With Therapies Like this, Who Needs
Disease?”, he discussed Azidothymidine, or AZT. About this very toxic drug that
was being given to AIDS patients, Duesberg writes, “AZT kills dividing cells
anywhere in the body—causing ulcerations and hemorrhaging; damage to hair
follicles and skin; killing mitochondria, the energy cells of the brain;
wasting away of muscles; and the destruction of the immune system and other
cells. . . . Amazingly, AZT was first approved for treatment of AIDS in 1987
and then for prevention of AIDS in 1990.” (IAV p.301) Duesberg didn’t
say it, but he didn’t have to. AZT was more of a cruel, sadistic, toxic
punishment than a medical treatment for AIDS patients.
AZT beautifully expressed the AIDS
zeitgeist. AZT was invented in 1964 to kill cancer tumors, but the drug also
effectively killed healthy growing tissues and was shelved without a patent
because it was too toxic. Twenty years later scientists reported that it was
capable of stopping HIV from replicating. Duesberg had serious doubts about
even the basic AIDS research that was done with AZT which suggested that it
could be given in small enough doses so that it would kill the virus without
also killing the t-cells and other cells in the body. Not surprisingly, given
the nature of AIDS science, the research that supported the safety of using AZT
could not be subsequently replicated and showed that “the same low
concentration [of AZT] that stops HIV also kills cells.” (IAV p.313)
Like much of the abnormal science of AIDS, if you looked diligently beneath one
fraud, you could find yet another.
The person most responsible for foisting
this quasi-genocidal toxic drug on AIDS patients was Sam Broder, the man who
was Gallo’s boss at the National Cancer Institute. He was the man responsible
for the original questionable research suggesting that AZT could be given in
doses that wouldn’t harm patients. AIDS patients would pay a horrifying price
for his scientific slovenliness. Duesberg notes, “Broder and his collaborators
have never corrected their original reports, nor have they explained the huge
discrepancies between their data and other reports.” (IAV p.313)
Duesberg’s critique of AZT gets even more
devastating when he points out that the virus is dormant and therefore the
virus “can only attack growing cells” and “like all other chemotherapeutic
drugs, is unable to distinguish an HIV-infected cell from one that is
uninfected. This has disastrous consequences on AZT-treated people; since only
1 in about 500 t-cells of HIV anti-body positive persons is ever infected, AZT
must kill 499 good t-cells to kill just one that is infected by the
hypothetical AIDS virus.” (IAV p.313) In a sardonic understatement,
Duesberg concluded “It is a tragedy for people who already suffer from a t-cell
deficiency.” (IAV p.314) Needless to say, as time passes, giving people
AZT sounds more and more unquestionably like a form of genocidal insanity. Pure
"homodemiology" in pill form. For a few who watched in horror as this transpired,
it did then, too. Duesberg wrote “A toxic chemotherapy was about to be unleashed
on AIDS victims, but no one had the time to think twice about its potential to
destroy the immune systems of people who might otherwise survive.” (IAV
p.314) AZT belonged more in a court room as Exhibit A of a crimes against
humanity trial than in the bodies of AIDS patients.
Unfortunately, given the all the surreal
terror and hysteria of the time and the prevalent abject mentality of the
patients, the gay community and its doctors wanted something—virtually
anything—that could (or seemed to) address the problem. But make no mistake
about it. There were also financial considerations that helped create the AZT
disaster. Burroughs Welcome, the company that owned the patent on the drug, was
eager to win approval for the treatment of AIDS by the FDA. Unfortunately for
the AIDS patients, Burroughs Welcome’s head researcher worked closely and
effectively with Sam Broder to get FDA approval.
The process of testing the effectiveness
of the drug was also highly questionable. The double blind, placebo controlled
studies of AZT on AIDS patients were not exactly double blind and placebo
controlled. They were as abnormal as just about everything else in the
Kafkaesque world of AIDS science. The list of things that went off the rails in
the study was long. The study was stopped prematurely because the positive
“results seemed stupendous.” (IAV p.316) But as scientists looked more
closely at the details of the study it turned out that the AZT trial was just
as unreliable as much of the basic laboratory science that had launched AZT in
the first place. More placebo patients had died than seemed reasonable. A close
look at the study revealed that many of the AZT users had suffered horrific
side effects which were downplayed even though they “more than abolished its
presumed benefit.” (IAV p.317)
When more information surfaced about the
AZT trial, it turned out that the controls for the study were a complete mess.
It was virtually impossible to conceal which patients were on AZT because in
patients on AZT the drug killed bone marrow cells so quickly, that patients
would come down with aplastic anemia, a not-hard-to-detect dreadful disease. According
to Duesberg, “the patients, needless to say, often found out what they were
taking” (IAV p.318) from clues like throwing up blood or changes in
their blood counts. That had a grimly ironic effect on the study because those
who discovered they were on the placebo, by comparing the tastes of their pills
with the pills of those who were actually taking AZT, wanted to take what
they had been told was the life saving AZT. It was a heartbreaking sign of
the desperation and helplessness of their situation. According to Duesberg,
“the patients had bought the early rumors of AZT’s incredible healing powers,
and they really did not want to take a placebo. Some of the placebo group
secretly did use AZT, explaining the presence of its toxic side effects among those
patients.” (IAV p.318)
Because doctors easily noticed in the
so-called “blinded” study that the AZT patients seemed to be doing better than
the non-AZT patients, the study was ended early. The study’s credibility was in
shambles when it turned out that some of the patients on AZT had to be taken
off of it because it was so toxic. According to Duesberg, “many of the patients
simply could not tolerate AZT, and the physicians had to do something to save
their lives.” (IAV p.319) And “15 percent of the AZT group disappeared,
possibly including patients with the most severe side effects.” (IAV
p.319) An inspection of documents pertaining to the study obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act revealed a wide array of abnormalities in the study
that suggested the study was one of the more notable frauds of the AIDS Era and
"Holocaust II."
While the initial results of the AZT study
indicated an improvement of t-cells, it turned out that a temporary increase of
t-cells did not really indicate that the patients were getting better. And
there might have been some improvement of the patients from a broad spectrum
antibiotic effect. The only problem was that the drug was also toxically
undermining the immune system. It was opposite world science at its best.
AZT was in essence becoming another cause of AIDS.
Tragically, even though the study was a
scientific train wreck, the FDA approved AZT. The FDA panel that approved AZT
included two paid consultants from Burroughs Wellcome. Duesberg notes “the FDA endorsement
could seem a cruel joke perpetrated by heartless AIDS scientists. Patients on
AZT receive little more than white capsules surrounded by a blue band. But ever
time lab researchers order another batch for experimentation they receive a
special label . . . A skull-and-crossbones symbol appears on background of
bright orange, signifying an unusual chemical hazard.” (IAV p.324)
Teach-in #3
How Kary Mullis Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
How Kary Mullis Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
Kary Mullis is a biochemist who won the
1993 Nobel Prize for the Polymerase Chain Reaction. He, like Duesberg, was
eventually troubled by the lack of evidence that HIV is the cause of AIDS. In
the foreword he wrote for Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, he
reported on the events that led to his criticism and ultimate confrontation
with the AIDS establishment. Mullis had been hired by a firm called Specialty
Labs to set up “analytic routines” for HIV. In the process of writing a report
on the progress of his project, he went in search of support for this statement
that was going to appear in the report: “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.” (IAV
p.xi) He was puzzled that there was no paper containing definitive proof of the
statement and one that was “continually referenced in the scientific papers”
about the epidemic. (IAV p.xi) He was puzzled that such a large
enterprise involving so many scientists and growing numbers of sick and dying
people did not rest on a solid foundation of a published paper that established
with great certainty that HIV was the probable cause. A computer search came up
with nothing. He started asking for the definitive reference at scientific
meetings, but after attending ten or fifteen meetings over a period of a couple
of years he “was getting pretty upset when no one could cite the reference.” (IAV
p.xi)
Mullis, without realizing it, had stumbled
into the world of the abnormal, totalitarian science of AIDS. He wrote, “I
didn’t like the ugly conclusion that was forming in my mind. The entire
campaign against a disease increasingly regarded as a twentieth century Black
Plague was based on a hypothesis whose origins no one could recall. That defied
scientific and common sense.” (IAV p.xii) It did however, make the
opposite world kind of sense that is associated with abnormal science. Like the
protagonist in Kafka’s novel, Mullis had arrived at the Castle of HIV research.
Science, logic and common sense would be utterly beside the point. And pungent
"homodemiology" was in the air, but Mullis, famous for his flamboyant,
unapologetic heterosexuality, couldn’t smell it.
When Mullis approached one of the founding
fathers of the HIV/AIDS paradigm, the French discoverer of HIV himself, Luc
Montagnier, he got the pass-the-buck, run-and-hide treatment that characterized
the behavior of many of the top HIV authorities. When Mullis approached Montagnier
at a San Diego scientific conference with his question Montagnier said,
condescendingly, “Why don’t you quote the report from the Centers for Disease
Control?” (IAV p.xii) This from the future winner of a Nobel Prize for
the discovery of HIV and one of the two people most responsible for an empire
of HIV testing, stigmatization and toxic treatments that has entrapped millions
of trusting people in its draconian public health agenda. When Mullis pointed
out the weakness of the answer, that it didn’t address the question, Montagnier
suggested that Mullis look at the work on Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. Mullis
responded that the research on that virus didn’t remind him of AIDS at
all, and didn’t answer the more basic question about the whereabouts of “the
original paper where somebody showed that HIV caused AIDS.” (IAV p.
xiii) At that point, Montagnier just abruptly walked away from Mullis. One
could say that it was a typical interaction between the two different cultures
of normal and abnormal science.
Mullis finally got his answer to the
question when he happened to be listening to the radio in his car and heard an
interview with Peter Duesberg. Mullis writes that Duesberg “explained exactly
why I was having so much trouble finding the references that linked HIV to
AIDS. There weren’t any. No one had proved that HIV causes AIDS.” (IAV
p.xiii)
Interestingly, although Mullis is often
considered a “Duesbergian,” in the foreword to the Duesberg book, he writes, “I
like and respect Peter Duesberg. I don’t think he knows necessarily what causes
AIDS; we have disagreements about that. But we’re both certain about what doesn’t
cause AIDS.” (IAV p.xiii)
Mullis also acknowledged in the foreword
the outrageous iatrogenic tragedy that was occurring in the name of the HIV
theory: “We have also not been able to discover why doctors prescribe a toxic
drug called AZT (Zidovudine) to people who have no other complaint than the
presence of antibodies to HIV in their blood. In fact, we cannot understand why
humans would take that drug for any reason.’ (IAV p.xiv)
Without formally calling HIV science
anything like a totalitarian opposite world of abnormal science, he came very
close when he wrote, “We cannot understand how all this madness came about, and
having lived in Berkley, we’ve seen some strange things indeed. We know that to
err is human, but the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is one hell of a mistake.” (IAV
p.xiv) It’s fair to say that he seemed to sense that we were in a period of
scientific psychosis.
When reporter Celia Farber asked Mullis
about “the guardians of the HIV establishment, such as Gallo and [Anthony]
Fauci,” in an interview in Spin in July, 1994, Mullis said “I feel sorry
for ‘em” and “I want to have the story unveiled, but you know what? I’m just
not the kick-’em-in-the-balls kind of guy. I’m a moral person, but I’m not a
crusader. I think it’s a terrible tragedy that it’s happened. There are some
terrible motivations of humans involved in this, and Gallo and Fauci have got
to be some of the worst. . . . Personally I want to see those fuckers pay for
it a little bit. I want to see them lose their position. I want to see their
goddamn children have to go to junior college. I mean who do we care about? Do
we care about those people who are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined?
Those are the people I’m the most concerned about. Every night I think about
this. I think, what is my interest in this? Why do I care? I don’t know anybody
dying of it. They’re right about that, well except one of my girlfriend’s
brothers died of it, and I think he died of AZT.”
In a chapter on AIDS in his own book, Dancing Naked in the Mindfield, Mullis angrily described the world of AIDS
research: “In 1634 Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for the last eight
years of his life for writing that the Earth is not the center of the universe
but rather moves around the sun. Because he insisted that scientific statements
should not be a matter of religious faith, he is accused of heresy. Years from
now, people looking back at us will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of
AIDS is largely not science at all. What people call science is probably very
similar to what was called science in 1634. Galileo was told to recant his
beliefs or be excommunicated. People who refuse to accept the commandments of
the AIDS establishment are basically told the same thing; if you don’t accept
what we say, you’re out.” (DNITMF)
Mullis got the same kind of hostile and
dismissive treatment from the scientific profession that Duesberg did: “The
responses I received from my colleagues ranged from moderate acceptance to
outright venom. When I was invited to speak about P.C.R. at the European
Federation of Clinical Investigation in Toledo, Spain, I told them that I would
like to speak about HIV and AIDS instead. I don’t think they understood exactly
what they were getting into when they agreed. Halfway through my speech, the president
of the society cut me off. He suggested I answer some questions from the
audience.” (DNITMF) Playing the all too predictable emotional
blackmail card of AIDS orthodoxy, the president of the society then asked the
first question himself—whether Mullis was being irresponsible and possibly
causing people to not use condoms. The same game of AIDS emotional blackmail
was played by virtually every institution of public health and science for
three decades.
Unfortunately, in his book Mullis joined
in the same kind of speculative, homodemiological free-for-all that many of the
Duesbergians succumbed to, in which they concocted their own, usually
heterosexist-flavored paradigms. Mullis’s seat-of-the-pants paradigm was based
on “highly mobile, promiscuous men sharing bodily fluids and fast lifestyles
and drugs.” (DNITMF) Mullis accepted the basics of the CDC’s
deficient epidemiology without asking whether that too was more like the
science of 1634. His encounter with abnormal, totalitarian science never got him close to
lifting the veil on Holocaust II and the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe and the
viral and epidemiological passageways between AIDS, CFS, autism etc. But his
challenge to the orthodoxy was certainly better than nothing and his notoriety
got his views broadcast widely. Even The New York Times was
forced to deal with Mullis, which they did in the characteristic arrogant and
dismissive way that they dealt with all important challenges to the HIV
hegemony. History will hopefully honor Mullis for using the leverage of his
Nobel Prize for a humanitarian purpose.
Without trying to be, Mullis was briefly
one of the more articulate voices of what could be called “the sorrow and the
pity of Holocaust II.” In his book, like Duesberg, he protested the use of AZT
on AIDS patients. Mullis wrote, “About half a million people went for it. No
one has been cured. Most of them are dead.” (DNITMF) And “I was
thinking that this technique of killing people with a drug that was going to
kill them in a way hardly distinguishable from the disease they were dying
from, just faster, was really out there on the edge of the frontier of
medicine. (DNITMF) It was also, unbeknownst to Mullis, on the
frontier of "homodemiological" and ultimately racist medicine.
Teach-in #4
How Robert Root-Bernstein Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
One of the most celebrated intellectuals who joined Duesberg and Mullis in their skepticism about the HIV theory of AIDS was Robert Root-Bernstein. Duesberg described him in Inventing the AIDSVirus: “Barely out of graduate school with a degree in the history of science, Root-Bernstein was awarded the MacArthur Prize fellowship—a five-year “genius grant—in 1981. This afforded him the opportunity to work alongside polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, followed by a professorship at Michigan State University in physiology.” (IAV p.245) Because of his background in the history of science, Root-Bernstein brought an academically analytical and philosophical perspective to the problems with the HIV theory. His book outlining his doubts about HIV, Rethinking AIDS, was published in 1993.
According to Duesberg, sometime in “early
1989 he had begun corresponding with Duesberg and other critics of the HIV
hypothesis. Scouring the scientific literature, Root-Bernstein found hundreds
of cases of AIDS-like diseases dating back throughout the twentieth century.
These data he extracted into a letter published in The Lancet in April
1990, showing that Kaposi’s sarcoma had not been as rare as supposed before the
1980s. The next month he fired off in rapid succession several more papers on
the history of other AIDS diseases, all of which the same journal now
rejected.” (IAV p. 246) (The Lancet, especially under the
guidance of Richard Horton, would play a major role in the maintenance
of the HIV/AIDS paradigm throughout what should be called "Holocaust II.")
In what Duesberg calls Root-Bernstein’s
major 1990 paper, “Do We Know the Cause(s) of AIDS?” he posited that “It is
worth taking a skeptical look at the HIV theory. We cannot afford—literally, in
terms of human lives, research dollars, and manpower investment—to be wrong . .
. the premature closure leaves us open to the risk of making a colossal
blunder.” (IAV p. 246) Oh, yes we could.
Root-Bernstrein’s own book was not as
Duesbergian as Duesberg probably would have liked because he found a place
for HIV in AIDS by theorizing that it might be a part of some sort of
multifactorial assault on the immune system that resulted in an autoimmune
process. Duesberg had no patience with the autoimmune theories of AIDS for a
number of reasons, including that fact that “if AIDS did result from
autoimmunity, it would have spread out in its original risk group into the
general population years ago, rather than striking men nine times out of ten." (IAV
p.248)
Regardless of the fact that, like
Duesberg, Root-Bernstein seems blissfully unaware of the presence of the
heterosexism in the manner in which the ground-zero definition of AIDS was
cooked up and despite his blind spot towards the existence of the chronic
fatigue syndrome epidemic which resulted from the CDC habit of cherry-picking data,
Root-Bernstein’s book was a strong scientific wake-up call that urged a greater
due diligence about the logic of AIDS and the emerging anomalous data that
contradicted and challenged the prevailing paradigm. Root-Bernstein brought a
distinctly Kuhnian sense of the nature of scientific process to his critique of
HIV/AIDS and he seemed to be very aware (without exactly naming it) that it was
engendering a culture of abnormal or totalitarian science. The epigrams in his
books are like shots across the bow of the conventional view of AIDS. He quotes
John Stuart Mill: “The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a
thing which is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their error.” And Rollo
May: “People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is
the only right one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of
dogmatism but of its most destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the
user from learning new truth and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt.”
His quote from William Trotter M.D. may be been even more appropriate for a
book on AIDS than even Root-Bernstein realized: “When we find ourselves entertaining
an opinion about which there is a feeling that even to inquire into it would be
absurd, unnecessary, undesirable, or wicked—we may know that the opinion is a
nonrational one.” (All quotes are from the frontispiece of Rethinking AIDS)
Root-Bernstein subsequently backed off of
his position challenging HIV, but his book is so powerfully written that the
damage it did to the credibility of the HIV paradigm could not be undone.
Without flinching, in the preface he seems to have detected the bizarre nature
of AIDS research: “I have read the medical literature assiduously, looking for
studies that test our current theory of AIDS. I have analyzed and synthesized
this information and found that our theory of AIDS is full of glaring holes,
confusing contradictions, and outright discrepancies. I am saying nothing more
than what the medical literature itself says about AIDS. The only difference is
that I am willing to say this in public, whereas most practitioners are not." (RA
p.xiii) (The bit about the practitioners deserves a little attention from
future historians of the epidemic. What does that tell us about the character
and ethics of the people who did the hands-on management of AIDS patients?)
Root-Bernstein says that he wants to
identify “the extent and nature of our ignorance” and that by doing so “we will
be able to do something about it. In science, to define the problem correctly
takes one more than halfway to its solution.” (RA p.xiii) Very Kuhnian
of him, but Root-Bernstein’s biggest mistake may be that he was prepared to
take the research he was studying at face value. In a kind of Kuhnian
overabundance of optimism about science and scientists, he writes “my critique
of AIDS theory assumes that most of the published experiments and clinical
observations are accurate” having been conduced by “many dedicated and
hard-working scientists.” (RA p.xii) That generous trust kind of
contradicts the radical statement he makes near the end of the book: “I have
put my scientific reputation on the line in this book in order to make certain
that we accept nothing about AIDS uncritically.” (RA p.373) Well, not
exactly “nothing,” if one critiques his
critique.
Root-Bernstein is basically saying that, even
giving the basic researchers and their “facts” the benefit of the doubt,
the interpretations and theories about the facts just don’t compute. He begins
his critical journey by pointing out that facts require theories and are not
facts until they are “interpreted in light of a theory.” (RA p.xiv)
Where the “facts” about AIDS are concerned he notes that “the data are all
easily validated by repeated observations and measurements, and yet may still
be misunderstood. A great deal of evidence suggests, for example that we have
attributed much too much to HIV . . . and too little to other causative
agents.” (RA p.xiv) He concluded that “it is imperative to rethink and
research AIDS.” (RA p.xv)
Like Thomas Kuhn, Root-Bernstein seems
inadvertently to be conveying an image of science with more of a sinister
potential than he realizes. He points out that “Most scientists believe that we
understand AIDS and have trumpeted their belief to each other and the public as
well . . . . This is the public face of AIDS—the face that is meant to exude
confidence, to reassure.” (RA p.1) But this public face was false and
makes one wonder to what degree the whole AIDS effort was an episode of
misbegotten groupthink from the beginning. He points out that “Scientists are
much more reticent about revealing their other face—the one that displays their
ignorance, confusion, and puzzlement over the aspects of the disease that they
do not understand. The best kept secrets about AIDS are the questions
unanswered, the puzzles unsolved, the contradictions unrecognized, and the
paradoxes unformulated.” (RA p.1) One doesn’t know whether to laugh or
cry over the casual way Root-Bernstein is basically telling us that the
powerful AIDS establishment, almost a decade into the epidemic, was keeping two
sets of books—an essential ingredient of abnormal science and "homodemiology."
Once again, like Kuhn, he may have been telling us far more about the real
nature of science than he realized.
By calling his first chapter, “Anomalies,”
Root-Bernstein is signaling a belief in the power of unexpected findings and
contradictions to force a critical reconsideration of paradigms, a distinctly
Kuhnian notion of the way the process of normal science and scientific
revolutions work, or are supposed to work. By doing so he is also in a way
reassuring us that he was operating in a world of normal science which turned
out—without him recognizing it—not to be the case at all. He asserts that “the
existence of significant anomalies or departures from the regular expectations
of the current theory must raise a red flag warning that our understanding of
AIDS is not as profound as we might wish.” (RA. p.1) Like any scientist
in the collegial, reasonable world of normal science, he thought that the anomalies
“are important enough to warrant serious rethinking of the causes and nature of
AIDS.” (RA p.2) We should note that, like Duesberg and many of the
Duesbergians, he was not going all the way and calling for a rethinking of the
ground zero epidemiology and early definition of AIDS.
The first anomaly he deals with is the
fact that “there were a large number of pre-1979 AIDS-like cases that have not
been accounted for in our current theories of AIDS.” (RA p.21) He asked,
“If HIV is a new and necessary cause of AIDS, as most AIDS researchers argue,
what was the cause of these pre-1979 AIDS-like cases? Are there causes of
acquired immune suppression other than HIV that may explain AIDS?” (RA
p.21)
Root-Bernstein’s second major anomaly
focused on his contention that “HIV is neither necessary nor sufficient to
cause AIDS.” (RA p.21) He notes that the prevailing notion was that
“infection with HIV is supposed to cause destruction of a specific type of
immune system cell known as the t-helper or T4 cell.” (RA p.22) Like
more than a few others he noted the odd manner in which the government stepped
in and basically established by fiat that the retrovirus HIV (or HTLV-III as it
was then called) was the cause of AIDS. He also notes the troubling fact that
the government announcement about the retrovirus happened “even before Gallo’s
paper [on HTLV-III] had undergone peer review and publication.” (RA
p.24) He also points out that the announcement was followed by a commitment to
HIV research that made AIDS research “virtually synonymous with HIV research.”
(RA p.24) In effect, all other avenues of research were closed off from
financial assistance or intellectual support from the HIV-obsessed AIDS
establishment.
One curious and important point that Root-Bernstein
acknowledges and historians won’t want to let go of in reconstructions of that
period is the fact that subsequently Gallo’s so-called French co-discoverer,
Luc Montagnier, had surprisingly indicated that HIV was actually not
sufficient to cause AIDS. Montagnier had uncovered evidence that
mycoplasmas are necessary to stimulate HIV, making mycoplasmas at least a
co-factor of AIDS, and possibly even more important than HIV, raising the
scandalous question of whether HIV was even the cause of AIDS. Root-Bernstein
also notes that, ironically, Gallo eventually also discovered his own
co-factor, Human Herpes Virus Six (HHV-6) in AIDS patients, also potentially
pulling the rug out from under Gallo’s own HIV-alone-causes-AIDS theory. (RA
p.26) The two so-called discoverers of
the cause of AIDS laid the groundwork for their own eventual fall from grace.
It’s a tragedy for all the ultimate
victims of HHV-6 and its family of viruses that Root-Bernstein didn’t look
harder at the virus because he might have helped make the public aware of the
blossoming HHV-6 pandemic. He did recognize the chicken-or-egg threat that
cofactors posed to the credibility of the HIV theory: “The only problem with
the scenario is that it raises the question of which came first—the HIV or the
cofactor.” (RA p.26) Like a number of critics, Root-Bernstein recounts
the shocking paradigm-challenging moment at the 1992 International AIDS
Conference at which it was announced that there were AIDS patients without
detectable HIV: “Suddenly AIDS without HIV became big news because too many
cases had surfaced to be ignored. There is no longer any doubt that HIV is not
necessary to cause acquired immunodeficiency.” (RA. p.29) Although at
the time there were those who argued that there were not a large number of such
cases, Root-Bernstein stood his ground, noting that “The actual number of
HIV-negative AIDS cases is irrelevant. The existence of even a handful of
HIV-negative AIDS cases is sufficient logically to raise doubts concerning the
necessity of HIV as a cause of AIDS.” (RA p.30)
Root-Bernstein came as close as he could
to stumbling into the raw truth about the pandemic of HHV-6 when he
hypothesized that one possibility implied by the HIV-negative cases was “that
there is a second epidemic masquerading under the guises of AIDS, which has yet
to have been detected and separated out from AIDS.” (RA p.30) We now
know that there was that other HIV-negative AIDS epidemic and it was, to
the detriment of the health and human rights of all the patients involved,
separated politically from the so-called AIDS epidemic. He was a witness to a
growing state of medical apartheid that was concealing the HHV-6 catastrophe
without realizing it.
His third anomaly focused on the mystery
of where HIV was in the body and how it was transmitted. He pointed out that
HIV was “anything but typical of sexually transmitted diseases. It can take
hundreds of exposures for HIV for transmission to occur at all.” (RA p.
31) It was rare to find HIV in semen. The way that HIV was actually transmitted
was complex and didn’t fit the STD picture the AIDS public health establishment
was promoting—another stroke against the consistency and trustworthiness of
those guiding the AIDS effort. The data about HIV suggested “it is probable
that those who become infected must be exposed repeatedly to many HIV carriers
or have some unusual susceptibility for the virus.” (RA p.38)
His fourth anomaly focused on the fact
that people could be exposed to HIV without seroconverting. Given the numbers
of sexual partners of HIV positives who did not seroconvert and oddities like
the fact that prostitutes who did not use intravenous drugs rarely became HIV
positive, he concluded that “HIV cannot be a sexually transmitted disease, in the
usual sense of the term.” (RA p.41) Other studies suggested that people
had to be immune suppressed before they became HIV positive. He
concluded that “Individuals with normal immune function should therefore be
resistant to HIV.” (RA p.42) And that comes very close to saying flat
out that HIV is an effect rather than a cause.
Like most (but not all)
of the heterosexuals in the Duesberg camp, he concluded that “one clear
implication of these studies is that the non-drug abusing heterosexual
community should have little or no risk of HIV or AIDS.” (RA p.43)
Root-Bernstein was blissfully unaware, like all the rest of the Duesbergians,
that a highly variable epidemic of HHV-6 was raging all around him while being
hidden epidemiologically behind the euphemism of “chronic fatigue syndrome.”
Like most Duesbergians, his main agenda often appears to debunk the myth of
heterosexual AIDS.
Given that HHV-6 would ultimately be seen
as a trigger for some cases of multiple sclerosis, it is interesting to note in
passing that Root-Bernstein writes about one unlucky heterosexual woman who did
seroconvert to HIV “suffered from multiple sclerosis, which had been repeatedly
treated with immunosuppressive drugs.” (RA p.44) Again in a French Farce
moment of the tragic AIDS story, he may have been an unopened door away from
the smoking gun.
The entire Duesberg camp seemed determined
to provide themselves a margin of safety that separated them and their fellow
heterosexuals from the possibility of the scarlet letter diagnosis of AIDS.
Root-Bernstein gave his fellow heterosexual Duesbergians the ultimate
reassurance when he wrote that “the transmission of HIV through heterosexual
intercourse is so rare that two heterosexuals without identified risks for AIDS
have an equal probability of being struck by lightning, dying in a commercial
airplane crash, or developing AIDS.” (RA p.44) Unfortunately, he could
not provide the same reassurance for the heterosexual Duesbergians about
chronic fatigue syndrome, autism or any of the other medical problems related
to the unrecognized immune-system-challenging epidemic of HHV-6.
One of the most damaging facts for the
credibility of the HIV theory was the matter of transmission (or
non-transmission) to health care workers. He writes that “there have however,
been more than 6,000 verified cases of health care workers reporting
subcutaneous exposure to HIV-infected blood or tissue as a result of
needle-stick injuries, surgical cuts, broken glass and so forth. . . . And yet
only a few dozen health care workers are known to have become HIV seropositive
during the entire decade of the 1980s in the United States. (RA p.44) He
was all too unaware that health care workers were, however, coming down with
illnesses associated with the so-called AIDS cofactor, HHV-6, and being
diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and other diagnoses on the HHV-6
spectrum. Being in the health care field was actually one of the biggest risks
for developing chronic fatigue syndrome. Root-Bernstein, again relying on the
CDC’s questionable ground zero epidemiology, notes that AIDS was not being
transmitted to patients by health care workers. (The same could not necessarily
be said for HHV-6 and chronic fatigue syndrome.) He accuses the HIV
establishment of not being sufficiently skeptical but the truth is that his own
skepticism never really went deep enough. But in his favor is the undeniable
fact that he did ask the kind of provocative questions that should have
helped alert the scientific profession that something was terribly amiss
in the world of AIDS research. The fact that most of his colleagues, throughout
the three decades of Holocaust II, didn’t listen to warnings like his and put
their heads in the sand will be puzzled over by historians for a long time to
come.
Root-Bernstein, on some level, was not-so-quietly
outraged by what he was seeing and brought a much needed dose of sarcasm to the
field when he asked if “HIV is so radically different from all other viruses
that we cannot compare it to them?” (RA p.42) Actually, he should have
asked if there was something so radically different about the science and
epidemiology of AIDS that no educated and decent person in their right mind
could possibly understand it. He certainly seemed to be onto the fact that
whatever the cause of AIDS was, if it was a virus, it had to be unique.
Which is exactly what the multisystemic virus HHV-6 turned out to be.
Root-Bernstein’s fifth anomaly concerned
the ability of some people to fight off an infection of HIV. Some people never
even developed antibodies to the retrovirus. Some tested negative for the virus
years after testing positive. Some tested positive and remained perfectly
healthy with intact immune systems. He caught a whiff of the Kafkaesque
politics that controlled the developing AIDS empire (and its "homodemiological"
reign of abnormal and totalitarian science) when he wrote “Oddly, the ability of adults and
infants to control or eliminate HIV infection in the absence of medical
treatment is not seen by researchers as a source of hope for those at risk for
AIDS but rather as a new public health threat.” (RA p.54) In that lucid
statement he inadvertently comes face to face with the looniness of HIV/AIDS
“science” and kind of shrugs his shoulders in puzzlement.
Because Root-Bernstein, like nearly all
the Duesbergians, didn’t seem to grasp the sexual politics driving the
psychology of the establishment he was challenging, he didn’t understand why
his statement “that even people in high risk groups who may have initially had
multiple contacts with HIV may successfully combat the viral infection” (RA
p.54) would not comfort a heterosexist scientific establishment that was
determined not to look back at its possible epidemiological and virological
mistakes. No “source of hope” that didn’t involve social control, stigmatization
and the administration of toxic drugs could be given to gays (or blacks) in
AIDS epidemiology and virology. The AIDS agenda was inexorable and unforgiving.
The fix was in. Public health had adopted a scorched earth policy against those it was
supposedly helping.
When Root-Bernstein brings up the evolving
latency period of AIDS, he may have touched on the most important anomaly of
all. He writes that “one of the oddest observations that strikes a historian of
the epidemic is that the latency period—the estimated time lag between HIV
infection and the development of clinical AIDS—has expanded almost yearly. In
1986, the figure was less than two years; in 1987, it was raised to three; in
1988, it became five; in 1989, ten; and as of the beginning of 1992, the
latency period was calculated to be between ten and fifteen years (RA
p.55) He wondered whether it was because the virus had become less virulent, or
had killed people with the highest risk lifestyles—in terms of drugs and
multiple sex partners—first. He concluded that “attributing AIDS to nothing
more than an infection by HIV is too simplistic. It leaves too much unexplained
and creates too many anomalies to be a satisfying scientific explanation. HIV
is not sufficient to explain the anomalies of AIDS. These anomalies represent
the challenge of understanding AIDS. A more thorough and skeptical analysis of
the data is needed.” (RA p.56) Blind to the heterosexism hardwired into
the “science” and epidemiology he was confronting, he didn’t understand that an
anomaly-riddled HIV theory was a very adequate and politically useful
scientific explanation in the opposite world of totalitarian, abnormal science
that AIDS represented. Something far more politically and emotionally
satisfying than reason and logic was at work here.
A rather democratic, collegial attitude
about science and scientists comes across in Root-Bernstein’s book. He was not
one to put people he disagreed with on the rack. (One doubts that the totalitarian HIVists
would ever return the compliment.) He asserted optimistically that, “anomalies,
problems, paradoxes, and contradictions are only the incentives for research.
If no one pays attention to them, they are fruitless. Even when they are
identified and scrutinized, they are only a beginning; they define the areas of
our ignorance.” (RA. p.57) Unbeknownst to him, the gang he was dealing
with was not interested in “our ignorance.” They had a commitment to not paying
attention to “anomalies, problems, paradoxes, and contradictions.”
Having accepted the basic correlation of
the ground zero definition of AIDS with its related ground zero epidemiology—a
big mistake with horrific consequences—he is left praising HIV with faint
damning: “The upshot of the discussion will be that HIV has not satisfied any
established criteria for demonstrating disease causation. Thus, although, there
is no doubt that HIV is an integral player in the drama of AIDS, we cannot say,
for certain that it is beyond a doubt, a solo actor doing a monologue.” (RA
p.58)
Like others who concocted their own
theories of AIDS causation before him, Root-Bernstein heads off into the wild
goose chase of multifactorial causation where HIV has “a whole cast of
supporting characters that foster its villainous work.” (RA p.58)
Root-Bernstein does at least give some
lip service to the importance of digging under the surface of the early
epidemiology of AIDS in his chapter on the role of HIV in AIDS. He notes the
disturbing history of the unstable definition of AIDS that always seemed to be
changing. He was troubled by the notion that there were people in the high risk
group with AIDS indicator diseases like Kaposi’s sarcoma who were
HIV-negative." Root-Bernstein noted that “AIDS, in short, has become a schizophrenic
disease . . . Some people are AIDS patients if they develop opportunistic
infections even in the absence of evidence of HIV, and in the presence of HIV,
almost any rare disease is diagnostic for AIDS regardless of whether the person
has other, more fundamental causes of immune suppression.” (RA p.63)
And, at the time his book was written in the early 90s, the CDC was proposing a
change in the definition of AIDS that meant “People may be diagnosed as having
AIDS even if they have no infections typical of AIDS, as long as they have a
significantly low number of T-helper cells and antibody to HIV.” (RA
p.63) What Root-Bernstein had to say about the proposed change came into close
proximity of this book’s thesis: “The reason for this latest
definitional alteration is social and economic, not scientific. AIDS activists
are now dictating how AIDS is to be diagnosed and who is to be included in the
count. For them, the issue is not one of correct diagnosis or elucidating the
cause of AIDS; it is the understandable desire to increase access to health
care.” (RA p.64) And what great humanitarians those activists were, and
what wonderful health care AZT and its toxic siblings turned out to be. What
Root-Bernstein failed to perceive was that the definition of AIDS, drawn from
the wrong first impressions of the real HHV-6 pandemic, was a groupthink-biased
epidemiological product developed by scientists who looked at the epidemic
through heterosexist and retroviral glasses.
Those who define the terms of an epidemic
can control how large or small it appears at any point, which gives them de
facto political power not only over the epidemic but potentially—with the broad
and invasive powers of public health sanctions—a whole country. The chief
definers would also be the chief deciders of the AIDS public health agenda. One
of the great ironies of Root-Bernstein’s often cogent criticisms of AIDS is
that he understands the political nature of this phenomena but comes to a
conclusion about the politics of the AIDS epidemic which is actually the direct
opposite of the inconvenient truth. And it is tragically typical of most of the
Duesbergians. Root-Bernstein points out that the CDC could say that AIDS cases
doubled by just changing the definition, or what he called “definitional fiat.”
(RA p.64) He is on the money that the epidemiological appearance of AIDS
was controlled by “definitional fiat” but not in the statistically upward
direction he and the Duesbergians imagined. In truth it was the CDC’s
heterosexist “definitional fiat” that was keeping the public from seeing the
connection of AIDS and CFS (and ultimately autism) in an exponentially larger
unified epidemic via the pathogen HHV-6. The difference between Root-Bernstein
vision of the epidemic and the truth was the difference between using public
relations to overstate an epidemic and using public relations to conceal one in
plain sight.
Like the point in a movie when the
audience sees a protagonist come within inches of a culprit without the
protagonist realizing it, Root-Bernstein came tantalizingly close to the truth
about the HHV-6 catastrophe when he notes, “We must be absolutely certain that
HIV is not an epiphenomenon of AIDS before we assert that it is a primary
cause. The fact that it is an extremely frequent finding in AIDS patients is
not logically compelling. It is only suggestive. Other active infections, such
as cytomegalovirus, are nearly universal among AIDS patients. If both are
correlated with AIDS, which is the cause?” (RA p.66) He was so very
close to the real issue of HHV-6 at that point and yet ultimately so far
away.
He zeroed in on the tragic truth about HIV
when he wrote “HIV may be an epiphenomenon of immune suppression rather than a
necessary cause.”(RA p.66) This very bright history-aware thinker was
also on the money when he wrote “one gaping lacuna in the AIDS definition” was
that “There are no criteria listed in any definition of AIDS that allowed for a
person to fight off AIDS or to be cured of it.” (RA p.67) He noted that
such a definition was “a medical novelty.” (RA p.67) Actually, the whole
field of AIDS research was one big medical novelty. He thoughtfully notes that
“this makes AIDS the first disease that no one can survive, by definition. Not
only is this description of AIDS logically bankrupt, it sends the demoralizing
and inaccurate message to people with HIV or AIDS that they have a disease that
is not worth fighting.” (RA p.68) Such a logically bankrupt demoralizing
definition is of course, the work of the abnormal science of "homodemiology" on a
productive day. But how could Root-Bernstein know that something like
"homodemiology" was in play if it was a construct completely absent from his
conceptual universe?
Like Thomas Kuhn, he seems
keenly aware that the psychology of scientists affects the decision-making
process. In frustration, he asks questions like “Why is it so difficult for
them to admit . . . that AIDS may have more than one cause?” (RA p.84)
He knows he is dealing with “dogma” but he doesn’t consider the possibility
that the confounding issues like the threat to institutional pride and
credibility as well as serious potential financial losses would follow upon the
admission that HIV was not the one and only cause of AIDS. Those pedestrian
kinds of conflict of interest could have done the trick even if the more
esoteric underlying issues of heterosexism and racism were not involved. But,
unfortunately, they were.
Again, Root-Bernstein asserted the point
that most of the other Duesbergians believed as an article of faith about the
risk of AIDS to heterosexuals: “If AIDS is a simple, sexually transmitted virus
then it should be running rampant in the heterosexual community by now.” (RA.
p.87) Cut to the real epidemic: HIV may have not been running rampant in the
heterosexual community, but HHV-6 (and its spectrum of related viruses)
certainly was and if the Duesbergians could have just looked behind the
euphemism of “chronic fatigue syndrome,” they would have had a ring side seat
from which to watch the real heterosexual epidemic of variable immune
dysfunction unfold.
Root-Bernstein insists that “Evidence of
the necessity of co-factors for HIV was found at the outset. (RA p.92).
What he didn’t realize is that co-factors were a political and economic threat
to those seeking Nobel prizes for HIV and those members of the public health
(and pharmaceutical) establishment who were rolling out a draconian
heterosexist (and eventually racist) toxic agenda around the seeming inexorable
public health logic of HIV control. One can’t assign medical Pink Triangles based
on a salad bar of co-factors.
Like the brightest Duesbergians,
Root-Bernstein notes that an unprecedented scientific logic was afoot, one that
cavalierly discarded Koch’s postulates. He describes the issue succinctly when
he writes, “The logic of Koch’s postulates is straight forward: Demonstrate that
one, and only one, organism is associated both with the occurrence of a
specific disease and with its onset by isolating and controlling its
transmission independent of other factors.” (RA p.95) He emphasizes that
“Every controllable infectious disease known to medical science . . . has been
solved by following Koch’s postulates.” (RA p.95) The abnormal, totalitarian,
Kafkaesque quality of AIDS research is inadvertently but beautifully captured
in Root-Bernstein’s statement that “the fact that HIV does not satisfy Koch’s
postulates does not convince HIV proponents that it is not the cause of AIDS.
On the contrary, ‘knowing’ that HIV causes AIDS most researchers reject Koch’s
postulates.” (RA p.99) The Madhatters of AIDS research generally hated
to be confused by the facts or standards of proof and logic. Root-Bernstein
underlines the outrageousness of this new form of “scientific reasoning” when
he writes that “AIDS researchers have ignored previous criteria for
establishing disease causation in favor of ad hoc inventions of their own.” (RA
p.100) Ad hoc inventions by AIDS researchers? Hello!
Root-Bernstein points out how flimsy the
original evidence for HIV was: “What is somewhat astonishing is that in 1984,
when Gallo first championed HIV as the cause of AIDS, the correlation between
HIV and AIDS was not even particularly convincing.”(RA p.101) (It was
somewhat astonishing if you didn’t know how Gallo and his homies and toadies
rolled.)
Gymnastic attempts were made by scientists
to concoct criteria to replace Koch’s postulates in such a way that they could
be conveniently used to prove HIV was the cause of AIDS. You could say that
gays were such very special people that the HIV/AIDS scientists wanted to come
up with very special rules that a proved that this very special virus was
infecting them in a very special way, and mostly only them.
In a Procrustean manner, the rules would be shaped in a heterosexist and
illogical manner to fit the evidence and support a preordained biased
conclusion. This is how the intellectual origami of abnormal science and
homodemiology is performed.
Root-Bernstein sums up the infernal game
being played in this scientific madhouse: “In short, HIV does not satisfy any
of the etiological criteria that existed prior to its discovery, and the
etiological criteria that have been developed since are all logically flawed.”
(RA p.103) Calling this kind of science abnormal or psychotic almost
seems like an understatement.
In a rather gentlemanly tone,
Root-Bernstein does indict a whole generation of doctors and scientists
who stood by as collaborators, enablers and useful idiots of this scientific
debacle when he writes that “Given this state of affairs, attempts to modify
Koch’s postulates after the assertion that the causative agent has been
identified smack of a posteriori reasoning. Such reasoning is always suspect to
logicians and should be equally suspect to physicians and scientists as well.”
(RA p.104). In the world of normal science maybe, but not in the
heterosexist world of abnormal, totalitarian science and "homodemiology."
Knowing that scientific change only occurs
when a new paradigm is offered that is more logical and attractive than the
prevailing one, Root-Bernstein takes his own out for a spin. He plays around
with the notion that AIDS may be “a synergistic or stepwise multifactor
disease.” (RA p.108) He tosses into his speculative multifactor salad of
immunosuppressive elements things like semen and addictive or recreational
drugs. He spends much of the rest of his book backing up his contention that
“there is a well-established set of diseases that have many of the
characteristics of AIDS—multiple disease causing-agents—that may provide an as
yet untested model for AIDS.” (RA p.109) One thing that strikes one as
refreshing about Root-Bernstein throughout his book is that, unlike many of the
people in the Duesberg camp, he doesn’t seem to be faithfully married to his
own dogma. In the spirit of keeping an open mind, he felt that “The case that
HIV causes AIDS is still open, and surprises are still possible.” (RA
p.109) By exploring a number of possible non-infectious causes of
immunosuppression like semen, recreational drugs, anesthesia, surgery,
pharmaceutical agents like antibiotics, blood transfusions, clotting factors,
and aging itself, he tries to build a case that any combination of these
factors might lead to immunosuppression and that the assumption that HIV “is
the only immunosuppressive agent in those at risk for AIDS and the only agent
necessary to explain the immune suppression that characterizes the syndrome.” (RA
p.111) He was saying that many different combinations of elements might be
creating a perfect immunological storm.
He also explored the possibility that AIDS
was the result of multiple, concurrent infections, arguing, with a somewhat
overzealous heterosexist bias, that “Perhaps no other group in history has ever
sustained anything like the disease overload experienced by highly promiscuous
homosexual men and intravenous drug abusers, with the sole exception of people
who live in Third World nations. . .” (RA p.149) While he explores a
laundry list of infections that he thinks may synergize into AIDS (CMV, EBV,
HBV, mycoplasma and others), he once again comes painfully close to the smoking
gun of the HHV-6 catastrophe at the core of Holocaust II when he writes about
HHV-6 that it “may be of particular importance in AIDS because Robert Gallo’s
laboratory has demonstrated that it is
common among people at risk for AIDS and acts as a cofactor to increase
infectivity and cell-killing by HIV under test tube conditions.” (RA p.152)
(Not to mention that it was also found in HIV-negative patients with the
heterosexual not-so-distant cousin of AIDS—chronic fatigue syndrome—but that
was something he seemed destined to not know anything about.)
Root-Bernstein devotes an interesting
chapter to the notion that AIDS may be a disease of autoimmunity, noting that
“autoimmunity has a wide range of manifestations in AIDS patients and people at
risk for AIDS.” (RA p.185) He argued that “autoimmunity directed at
lymphocytes is only one of the many forms of autoimmunity that manifest
themselves during the process of AIDS.” (RA p.190) He certainly had a
much more complex vision of what was going on in AIDS than the rather
simplistic HIV-infecting T-4 cell disease image that the patients and the
public were indoctrinated with. When historians go back and try to determine
why scientists and epidemiologists didn’t recognize that AIDS and chronic
fatigue syndrome were actually part of the same variable but unified epidemic,
they will wonder why Root-Bernstein’s description of the complexities of AIDS
didn’t have an eye-opening impact on anyone who was watching the emergence of
chronic fatigue syndrome in the general population at that point in the late
80s and early 90s. The honest, open-minded critics of the HIV theory of AIDS
and those concerned about CFS were just ships passing in the night.
Root-Bernstein wrote that “Many AIDS
patients develop an autoimmune form of arthritis; autoantibodies directed at
muscle proteins; and symptoms similar to both Sjorgren’s syndrome and systemic
lupus erythmatosus, including skin rashes, kidney damage, and antibodies
against DNA, thyroglobulin, and adrenocorticosteroids.” (RA p.191) He
was not ready to just glibly attribute all these complications to HIV. The
patients back then would have probably been better served if the people
attending to their health hadn’t been forced by the establishment to adopt the
simplistic “HIV-only” and “T-4 cells-mainly” way of looking at the disease
Root-Bernstein was concerned that “HIV is
only one of a multitudinous cast that cooperate to produce autoimmunity.” (RA
p.203) He felt that scientists were making a major mistake in ignoring “the
huge number of other infectious agents that are also present in AIDS patients,
often concurrently.” (RA p.203) Among those concurrent infections was of
course, one very special one, the star of the multi-systemic biomedical
catastrophe, being mostly ignored and hiding behind the alibi that it was just
another not-so-interesting infection that AIDS patients supposedly got
secondarily: HHV-6.
Root-Bernstein was particularly interested
in CMV which was a major viral problem in AIDS and which he thought could cause
autoimmunity when it combined with other infections. He was especially
intrigued by the possibility that CMV or some other herpes virus (he didn’t
bring up the then recently discovered HHV-6 here) was causing encephalitis or
demyelization in a significant number of AIDS patients. The AIDS establishment
of course, was determined to blame this, like everything else in AIDS, on HIV
alone, to which he replied, “My opinion is that we have asked HIV to be
responsible for too much of AIDS.” (RA p.209) This statement from Root
Bernstein captures how potentially damaging this over-simplification of AIDS
into “HIV T-4 cell disease” was: “ . . . autoimmunity has many manifestations in
AIDS besides that directed at lymphocytes. The causes of lymphocyte depletion
may be entirely unrelated to causes of specific autoimmune symptoms, such as
demyelization and thrombocytopenia, that are frequent concomitants of AIDS. It
is possible that HIV may play the major role in one form of autoimmunity, and
none in others. A concerted effort is needed to disentangle the many different
forms of autoimmunity. As these various manifestations become distinct, they
will inevitably call for new treatments unrelated to retroviruses.” (RA
p.218) Unfortunately, Root-Bernstein didn’t realize just how much control the
vicious HIV mafia would continue to have for decades over the AIDS public health
agenda—control that AIDS patients would pay an unprecedented medical and social
price for. And they would hardly be alone.
Root-Bernstein seems to have been
operating under the belief that the genteel Thomas Kuhn universe of normal
science was the one he was living in when he wrote, “The purpose of theorizing
is to cause us to rethink things we thought we understood in order to go out
and ask new questions.” (RA p.219) To which the AIDS establishment
snarkily could probably have replied, “And who said anything about asking
questions?” Given the relationship of AIDS to chronic fatigue syndrome and all
the other manifestations of HHV-6 it is quite ironic to hear Root-Bernstein
state ever so innocently and plaintively, “There may be major discoveries still
left to be made not only concerning AIDS but the entire field of immunology—discoveries
that may illuminate many diseases besides AIDS. With these discoveries will
come new possibilities for treatment.” (RA p.219) Unfortunately, in the
nasty Realpolitik of Holocaust II, it was simply not meant to be.
The whole
Duesbergian critical-thinking and re-thinking movement seemed to revolve around
whistling-past-the graveyard attempts to prove that heterosexuals were essentially not at risk for
what the CDC called AIDS. They were on thin ice because they depended upon the
CDC’s ground zero epidemiological judgment calls. In a chapter titled “Who is
at Risk for AIDS and Why,” Root-Bernstein throws down the gauntlet; “If
exposure to HIV is sufficient to cause AIDS, then everyone should be at equal
risk, and AIDS should develop at an equal rate among different risk groups once
infection has become established. Clearly that is not the case.” (RA
p.220) Earth to Root Bernstein: HHV-6 and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Root-Bernstein, like all the rest of the
Duesbergians, confused the threat of AIDS with the threat of being diagnosed
HIV positive. Just because heterosexuals were not being labeled as HIV-positive
or as having AIDS, didn’t mean that a large number of heterosexual Americans
were not starting to develop a broad range of immunological dysfunctions and
other problems that resembled the AIDS spectrum of pathologies. The
Duesbergians, keenly unaware of the wildfire of HHV-6 and CFS, loved to make
statements similar to Root-Bernstein’s that “Some calculations place the figure
of contracting AIDS from a heterosexual without risk factors as low as 2 in 1
million or the same risk as being struck by lightning.” (RA p.220) About
as close to never as you can get.
Working with the CDC’s flawed,
heterosexist data on what was AIDS and what wasn’t, Root-Bernstein goes to town
on the gay community and writes that “Until we understand exactly what these
predisposing factors are for each separate risk group, we will not be able to
identify, treat, control, or eliminate the risks of AIDS.” (RA p.222) Never in the history of mankind has there
been such a showboating of intense benevolent interest in understanding the gay
community, and with understanding like this the gay community didn’t need
enemies. As could be predicted by this heterosexual noblesse-oblige-driven
journey into the sex and drug habits of the gay community, the blame for AIDS
is laid, more or less, on “promiscuous, drug-abusing, multiple-infected gay
men.” (RA p.232) You know, people who like to party. Coincidentally,
since the general heterosexual population was not “promiscuous, drug-abusing,
multiple-infected,” they had no worry about contracting what the CDC had
branded as “AIDS.” Unless, of course—and this was not on Root-Bernstein’s
radar—they came in contact with the immune-system-compromising party-pooper of
a casually transmitted virus, HHV-6.
While Root-Bernstein also points to the
multiple-infection lifestyle of drug users and the multiple-immunosuppressive
risks of transfusion patients and hemophiliacs,—and some infants born to
parents with immunosuppressive drug-using lifestyles—they do little to take
away from the notion that the driving force of his theorizing about AIDS was
the same kind of Gay-Related-Immune-Deficiency-think, (GRID-think) or Got-AIDS-Yet?-think, that dominated the AIDS
establishment’s ground zero epidemiology. GRID-think was the heterosexist gift
that just kept on giving for three decades. Root-Bernstein looked at AIDS as
the inexorable price that some gays paid for an overindulgent lifestyle. That
kind of thinking, which made heterosexuals feel comfy cozy inside the
Schadenfreude of their invulnerable biomedical cacoon, blinded society to the
catastrophe of CFS, autism and everything else on the HHV-6 spectrum.
While his critical mission in his chapter
on immunosuppression in AIDS was to expose the power of co-factors in the
so-called AIDS risk groups, he may have inadvertently discovered that a broader
definition of AIDS that focused on a wide range of indicators of
immunosuppression (or more appropriately, immune dysfunction) would have shown
that there was a far bigger and more variable AIDS or AIDS-like epidemic
happening even in the gay community itself. In his chapter on the matter
he promises to “show . . . that significant immune suppression is present in
large numbers of people in high-risk groups for AIDS in the absence of
HIV infections. Sometimes the degree of immune suppression is equal to, or even
greater than, that experienced by HIV-positive, matched patients.” (RA
p.259) In the world of normal, nontotalitarin science this should have been all you needed to
know to have an anomaly-driven epiphany that HIV was probably not the
cause of AIDS. But not in the opposite world of abnormal science that
Root-Bernstein was unknowingly adrift in. If that wasn’t enough, he points out
that “many people in the high-risk groups for AIDS have significant immune
impairment prior to contracting an HIV infection and are thus susceptible to
both infection and the effects of infection than are immunologically healthy
individuals.” (RA. p.259) It’s almost like he’s saying that people have
HIV-negative AIDS (something CFS turned out to be) before they have
HIV-positive AIDS. He strengthened his case by noting that “it is clear that
acquired immune deficiencies do not require the presence of HIV infection.” (RA.
p.259) The chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic that he, for whatever reason,
didn’t know about was certainly a neon sign for that notion.
Rather than suggest that there may be some
other agent responsible for both HIV-positive AIDS and what looked like
HIV-negative AIDS in the gay community, (while also not considering that there
might be an unseen HIV-negative immunological event going on in the general
population—which there was), he instead went on a fishing expedition for infections
associated with gays that could support a multi-factorial
HIV-plus-something-else theory of AIDS. It’s a shame that he didn’t take the
HIV-negative AIDS issue and run with it, launching an all out assault on the
HIV theory. As they say, he who would wound the lion must kill him. He was
merely wounding the paradigm. If HIV-negative AIDS was nature’s way of saying
flat out that HIV couldn’t be the cause of AIDS, then Root-Bernstein wasn’t
listening closely enough. It’s amazing that Root-Bernstein didn’t see more red
flags considering that he wrote, “In fact, a large body of evidence
demonstrates that significant immune suppression occurs in the absence of HIV
infection in groups at high risk for AIDS but not among low-risk groups. HIV
seropositive individuals within each identified risk group are no more immune
suppressed than those who are HIV seronegative, as long as they do not contract
other active infections.” (RA p.261) He also reports that “the
laboratories of Jerome Groopman and Robert Gallo [of all people] found that as
many as 50 to 80 percent of HIV-seronegative homosexual men and hemophiliacs
had significantly reduced T-helper/T-suppressor ratios during 1984.” (RA
p.262) Again, it was as though they had found a big gay HIV-negative epidemic
of immunosuppression that might have pulled the rug out from under the HIV
positive paradigm that was about to trap the gay community in a draconian and
toxic public health agenda.
While Root-Bernstein points to studies
that suggest that Cytomegalovirus (CMV), the under-appreciated virus that the
CDC initially suspected was the cause of AIDS, was responsible for the
immunosuppression in HIV-negative men who were immune-suppressed, it was the
HIV-negativity itself rather than the CMV that should have sent everyone back
to the epidemiological drawing board to see if they had overlooked some other
new infection—like the recently (at that point) discovered HHV-6. It was a huge
missed opportunity, to say the least..
One of the most damning studies for the
HIV theory of AIDS “consisted of an immunological and infectious disease
evaluation of 100 ‘healthy’ homosexual men in Trinidad in 1987 carried out by
Robert Gallo, William Blattner, and their colleagues. Nearly all of the men in
the study, whether they were HIV seropositive or not, had a significant
depletion of T-helper cells.” (RA p.265) On top of that they also
discovered “that some HIV-infected men had normal T-helper cells. Thus HIV
alone did not uniquely signify concomitant immune suppression.” (RA
p.265) Once again, that might have finished HIV off if research was occurring
in the world of normal science rather than in one guided by the heterosexist Ouija Board of "homodemiology."
Given the confusion between CMV and HHV-6
in AIDS, Root-Bernstein again came close to peering into the HHV-6 catastrophe
when he wrote, “In fact, although very few studies have been performed,
cytomegalovirus appears to be as good a marker for increasing immune
incompetence as HIV. R.J. Biggar and his colleagues reported in 1983 (prior to
the isolation of HIV) that a very good correlation existed between the
excretion of CMV in the semen of homosexual men and the degree of the immune
suppression.” (RA. p.279) CMV was good. But the HHV-6 family, as it
turns out, was better.
And similarly, given the role of EBV in
CFS (sometimes considered to be HIV-negative AIDS), which some people had
called “chronic mono” because of the EBV reactivation or infection that it was
associated with, Root-Bernstein also came tantalizingly close to inadvertently
letting the cat out of the bag about the link between AIDS and CFS when he
noted that “In 1986, Charles R. Rinaldo, Jr., and his co-workers demonstrated
that homosexual men who seroconvert to HIV simultaneously experienced a
fourfold increase in antibody titers to EBV VCA antigen (virus capsid antigen).
Furthermore, they documented a direct correlation between HIV antibody titer
and EBV antibody titer. The higher the one, the higher the other.” (RA
p.280) Again, inadvertently, Root-Bernstein may have uncovered the fact that
AIDS was just a serious development in gay men who essentially had all the
signs of “chronic mono” or “chronic fatigue syndrome.” Root-Bernstein
appropriately chided his fellow scientists: “Whether other viruses associated
with AIDS . . . are similarly predictive of disease progression remains to be
seen, since no one, as far as I can tell, has even bothered to look. This
failure to look has left us in the position of assuming that HIV is the only
valid measure of disease progression in AIDS, without the scientific benefit of
having checked the assumption.” (RA p.280) Checking assumptions was
something that was only done on the alien "non-homodemiological" world of normal, non-tolitarian
science.
In his chapter, “Why AIDS is Epidemic
Now,” Root-Bernstein may have jumped the
heterosexist shark as he entered the dangerous area of speculation about the
sociological underpinnings of AIDS, asserting that “To understand AIDS, we must
document and understand the sociological changes in homosexuality, drug use and
medical practice that have created the conditions that allowed the syndrome to
explode into prominence during the past decade.” (RA p.282) The chapter
gets everything backwards. It’s not that anything he says is flat out factually
wrong. It’s just that he misses the heterosexist context in which everything he
asserts actually takes place. Every negative statement he makes about gays
could be matched with a critical or negative statement about a biased
heterosexual society and the scientists who eventually entrapped gays in the
bogus HIV/AIDS and “chronic fatigue syndrome is not AIDS” paradigms. Changes in
homosexuality were not the only thing that needed to be discussed in order to
understand the true nature of the epidemic. Changes—not good ones—in the
application of society and science’s heterosexism kept up with them.
Root-Bernstein confidently notes that the
“sociological manifestations of homosexuality have changed in the recent past.
. . . New expressions of homosexuality concomitant with the gay liberation
movement have created an unusual and new disease profile for gay men.” (RA
p.282) Root-Bernstein was clearly not applying for the position of Grand
Marshal of any Gay Pride parade. While he notes that “The medical literature is
quite explicit about some of these new manifestations of gay male life” (RA
p.282)—promiscuity-related infections—he misses the sociological fact that for
every gay action there can be a heterosexist reaction and in this case “new
manifestations of gay male life” were accompanied by new manifestations of
heterosexist bias in science, medicine and epidemiology. Root-Bernstein
certainly had a “Got-AIDS-Yet” eye for the gay guy, that focused on various
aspects of gay sex that he thought were potentially linked to “AIDS.” He found
his smoking gun in the studies that showed “an increase in risky behavior among
gay men immediately preceding the exploding in AIDS.” (RA p.286) He also
pointed to the enablers of the new “way of sex as recreation and pleasure,” (RA
p.286) namely “bath houses, backroom bars and public cruising areas.” (RA
p.286)
AIDS
was—in his own epidemiological vision— the result of the sexual and
recreational drug revolution. Whether it was the increase of CMV or amebiasis
in gay men, the tipping point for AIDS was gay liberation: “AIDS became
a problem for homosexual men only when rampant promiscuity, frequent anal forms
of intercourse, new and sometimes physically traumatic forms of sex, and the
frequent concomitants of drug use and multiple concurrent infections paved the
way. As Mirko Grmek has concluded, ‘American homosexuals created the conditions
which, by exceeding a critical threshold, made the epidemic possible.’” (RA
p.292) Basically this was as good as GRID-think gets. AIDS was a gay disease,
so its cause ipso facto had to be intimately related to gay behavior and gay
culture. It was this kind of tragic myopic epidemiological obsession that would
allow the HHV-6 catastrophe to quietly simmer all over the world in all kinds
of people who had never marched in a single gay liberation parade or enjoyed
the diverse hedonistic pleasures that Root-Bernstein saw as the sine qua non of
AIDS. Root-Bernstein doesn’t say it, but it’s hard not to connect the dots and
conclude that the implications of his sociologically biased epidemiology that
AIDS could only be stopped with a political or sociological intervention. One
can only assume that in one form or another such an intervention might mean
rescinding the whole gay liberation movement—or at least its sexual side.
What would never occur to Root-Bernstein
was the possibility that the uneven distribution of AIDS and the apparent total
safety of the heterosexual general population was a actually a mirage of
groupthink, a byproduct of the political use of a heterosexist definition of
AIDS that the CDC had put into play. A far more radical political and
sociological analysis actually needed to be conducted on the epidemiologists
themselves who were blind to the emerging CFS form of AIDS and the pandemic
of HHV-6 that was all around while they were doing their thinking in
heterosexist boxes.
Given Root-Bernstein’s GRID-think approach
to AIDS and his acceptance of the CDC’s ground zero epidemiology, it is not
surprising that he took issue with Stephen Jay Gould who wrote an alarming
piece in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine “proclaiming
heterosexual AIDS a ‘natural’ and therefore inevitable phenomenon.” (RA
p.299) This was like waving a red flag at everyone in the Duesbergian
heterosexual-AIDS-is-a-myth camp. Root-Bernstein disapprovingly quotes Gould
proclaiming that “the AIDS pandemic . . . may rank with nuclear weaponry as the
greatest danger of our era. . . . Eventually, given the power and lability of
human sexuality, it spreads outside the initial group into the general
population, and now AIDS has begun its march through our own heterosexual
community.” (RA p.299) Gould went on to say that those infected would be
“our neighbors, our lovers, our children and ourselves. AIDS is both a natural
phenomenon and potentially, the greatest natural tragedy in human history.” (RA
p.299) Inadvertently sounding like “The Great Prophet of the chronic fatigue syndrome
and Autism Epidemic,” Gould was uncannily and inadvertently prescient about
what was actually going on behind the CDC’s biased epidemiological concoctions
and sexual balkanization. He was spectacularly on the money if he had been
referring to the HHV-6 pandemic. But HIV—not exactly.
Root-Bernstein took issue with Gould and
others who in any way tried to extrapolate a picture of the future of the AIDS
epidemic from what was going on in Africa. He insisted “AIDS in Africa cannot
used as a model for AIDS in Western nationals because typical sub-Saharan
Africans are not comparable to Western heterosexuals in their disease load,
their nutritional status, or their immunological functions.” (RA p.301)
This
was an example of heterosexist presumptions morphing into racist
presumptions. "Homodemiology" was becoming "Afrodemiology." Just as he
blamed the gay revolution
for AIDS in America, he noted that “Social and political revolutions are
also
taking their tolls on African health.” (RA p.308) He pointed to Daniel
B. Hrdy’s notion that population movements and what Hrdy called the “sexual
mixing“ “of various African groups may be related to the spread of AIDS.” (RA
p.308) He also blamed wars in Africa which could lead to the kind of breakdown
of public health infrastructure as a possible foundation for AIDS. He insisted
that as far as heterosexual AIDS was concerned, “Europe and America were not
Africa,” (RA p.310) and “Far from presenting us with a look at the
future of AIDS in North America and Europe, African heterosexuals simply confirm
the fact that AIDS is a problem only for individuals who have multiple causes
of immune suppression prior to, concomitant with, or independent of HIV
exposure. AIDS will never become a major health threat to Americans and Western
Europeans that it has become for Africans. AIDS will be a continuing problem
only for individuals whose life-style, medical histories, or socioeconomic
conditions predispose them to immune suppression in general.” (RA p.311)
This Root-Bernstein conclusion was on target only because he was blissfully
unaware that whenever his fellow white American heterosexuals saw their immune
systems go either south or haywire, it would be deceptively called chronic
fatigue syndrome. And those unfortunate white American heterosexuals would be called
crazy if they happened to notice in any way that their illness, which would be
trivialized as “Yuppie Flu,” was even real, significant or transmissible.
Once again, like most of the
Duesberg camp, Root-Bernstein was incredulous about the notion that healthy
heterosexuals could ever in a million years get AIDS: “In fact, the chances
that a healthy, drug free heterosexual will contract AIDS from another
heterosexual are so small they were hardly worth worrying about.” (RA
p.313) One gets the feeling that he actually thinks it was almost literally
impossible. He even doubted that cases of heterosexual cases of AIDS (as
identified by the CDC) were really what they were cracked up to be. He went so
far as to question the credibility of the world’s most famous case of
heterosexual AIDS, basketball player Magic Johnson: “ . . . no one knows what
risk factors Johnson did or did not have for contracting HIV other than
extraordinary promiscuity. We have only his world that he contracted HIV from a
woman. He has never directly stated that he never engaged in homosexual
activity or used intravenous drugs.” (RA p.313) In other words, he had
never gotten the GRID third degree or the Got-AIDS-Yet? enhanced interrogation.
Root-Bernstein was skeptical and asserted that “a variety of other cases touted
by the government and media as heterosexually acquired AIDS cases are similarly
suspect.” (RA p.314)
Root-Bernstein applies the
"homodemiological" way of sorting things out by also bringing up the possibility
that the unmentionable practice of heterosexual anal sex may be a stealth
factor for heterosexual AIDS in America. He argues that the female inhibition
towards discussing anal sex was concealing the real reason for any supposed
heterosexual AIDS. He also points out that many woman “are reticent to discuss
the sharing of sexual toys such as dildos and butt plugs that may also
represent modes of transmitting sexual diseases.” (RA p.322) In an
uncanny way, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest he was coming very
close to saying that heterosexuals contracted AIDS because, although they were
straight, they had done something gay.
One doesn’t want to go too negative on
Root-Bernstein, however, even if his thinking did somewhat reflect the
hegemonic heterosexist culture he was part of, because at a critical time
during "Holocaust II," along with several others, he did play a significant part
in keeping minds open enough to prevent the HIV/AIDS research elite from going
completely unchallenged. He put his own reputation on the line in doing so. He
also kept the door open for additional critical scientific thinking that could
pick up where he left off. For those bravely standing up to a very hostile and
powerful HIV/AIDS empire, his call for better science and creative scientific
thinking was manna from heaven: “We must elaborate possibilities. In science as
in theater or fiction, the tension of the plot is produced by the alternative
resolutions we can imagine. A plot that unfolds without suspense is boring.
Similarly, in science research that can only reach one conclusion is hardly
worth performing; it has no potential to yield discoveries. We want a plot that
proffers alternatives. HIV has been set up as the villain of this piece, but it
is still possible that we have been led [on] a merry chase away from the real
culprits?” (RA p.327) He didn’t realize the degree to which he was
trapped in an opposite world of abnormal, totalitarian science that was driven
by an agenda and a mindset that had no real interest in surprises and plot
twists, discoveries and anomalies. Channeling Thomas Kuhn, he wrote, “I have
previously defined scientific discovering as a process of elaborating all
imaginable explanations for a phenomena, constrained by an ever-increasing body
of observation and experiment. The resulting recursive interplay of imagination
and reality assures us that we have reached the correct answer.” (RA
p.328) That kind of freedom-to-imagine was not permissible in an abnormal,
totalitarian world in which scientists were expected to follow HIV dogma.
When historians try to assign culpability
to all the scientists who stood passively and silently on the sidelines while
the medical and scientific atrocities of "Holocaust II" occurred, they will want
to investigate the trails suggested by this statement by Root-Bernstein: “Thus,
despite repeated statements by government officials that the cause of AIDS is
known and that it is HIV, I can no longer find any major investigators in the
field of AIDS who will defend the proposition that HIV is the only
immunosuppressive agent involved in AIDS.” (RA p.330) Whoever these
scientists were, they will have to face the judgment of history when it asks
why they sat on their hands and allowed the HIV mafia of "Holocaust II" to build
a hellish public health empire for AIDS patients and the gay community around
the notion that “HIV is the only suppressive agent involved in AIDS.”
It is only fair to pay special tribute to
the fact that Root-Bernstein gave some rather astute, prescient attention to
HHV-6 in his penultimate chapter. In discussing co-factors, he notes that even
Robert Gallo had one, namely HHV-6: He quotes Gallo himself saying, “Another
candidate [for an AIDS cofactor] is human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6, originally
designated human B-lymphotropic virus), which has not only been identified in
most patients AIDS by virus isolation, DNA amplification techniques and serological
analysis, but is also predominantly tropic and cytopathic in vitro for
CD4+ T lymphocytes . . . These observations indicate that HHV-6 might
contribute directly or indirectly to the depletion of CD4+ cells in AIDS.” (RA
p.330) Root-Bernstein was far too optimistic about the flexibility and good
faith of the AIDS establishment in general and Gallo in particular when he
concludes, “Statements such as this one [about HHV-6] suggest that even
mainstream HIV researchers are beginning to consider the possibility that HIV
may not be sufficient to cause AIDS. They do not doubt that it is necessary.” (RA
p.330) To Gallo, HIV never really stopped being the “truck” that killed
patients. (Gallo and his gang themselves turned out to be that truck.)
History might have been different if at
this point in his rethinking Root-Bernstein had looked more critically at the
psychology, sociology and politics of the world of AIDS science and
epidemiology. Absent an ability to detect the presence of heterosexism and the
negative effects of its cognitive bias, he was left clueless a little like
Kafka’s K trying to understand what was going on up in the Castle. He was
sensitive to the bullheadedness of those in power but couldn’t peer into the
thick skulls or twisted souls of those in charge. He quotes the imperious
Anthony Fauci, the Director of NIAID, as saying that “critiquing a dubious
theory would take time away from more productive efforts.” (RA p.331)
And he quotes James Curran as stating unequivocally at the Amsterdam AIDS
Conference in 1992 (at which it was announced that there were cases of
HIV-negative AIDS), “There is not AIDS without HIV.” (RA p.331) What
Curran was really stubbornly saying was, “We’re the Centers for Disease
Control. We have the power to define disease and epidemics, and if there is HIV
then we say there has to be AIDS, and if there is no HIV we won’t call it AIDS.
Period. End of discussion. And if you call that circular reasoning, you can
just suck it up.” Fauci and Curran weren’t exactly stupid. They must have known
where the cofactor argument might lead—to the conclusion that they had both
made major contributions to the biggest scientific mistake in history. That
they themselves were the final arbiters of the legitimacy of their own work is
just one more factor that made AIDS a period of accountability-free abnormal
and totalitarian science.
Again, Root-Bernstein seemed like he was
making his own pact with the devil in giving HIV too much credibility by
shaping his critique around finding cofactors for HIV rather than going all the
way by asking a far more radical question of whether HIV was a total
disaster-inducing red herring, the biggest scientific mistake in history. In a
way, he was inadvertently helping to keep the HIV agenda alive through faint
(sometimes slightly fawning) criticism. He goes out of his way to give HIV
sufficient deference: “There is no doubt that HIV is highly correlated with
AIDS. Correlation is not, however, proof of causation.” (RA p.329) He
chose to enter his own dog in the race in the form of an “HIV-plus-cofactors
theory.” (RA p.337) But even his theory that AIDS might be “a
multifactorial, synergistic disease” kept a place for HIV as an important but
not necessary opportunistic part of the disease process. He didn’t fully seem
to grasp that it would be game over for the HIV establishment if it
became known that they had built their scapegoating, dystopian antigay empire
around a virus that was not even necessary for AIDS. People were not jumping
out of skyscrapers because they tested positive for an AIDS cofactor. People were
not be arrested for transmitting an AIDS cofactor to others. People were not
being turned into AZT toxic dumps because they were infected with an AIDS
cofactor.
Root-Bernstein tries to have his cake and
eat it too by sticking it to Duesberg: “I believe that Duesberg is wrong in
ignoring the role of HIV in AIDS. It is certainly highly correlated with the
syndrome (even given the methodological sleight of hand involved in defining
the syndrome by the presence of the putative causative agent prior to definitive
demonstration of causation) . . . . It is just as big a mistake to ignore the
potential role of HIV in AIDS as it is to ignore the roles of all other
immunosuppressive agents that affect AIDS patients.” (RA p.343) The AIDS
establishment was not shaking in its boots about the latter charge. The AIDS
empire was not being built on the premise that HIV contributed to AIDS
like a wide array of other immunosuppressive agents. HIV was being packaged as
the Gay Andromeda Strain. It was an evil and inexorable agent. Those infected
with it carried an evil germ and were capable of doing a great deal of damage
to society with the venereally transmitted agent, meaning that those people’s
very sexual identities were tied up with the single evil virus.
In many ways, the notions that Peter
Duesberg concocted about AIDS were not any less heterosexist than
Root-Bernstein’s, but with far more political sensitivity than Root Bernstein,
Duesberg grasped the personal implications for anyone who got caught in the labyrinth
of epidemiological fraud and ended up labeled HIV positive, the virtual medical
Yellow Star (or more accurately a pink triangle) with all the perks that went
with it. They weren’t just being labeled “cofactor positive.” Peter Duesberg
had the kind of empathetic x-ray vision that could see the human toll the
scientific mistake (or fraud) of HIV was taking.
For
all we know, Root-Bernstein may have
thought that his was a kind of big tent compromise position that could
bring
the anti-HIV camp back to the scientific table with the growing HIV
establishment so as to develop a new synthesis of both positions, but it
was
all for naught regardless of his good intentions. The AIDS establishment
had
bet their professional and financial lives on HIV and Duesberg thought
HIV was a non-negotiable crock and that was that. And while all of these
scientists
fiddled with arguments about HIV, Rome was burning with HHV-6 and its
family of "strains" and diseases .
Root-Bernstein ends his important book by
asking how so many scientists could be so wrong about something and reminds his
readers that “Science, despite its elusive goal of objective truth, is just as
human and just as fallible as any other human activity.” (RA p.350) It
is his belief that oversimplification and gullibility have contributed to the
mistake of thinking HIV is the cause of AIDS. He asserts that “authority—even
wishful thinking—is just as powerful and prevalent in science and medicine as
it is in any other sphere of human endeavor.” (RA p.353) He also points
out the scandalous and unbelievable fact that studies have shown that
“physicians are perhaps the most authority oriented of all professionals. They
are evaluated in medical school not on the basis of their critical thinking
skills, their creativity, or their independence but their ability to learn
quickly, to memorize well, to act prudently, and to be able to quote authority
extensively.” (RA p.353) They would clearly also make good priests—which
is what some of them seemed like during Holocaust II. He goes to the tragic
heart of the matter when he writes, “There can be no breakthroughs without
research, but breakthrough research is not possible when conformity is rewarded
and skeptical inquiry punished. AIDS may continue to plague modern society,
just as other preventable infections such a puerperal fever plagued our
forebears, because of the closemindedness of the very physicians whose job it
is to diagnose, treat, and prevent these diseases.” (RA p.354) He didn’t
know the half of it. In the solace of his certainty that these mistakes didn’t
put the heterosexual general population at risk, he thought he was throwing
life rafts at pathetic, drowning risk groups from a boat that couldn’t sink. He
didn’t know he himself was standing on the heterosexual HHV-6 Titanic.
As
with Duesberg and Kary Mullis, one must express gratitude that he joined those
who spoke out against AZT and similar treatments: “One caveat concerning
long-term prophylaxis for AIDS is in order. As I have pointed out repeatedly,
chronic use of antibiotics can lead to immune suppression. . . . There are,
however, almost no long-term studies of the effects of chronic exposure to the
vast majority of drugs that might be used prophylactically in AIDS. . . . We do
not want to be in the position of saying that we cured the patient but the
treatment killed him.” (RA p.337) We don’t? We didn’t? Could have fooled
us. He caught the real tragedy of blaming the wrong agent for AIDS when he
pointed out that “It may prove easier to stop a mycoplasmal or cytomegalovirus
infection [or any infection that be part of the mutifactorial mix in AIDS] than
to stop HIV.” (RA p.357)
It is once again disquieting to note how
close to the truth of the HHV-6 catastrophe Root-Bernstein actually got and how
much help he could have been if he had stayed with the issue—as focused and
critical as he was in his book—for another decade. Thinking way outside the
AIDS box, he even theorized that scientists could have gotten the whole
orthodox paradigm of immunosuppression in AIDS backwards when he
speculated that “One very odd possibility is also raised by alternative
theories of AIDS, particularly by the theories that incorporate autoimmunity as
a major event in the prognosis of the disease. Immunosuppressive drugs may
actually benefit AIDS patients.” (RA p.358) Such a radical change in the
AIDS paradigm would have caused what Kuhn refers to as a “visual gestalt shift”
and that was simply not allowed in the totalitarian, abnormal, paralyzed world
of AIDS science. Without fully realizing it, Root-Bernstein was tilting at
political windmills when he wrote “In the meantime, various aspects of medical
practice must change to accommodate the possibility that HIV is not the sole
agent responsible for AIDS.” (RA p.358) To which one could hear every
member of the HIV establishment thinking, “Over our dead bodies.” There would
absolutely be no dialing back on the AIDS paradigm or agenda. Rethinking was
for “denialists.” HIV would never ever be considered “no more than a serious
warning that a patient has multiple risks that need to be ferreted out and
controlled and corrected.” (RA p.358.) He might just as well have
proposed that homeopathy or liver cleanses be applied to AIDS. There was no way that the crown
jewel of "homodemiology" (and "Afrodemiology") was going to be abandoned. Its
totalitarian power to stigmatize, control and for some to make a lot of money
and advance careers was not something to be given up without a vicious fight to
the death using all the establishment and governmental powers at hand.
Like a good Kuhnian, Root-Bernstein
thought that the answers to AIDS might come from unexpected sources, from
people not at the center of the reigning establishment that controlled the
shape of the official paradigm: “I would not be surprised if the most important
innovators in AIDS research and treatment turn out to be peripheral members of
the research and treatment communities.” (RA p.363) Following the rules
of abnormal, totalitarian science, AIDS research was the enemy of true innovation. AIDS was
dogmatic and innovation was heresy and worthy of inquisition. To cross the AIDS
leadership was to become a peripheral member of the research and treatment
communities.
Near the end of his book the very earnest
Root-Bernstein makes a statement full of laugh-out-loud irony for any student
of "Holocaust II": “We need to solve the social, economic, health education, and
medical care problems that create the conditions that permit AIDS to develop in
the first place.” (RA p.368) Fair enough, but the number one problem
hidden in that politically correct smorgasbord is something that Root-Bernstein
was himself an (albeit relatively decent) ambassador of: heterosexism.
Heterosexism may have had social and economic cofactors in the creation of
Holocaust II, but it still was the sine qua non. Heterosexism is what held the
AIDS quilt—so to speak—together. And ultimately it would also blindly hold the
CFS and autism quilts together.
Root Bernstein closes his book by
asserting that “The only path to the truth is to continue questioning—even
things that are taken to be undeniable facts.” (RA p.373) Given that we
are now in the middle of an HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe which is potentially
affecting everyone immunologically, neurologically and in a variety of other
ways and manifesting itself as an alphabet soup of AIDS, CFS, MS, autism,
Morgellons and God knows what else, he may want to question some of the ground
zero data and epidemiology that led to his belief that the general
population had nothing to worry about where the virtually impossible
lightning strike of AIDS was concerned. One day he just might want to write a
sequel to Rethinking AIDS called “Rethinking My Rethinking of AIDS.”
Teach-in #5
How Serge Lang Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
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."
Teach-in #6
How Rebecca Culshaw Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
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.”
Teach-in #6
How Rebecca Culshaw Tried to Fix the Corrupted Hard Drive of AIDS Research
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.
