Bulletin #126 from the Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)

Robert Root-Bernstein: The Genius Who Almost Recognized the HHV-6 Epidemic

". . . it raises the question of which came first—the HIV or the cofactor."

     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.”

 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about the International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard November 9-11, 2015

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Art, Cartoons, and Posters for the International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in at Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)

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Bulletins from The Coordinating Committee of The International HHV-6 Protest and Teach-in At Harvard (November 9-11, 2015)

The Harvard Declaration of the HHV-6 Rights of Man

1. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in AIDS.

2. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

3. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Autism.

4.The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Multiple Sclerosis.

5. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Brain Cancer.

6. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Heart Disease.

7. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalitis.

8. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cognitive Dysfunction.

9. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Drug Hypersensitivity Syndrome.

10. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Bone Marrow Suppression.

11. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Lymphadenopathy.

 12. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Colitis.

13. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Endocrine Disorders.

14. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Liver Disease.

 15. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

 16. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Glioma.

17. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cervical Cancer.

18. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hypogammaglobulinemia.

 19. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Optic Neuritis.

20. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Microangiopathy.

21. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Mononucleosis.

22. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Uveitis.

23. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.

24. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Rhomboencephalitis.

25. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Limbic Encephalitis.

26. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalomyelitis

27. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pneumonitis.

28. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in GVHD.

29. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Ideopathic Pneumonia.

30. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pediatric Adrenocortical Tumors

31. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in the reactivation of endogenous retroviruses.

32. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on T-Cells.

33. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on B-Cells

34. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on Epithelial Cells.

35. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Natural Killer Cells.

36. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Dendritic Cells.

37. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the brain.

 38. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the liver.

39. The right not to be lied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect cytokine production.

40. The right not to be lied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect Aortic and Heart Microvascular Endothelial cells.

41. The right not to be lied to about the role of an HHV-6 cover-up in a massive HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme that in a number of ways resembles the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and Nazi medicine.