Day 3: Six Harvard Teach-ins of the International HHV-6 Protest at Harvard
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
