June 16, 2016 Editorial: The Sociopathic Science of Robert Gallo
HHV-6 University Editorial
Why does anybody in AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research trust the sociopathic science of Robert Gallo?
Previous HHV-6 University Editorials
June 13, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Another Reason James Curran Should be Asked to Resign from Emory University
When historians attempt to deconstruct the sociopathic science that has given us the cover-up of a major HIV/AIDS Ponzi scheme and a massive epidemic of diseases related to HHV-6 (like AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, etc.), they should look closely at a shocking moment back in the 80s when the CDC's James Curran (now a Dean at Emory University) altered AIDS research data.
In Science Fictions, John Crewdson's meticulous documentation of the frauds of Robert Gallo, the scientist who makes Bernie Madoff look like Mother Teresa, that moment is described. Under political pressure to name something the cause of AIDS, James Curran, then a kind of de facto AIDS Czar, basically did something scientists often do when their data doesn't perfectly fit their hypothesis: he altered it.
Gallo, as everyone now knows, stole the so-called exogenous retrovirus that the French scientists at the Pasteur Institute supposedly found in AIDS patients. Gallo and his toadies then created their own fraudulent test from their stolen French retrovirus and then, in Three-Card-Monte fashion, they had an Americanized test for an Americanized retrovirus. When the Centers for Disease Control compared the French and Gallo tests for accuracy, according to Crewdson, the Pasteur Institute's test was slightly better. According to Crewdson, in typical Gallo style, he wanted the CDC to alter the results so as to reflect a better score for Gallo's version of the test. It was just another day in the sociopathic science of AIDS, so of course James Curran agreed to Gallo's outrageous request.
This is just another reason Emory University immediately should ask for the resignation of James Curran, a scientific crook who should not be the Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health. Unless of course the whole purpose of universities is to turn out sociopathic scientists who can compete against other sociopathic scientists in the brave new world of sociopathic science that AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research have created.
June 10, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
It's time for the students and faculty at Emory University to dump James Curran, one of the people who helped craft the homophobic, racist and sociopathic science of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Why is he the Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health?
June 9, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
It's time to reconsider the Jane Teas African Swine Fever Virus AIDS Hypothesis
Now that African Swine Fever is back in the news in the context of an AIDS epidemic in bees that is causing colony collapse disorder, it's time to reconsider the hypothesis of Jane Teas that African Swine Fever is the real cause of AIDS. What is the relationship of African Swine Fever to HHV-6 and HHV-8? Is African Swine Fever really the trigger for both AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Are American pigs now infected with some new strains of African Swine Fever Virus? There are a number of articles on Jane Teas and her colleague John Beldekas available on the internet. Here is one at Spin Magazine. And here is an AP story that appeared in The New York Times.
June 4, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Before Ron Davis, Ian Lipkin and Maureen Hanson start doing new rounds of CFS hocus-pocus in their laboratories, we suggest they test what could be called the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis.
The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis:
For over three decades, the Centers for Disease Control has been covering up the relationship between so-called AIDS and so-called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by a massive deception and self-deception involving nosology, epidemiology, HIV and HHV/6/7/8 fraud.
Capiche?
(Please read and reread this metahypothesis very, very carefully and make sure you thoroughly understand it before any research commences. Ponder its implications before you even start to form your own hypotheses.)
Good luck testing the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis! If you ignore it may the best CFS hocus-pocus win!
June 1, 2016 HHV-6 Editorial
Ron Davis, CFS Reinvent-the-Wheelism and CFS Virgin Birtherism
Geneticist Ron Davis, who has a son suffering terribly with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is getting involved with CFS research. According to the End ME.CFS Project, "Under the guidance of world-renowned geneticist Ronald W. Davis, PhD., we have brought in top experts in a variety of fields for a bold and new collaborative research project. Our ultimate goal is unlocking the mystery of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and end the suffering caused by the disease. The project’s first study is the ME/CFS Severely Ill-Big DATA Study that is designed to find a clinically useful diagnostic biomarker."
Cool, right? Open the champagne, right? World-renowned? Whoopty do!
Not so fast.
We fear all this smells of "CFS Reinventing-the-Wheelism" and "CFS Virgin Birtherism."
Anyone who comes to CFS and starts throwing around the word "mystery" has a serious ethical problem. Scientists are not supposed to ignore previous work on something they are researching. When they do that in the realm of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you pretty much know you are in the presence of "CFS Reinventing-the-Wheelism." You also know you are in the presence of the kind of naive folks who think that science is not political and government scientists never lie about anything. Poor things. Sad.
There are hundreds of studies about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that make this illness very unmysterious. Painfully so.
Read the work of Hillary Johnson and Neenyah Ostrom and ten years of reporting on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in New York Native.
To call it mysterious is to promote a very Big Lie.
All of the science that has been published on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is bullshit? Says who? A renowned geneticist? One who wears his underpants on the outside of his pants and a cape?
What is mysterious is the cockamamie act of CFS scientists ignoring what has preceded them.What is mysterious is CFS scientists ignoring all the damage HHV-6 is doing to the bodies of CFS patients.
Over the years a number of scientific narcissists (Hello Ian Lipkin!) have entered the field who have basically implied that nobody should worry because now a real rootin'-tootin' scientist has arrived. These narcissists generally are anti-history and anti-intellectual and have have not bothered to do their homework, But then scientists are not paid to read deeply or widely, think or seriously challenge authority. (Read Betrayers of the Truth if you have any doubt about that).
Does Ron Davis have a clue about the sociopathic science that forms the foundation of the CFS and AIDS cover-up? We doubt it. We suspect that his illustrious colleagues are probably clueless, too. A new variation of an old-boy network is not the antidote to an ongoing era of sociopathic science.
One of the nonmysteries about CFS is that it is transmissible. Families come down with it. Orchestras, classes, people who have slept with the same woman who was suffering from CFS. (Go to the index in Johnson's Osler's Web and check out "transmission" in the index.)
To not talk about transmission is to go down the road of "CFS Virgin Birtherism," a belief that somehow, out of nowhere, one suddenly comes down with CFS, a disease that should be called AIDS Lite or AIDS Spectrum Disease, but never is by the politically correct CFS crowd that is trying to control the activist narrative. (They would rather die than talk about the intertwined relationship of CFS and AIDS. Unfortunately, many have.)
To talk about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and AIDS in the same breath results in the kind of exile that Judy Mikovits has experienced. First Mikovits was screwed by the scientific establishment for basically finding AIDS-like retroviral activity in CFS and now she is being screwed by the CFS community for referring to CFS as "Non-HIV AIDS." In a world of sociopathic science she just can win for losing.
The big questions directed at Ron Davis should be "Does your son possibly have a virus or some other agent that he is capable of spreading to you and the rest of your family? Are you already infected and showing the effects of that agent in different ways? Can people who come in close contact with your son develop the disease? Can they then infect other people? Has that agent been spreading for over three decades and are millions of people now on the CFS Spectrum or more appropriately, the AIDS Spectrum? Is your son just one of many millions of infected people who are victims of a pandemic that has been ignored at best and covered up at worst? Are scientists emphasizing genetics actually aiding and abetting a public health cover-up of a contagious illness capable of destroying the immune system?"
If Davis thinks that such questions don't really matter and we just need a genetics genius like him and a team of big names (all male) to ride in on white horses and reinvent the CFS wheel, then we suggest that he could be of more use running around the world with his underpants on the outside of his clothes (he is pictured below). Nothing gets the world's attention more than a world-renowned geneticist wearing his underwear outside of his pants. If his science is as good as his public relations strategies, all CFS patients should make sure their wills are in order.
A renowned geneticist who will save the world.
May 25, 2016 HHV-6 Editorial
The Millions Missing campaign utilizing shoes is perhaps the most effective effort we have yet seen on behalf of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Congratulations to everyone behind it. You're hitting it out of the park.
We have a suggestion.
Everyone involved should now send one of their shoes to Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health (9000 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20892). The other shoe should be sent to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (3012 43rd St NW, Washington, DC 20016).
We have little doubt that every major media outlet in the country would eventually cover this story.
May 24, HHV-6 Editorial
How Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Threatens to Expose AIDS Czar Fauci and the CDC's Perfect Scientific Crime
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers are constantly puzzled by the remorselessly contemptuous manner in which they are treated by AIDS Czar Anthony Fauci and government scientists at the CDC. Hillary Johnson did a wonderful job of capturing that contempt in her masterpiece Osler's Web.
The treatment has been uncanny and never seems to really change. The patients cry, "Why, why, why, why?" To many it makes no sense. Many of the sufferers are white middle class heterosexuals are used to being treated with a modicum of respect from their government and its bureaucrats. They feel a certain amount of white heterosexual privilege and just can't fathom why they are being so ruthlessly disrespected and "disappeared."
The patients don't realize that they are being gaslighted by a grotesque empire of sociopathic science. The patients are treated like they are whiny nuts. When they complain they are almost driven crazy by sadistically being told that they are crazy.
It's a shame that CFS community doesn't understand what is going on. Patients operate from a basis of naive good faith, totally unaware that they are petitioning a system full of all the bad faith and consciencelessness that is characteristic of sociopaths and sociopathic science.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients do not understand that they are potentially ruining and exposing a perfect sociopathic scientific crime. Sociopaths hate when they are recognized for what they are and the sociopaths who are in charge of AIDS are no different from classic sociopaths.
Wikipedia defines a perfect crime: "Perfect crime is a colloquial term used in law and fiction (especially crime fiction) to characterize crimes that are undetected, unattributed to a perpetrator, or else unsolved as a kind of technical achievement on the part of the perpetrator. In certain contexts, the concept of perfect crime is limited to just undetected crimes; if an event is ever identified as a crime, some investigators say it cannot be called 'perfect.'"
By not recognizing exactly what Fauci and the CDC are doing, CFS patients help keep a perfect crime "perfect."
Serious research into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from day one has always pointed to a relationship between Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and AIDS. Anyone who disputes that is either seriously uninformed or lying to themselves. Newbies should start their research with the 1990 paper by Nancy Klimas in which she describes as "a form of acquired immunodeficiency." Hello!
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ruins the perfect crime of systemic AIDS fraud.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to expose the perfect crime of AIDS epidemiological fraud.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to show that AIDS Czar Anthony Fauci has been in charge of one of the most perfect scientific crimes in the history of mankind.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to expose the massive retroviral fraud that has been used to cover up what HHV-6 is and what it does. (This goes for HHV-7 and HHV-8 too.)
When Elaine DeFrieitas detected some retroviral activity in CFS and tried valiantly to sort it out, she came too close to exposing the fraud of HIV and the cover-up of HHV-6 and HERV-K18. She had to be derailed.
The same thing happened to Judy Mikovits when she detected retroviral activity in CFS and got too close to exposing the perfect scientific crime of HIV fraud and the cover-up of HHV-6 and HERV-K18. Mikovits now sadly and pathetically travels around the country doing talk shows and giving interviews in which she describes CFS as "Non-HIV AIDS." CFS patients don't like to talk about her as much as they once did because "Non-HIV AIDS" is just a little too much truth for their tastes. And the AIDS establishment must also be terrified of that expression because it is yet another threat to the perfect scientific crimes that AIDS pseudoscience and pseudo-epidmiology are.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients who treat AIDS as a separate epidemic have basically become accessories to AIDS Czar Fauci and the CDC's perfect scientific crime. The inconvenient truth is that they have become Fauci's useful idiots and his enablers.
Until CFS patients can accept the relationship between CFS and AIDS, the sociopathic science of Fauci and the CDC will continue to roll over them with impunity.
May 21, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Is Ian Lipkin Some Kind of Idiot?
“ME/CFS is a global problem that we need to address – it robs people
of the most productive years of their lives, it causes immunological
dysfunction, profound fatigue, cognitive dysfunction. It really
destroys peoples’ lives. It is underappreciated, it is underfunded,
and with your support we hope to find solutions to this crippling
problem”. ~Dr. Ian Lipkin
If Ian Lipkin doesn't see Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as part of the AIDS epidemic and if he doesn't examine the role of HHV-6 in CFS as well as the endogenous superantigen retrovirus HERV-K18 it transactivates, then he is just playing games with people's lives and money. At best he is an enabler of the socipathic science that has characterized CFS/AIDS research for over three decades. At worst he is just another CFS/AIDS charlatan and rip-off artist.
Lipkin needs the members of the CFS community to play his patsies. Don't oblige him.
May 16, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Dating while Disabled (Uhhhh, with a Contagious Disease)????
Litsa Dremousis has written a an op-ed piece in The Washington Post that raises questions she seems to not even be aware of. The title of the piece, "Dating while disabled: From Day One with someone new, I feel vulnerable" immediately caught our attention.
Ms. Dremousis writes about breaking up with an man who had been her fiance "until two weeks ago." She notes, "when you’re disabled, you feel indebted every day, making dating that much harder than it is for the average person." As we read that sentence we thought, well, yes, especially since you have a contagious illness, Ms. Dremousis. She outlines some of the challenges: "And no matter how fiercely autonomous and intelligent you are, you’re starting each relationship as the one who needs help doing otherwise simple tasks, such as walking downstairs or driving. Even with healthy self-esteem, it’s hard not to feel intensively vulnerable."
We of course wondered about the challenges of the uninfected person without CFS who might end up dating her, someone who might be exposed to a contagious illness that seems to effect every system in the body. Oh, but that's their problem.
Ms. Desmousis is not slacker when it comes to describing CFS. She's not from the "too tired to get out of bed school" of CFS self-description. She writes, " . . . struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome makes me often feel as if I have a powerful flu. I deal with constant temperature fluctuations; extreme sensitivity to light and sound; dangerously low blood pressure; and fatigue so powerful it feels like a Buick is sitting on my chest." And she adds, "I’m unable to stay upright more than a few hours on a good day; for the past several years, I have needed to be wheeled through airports (if you think air travel is a nightmare, try doing it in a wheelchair). And when I’m on a plane or bus, I have to wear a surgical mask because my immune system is so compromised. Twice in recent years, someone else’s cold became my pneumonia."
She writes, "For 24 years I’ve had ME/CFS (formerly known as “chronic fatigue syndrome”), a disabling neuro-immune illness similar in many ways to multiple sclerosis" Imagine if she had written, "For 24 years I’ve had ME/CFS (formerly known as “chronic fatigue syndrome”), a contagious disabling neuro-immune illness similar in many ways to multiple sclerosis and AIDS. "If she had she would have been exiled from the CFS community and The Washington Post would probably not have published the piece in the first place.
But the real bombshell in the piece was what she wrote about Trent, her fiance: "Five days after Trent asked me to marry him, a routine check-up unearthed a brain tumor behind his left ear. A longtime professor, Trent is deeply intelligent and tenacious. We were in love and determined to remain upbeat about his prospects. I took care of him over six months, as we assembled his surgical team, spent a week in the hospital as he underwent and recovered from the successful but complicated brain surgery, and then as he went through months of physical therapy. I was his main source of emotional support, but it took a huge toll on my health."
While we sympathize with Ms Dremousis and Trent, what really turned our head was the possibility that the two of them might have shared something more than their love, namely a virus called . . . drum roll . . . HHV-6. For any newbies visiting HHV-6 University, we have done numerous items on the relationship between HHV-6 and cancer. HHV-6 is very oncogenic. Did we say very?
Did it never dawn on Ms. Dremousis that Trent's brain cancer and her CFS could be virologically related? Is she unread on the subject of CFS. No book in her library by Hillary Johnson or Neenyah Ostrom? No awareness of the New York Native? Really? Ms. Dremousis seems to be some kind of intellectual. She writes, "I give literary readings several times a year and am diligently working on the manuscript for my second book." We suspect she has a library card or access to Amazon.com. What gives?
It is uncanny that Ms. Dremousis notes, "Our relationship became a constant cycle of doctor appointments and medical tests — and the stress eroded the joy we once found in each other. And because everyone asks: Yes, of course we had sex. All the time. Even at my sickest, I’ve been sexually active. I’m disabled, not dead." For anyone familiar to HHV-6, that could be called "sex in an HHV-6 cluster." Otherwise known as the new normal in sex these days, thanks to our NIH and CDC.
The irony burns like Hiroshima when she write, "I remain optimistic. Each relationship I’m in is affected by my health. For instance: Am I strong enough to go to the movies tonight, or should we stay in and watch Netflix? Can we eat breakfast with the curtains open, or are my eyes too light-sensitive this morning? For a relationship to be successful, the person I’m with has to be empathetic and understand that some things are beyond my physical control. Yet so many of these relationships have profoundly enriched my life. I’d be foolish to waste the rest of my life convinced that I won’t find love."
Oh yes, the person she finds had better be empathetic and even downright forgiving because the big unspoken and unmentionable problem is that when she finds love, the person she gets involved with may have found a woman who is infected with a contagious virus that not only can cause Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and cancer but so many other illnesses that this website, which is devoted to reporting on them, now has over 1725 posts (as of this day).
May 15, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
If members of the so-called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community really want to get to the bottom of their epidemic (and sometimes we doubt that is true), they should stop making sob sister documentaries and prancing around with their underwear outside of their clothes. One more boo-hoo story about how awful CFS is will just make the world yawn and say, "Get in line, buddy. We all have problems." The misguided underwear-on-the-outside campaign will only make the patients look silly, but we won't get into that here.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is first and foremost a political matter. Untrustworthy scientists in power are controlling and masking what the public knows about CFS. Anyone who has watched the CFS narrative unfold, in all of its sociopathic glory, knows that what is being hidden from public consciousness is its obvious contagiousness and the intertwined relationship between CFS, AIDS and HHV-6. For more on that we suggest you look at some of the hundreds of posts on HHV-6 University.
Stop whining. Stop being silly. Get political. Face facts. Get real.
If the contagious nature of their illness and the relationship between CFS, AIDS and HHV-6 are too much truth for CFS patients, then Houston, we have a real problem. If CFS patients, researchers and activists can't handle the truth, they're destined to live out the rest of their days in a cockamamie wild goose chase full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Why does anybody in AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research trust the sociopathic science of Robert Gallo?
What the world didn't know, of course, is how much Gallo had done to create the image of an obsessed [Chicago Tribune reporter—and chronicler of Robert Gallo's misdeeds—John] Crewdson. Only Crewdson, who recorded the defamation of his character with the same diligence and care that he recorded everything else, knew. He knew it from having to answer when his sons asked why the police were coming to the door at dinner time [after Gallo suggested to police that Crewdson might have broken into his house]. And he knew it from the rumors he kept catalogued in a file at home. Only one of those, he says, truly bothered him, because it reflected on his family. It was that Crewdson had divorced his wife to join a gay commune in San Francisco, and had then "set up housekeeping with his boyfriends" in Bethesda. Though it was unclear if this tale, like the others, had originated with Gallo, Gallo had often tried to label his critics in AIDS as being gay; the story seemed to bear his stamp."I've caused problems for other people in my career," says Crewdson, understating the damage he helped unleash upon the Nixon White House, the FBI and the CIA, all of which were known to retaliate against journalists for less. "But I don't ever remember a government official engaging in a sustained personal attack on me or any other reporter." That Gallo is a physician, sworn to compassion, seems to make the situation all the more unusual. —Barry Werth, “By AIDS Obsessed,” GQ, August, 1991"Gallo was certainly committing open and blatant scientific fraud," Sonnabend says. "But the point is not to focus on Gallo. It's us—all of us in the scientific community, we let him get away with it. None of this was hidden. It was all out in the open but nobody would say a word against Gallo. It had a lot to do with patriotism—the idea that this great discovery was made by an American." —Celia Farber, “Fatal Distraction,” Spin, June 1992
Robert Gallo was a sine qua non of
what should be called "Holocaust II." It is unimaginable without him at the very core of its deadly
insanity. He wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill scientific villain. He was larger
than life, someone you would expect to see in a Batman movie. One where Batman
dies. The world owes a great debt of gratitude to John Crewdson, the Pulitzer
Prize winning Chicago Tribune journalist who mastered the irritating
minutiae of retrovirology (and pseudoretrovirology) in order to capture Gallo in all of his exasperating
and pathological glory.
In Science Fictions, the
under-appreciated book of microscopic reporting, John Crewdson piles up detail
after detail of Gallo’s career like a skilled novelist, determined to sear
Gallo’s essence into our consciousness and to leave us in a state of shock
about what actually took place behind trusted laboratory doors while people
were dying horrific AIDS deaths all over the world. When Crewdson is done with
his awesome dissection of Gallo, and we have seen the innards of the world’s
most amazing pathological liar laid out on the autopsy table, no reasonable
observer should take anything Gallo said about AIDS seriously. Yet
Crewdson himself seems to have ultimately had no qualms about leaving Gallo’s
theory of HIV-causes-AIDS standing totally hegemonic and unchallenged amid all
the shocking evidence of Gallo’s chronic perfidiousness. It’s a real
puzzlement.
According to Crewdson, the early career of
Robert C. Gallo, the world’s most famous AIDS researcher at the National Cancer
Institute, got off to a precocious start as a lab chief at the age of
twenty-seven. But it was subsequently unsuccessful and frustrated until Gallo
accomplished what appeared to some scientists at the time to have been his
first viral theft. That may have involved stealing credit from the Japanese who
discovered a virus named ATLV by renaming the same virus HTLV. Regardless of
whether Gallo did steal credit for that virus, the questionable fog of
its discovery certainly fit the funky pattern of what occurred in his lab
during the 1980s when Gallo sank his teeth into the search for the cause of
AIDS. And even beyond that. Crewdson establishes early in his lengthy book that
Gallo is a man of great manipulative schtick. Gallo’s mythological song and
dance about himself and his origins is a somewhat revealing Dickensian story
about the source of his professional drive and his great destiny: Crewdson
writes, “In newspaper and magazine articles, Gallo’s single-mindedness was
frequently attributed to the death of his five-year old sister, Judith from
childhood leukemia, an event Gallo recalled as the most traumatic of his young
life, and which had transformed the Gallo household into a grim and joyless
place without music or laughter where Thanksgiving and Christmas was no longer
observed.” (SF p.15) How could anyone question a man of such noble
motives? (Actually, how could anyone not?)
In Science Fictions, Crewdson
presents a Gallo who is a loud, crass braggart who people either loved in a
toadying manner or, if they were streetwise, considered him to be what one
scientist once described as a “black hole” that destroyed everything in
its vicinity. Crewdson describes a period of early disgrace at the NCI during
which Gallo had supposedly discovered the first evidence of reverse
transcriptase “in human leukemia cells” which subsequently turned out to be
irreproducible when another scientist tried to replicate the finding. (SF
p.14) Bad luck struck again when Gallo was celebrated on the front page of The
Washington Post only to have his discovery, a virus called HL23,
undermined by one of his enemies who proved that what Gallo had was not a human
retrovirus “but a melange of three animal viruses—a woolly monkey virus, a
gibbon ape virus and a baboon virus—jumbled together in a retroviral cocktail.”
(SF p. 19) A humiliating retraction was made subsequently in Nature.
Unfortunately, this kind of failure in the life of a character like Gallo only
made the man more determined to vindicate himself at all costs as a
great scientist. The whole world would pay a terrible price for his
extraordinary determination.
There is something about Robert Gallo—if
you’ve ever met him in person or seen him on television or talked to him on the
phone—that makes you wonder what planet or species he is from. Crewdson
captures his uncanny strangeness when he notes that, “Gallo’s conversations
often sounded as though a tape recording were being played back at faster than
normal speed, and his syntax frequently lent the impression of someone whose
first language was not English.” (SF p.19) By the time Crewdson is done
with him 600 pages later, one is convinced that Gallo’s first language is
falsehood.
Crewdson presents Gallo’s lab in its early
days as a place where things were always mysteriously going wrong. It wasn’t
just that the scientific findings the lab produced couldn’t be replicated, but
there were also odd break-ins and very peculiar acts of sabotage. But the best
was yet to come.
Unfortunately, as Gallo’s desperation for
a big discovery grew, so had the budget of the National Cancer Institute as the
nation committed itself to the desperate hunt for the viral origins of cancer.
Richard Nixon cancer initiative was the wind beneath Gallo‘s wings. However,
things got off to a disappointing start for many years and, in a moment of
political bad timing, Gallo’s HL23 scientific embarrassment happened shortly
after there had already been numerous viral dead ends at NCI and the whole
program was losing its luster and in real jeopardy of being cut back.
That the HL23 virus turned out to be a
laboratory contaminant rather than a new virus after it had been touted in
the press, even before its publication in a scientific journal became a
familiar pattern in Gallo’s scientific lifestyle (and may have been adopted by
some of his underlings). Also to be repeated throughout his career was his
inability to admit he was wrong about this HL23 until it couldn’t seriously be
denied. (SF p.19) The fact that the contaminant looked like it had to
have been a deliberate act of sabotage by somebody suggested that even darker
things were going on at the National Cancer Institute around Gallo, things that
even super sleuth John Crewdson may have been unable to nail down. This dark
possibility of an even bigger missed story is a cloud that hovers over all the
events in the Crewdson’s narrative.
According to Crewdson, the only reason
that Gallo’s career didn’t go down the tubes over the HL23 debacle was because
he had a protector at NCI, his boss Vincent DeVita, someone who would come to
Gallo’s rescue more than once during his troubled tenure at the Institute. (SF
p.20) According to Crewdson, DeVita was one of a number of people who held the
opinion that Gallo was basically a genius who was also a handful. This was a
tragic flaw in DeVita’s judgment that would have terrible consequences for the
legacy of American biomedical science and the health of every person on this
planet.
Crewdson portrays Gallo as a man obsessed
with winning a Nobel Prize (SF p.20) He was ready to do whatever needed
to be done and to elbow out everyone who got in his way. He had no qualms about
cheating his subordinates out of appropriate credit for their (sometimes
questionable) discoveries. He was also happy to reward achievement of
subordinates by unceremoniously getting rid of them when they threatened to
outshine him. (SF p.23) Gallo’s bizarre, paranoid laboratory was the object
of suspicion from other scientific quarters. When his lab supposedly discovered
HTLV, Gallo refused to let samples of that virus leave his lab and Crewdson
quotes a colleague of Gallo’s as saying there was “a feeling around the N.I.H.
that there was something, ah, wrong with HTLV.” (SF p.31) Gallo may have
realized early in his career that if you didn’t want people to find anything
wrong with your work the best thing to do is to not share your viruses—or
anything else—with them.
The funny thing about Gallo, surely one of
the most paranoid people to ever call himself a scientist, is that he was
always accusing others of paranoia and baseless suspicion—toward him and
his eminently questionable motives. When it seemed to some scientists that
Gallo’s lab had switched the Japanese virus, ATLV, with the Gallo lab’s
supposed version of the same virus (the soon-to-be celebrated HTLV), he argued
that it was paranoid for anyone to even dare to think that way. (SF
p.32) For Gallo, there was always something structurally wrong with the brains
of the people who witnessed his crimes. They were always crazy, and he was
always sane. You could say that Gallo was from the blame the victim school of
scientific fraud.
Adding insult to injury, after what looked
like a viral theft of ATLV from the Japanese, he barely gave them any credit at
all for their research into the very virus his lab seems to have taken
advantage of. And he mocked the work of the Japanese on ATLV several times (SF
p.36) The Crewdson picture of Gallo throughout the book is of a man with
absolutely no shame.
Two of Gallo’s subordinates, the so-called
hands-on discoverers of the suspiciously discovered HTLV, Bernard Poiesz and
Francis Ruscetti, got the usual treatment that putatively successful people (or
co-virus-lifters) got in Gallo’s lab. Ruscetti went on “the endangered list”
and was never cited in the award Gallo was given for the discovery of HTLV.
Poiesz was betrayed by Gallo in the form of receiving a lukewarm endorsement
from Gallo when he applied for a grant. Crewdson quotes Poiesz as saying about
Gallo’s credit-grab for the discovery of HTLV that it was “like saying that
Queen Isabella discovered America after Columbus came home told her about it.”
(SF p.37)
Unfortunately, in terms of the world’s
biomedical safety, Gallo was in the wrong place at the wrong time when AIDS
occurred and initially he had the wrong virus at the ready: HTLV, of course,
because that’s what he was working on. Just the adoption of the idea that HTLV
might be the cause of AIDS (an idea supposedly given to Gallo by others) was
patently absurd and raises questions about Gallo’s scientific judgment. It may
have been purely driven by the prurient fact that the Japanese, according to Crewdson,
“had shown that HTLV was transmitted by sexual intercourse.” (SF p.39)
The fact that the CDC had given him a gay-obsessed and sexual epidemiological
paradigm to work with didn’t help matters. One feels a sense of dread at the
prospect of Gallo getting involved in anything with a sexual angle when
Crewdson quotes the CDC’s Cy Cabradillo talking about Gallo: “He [Gallo] didn’t
seem that interested. . . . I don’t think he wanted to get involved with a gay
disease. What turned him around was Max [Essex].” (SF p. 41) One almost
wishes that Gallo’s homophobia or gay-antipathy had been even more pronounced
and that Essex had weaker powers of persuasion and that Gallo had blown off
requests to get involved in AIDS. It would have saved the gay community and the
rest of the world from decades of grief. (And one in fifty or so kids right now
might not be on the HHV-6/autism spectrum.)
What was so intellectually challenged
about Gallo’s notion that HTLV could even remotely be the cause of AIDS was the
fact that, as most retrovirologists knew, “quite apart from killing T-cells,”
HTLV “transformed them into leukemic cells.” (SF p.44) But that didn’t
stop Gallo once it became his idée fixe. Gallo was always light-years ahead of
his data—imaginary and real.
While Gallo was promoting the silly notion
that HTLV was the cause of AIDS, French researchers at the Pasteur Institute in
Paris discovered a retrovirus they called “LAV” in the lymph nodes of AIDS
patients. Gallo pulled off one of his many fast ones when he offered to submit
Pasteur’s LAV paper on the discovery to Science. When they took him up
on the offer, he noticed the Pasteur scientists had failed to write an
abstract, in a moment of fake generosity he called Luc Montagnier and said he
would be willing to write the abstract (SF p.56) One should always
beware of Gallos bearing gifts. According to Crewdson, “To his everlasting
regret, Montagnier agreed.” (SF p.56) What Crewdson described at this
early point in his account of Gallo is so egregiously crooked that it boggles
the mind that anyone subsequently ever took at face value any of the science
that came out of that NCI den of biomedical iniquity. Gallo completely
distorted the meaning of the Pasteur paper in the abstract he concocted, an
intellectual act of dishonesty so in-your-face that it takes one’s breath away.
In the true spirit of the opposite world of abnormal science, Gallo twisted the
whole meaning of the Pasteur paper to point towards his own birdbrained notion
that their AIDS related virus was actually HTLV. According to Crewdson,
“As summarized by Gallo . . . the French manuscript appeared to be reporting,
if not the isolation of HTLV itself, then a very closely related virus.” (SF
p.56) And to add humor to injury, Gallo ran the abstract by the French on the
phone, reading it so quickly that, according to Crewdson, they didn’t even
understand it. It didn’t stop there. Robert Gallo also altered some of the text
of the French paper, again in the direction of making it sound like the French
retrovirus was from the same viral family as his own misguided HTLV. Montagnier
had deliberately called it a “lymphotrophic virus” to make sure it was not
confused with the members of the HTLV family. Montagnier criticized Gallo’s
obsession with HTLV, insisting “Gallo didn’t believe there could be more than
one kind of human retrovirus. He was fully convinced that HTLV was the right
one, that there was only one human retrovirus involved in AIDS.” (SF
p.57) As was typical in the self-dealing abnormal, totalitarian science of AIDS, the reviewer
for the paper turned out to be the paper’s re-writer himself, Robert Gallo. Not
surprisingly, he gave the French paper that he himself altered “his
enthusiastic endorsement.” (SF p.57) And for good measure he basically
misled again in his letter to Science with the paper, telling the editor
that Montagnier agreed with it all. (SF p.57)
Curiously, in terms of the underlying
HHV-6 truth about AIDS, Crewdson notes the fact that at that point Gallo’s
boss, Vince DeVita, thought that HTLV, the virus Gallo was pushing, was
actually a passenger virus.
Gallo’s HTLV baloney gained credibility
when his Harvard pal, Myron Essex, published a very questionable report that
“between a quarter and a third of the AIDS patients he tested had antibodies to
HTLV.” (SF p.58) The publication made Essex an instant millionaire the
day after its publication because Essex owned stock in a company that
manufactured tests for HTLV, the virus that ultimately would turn out to have
nothing to do with AIDS. (SF p.58) He wasn’t the only one to get rich
peddling bogus science during Holocaust II.
What could have been a cautionary note
about the herd-of-sheep psyche of the abnormal, totalitarian world of AIDS research in general can be
found in Crewdson’s amusing passage about other scientists’ ostrich-like
inattention to the total lack of logic in blaming a leukemia causing virus for
a disease that involved the killing of t-cells. Instead of questioning Gallo
and Essex’s bizarre HTLV logic, according to Crewdson, potential critics and
people who should have known better doubted themselves. He quotes one of
the deferential self-doubters: “ ‘I didn’t consider myself capable of
questioning Max Essex,’ one researcher recalled. ‘Max Essex was a person at
Harvard. That meant that Max Essex would probably be right. The likelihood that
he needed me to re-evaluate his data was zero.’ ” (SF p.59) This was
Myron “FOCMA” Essex he was talking about. In the abnormal scientific community
of AIDS research your data wasn’t the issue. The school you were associated
with was all that mattered. (If historians ever wake up and there is
any justice in the world, one day, thanks to Essex, the word "Harvard"
will be a metaphor for scientific fraud. Maybe one day it will be even
used as a verb, as in "to Harvard the data" or "to Harvard the books.")
Much like Gallo, Essex always had a reason
why he was always right and others were always wrong. According to Crewdson,
“asked why if [HTLV] was the cause of AIDS, he had only found antibodies
in fewer than half the AIDS patients he tested, Essex replied that his test probably
wasn’t sensitive enough.” (SF p.59) When Gallo was asked the same
question about his own study that found HTLV in only four of three dozen AIDS
patients Crewdson notes that “Gallo suggested that the virus was difficult to
find when the number of remaining T-cells was small.” (SF p.59) And
Crewdson reports that Gallo even had a Galloesque answer for why there was
virtually no AIDS in Japan where there was a great deal of HTLV: “Gallo replied
that AIDS simply hadn’t been noticed in Japan or maybe the Japanese responded
differently to HTLV than Africans or Americans.” (SF p.59) Anyone who
lived through the early days of what was called “AIDS” knows that it was kind
of hard not to notice.
Gallo’s prestidigitations were very
successful at making the media and the public think the French researchers were
barking up the same HTLV retroviral tree he was. He highhandedly went so far as
to suggest the French should actually stop working on their virus if it
wasn’t the same as HTLV. And Gallo did everything he could do to encourage
other scientists not to take the French discovery seriously. Crewdson artfully
captures Gallo constantly talking out of both sides of mouth about the
relationship—or lack of one—between the French virus and his beloved HTLV. Crewdson
reports that Gallo’s own staff had in fact done the necessary research
to determine that they were different viruses and according to Crewdson,
“Whatever Gallo was saying in public, in private he agreed with his staff.” (SF
p.63) One could always count on there being two sets of books in the abnormal
science of AIDS, especially in Gallo’s laboratory.
The French were in a vulnerable position
where Gallo was concerned because, according to Crewdson, they were afraid that
he might cut off their access to scientific publication. (SF p.71) Gallo
was a serious power broker in the world of science and that certainly should
have been more of a warning sign to the scientific community that the very
essence of AIDS science was mired in hardball politics. Gallo even had enough
power to be able to threaten the Centers for Disease Control. When the CDC
dared to complain that Gallo was not sharing his HTLV probes, according to
Crewdson, Gallo sniffily threatened to not cooperate with the organization. (SF
p.74) “There was a fight,” one scientist told Crewdson, “between the CDC and
Gallo over who was supposed to be gathering data from research. Gallo felt they
should be gathering data, and he should be doing the science.” (SF
p.74)
Whatever that means. Gallo didn’t realize what a perfect match his kind
of
virology actually made for the CDC’s kind of epidemiology.
Scientifically speaking, it was like the mafia families of two major
cities joining forces.
One crossed Gallo at one’s great peril.
According to Crewdson, when a scientist named David Purtillo began to finds
serious evidence that not a single AIDS patient in his study was positive for
HTLV, he found that Science magazine “wasn’t
interested in undercutting its high-visibility articles.” (SF p.75) When
Joseph Sonnabend, a New York AIDS doctor who was the first editor of AIDS Research,
a small journal, dared to publish the Gallo-challenging Purtillo findings,
according to Crewdson, “the publisher of AIDS Research replaced
Sonnabend with [Gallo crony] Dani Bolognesi, who promptly installed Gallo on
the journal’s editorial board.” (SF p.75) That’s how scientific
publishing worked during "Holocaust II." You scratch my back and I’ll destroy
your enemies.
As evidence piled up showing that the
French had found the so-called AIDS retrovirus, Gallo imperiously dug in his
heels for his HTLV. So did his Harvard pal Myron Essex who had spent his
formative years with his buddy Gallo just trying to convince the scientific
community that retroviruses do really cause cancer. Together they did
their best to dampen the world’s enthusiasm for the French virus as the
probable cause of AIDS. It was one of the great examples of teamwork in science.
Gallo saw his HTLV dream start to fade
when Montagnier showed up at a scientific meeting that was focused on Gallo’s
own candidate for AIDS virus. Montagnier presented evidence that patients who
were positive for the French retrovirus were not positive for Gallo’s
HTLV. (SF p.81) And even worse, according to Crewdson, he “pointed out
the similarities between LAV and the Equine Infectious Anemia Virus rather than
HTLV.” (SF p.81) And most threatening of all to Gallo’s dreams of a
Nobel Prize was the fact that Montagnier had found LAV in “63 percent of
pre-AIDS patients and 20 percent of those with AIDS but less than 2 percent of
the general population.” (SF p.81) At the meeting at which Montagnier
made his dramatic presentation, Crewdson wrote that Gallo did his best to cast
aspersions on the research, bizarrely “questioning the reality of the reverse
transcriptase activity.” (SF p.81) According to one scientist at the
meeting who is quoted by Crewdson, “[Gallo] insulted Montagnier. It was a
disgusting display, absolutely disgusting. He told him it was terrible science,
that there was no way it could be true. He ranted and raved for eight or ten
minutes.” (SF p.81) And of course, while Gallo was publicly humiliating
Montagnier, privately he was asking for more samples of the French
virus. (SF p.81)
The French discovery made it clear that
Gallo had led the whole scientific community into a retroviral cul-de-sac, but
at a later conference in Paris, he was at it again, playing the same tiresome
duplicitous game, pushing bogus HTLV while evidence was clearly accumulating
against it. Gallo could feign and bully like nobody else in the history of
science. One scientist described to Crewdson a fight Gallo had with Montagnier:
“ . . . during that fight one had the impression Montagnier was a little boy
and Gallo was a genius. Because Montagnier didn’t argue well.” (SF p.87)
Gallo wore his opposition down with over-the-top verbal displays.
Gallo changed gears from the deadender
HTLV to a virus that he could get away with calling the cause of AIDS the old
fashioned way: he stole it. The complicated manner in which that was obfuscated
and outrageously covered up makes up the main investigative feast in Crewdson’s
book. Gallo’s decade of gymnastic AIDS mendacities might have been lost to
history without the laser vision and crystal clear exposition of John Crewdson. If not for New York Native and John "Javert" Crewdson, Gallo would have gotten away with murder. Make that "genocide."
Even when Gallo’s lab was pursuing a new
virus like the one the French had, Gallo kept up the public pretense that HTLV
was the very best candidate for the cause of AIDS. His laboratory was secretly
and frantically playing a game of catch-up with the French. They had received
samples of the French virus and were not honest about what they were doing with
them. Gallo’s subordinates privately confirmed that the French virus could be
found in AIDS patients, but it would never be admitted publicly. Adding insult
to deception, because Gallo had so polluted the scientific community with his
stubborn, delusional notion that HTLV had to be the only possible cause, the
French had trouble getting their growing body of research on LAV published. Science
turned down an important paper that made it clear once and for all that the
French LAV was not the Gallo HTLV. (SF p. 98) Gallo was dismissing their
discovery with one hand and appropriating it with the other.
At a conference in Park City, Utah in late
1983, Gallo played his familiar game of asking disingenuous and disparaging
questions publicly after a Pasteur presentation on LAV. Meanwhile, Gallo
ignored doubts about his own HTLV by scientists like Jay Levy, “who wanted to
know why, if HTLV caused AIDS, AIDS patients didn’t have T-cell leukemia.” (SF
p.99) According to Crewdson, the obdurate Dr.Gallo insisted to Levy that “HTLV
itself . . . could still cause AIDS.” (SF p.99)
Luckily for the French, scientists at the
CDC, home of the "impeccable" original AIDS nosology and epidemiology, had growing doubts
themselves about HTLV, and even Myron Essex’s old protege, AIDS researcher and
retrovirus aficionado, Donald Francis, was ready to jump ship. Crewdson
captures one of many ironic moments in Holocaust II when he quotes Francis as
saying, “It had become clear . . . that we had made a very big mistake.” (SF
p.100) Unfortunately, Francis didn’t have a clue that he and his associates at
the CDC and NIH were about to make an exponentially even bigger virological
mistake that would threaten the whole world’s health.
Thanks to the fact that his staff was
working with the retrovirus foolishly supplied by the gullible French
scientists, Gallo was finally seeing some interesting numbers of AIDS patients
testing positive—and given what he was working with why wouldn’t he? After he
developed his own blood test for his purloined retrovirus, the CDC tried to
determine if the French or Gallo had the best test for detecting an AIDS case.
The Pasteur test did slightly better in a competition between the two country’s
tests and lest things be done on the up and up, according to Crewdson, Gallo
wanted the CDC to alter the results so as to reflect a better score for
Gallo’s version of the test—another typical moment in the abnormal science of
Holocaust II. To his eternal discredit, Jim Curran, the top AIDS researcher at
the CDC, actually agreed to Gallo’s
ridiculous request to alter the results. To do otherwise would have been to
commit normal science. Giving Gallo that unholy advantage was just one more
enabling act that helped Gallo become the top spokesman for the infernal
HIV/AIDS paradigm throughout "Holocaust II."
The minute that the CDC gave Gallo the
word that his test for the so-called AIDS retrovirus was as good as the Pasteur
one (or sort of as good), Gallo went into extreme Gallo mode, crowing to
the world about his supposed achievement, and even more charmingly, according
to Crewdson, he began “denigrating the work in Paris.” (SF p.109) He
told people he was “far ahead of the French.” (SF p.109)
Gallo subsequently submitted data on his
retroviral “discovery” in four papers to Science. The papers never said
where the virus actually came from because they didn’t dare. Mika Popovic, the
unlucky scientist in Gallo’s lab who did most of the bench work on the virus
Gallo stole, watched as his manuscripts about the so-called discovery of the
AIDS virus were methodically altered by Gallo. According to Crewdson, “entire
sentences, even whole paragraphs had been excised, replaced with Gallo‘s
scrawled additions. Crossed out altogether was the paragraph in which Popovic
acknowledged the Pasteur’s discovery of LAV and explained here that the French
virus was ‘described here’ as HTLV-3.” (SF p.111) From the scientific
documents that would change the world forever, Gallo had taken out any
acknowledgement of the Pasteur discovery. (SF p.111) In one of the most
notorious notations of Gallo’s whole wackadoodle career, next to a passage in
which Popovic wrote something about LAV, Gallo scribbled, “Mika, are you
crazy?” (SF p.111) (Screamed the pot to the kettle.)
One of the most important of the four
seminal Science papers contained the egregious falsehood that Gallo’s
virus, which he called HTLV-3, had been isolated from 48 patients. Gallo also
made sure, according to Crewdson, that the only reference to the French virus
in the paper “sounded as though the French had the wrong virus.” (SF p.111)
Even though Gallo had basically used LAV to “discover” HTLV-3, he kept
disingenuously insisting that LAV and HTLV-3 were different viruses. And even
though the French had provided Gallo with LAV, and Gallo’s staff knew all too
well that they were not different in the least, Gallo lied to the French when
they asked why he had not compared HTLV-3 to LAV and reported on it in the
seminal science papers. One of Gallo’s biggest lies to the French was “that
Popovic hadn’t been able to grow enough LAV to make comparisons.” (SF
p.118)
As Gallo was preparing to present the
world premiere of the so-called virus that causes AIDS he at first offered to
include the French in the announcement to the world about the “discovery” of
the virus and to cut the CDC—which had also played a role in the process—out of
the deal. He then turned around and offered to make the announcement with the
CDC and cut the French out of the deal. (SF p.119) Polyamory in the Gallo universe consisted of everyone having a chance
to screw other people with Gallo before they themselves got screwed.
A sign of Gallo’s enormous power in the
intellectually challenged world of abnormal, totalitarian AIDS science was the fact that his
“manuscripts were accepted by Science nineteen days after their
submission.” (SF p.123) A suggestion from Science that four
papers were too many got the Gallo threat that he could easily take his papers
elsewhere. (SF p.123) The original papers had needed pictures of the
virus that Gallo had supposedly discovered, and Gallo had them: they were
pictures of the French virus relabeled as Gallo’s HTLV-3. At least Gallo was
consistent.
Crewdson’s book doesn’t just focus on the
fact that Gallo’s historic AIDS papers in Science were full of purloined
credit he didn’t deserve. In terms of the thesis that much of AIDS science was
the work of pseudoscientific sloppiness, it is important to point out that
Crewdson also wrote that “An astute reader might have noticed that Gallo’s
condition for labeling a virus HTLV-3 were so ambiguous that nearly any
retrovirus, animal, or human, would have qualified.” (SF p.124) In the opposite world of abnormal science here are no rules
to keep science from becoming a big Alice-in-Wonderland mess. About the
original papers Crewdson said something that only increased the irony and
tragedy of Crewdson ultimately himself accepting the HIV/AIDS paradigm: “. . .
a perceptive reviewer might even have questioned Gallo’s claim to have found
the presumptive cause of AIDS.” (SF p.124) (If only Crewdson had jumped
in for the sake of the whole world and done with his acute journalistic skills
what a perceptive reviewer should
have done. Two frauds were passing in the night.)
A strange incident that occurred just
prior to the publication of the big four papers in Science, one that
captures Gallo in all his zany treacherousness. Gallo had voluntarily given a
European reporter copies of his forthcoming Science papers, and when the
reporter published a story about them—under the reasonable impression that he
wasn’t breaking any embargo—Gallo accused the reporter “of having stolen the
four Science manuscripts from his office while Gallo’s back was turned.”
(SF p.126)
The theft of the French virus was not just
a theft of credit from the French. It was also a theft of money in the form of
lost royalties for the tests that would be developed from the purloined virus
thought to be the cause of AIDS. Gallo’s lab had essentially pulled off an
unarmed scientific robbery; the French were destined by Gallo’s shenanigans to
lose millions of dollars. The matter was made even ethically worse (if one
believed the virus actually was the true cause of AIDS) by the fact that the test
Gallo’s people developed using the stolen virus was inferior to the test
developed by the Pasteur Institute. (SF p.128)
As previously noted, some in the American
government knew from the start that Gallo was pulling off a scientific heist.
On the eve of the announcement by HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler, NIH Director
Ed Brant received a phone call from James Curran and Donald Francis of the CDC
warning him “that Heckler was about to make a huge mistake: the French, not
Gallo, had been the first to find the cause of AIDS.” (SF p.130)
Unfortunately, the duplicitous train had left the station and the American
government’s scientific establishment was about to apply several layers of egg
to its face. (And that didn’t even involve the fact that the stolen, supposedly exogenous, retrovirus
wasn’t even the cause of AIDS.) During the April 23, 1984 announcement debacle
Gallo even went out of his way to make sure that absolutely no credit
was given to the French for their role in the discovery. As if it wasn’t absurd
enough that the Secretary of HHS was celebrating a stolen discovery, she also
confidently announced “We hope to have . . . a vaccine ready for testing in
about two years.” (SF p. 135) She seems to have been off by, well, like
forever.
The credulous media fell for the Gallo
scam, generally downplaying the French contribution and the Pasteur scientists
were appropriately apoplectic. Predictably, Gallo, according to Crewdson, “set
about expunging the evidence that he had spent two years chasing the wrong
virus. (SF p.144). Not only could Gallo do viral theft, but he was also
one of science’s greatest expungers and time travelers. He rewrote the remarks
he had given at past scientific conferences to make it look like he was on the
trail of the AIDS virus (which he called HTLV-3) all along when in actuality he
had aggressively been pushing the lost cause, HTLV. In abnormal, totalitarian science the
past is carved in sand.
After Gallo’s big splash in Science,
he often bragged about things that were not even in the papers, findings that had
actually never even been accomplished in his lab. He also violated one of the
collegial rules of science by refusing to share his viruses or cell lines with
other scientists unless they agreed to certain bizarre and highly suspect
preconditions. (SF p.149) According to Crewdson, for some scientists
“Gallo tried to impose conditions on which experiments they could perform and
which they could not.” (SF p.149) Gallo forced one scientist to sign an
agreement not to compare Gallo’s virus to other viruses. (SF p.150) One
either played by the rules of abnormal, totalitarian science or one did not play at all.
Gallo wanted to control what people said about his virus and who they shared it
with. He knew what was at stake if the truth ever came out.
Even the powerful Centers for Disease
Control could not get Gallo to cooperate by sharing his cell lines. When noises
started to be made in Paris and down in Atlanta at the CDC that Gallo had not
really discovered the “AIDS retrovirus,” Gallo went grandiosely ballistic, saying
strange things like “We started the field. We predicted AIDS.” (SF
p.153) He accused anyone who tried to tell the truth about the matter of
spreading “plot and innuendo.” (SF p.156) The husband of Flossie
Wong-Stahl, a woman who worked closely (actually, more than closely) with Gallo in his lab astutely described
Gallo and his milieu to Crewdson: “The whole business has the ethics of a used-car lot. It’s what you can get away
with. The older-style scientists are falling by the wayside. To be a success in
science these days, you need a big operation. . . . It’s become an
entrepreneurial business and Gallo’s good at that . . . He was one of the first
big-time laboratory operators.” (SF p.158) One could say that "Holocaust
II" was partly born in a used-car lot.
The world fell easily for Robert Gallo and
his stolen virus and his questionable science. According to Crewdson, Gallo
received a major honor from “the Italian-American Foundation . . . that
compared Gallo to Galileo.” (SF p.158) If that wasn’t enough, both his
boss and the future Director of the NIH would compare him to Mozart. To the
rest of the world he would be the great man who had discovered the cause of
AIDS.
When his luck did start to change and
people spoke more openly and brazenly about the virus-lifting, Gallo
predictably tried to turn the tables and actually suggested that the French had
made the mistake as a result of a contamination by his virus, which was
patently ridiculous, as Crewdson shows in his book with detailed chronology of
the actual events. All the evidence pointed to a contamination in Gallo’s
lab—at best. (SF p.162)
Unfortunately for the future scientific
credibility of the American government, Crewdson points out that “The National
Cancer Institute preferred Gallo’s version of events.” (SF p.162) It’s
interesting that the NIH uncharacteristically tried to silence Gallo when he
actually may have been inadvertently tried to tell the truth about the nature
of the real epidemic. Crewdson writes that the Director of NIH “tried to muzzle
[Gallo]” when he “speculated publicly on the risk of transmitting AIDS to women
via heterosexual contact.” (SF p.163) But, Crewdson writes, “Gallo
wouldn’t stay quiet. After Jerry Groopman and Zaki Salahuddin reported
detecting the AIDS virus in the saliva of nearly half of pre-AIDS patients,
Gallo warned the American people that direct contact with saliva ‘should be
avoided,’ setting off alarms about the safety of oral sex, water fountains, restaurant
cutlery, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.” (SF p.163) That wasn’t
exactly how the government wanted to frame the epidemiological image of the
AIDS epidemic. Very interesting, in retrospect.
Even after it was clear that HTLV-3 (as
Gallo renamed LAV) was not a member of the HTLV family of retroviruses, Gallo
stubbornly and perversely continued to promote the bogus notion. He even
published data trying to fudge the issue. (SF p.163) And as could be
expected, according to Crewdson, he continued his two-faced act: “Whatever
Gallo was saying in print, in private he was far from certain that the AIDS
virus had anything in common with the HTLVs.” (SF p.163)
One of the more bizarre things about the
so-called discovery of the AIDS virus in Gallo’s lab was the fact that early
on, according to Crewdson, “Gallo hadn’t said a word about the patient in whom
Popovic had found it.” (SF p.164) It turned out that it hadn’t even been
found in an individual patient but it had “been isolated from the T-cells of
several AIDS patients, whose cultured cells Popovic had pooled together.” (SF
p.164) As was typical of the kind of science and reporting that underlay the
HIV/AIDS paradigm, this Frankenstein of a “patient pool” was not mentioned in
the seminal, history-changing paper published in Science, the
cornerstone of the HIV/AIDS paradigm. According to Crewdson, Donald Francis of
the CDC “thought it odd still that Popovic had pooled patient material in the
first place, something Francis viewed as a certain way not to know which
patient was the source.” (SF p.164) Not really knowing where a virus had
come from was the characteristic way science was done in the opposite world of
AIDS research.
Like many of Gallo’s lies, the LAV lie was
not without its dark humor. Not only was the virus Gallo worked with the
same virus that the French had discovered, but most damning, it even turned
out originally to be from the exact same patient. ( SF p.165) A
scientist named Murray Gardner confronted Gallo about this malarkey and
according to Crewdson, Gardner said, “Bob browbeat me, in his way, for about an
hour. . . . He questioned my patriotism, He asked me, ‘Are you French or are
you American? Aren’t you an American?’” (SF p.167) If nothing else, the
pseudoscience was patriotic.
At a time when Gallo should have been
bathing in the glow of being the discoverer of the so-called AIDS virus,
according to Crewdson, “Most of his energy was being devoted to fending off
suspicions that his discovery was really somebody else’s discovery.” (SF
p.177) It was becoming clearer to the world that “the virus discovered in Paris
in 1983 was the same virus Gallo claimed to have discovered in 1984.” (SF
p.178)
Even
after the discovery issue was on its way to being resolved in the favor of the
French scientists, Gallo, without one single qualm, bizarrely insisted in
retaining his HTLV-3 name for the virus. It mattered not to Gallo that the
virus was obviously not a member of the HTLV family. And just as
absurdly, he performed all kinds of silly mental acrobatics to try and explain
why his virus was exactly like the French virus, suggesting that his virus came
from someone who must have gotten infected at the same place and the same time
as the French AIDS victim from whom the French had isolated their virus.
According to Crewdson, “The French dismissed Gallo’s explanation as balderdash.
(SF p. 180)
What was it like to be a part of the Gallo
team during those heady days when the French virus was stolen and the
pseudoscientific foundation of "Holocaust II" was laid down? Omar Sattaur, a
journalist who covered Gallo for the publication New Scientist,
recounted to Crewdson that one of Gallo’s subordinates told him “that everybody
in Gallo’s lab felt paranoid in some way and that it was quite an awful place
to work. Because it was very high-pressure and he ran it like an autocrat. They
were his minions.” (SF p.183) Nobody messed with Captain Hook.
The New Scientist reporter was one
of the first people to nail the details of the Gallo theft in print. The piece
resulted in one of Gallo’s biggest critics, Oxford scientist Abraham Karpas
referring to the affair as “Gallogate.” (SF p.184) Karpas was on the
money in more ways than he realized. But the real “Gallogate” went way beyond
the stealing of a retrovirus. Unbeknownst to Karpas and Sattaur, it was ultimately
about something that would cause a potential consequences for every member of
the human race. Gallo’s world class narcissism manifest itself in the fact that
he told Sattaur that he was of a mind to have the government start a libel
action against him. What is even more absurd is that given the government’s
bizarre (and not fully-fathomed in Crewdson’s book) relationship with Gallo,
one could almost imagine that actually happening. Sattaur astutely captured the
Gallo psyche when he said to Crewdson, “Gallo has this ability to just absorb
everything . . . He’s wonderful at it. He’s so good at manipulating things that
I’m pretty sure that unconsciously he’s doing it most of the time. If you talk
to him about other people’s work, he’ll say, ‘Well, he worked in my lab for six
weeks. I taught him everything he knew.’ He’s a real megalomaniac.” (SF
p.185) There was something uncanny about Gallo that, unfortunately, seemed to
bemuse people at the same time that it disturbed them, so that even some of the
most sober minds that came into his outrageous orbit somehow missed that fact
that they were in the presence of a very unique kind of monster, a human whose
actions and statements, from his victim’s and history’s point of view, heralded
from a psychic netherworld located somewhere in the vortex of clownishness,
sociopathy and downright evil. Once can’t help but speculate that because the
marginalized people whose lives hung in the balance were “gay,”—or “very gay,”
as the CDC's James Curran would say—that extreme moral outrage on the part of most
heterosexual scientists (and some gay ones too, unfortunately) often took a
vacation in Gallo’s presence. Gallo wasn’t playing his infernal games with
breast cancer, prostate cancer, or heart disease. No matter what lip service
people gave to broaden the perceived social spectrum of this particular
disease, from the extant scientific community’s perspective (and the public’s) it
was gay through and through.
As previously pointed out, Gallo’s crime against the
French was not just the intangible one of falsely claiming primacy of
discovery. The theft was also a major financial crime in that he was also
stealing the Pasteur’s rightful royalties from the test for the so-called AIDS
retrovirus. The American government’s patents had all been hurriedly filed
under the false pretenses that Gallo had created them with a virus that he had
actually discovered. And to make matters even crazier, in terms of testing for
the retrovirus virus that was now considered to be the cause of AIDS, his
fraud-based test didn’t even work as well as the French test. (SF.
p.188) Gallo’s rushed filing for the AIDS test patent, according to Crewdson,
“had been approved in near-record time,” (SF p.191) another indication
that the government was in bed with Gallo. Crewdson reported that “The French
application had fallen between the cracks, and nobody at the patent office
seemed to have noticed.” (SF p.192)
One of the
zanier details of the Gallo biography is the fact that he had a baby with one
of the married scientists who worked with him, Flossie-Wong Stahl, which was
awkward for the rest of his staff—and for Wong-Stahl’s husband. According to
Crewdson, the messy affair resulted in Gallo “being put in the hands of a
psychiatrist for a while.” (SF p.194) In terms of Gallo’s impact
on the
world, it may be a shame that it was only for “a while.” (The
catastrophic HHV-6 pandemic might have been nipped in the bud if the
whole Gallo lab had been put
in the hands of a psychiatrist.)
When journalists all over the world
started to wake up to the fact that Gallo had stolen credit for discovering the
AIDS virus, Gallo became a Whirling Dervish. One science reporter told Crewdson
that “Bob Gallo would write to every journalist in the world who would publish
an article that wouldn’t be completely in favor with his point of view. He
would explode. He would immediately conclude that the journalist who had
written the article that was not in favor of his genius was prejudiced, was
poorly informed, was a friend of Pasteur or something like that.” (SF
p.196)
Ever proactive, Gallo went to Paris and
got Jean Claude Chermann, (one of the members of the Pasteur’s LAV team) drunk
and had him sign a phony, Gallo-friendly re-write of the history of the
discovery of the so-called AIDS virus. (SF p.198) According to Crewdson,
“Gallo promised the document would never see the light of the day. Back in the
United States, however, Gallo sent a copy to Jim Weingarten [the Director of
NIH].” (SF p.198) And when the incorrigible Gallo sent documents to a
French journalist in order to bolster his claims that he had not stolen the
virus from the French, he included an old letter from Chermann which had been
doctored in classic Gallo style. Chermann happened to see the doctored letter
and according to Crewdson, “When Chermann compared the letter sent by Gallo to
the original in his files, he saw that someone had cut out his signature and
posted it at the end of the third paragraph, transforming what had been a
scathing two-page critique of Gallo’s behavior into a one-page testimonial. (SF
p.199) This is not exactly what Thomas Kuhn would call "normal science."
It will forever be a dark blemish on the
integrity of the top people in the American government’s scientific establishment that
the Health and Human Services elite went to bat for this scientific shyster.
The Pasteur Institute could not believe the institutional support that the
Gallo was getting, but now they were not about to be intimidated. They were ready
to sue their way to the truth about the discovery in the American courts and to
secure their just rewards from the AIDS test patent. What is really disturbing
in the Crewdson account of the affair is that the government gradually did
start to realize that Gallo’s discovery claim was bogus, but the authorities
shamefully continued to push on with Gallo‘s defense. And, in keeping with the
Gallo habit of leaving no supportive deed unpunished, he turned around and
blamed the American government itself for filing the patent that had enriched
him and had enhanced his reputation. Even more outrageous was the fact that he
was telling people that he made no money from the patent, about which one
government official said to Crewdson, “Well I didn’t see him turn his checks
down when they came to him.” (SF p.204) According to Crewdson, “ . . .
with the AIDS test earning millions—both Gallo and Popovic qualified for the
maximum payment—$100,000 a year during the lifetime of the patent, a total of
$1.5 million a piece over fifteen years. The AIDS test had made them
millionaires.”(SF p.278)
One of the most stunning revelations in
Crewdson’s book, as we have already pointed out, is that Gallo’s lab wasn’t
just mendacious, but at the same time it also seems to have been surprisingly
sloppy and disorganized which is just what one wants to hear about the place
that helped lay down the foundation of the AIDS paradigm. The Pasteur
Institute, on the other hand, (at least on the surface) seems to have been a
model of fastidiousness. Crewdson describes their record keeping: “Pasteur
scientists kept the records of their experiments in the European style, in
sequential hardbound volumes that made it impossible to insert or remove pages
of what had transpired in their labs.” (SF p.206) In the opposite world
of Gallo’s lab, Mika Popovic, who did much of the work on the discovery or
rediscovery of the AIDS virus “didn’t have any notebooks.” (SF p.206) Gallo is quoted as saying, about Popovic’s record keeping, “We
were finding stuff in drawers, pieces of paper . . . I mean we pulled out stuff
that Mika didn’t even know he had. And there it was. You know, old stuff, old
archaic papers with scribbles on them.” (SF p.206) Crewdson reported
that “the scraps proved to be the only records Popovic could produce of what
the government now counted a landmark achievement.” (SF p.206) Given
what the landmark “achievement” would actually turn out to be, it shouldn’t
surprise anyone that it was arrived at in such a ramshackle “scientific” style.
Popovic was quite generous with his scraps of paper once under investigation.
According to Crewdson, when investigators came to look at his records he said
“Take whatever I have. I don’t want to go to jail.” (SF p.207)
It
was convenient for Popovic’s records to
be that sloppy because the Humpty-Dumpty pieces of evidence almost made
it impossible
to reconstruct a credible narrative of exactly how Gallo had succeeded
in using
the French virus to pretend he had discovered his own. (Lesson to
fraudlent scientists everywhere: sloppiness creates plausible
deniability.) But Crewdson, the master
detective, worked his way patiently though the devious trails of
disorganized
paper to make Gallo’s theft of credit for the discovery painfully
obvious. In
the process, Crewdson found evidence that Gallo altered memos to reflect
fraudulent dates for when important experiments were done. (SF p.208)
Gallo stonewalled when Health and Human
Services tried to find out what happened in his laboratory in order to put
together a defense for Gallo’s claims in court. As Gallo tried to rewrite the
past, Crewdson reports that all kinds of discrepancies emerged. There was a
clear record that he had been pursuing HTLV-1 as the cause in the period that
he now was disingenuously trying to convince the world that he was actually
pursuing HTLV-3, which of course turned out to be the LAV which the French had
provided his lab with.
The smoking gun moment that destroyed
Gallo’s credibility for all eternity came when it was discovered that the
so-called AIDS virus was incredibly changeable and every isolate was
dramatically different from every other isolate. When it was discovered that
there was virtually no difference between Gallo’s isolate of HTLV-3 and
the French isolate of LAV, it was obvious that Gallo had indeed been working
with the Pasteur’s isolate, not an isolate that he had discovered.
As Gallo’s luck would have it, his test
for the AIDS virus, which was based on the stolen French virus, was not very
reliable. The French test was supposedly much better but the Gallo test had won
the licensing race politically and was often failing to detect blood that was
supposedly infected. Gallo’s test not only had a high rate of false negatives,
but it also had false positives. Gallo’s incompetent test ended up ruining a
number of people’s lives. (SF p. 228) (Of course the real problem with
the testing for the retrovirus by either the French or American test was that
it begged the larger theoretical question of whether either test was really the
test for the true cause of so-called AIDS.)
Gallo exceeded his usual standard for
craziness in the fight over the name of the virus he had stolen from the
French. How dare the French want to name the virus they discovered! According
to Crewdson, “When Gallo discovered the French were using the term LAV alone,
he sent Montagnier a peevish letter.” (SF p. 235) In the end the French
were only half-screwed when the Gallo name of HTLV-3 did not prevail and the
virus was labeled “Human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.” (SF p.236) The
fact that the new name was a kind of Orwellian way of disingenuously
establishing that the virus was the cause of AIDS without the inconvenience of
further debate was lost on most people. The lesson of this episode of abnormal, totalitaran
science is that if you want to prove that a virus is the cause of a disease,
just give it a name that implies that it is the cause. With “Human
immunodeficiency virus or HIV” that mission was brilliantly accomplished. A fun
bit of trivia about the voting on the name change is that the only person to
support Gallo’s preference of HTLV-3 was—guess who?—Myron Essex. (SF.
p.236) (The name of the virus was "Harvarded" into history.)
One of the most embarrassing moments in
the Gallo affair was the point at which it was discovered that the photographs
that Gallo’s lab had submitted to Science as being photos of their
virus turned out to actually be photos of the French virus. According to
Crewdson, “the revelation dealt a major blow to the [National Cancer
Institute’s] credibility. (SF p.240) Gallo himself had a copy of the
photo of the purloined virus in a framed collage on his office wall and
Crewdson reports that “When Gallo found out the virus in the collage was LAV,
Salahuddin [his subordinate] recalled ‘he took it down from the wall and threw
it on the floor, smashing glass everywhere.’” (SF p.241) One can only
assume that like every other Gallo mess, someone else in his lab cleaned it up.
The fake photo caper was one of the things that according to Crewdson, helped
turn Gallo’s boss, Vince DeVita, against him. Crewdson wrote that “DeVita was
determined that Gallo would correct the record.” (SF p.241)
What is mind-boggling about Gallo is that
even while under investigation for the LAV fraud, he and his staff still
continued to churn out more fraud. A letter from the Gallo folks published in Nature
in May of 1986, meant to exonerate Gallo, contained brand new fibs. Gallo
claimed to have isolated HTLV-3 from a patient he hadn’t even been looking for
the virus in at the time that was clearly impossible because it was the same
period in which all the evidence showed he was still obsessed with HTLV-1.
Gallo reconstructed a fictional past in the letter and included a picture that
had just happened to have both HTLV-1 and LAV/HTLV-3 in it. According to
Crewdson, he pretended to have discovered HTLV-3 earlier than he really did
just by the happenstance of it being in the same photo. (SF p.244) One
could call it a classic Gallo scientific discovery. Once again it was as if Gallo had a
time machine that allowed him to go back into the past and fashion history more to his liking.
Crewdson describes NCI scientist Berge Hampar’s reaction to the new photo caper
that appeared in Nature: “ ‘When we saw Nature, we laughed,’
Hampar said. ‘We said, “Is this the only photograph they got? They’re staking
all their claims on one photograph with two particles in it.” That’s when I
said to myself, ‘These people are crazy.’”(SF p.245) It’s too bad that
the NCI scientist didn’t do more than just say truthful things to himself
because these crazy people helped give us "Holocaust II."
Gallo still wouldn’t back down in the
spring of 1986 when, at an AIDS conference, according to Crewdson, he referred
to “the Pasteur’s contribution to the search for the cause of AIDS as
inconsequential.” (SF p.246) The Pasteur scientists gave as good as the
got. One of their lawyers, Jim Swire, according to Crewdson, “upped the ante by
accusing someone in Gallo’s lab of having stolen LAV. ‘They simply studied it,’
Swire said ‘concluded we were correct, renamed it, and claimed it as their
own.’” (SF p.247) Otherwise known as the classic Gallo Hokey Pokey.
The person in Gallo’s lab who would
ultimately get hung out to dry for the handling of the fake discovery of
HTLV-3, Mika Popovic, was eager to give investigators the impression that if
anything untoward had happened, it was just an innocent mix-up. But according
to Crewdson, the French were just not having any of that. (SF p.248) The
bottom line for the French was that they wanted their “share of the patent
royalties.”(SF p.249) After all, Gallo had used their supposedly exogenous retrrovirus to make his lousy test.
Things got even more sinister in this
story when the lawyer for the Pasteur Institute used the Freedom of Information
Act to try and obtain documents from Gallo’s lab that would support the French
case against Gallo’s claims. According to Crewdson, “the memos that would have
been most helpful to the Pasteur’s case—and most detrimental to the
government’s—were withheld, in some cases without any indication that they even
existed.” (SF p.259) One of the withheld documents which Crewdson
ultimately obtained, made it clear that Gallo had lied about when he had
isolates of his so-called AIDS virus. (SF p.260) According to Crewdson,
the most damning document that was withheld was a memo from Gallo about growing
the French virus at a time that he later insisted he had not been growing
it. (SF p.260) The only documents that seem to have been withheld
were ones that supported the unavoidable conclusion, that Gallo was one of
science’s greatest pathological liars.
Joanne Belk, the government’s person in
charge of providing the documents requested under the Freedom of Information
Act, described her interaction with Gallo to Crewdson: “I didn’t know how rude
he was . . . . This man called me and started blasting me on the phone. ‘Who
the hell do you think you are?’ He was terribly profane. Nobody ever talked to
me like that. That was my introduction to this so-called eminent scientist.” (SF
p.260) Gallo was totally uncooperative. Interestingly, in terms of the basic
quality of Gallo’s science, Belk’s overall impression of his lab from a visit
was that it was “impressively messy.” (SF p.261) When Gallo finally did
comply with the F.O.I.A. request, Belk got a call that she could pick them up
at “Biotech Research laboratories in Rockville which Beck thought surpassingly
odd.” (SF p.262) One wonders, like so many other parts of this sometimes
mysterious story, what was that about?
The documents that were turned over to
Belk were very much in the Gallo lab’s signature style. According to Crewdson,
“. . . none of Popovic’s pages was signed. Neither were any of the pages
evidently kept by others in Gallo’s lab.’ (SF p.262) Most shockingly
considering his pivotal role in creating the scientific paradigm at the heart
of "Holocaust II," “Popovic’s notes, written in an unmistakable middle-European
hand, resembled a diary or a journal, filled with retrospective observations
and abbreviated descriptions of each day’s work, but scarcely any experimental
protocols or new data.” (SF p.262) The lawyer for the Pasteur Institute
is quoted by Crewdson as saying that the notes looked like they had been “shuffled
like a deck of cards,” and when he “tried to assemble the notes in
chronological order, he found that the follow-up results for one experiment
were dated three weeks before the experiment.” (SF p.262) This was the
orderliness of the abnormal, totalitarian science of HIV/AIDS at its very best. According to
Crewdson, one Popovic page “dated Jan 19, 1984 was continued on a page Nov 7,
1983.” (SF p.262) The Mad Hatter would have been at home in a white coat
at a workbench in this laboratory. Best of all, according to Crewdson, “Several
of Popovic’s pages weren’t dated at all.” (SF p.262) As was typical for
a laboratory skilled at rewriting the past, Crewdson reports that several of
the Popovic pages “were whited out.” and “In a sequential log of laboratory
specimens, the year ‘84’ had been crossed out and replaced by ‘83.’” (SF
p.262) That describes what they found, but according to Crewdson, once again
the scarier thing was what the lawyers did not find: “In the notes that
did exist, Swire and Weinberg could find no support for many of the experiments
described in Popovic’s Science article.” (SF p.262) Swire could
find no evidence of the isolation of the so-called virus from patients that
Gallo had written about in his letter to Nature which was meant to
exculpate him. (SF p.262) Most importantly, in terms of the French
lawsuit, important documents reflecting the Gallo lab’s work with the French
retrovirus were missing, and one of Gallo’s subordinates told Crewdson that the
staff had been told to leave them out. Crewdson wrote that “to Swire, it
looked as if somebody had systematically tried to replace the evidence of
Popovic’s work with LAV [the French virus] with something that would appear
innocuous to the Pasteur’s lawyers.” (SF p.265) There was also evidence
that the French virus had gone through a process of renaming in the documents in
order to obscure the origin of the virus the Gallo lab worked with. (SF
p.265)
None of this came as a surprise to Gallo’s
close observer and arch enemy in England, scientist Abraham Karpas, who watched
all of this unfold in an “I told you so” mode. He told Crewdson, “Dr. Gallo
still believes that in this age of communication and science he can get away
with not only saying, but even writing, that black is white and vice versa.” (SF
p.269) If only people like Karpas, who seemed to astutely recognize that Gallo
lived psychologically in some kind of scientific opposite world, had gone a
step or two further and realized that when Gallo said that HIV was the
indisputable cause of AIDS that “killed like a truck,” he was also saying
something akin to “black is white and vice versa.”
As the noose tightened, Gallo went into
advanced paranoia, suggesting that the lawyer for the French was “hiring people
to come to restaurants to sit where I go to eat, to try and hear what I say.” (SF
p.271) Crewdson quotes one rant that makes Gallo sound like he had completely
lost it: “I look at the French capitalizing on their food industry from some
places where my ancestors came from . . . I think they do great in getting
credit for nothing half the time, more than any people I’ve ever seen. That’s
the bias I would have against France . . . They helped us get into Vietnam.” (SF
p.273)
One of the more revealing Freudian moments
in Crewdson’s portrait occurs when he quotes Gallo telling the editors of Nature
in an unpublished interview that Montagnier “hasn’t a single collaborator left,
because no one trusts him. I find him extremely political, always not sure what
he believes. People who are full of distrust and see the world scheming to
screw them. That’s the way I look at the guy . . . Montagnier’s an example of a
small guy who stumbled into shit. And he got famous. More than he deserves. He
can’t handle it, sees everybody as plotting against him.” (SF p.273)
This from the most paranoid man in science, the man who was always accusing
everyone of being out to get him. The real tragedy of "Holocaust II" was
that the world was not and is not out to get him. At least not yet.
In the unpublished Nature interview, Gallo contradicted things that had been published in that very
publication. According to Crewdson, “Nature had previously assured its
readers that Gallo had grown LAV for one week only and in small quantity. Now
Gallo admitted that LAV had grown for at least three months and there had been
plenty of virus.” (SF p.275) The fact that this vital information was
never published is consistent with what we have said about the manner in which
information is managed in the world of abnormal, totalitarian science. Crewdson writes, “Had
the Gallo interview been reported, it would have dramatically changed the face
of the dispute with Pasteur. But Nature never published a word of what
Gallo had said—or anything else about its investigation.” (SF p.275)
Gallo could even count on international protection for his kind of science.
As the Gallo dispute with the Pasteur
Institute got more cantankerous, the scientific community began to fear the
collateral damage it was doing to the image of science itself. Legendary scientist Jonas
Salk sought to lower the temperature of the conflict and according to Crewdson,
he “spent the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987 shuttling between Robert
Gallo and Luc Montagnier in search of a shared version of history.” (SF
p.293) These scientists seem to have had a very abnormal idea of what history
actually is. It is not the difference you split between two warring scientists,
especially when one of the scientists is a pathological liar. Eventually,
according to Crewdson, “Jonas Salk had nearly given up hope of working out a
history acceptable to both Gallo and Montagnier. ‘Insanity afloat,’ was the way
Salk described the process to Don Francis.” (SF p.295) “Insanity
afloat,” unbeknownst to Jonas Salk, was the best way to describe the all of the
science and epidemiology of "Holocaust II."
Eventually, worn down, Montagnier stupidly
agreed to a publication of a joint chronology of the discovery of the so-called
AIDS virus with Gallo in Nature. As is typical of abnormal, totalitarian science, it
was published without any peer review which, according to Crewdson, “may
explain why it contains a number of factual mistakes, why several names were
misspelled and why portions of the text read as if they had been translated
from Chinese.” (SF p.296) And Crewdson notes that the chronology’s
preamble began with a real mutually-agreed-upon whopper: “Both sides wish it
known that from the beginning there has been a spirit of scientific cooperation
and a free exchange of ideas, biological materials and personnel between Dr.
Gallo’s and Dr. Montagnier’s laboratories. The spirit has never ceased despite
the legal problems and will be the basis of a renewed mutual cooperation in the
future.” (SF p.296) Beyond enjoying the hilarious “WTF” absurdity of this
big lie one also starts wondering about the integrity of the French discoverers
of the so-called AIDS virus. Note to future historians: Gallo apparently wasn’t
the only one willing to cut corners.
Crewdson reports that despite whatever
peace Gallo got from the pile of revisionist lies published in Nature,
he was soon disturbed by a new investigative piece in New Scientist written
by Steve Conner. The article began, “In the war against AIDS scientific truth
was among the first casualties. No one listened when Luc Montagnier at the
Pasteur Institute in Paris said that he had found the virus that causes AIDS.
Scientific journals and scientists preferred to hear what Gallo was saying from
The National Cancer Institute in the U.S.” (SF p.298) The article
included Gallo’s photos which had been misrepresented as HTLV-3 as well as the
accusation that Gallo’s outrageously dishonest behavior had cost many lives.
Gallo’s protectors didn’t waste time coming to his rescue. Crewdson reported
that one of Gallo’s cronies, Dani Bolognesi, wrote a letter to his colleagues
urging them to respond to the article. (SF p.299) And even the Reagan
administration got involved in trying to get the French AIDS officials to join
Health and Human Services in condemning the article, even though, as Crewdson
points out, “no one could say what inaccuracies Connor’s article contained.” (SF
p.299) Such awesome power can only make one wonder what Gallo had on the
government that made the authorities so ready and willing to always come to his
rescue.
When a settlement agreement was finally
signed by the French—so that they could at least get their royalties for the
AIDS test—they had to agree to renounce “any statements, press releases,
charges, allegations or other published or unpublished utterances that overtly
or by influence indicated any improper, illegal, unethical or other such
conduct or practice by any scientists employed by HHS, NIH, or NCI.” (SF
p.299) The royalties the French would receive had officially become hush money.
Crewdson notes that, “With the stroke of a pen, the accusations and contentions
of the past two years had been erased.” (SF p.299) More importantly for
the larger issue and the real history of Holocaust II, the French agreed not
to tell the whole truth about the history of AIDS, again making them in
some ways not all that different from their American counterpart.
In the Gallo tradition of biting the hand
that had saved him, Gallo, according to Crewdson, threatened the White House if
they dared to try and take any credit for the mendacious agreement. (SF
p.300) Who the hell did the American government think it was? After the
bizarre, egregiously dishonest agreement with the French was signed, in a
statement that should have made everyone who died of AIDS roll over in their
graves, Gallo said, according to Crewdson, “Now, instead of being distracted by
all the legal business, I’ll be able to return full time to trying to do
something about this disease.” (SF p.301) In other words, the bad luck
of the gay community (and the black community) was about to get much worse.
The agreement rankled the Pasteur team who
felt that French politicians like President Chirac who had put pressure on
Pasteur to sign the agreement had betrayed them. According to Crewdson,
“Jean-Claude Chermann couldn’t comprehend why someone who had chased the wrong
virus for so many months was now being anointed in the press as the
co-discoverer of the right virus.” (SF p.302) Of course the whole
situation was even wackier than Monsieur Chermann realized.
One of the absolute worst things that
happened to the world as a result of the Gallo crime was that Gallo became the
go-to spokesperson for AIDS science. According to Crewdson, “The settlement not
withstanding, the newspapers and magazines continued to laud Gallo as the
discoverer of the AIDS virus while rarely mentioning Montagnier” and “whatever
Gallo said was likely to make news.” (SF p.310) He had become the
spokes-scientist for AIDS based on false pretenses. Even David Remnick, The
Washington Post reporter who would
years later become the editor of The New Yorker, had a warm shoulder for
Gallo to whine on: Gallo complained to him that the settlement with the French
had failed to end the “accusations” and “hatred” from some of his scientific
colleagues. (SF p.310) In a hyper-ironic candid confession, Gallo said
to Remnick, “I’m telling you, there are days when I wake up in the morning and
feel like the Archangel Gabriel. By the time I go to bed at night, I feel like
Lucifer. What’s going on? Please tell me why they do this to me. Why do they
say these terrible things about me? Do you know? Do you?” (SF p.310) Is
it possible that deep down Gallo may have known himself that the questionable
science of the HIV/AIDS paradigm was crafted in part by a Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde?
Gallo’s propensity for boiler plate
homophobia kicked in a bit when Randy Shilts’s book, And the Band Played On came
out. Crewdson quotes Gallo as saying, “It never ceases to me to be a source of
great wonder . . . How people such as a gay young man on the West Coast think
they know more when they’re stimulated [sic] by the same two people over and
over again. Namely Don Francis and what I would regard as a psychotic who lives
in Cambridge.” (SF p.311) In the heterosexist world of abnormal,
totalitarian, "homodemiological" science that characterized AIDS, there
was nothing more
threatening than a "stimulated" gay reporter, especially one who had
been
"stimulated" by a psychotic. As for Gallo’s ludicrous charge of
psychosis clearly
directed at his critic Abraham Karpas who was at Oxford, well, let's
just say that science's largest glass house had rocks flying in every
direction.
Gallo was so angry at the things that
Randy Shilts quoted the CDC’s Donald Francis saying about him that he penned a
letter of retraction and he demanded Francis sign it. He told Francis that if
he didn’t (according to Crewdson), he had a “plan of action against Don
Francis, which included evidence like letters and tape recordings, that would
show financial impropriety in Francis’s relationship with Randy Shilts.” (SF
p.313) One wonders: What, no gay sex? But wait. According to Crewdson, he also
threatened to expose things from Don Francis’s personal life. (SF p.313)
Gallo was the J.Edgar Hoover of science with a real or imagined dossier on
everyone. The long arms of this vindictive scientist are reflected in the fact
that, according to Crewdson, “When it became clear Francis had no intention of
signing Gallo’s letter, word reached Berkeley [where he was happily working]
that he was being transferred back to CDC headquarters in Atlanta—to work not
on AIDS, but on tuberculosis.” (SF p.313) It was the career equivalent
of sleeping with the fishes.
Eventually, even Gallo’s boss, Vince
DeVita, tired of his antics. He told Crewdson, “there was always some crisis
with Bob Gallo . . . He has an arrogance about him, that he felt he could talk
to you and persuade you to his way of thinking. And he almost always failed.” (SF
p.314) Crewdson reports that Gallo, as per usual, refused to share his “AIDS” viruses
and his cell lines which prompted people like Nobel Laureate David Baltimore to
join another scientist, Howard Temin, “in worrying that Bob’s way of handling
himself does significant harm to both himself and to the national AIDS effort.”
(SF p.310) Baltimore and Temin were only aware of the tip of the
iceberg. (Of course Baltimore himself wasn’t exactly the Mother Teresa of science.)
Gallo exhibited the censorious style
typical of abnormal, totalitarian science when a book which was critical of him
by Michael Koch was published in Europe. Koch’s book contained entertaining
sentences about Gallo like, “He was so fond of his own ideas that he saw
evidence where there was no evidence.” (SF p.320) Koch in due course got
the Gallo treatment. According to Crewdson, when Koch ran into Gallo at a
scientific conference, Gallo told him, “Here is a five-step program to destroy
you. You, your job, your position, your damned Carnegie Institute in
Stockholm.” (SF p.320) One thing you could say about Gallo is that even
his rants had power points. (SF 320) One thing Gallo said about
Koch underlines the danger of ceding absolute power to scientific elites.
According to Crewdson, Gallo insisted “I do not feel he was qualified to write
such a book. Moreover, Koch has no experience in retrovirology . . .” (SF
p.321) Perhaps the only person qualified to write about Robert Gallo was Myron
Essex or Gallo himself.
After Gallo’s administrative assistant,
Howard Streicher, wrote a threatening letter to Cambridge University Press, the
firm that was going to publish the English language edition of the Koch book
which had been first published in Germany, the book was cancelled. Streicher
wrote in his letter that the book was “both maliciously damaging and likely to
be scientifically, historically and medically unsound.” (SF p.322)
Translation: the book told the truth.
On the heels of the settlement with the
French, a new Gallo scandal emerged. It turned out that the cell line Gallo’s
lab had supposedly created to grow the stolen French AIDS virus was also
basically, well, stolen. Gallo had used his familiar modus operandi; he
just changed the name of the cell line which had actually been created by a scientist
named Adi Gardner and—Presto! Chango!—it was Gallo’s. According to Crewdson,
“When Gazdar told a Public Health Service lawyer he thought Gallo and Popovic
had appropriated his discovery, he was advised not to pursue the matter. (SF
p.333) Some scientists are said to have green thumbs because they are so good
at growing things like viruses and creating cell lines. Gallo didn’t need a
green thumb. He had sticky fingers.
The idea that this character seriously
thought he would win a Nobel Prize by operating in the manner he did challenges
all definitions of sanity. Scientist Sam Waksal (who went to jail for the
insider trading financial scandal that involved Martha Stewart) described a
special night with Gallo in which “Gallo was drunk, and he had a tear in his
eye, and he said, ‘You know, I would do anything—anything—to win the Nobel Prize.’
I always thought it was the most telling thing about him. Because in the world
of science the goal is the pleasantry of the discovery and he could never find
as much satisfaction in the discovery as he could in the limelight.” (SF
p.336)
There was still more public humiliation in
store for Gallo when sophisticated genetic analysis of Gallo’s so-called HTLV-3
made it painfully, embarrassingly clear that it was LAV and that whatever
happened in terms of contamination or theft, it had definitely all happened
in Gallo’s lab. (SF p.341) And then the darkest moment of Gallo’s
travails happened on November 19, 1989 when John Crewdson’s 55,000 word piece
with all the details of his pseudo-discovery of the AIDS virus was published in
The Chicago Tribune. The piece’s conclusion was that “What happened in
Robert Gallo’s lab during the winter of 1983-84 is a mystery that may never be
solved. But the evidence is compelling that it was either an accident or a
theft.” (SF p.343) The Chicago Tribune piece aired all of Gallo’s
dirty laundry, exposing him making bogus claim after bogus claim; it showed him
perpetually rewriting history, and the article displayed his
stealing-and-renaming habit as well as his penchant for deliberately altering
scientific documents. As was typical of this master double-talker, according to
Crewdson, in an interview about The Chicago Tribune piece,
“Though [Gallo] claimed not to have read the Tribune, Gallo nonetheless
took umbrage at a number of the quotes it contained.” (SF p.344) What
Crewdson had done in his amazing Tribune piece (and subsequently in his
book) was to show the dark side of science: “The reality that scientists often
engaged in the same kind of back stabbing and throat-cutting as politicians and
businessmen had remained behind laboratory doors.”(SF p.347)
As Congress began to wake up to the
general issue of fraud in science, the NIH had been guilt-tripped into creating
“a new agency, the Office of Scientific Integrity” which was responsible for
“investigating and deciding cases of suspected plagiarism, falsification, or
other scientific misconduct.” (SF p.349) In other words, all the dishes
that could be found in the Gallo buffet. After reading the Crewdson article on
Gallo, the acting director of the new Office of Scientific Integrity decided
that the Gallo affair deserved to be investigated.” (SF p.351)
Even as the Gallo investigation was
getting underway, he was out in the public serving up more scientific baloney.
According to Crewdson, he “was at Fordham University in the Bronx where he
announced a breakthrough discovery—a cure for Kaposi’s sarcoma, the malignant
lesions that account for about one in five deaths among AIDS patients.” (SF
p.354) The only problem, according to Crewdson, was that “Gallo hadn’t
published any such results, and he hadn’t presented any data at Fordham to back
up his claims.” (SF p.354) In other words, for Gallo it was business as
usual. When a desperate AIDS patient contacted one of the scientists in Gallo’s
lab he was treated badly. The man subsequently wrote a letter to the scientist
and Crewdson quotes it: “You have probably forgotten our conversation . . . But
I have not and I will not forget it in a long time. I have never in my life
been talked to in such a demeaning, condescending, rude and abrupt manner by
anyone let alone an alleged health care professional on the public payroll. I
am dying from AIDS and in particular Kaposi’s sarcoma . . . Which is what
motivated me to call Dr. Gallo’s office in the first place . . . How cruel it
is to publicly talk about a cure and then refuse the information to the
public.” (SF p.354) Demeaning? Condescending? Rude? Cruel? What the man
with AIDS tragically didn’t realize was that the very epidemiological paradigm
he was trapped in (and probably died in) was all of that and more. When Gallo’s
boss heard about the exchange, he ordered Gallo to apologize to the man, and,
according to Crewdson, “to explain that he didn’t have a cure for Kaposi’s
sarcoma after all.” (SF p.354) It was one of the few times that being
Robert Gallo didn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry.
As the full-scale investigation of the
Gallo affair by the Office of Science Integrity got under way, Gallo was fully
cooperative. Not. Crewdson reports that “It had been early January of 1990 when
Suzanne Hadley requested the originals of the Gallo lab’s notebooks, but by
mid-March she still didn’t have them.” (SF p.355)
Because of both Crewdson’s Tribune
piece and the OSI investigation, Monagnier felt emboldened to ignore the
agreement to “ferme la bouche” and he admitted to Le Monde that there
was a real possibility that Gallo had stolen LAV. (SF p.356) Gallo was
furious and once again ran to the sympathetic Washington Post with his
bogus version of the story. (SF p.357) (This was clearly not the same
paper it had been during the Woodward and Bernstein era.) Gallo also hired a
P.R. firm and a lawyer but, according to Crewdson, told his staff that “It should
not be obvious that we are using a P.R. firm or a lawyer.” (SF p.358)
Abnormal science can not be conducted without a P.R. firm and a lawyer that
agree to keep a low profile.
The list of property crimes committed by
Gallo’s gang expanded while he was under investigation by OSI when it was
discovered that Zaki Salahuddin, the Gallo subordinate who was supposedly the
co-discoverer of HBLV (eventually called HHV-6) had set up a company called
PanData in order to funnel money into his own bank account by selling medical
supplies to the National Cancer Institute—supplies which he himself ordered. (SF
p.322) (At least he wasn’t out stealing viruses, although, when the whole story of HHV-6 is told, that might not exactly be the case.) According to Crewdson,
Congress got wind of the scam and John Dingel eventually called it “‘a gross
conflict of interest . . . on the part of a prominent AIDS researcher at the
National Institutes of Health’ who had hidden his ‘improper financial interest
in a biomedical firm doing substantial business with his own laboratory at
NIH.’” (SF p.362) According to Crewdson, Gallo told the General
Accounting Office that he knew about the Salahuddin company only three months
before the investigation, but he told The Washington Post he had
known about it for a year. (SF p.362) Crewdson reports that Salahuddin
was also selling viruses and cell lines derived from Gallo’s lab. One could say
that abnormal science and abnormal commerce are bosom buddies.
Salahuddin was ultimately investigated by
a Grand Jury. During his tribulations, Salahuddin said an all too true and
disturbing thing about Gallo, “Here’s Gallo, they provide him double coverage,
internal investigation and so forth, all this moral turpitude he is accused for
such a long period of time. No one ever talks of suspending him. In my case
they go immediately for the knife and throw me to the wolves.” (SF
p.363) Salahuddin was eventually “formally accused of violating
conflict-of-interest statues and accepting illegal gratuities in the PanData
case.” (SF p.375) As part of his punishment the was supposed to perform
community service by researching HHV-6, the virus he purportedly discovered,
which was a little like sentencing Bernie Madoff to selling stocks.
During the OSI investigation more
mindblowing information surfaced. Mika Popovic provided a shocking description
of his period in Gallo’s lab: “When I came here nobody gave me whatsoever any
instructions how we should write out notes or anything else. And when the
litigation started, suddenly I was asked for notes.” (SF p.364) (That
anyone in any way trusted the basic science that came out of this scientific
pig pen is unbelievable.) The OSI investigation identified new
misrepresentations that Popovic had made in the Science papers that had
supposedly nailed HIV down as the cause of AIDS. According to Crewdson, Popovic
didn’t have data to back up statements in the signature AIDS papers about
patients he had described as showing evidence of reverse transcriptase. (SF
p.364)
According to Crewdson, in the course of
the OSI investigation, Gallo’s testimony
basically revealed that he had misrepresented the truth during the
period in which the government was aggressively and groundlessly defending him
against the French lawsuit. (SF p.371) He admitted he had no AIDS virus
before his lab got its hands on the French virus. (SF p.371) He also
confessed he didn’t have the isolates of the AIDS virus that he had bragged
about at the time of his Science paper appeared. (SF p.371) It
had all been just the usual Gallo malarkey. According to Crewdson, Gallo told
the OSI that he had made the false claim about the isolates because “to be
quite frank, I was nervous.” (SF p.371) Crewdson points out that if
Gallo had been as honest during the French lawsuit, Pasteur would have walked
away with complete ownership of the patent of the so-called AIDS blood
test. (SF p.372) And reporters might not have been calling up Gallo and
hanging on to his every word of wisdom about AIDS.
A panel drawn from the Academy of Science
that was called in to oversee the OSI investigation voted to move the OSI
investigation from an inquiry to “a formal misconduct investigation of Gallo
and Mika Popovic.” (SF p.373) They were shocked by “the apparent lack of
supporting data for Popovic’s key experiments.” (SF p.373) The Academy
of Science panel didn’t realize that they were conducting an investigation in
the opposite world of abnormal, totalitarian science. One of the panelists noted—about the
basic work on the AIDS virus done in Gallo’s lab—that “It may not be that you
will be able to find a written record of all the data that are in print.” (SF
p.374) One could say that the data that helped build the HIV/AIDS paradigm of
"Holocaust II" wasn’t worth the paper it was not written on.
Gallo kicked and screamed when OSI went so
far as to requisition materials that had been used in the original AIDS
experiments. When Suzanne Hadley arrived to collect those materials, according
to Crewdson, she “felt like the vampire surrounded by angry villagers.” (SF
p.375) She told Crewdson, “His whole lab, they just worship Gallo and will not
challenge him. Anybody who gets a bunch of people around him who gets a mindset
that he can do no wrong and that everybody else is wrong and wants to get him,
you know that’s a prescription for disaster. Because nobody is asking the tough
questions on the inside.” (SF p.375) Gallo’s own description of his gang
in Crewdson’s book is quite revealing: “About seventy-five percent of the
people with me are from foreign countries, their salaries are twenty to thirty
thousand dollars, they’re M.D.-PH.D.s, they work day and night, they work seven
days a week.” (SF p.385) It would appear that the virological fraud that
helped created "Holocaust II" may have been crafted in what could be deemed a
scientific sweatshop. What Zaki Salahuddin said about Gallo’s rosy prospects
during the investigation deserves close scrutiny by anyone trying to understand
the nature of Gallo’s political power: “Nothing will come out of it. No one
wants America to go down. They just rally around the flag. NIH and Gallo are
inseparable right now. If he goes down, NIH goes down.” (SF p.376)
One of the more amusing moments in the
Crewdson book concerns an NPR radio show on which Business Week reporter
and author Bruce Nussbaum was being interviewed during the promotion for his
book on AIDS, according to Crewdson, which purported “to show that Wall Street
and NIH had conspired to slow the approval of potential AIDS drugs.” (SF
p.384) One of the people calling into the radio show attacked Gallo by name,
saying that he had “‘done a disservice to research in general.’”(SF
p.384) Gallo just happened to be listening to the radio and he angrily called
the show. When Gallo started going on and on about how he and his associates
had risked their lives doing AIDS research and basically suggested that
Nussbaum didn’t have “a depth of understanding of science,” (SF p.385)
Nussbaum responded, “I think you’re expressing the type of attitude which is
part of the problem. . . . You simply dismiss anyone who is criticizing NIH in
any way.” (SF p.385) He also said, “Your attitude is one of incredible
arrogance . . . . I think you’re really expressing the type of attitude that is
really at the core of the problem of the NIH . . . . And you’re not open to
criticism . . . . Even if that criticism is valid. You simply dismiss all
criticism as invalid.” (SF p.386)
Popovic’s defense of himself during the
OSI investigation continued to provide evidence that Gallo’s lab had the
rigorous organization of a town dump. According to Crewdson, he told
investigators that he had been “working under a great deal of pressure, under
very difficult conditions, and without technical support,” and he complained
that the equipment was of “poor quality.” (SF p.387) Unfortunately, we
now know that the science that came out of that equipment was of the same quality.
He complained that the seminal AIDS virus articles in Science had been
written in his bad English very quickly because of intense pressure from Gallo.
(SF p.387) And the world would live with the tragic effects of that bad
English and that rush job for many decades.
The Office of Scientific Integrity wasn’t
buying anything Popovic was selling. The committee was especially concerned
about a key falsehood in the original Science papers which was that the
French virus LAV hadn’t been growing in the Gallo lab at the time the so-called
Gallo virus, HTLV-3 had been discovered. Popovic betrayed the boss by saying
that he wasn’t the one who wrote the offending sentence in the Science
paper and according to Crewdson, that basically left Gallo as the chief suspect.
(SF p.389) Popovic had dared to be honest about the matter. He is quoted
by Crewdson as telling OSI, “I am sure that originally I had referenced the LAV
in my very rough draft. Even I think I insisted on it. I thought that we should
include the LAV data in the paper . . . . Then it was changed in the editing .
. . LAV was put to the end of the manuscript, in the end, and I think it was
Dr. Gallo’s decision not to include LAV.” (SF p.389)
While this investigation was underway,
another scandal broke out in the Gallo lab. Gallo’s deputy lab chief, Prem
Sarin, had taken money under false pretenses from a company that wanted Gallo’s
lab to test a potential AIDS drug called AL-721. (SF p.390) Sarin,
according to Crewdson, was convicted “of embezzlement and making false
statements to the NIH” and he “got two months in a halfway house in Baltimore.”
(SF p.391) While he had been under investigation, his fellow financial
felon in the Gallo lab, Zaki Salahuddin, had urged Sarin to avoid going to jail
by spilling some beans on Gallo, but given Gallo’s psychological and
professional iron grip on his staff that would never happen. (SF
p.391) It will fall to future historians to determine the nature of the beans
that were never spilled and what bearing they might have on the true and
complete narrative of the AIDS era.
Peter Stockton, an aide to Congressman
John Dingell, was amazed to see Gallo get off while his subordinate was nailed.
(SF p.399) When Dingell’s committee staff interviewed Gallo about his
responsibility for all the financial misbehavior in his lab, Stockton,
according to Crewdson, said that Gallo excused himself by saying, “‘Hey, come
on, it’s not my job to be doing that kind of thing. I’m a scientist and I’m
trying to cure AIDS, and I can’t be bothered with this kind of crap.’” (SF
p.392) And Stockton’s committee basically said back to Gallo, according
Crewdson, “Somebody’s got to be concerned about this. You just don’t turn
laboratories over to felons to run wild. You’ve got to keep some control over
what’s going on.” (SF p.392) What Stockton didn’t realize was that AIDS
research in general had been turned “over to felons to run wild.” Gallo was an
iconic role model for everyone in that field. He was their Fagin.
The Pasteur Institute eventually published
a paper in Science that settled the matter genetically and established
conclusively that LAV and Gallo’s supposed discovery were the same virus and
that everything Gallo had said about the matter was a crock. It was the
beginning of the end of Gallo at N.C.I. He had embarrassed the whole NIH. (SF
p.402-403) But with Gallo there was always time for one more scandal and the
next one may have been his ugliest one yet because it involved the deaths of
human guinea pigs. Gallo had gotten involved with French researcher named
Daniel Zagury in a research project that involved testing experimental vaccines
on Africans. And not just any Africans—the test subjects were children. In the
course on testing the vaccine, there were three deaths. Gallo and “Zagury had
failed to mention that in the report on the vaccine.” (SF p.406)
One of the most fascinating revelations in
Crewdson’s book is the fact that while using LAV in his experiments, Popovic
was so afraid that Gallo might screw the French that he had given his sister in
Czechoslovakia “the early drafts of the Science article for safe
keeping” because, according to Popovic, “I believed that sometimes in the
future I might need them as evidence to prove that I gave fair credit to Dr.
Montagnier’s group.” (SF p.411) According to Crewdson, “the hidden
manuscripts suggests that Gallo was guilty for his rewriting of Popovic’s
paper.” (SF p.411) Popovic clearly knew all too well what Gallo was
capable of.
The OSI report which was drafted by
Suzanne Hadley stated that both Gallo and Popovic were guilty of scientific
misconduct. (SF p.414) But when the higher ups saw it, they balked and wanted
the guilty verdict against Gallo erased. (SF p.414) Gallo once again
ducked the bullet thanks to what looks like just an old fashioned act of
looking the other way by the government. But Gallo didn’t go completely
unscathed. According to Crewdson, the OSI report “said that Gallo’s behavior
‘had fallen well short of the conduct required by a responsible senior scientist
and laboratory chief.’ Gallo had ‘acquiesced in Dr. Popovic’s wrong doing.’ He
‘may even have tacitly encouraged, and at a minimum, he did not discourage, the
conditions that fostered the misconduct.’” (SF p.418) What was actually
fostered in those conditions was far worse than anyone could have imagined.
Suzanne Hadley, according to Crewdson,
felt that the conclusions of OSI supported the perception that Gallo had lied
under oath during the dispute with the French over the AIDS virus patent. (SF
p.419) She was upset when her superior, NIH Director Bernadine Healy, wanted
her to rewrite her report. (SF p.420) She asked Healy to make the
request for a change in writing and warned that it would compromise “the OSI
independence from NIH.” (SF p.420) Healy then backed down. But Hadley
would pay a price for standing up to her boss. She was told she was being
“reined in” and would make no more “decisions in the Gallo case.” (SF
p.421) Crewdson notes that previous to her involvement with the Gallo case,
Hadley “had been one of the NIH’s rising stars.” (SF p.420) But given
her perception of Healy’s power and temperament, Hadley completely withdrew
from OSI’s Gallo case, saying, according to Crewdson, “The hell with it, I just
want to get rid of it. I don’t need this shit anymore. . . . I never wanted
anything out of this . . . except to do it right. But I certainly never wanted
to get just absolutely destroyed. I would have been demolished by Bernadine.
She absolutely would have destroyed me.” (SF p.422) That’s what happens
in abnormal, totalitarian science in general when one tries to tell the truth or do the right
thing.
When the OSI report was released, Gallo
got the kind of cover he often received from an uncritical press. According to
Crewdson, “The Associated Press declared Gallo’s vindication,” and said nothing
about the Popovic misconduct verdict. (SF p.422) Crewdson reports that
all that Healy did to Gallo was issue a directive ordering him to “‘familiarize
himself with all HHS and NIH regulations relevant to his job, including
standards of conduct for federal employees and the rules governing medical
experiments on human subjects.’”(SF p.423) Gallo was also, according to
Crewdson, ordered “to review ‘all primary data’ produced by any scientist under
his supervision before the data was submitted for publication, and to ensure
that his assistants maintained ‘written laboratory notebooks and records
sufficient to permit scientific peers and supervisors to adequately interpret
and duplicate the work.’” (SF p.424) If such rules had been in place for
Gallo—and followed—before he got his mitts on AIDS research, HIV may
never have become the central fraud of "Holocaust II."
Gallo decided to set the record “straight”
in his inimitable style by writing a book called Virus Hunting, which
was as flattering to himself as one would expect, and according to Crewdson,
was a project in which he didn’t even get Montagnier’s first name correct. (SF
p.429) According to Crewdson, “Buttressed by scant documentation, Gallo’s book
was drawn mainly from his own recollections and those of his staff. Perhaps for
that reason, it frequently left the impression that some insight or discovery
occurred sooner than it did.” (SF p.429) It was interesting that
according to Crewdson’s account at least one member of the French team seemed
to also be capable of playing the kind of games that Gallo played. Crewdson
writes that “a preface by Jean-Claude Chermann recounting the discovery of LAV
. . . read as though Chermann had done it single-handedly.” (SF p.430)
One begins to wonder if any leading scientist during the AIDS era got enough
love and attention as a child.
According to Crewdson, when the OSI report
came out, the “publicity in Paris” inspired the Pasteur Institute to consider
“the possibility that the 1987 agreement [with Gallo] would have to be
renegotiated.” (SF p.430)
Looking back on her work on the Gallo OSI
investigation, Suzanne Hadley, according to Crewdson, was most “dismayed” by
her failure “to get an early handle on the full compass of the case—to see how
some of the entries in Mika Popovic’s notes, or some of the phrases in his Science
article, while seemingly disconnected might have implications in a larger
context for the patent, the blood test, the veracity of the Reagan
administration, and the settlement with the French.” (SF p.434) Crewdson
reports that she said, “It was so much bigger than we imagined. Once I began to
get my wits together, it was too late.” (SF p.434) Crewdson summed up
the dilemma: “So broad was the scope of the Gallo case that it seemed ludicrous
in retrospect, to have attempted to fit it into the narrow framework of a
scientific investigation, which typically focused on the misreporting of an
experiment in a published article. Even more than whatever had happened in
Gallo’s lab, Hadley was appalled by the government’s behavior, in and out of
court.” (SF p.434) Hadley told Crewdson, “Whatever one thinks about
Gallo . . . he had support all the way up the line. They had data back in 1984
showing they were the same virus . . . There never was an iota of a chance that
HHS would do an honest thing. Before anything had even happened the die was
cast, the decision was made. After that it was simply a matter of crafting a
litigation strategy.” (SF p.434) Hadley deserves great honor for doing
the right thing but even her intense epiphany about Gallo and the realization
about what she was actually staring at was just scratching the surface of the
main event. Beneath the mendacities by Gallo and the Reagan administration
concerning who discovered the so-called AIDS retrovirus lay far more
catastrophic secrets and lies that would ultimately blossom into a world of
HHV-6 related immune dysfunction.
When the scientific community saw the
watered down OSI report—which Crewdson described as almost completely changed
from the Suzanne Hadley version (SF p.436)—with its main misconduct
charge focused on Popovic, and Gallo once again ducking the main bullet, many
were horrified. But The Washington Post, once again played the role of
Gallo enabler and declared Gallo vindicated. (SF p.436) One scientist,
Gene Myers, when he heard Gallo was still not willing to admit that his
discovery was actually the French retrovirus, is quoted by Crewdson as
comparing Gallo to Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov. (SF p.436)
When Bernadine Healy met with the panel
that was overseeing the final watered-down OSI report, one of the members
described what she said to them and it was chilling and ironic. Crewdson quotes
Alfred Gillman’s account of Healy’s remarks: “What she wanted to know . . . is
does Gallo have no redeeming qualities at all? Is this guy the scum of the
earth? Or is there a spark of genius there that ought to be nourished? Or is he
mentally ill?” (SF p.438) One can reasonably guess that the victims of
"Holocaust II," voting from their graves, would probably vote “no” on redeeming
qualities, “yes” on scum of the earth, “not so much” on spark of genius and
“absolutely yes” on mentally ill.
While The Washington Post bent over
backwards to help Gallo, ABC’s Sam Donaldson went in the other direction when
he took up the story. Donaldson’s TV report began, “It may be the greatest
scientific fraud of the twentieth century.” He also warned that “important
elements of the United States government seem reluctant to have all the facts
revealed.” (SF p.442) If he only knew. Donaldson was just one more
reporter who didn’t see the even more important issue lurking beneath the
surface of the LAV story.
One of the most disturbing moments in the
government’s peculiar protection of Gallo, and one that should be pondered and
investigated by historians of "Holocaust II" for many decades to come happened
when Congressman John Dingell’s office began their investigation of the Gallo
affair. Dingell brought the beleaguered Suzanne Hadley into his congressional investigation
of Gallo because she knew where all the Gallo bodies were buried. But when the
committee requested the files from the preceding OSI investigation she herself
had conducted, it turned out that notebooks from the investigation had been
shredded by Hadley’s replacement at OSI. (SF p.461) Gallo was a cat
with more than nine lives. Abnrmal and totalitarian science had abnormal and totalitarian oversight.
For anyone who believes that some kind of
bizarre group psychosis characterized the whole enterprise of AIDS research, it
is of interest that when Peter Stockton talked to famous Nobel Prize winning
scientist James Watson during this period about Gallo, according to his account
in Crewdson’s book, Watson’s “big point was that Gallo is a manic depressive.
He thinks the subcommittee should back down because Gallo’s crazy. He thinks we
should talk to Gallo’s shrink.” (SF p.473) One could say that to
comprehend all the pseudoscientific underpinnings of AIDS or "Holocaust II" one must talk
to Gallo’s shrink.
As could be expected in the arbitrary and
opposite world of AIDS science, OSI itself was changed into the Office of
Research Integrity and the rules were changed even while the Gallo
investigation was ongoing—just like the rules of science were altered by bogus
AIDS research. Instead of simply finding scientists guilty of publishing
fabricated scientific results, under the new rules the committee had to show
that the scientists who was charged had intended to do so. (SF
p.466-475) That ridiculous new standard made it nearly impossible to find any
scientist guilty because, according to Crewdson, the scientist “could simply
claim he hadn’t intended to deceive anybody.” (SF p.454) Gallo’s
most
powerful Guardian Angel had arrived on the scene in the form of this
crazy new
rule. Another dark legacy of AIDS and "Holocaust II" would be that the
government’s process of trying to defend Gallo would make it easier for
all
American scientists to commit fraud and get away with it. Gallo was
truly an historic figure in that he paved the way for many more years of
plausibly deniable scientific fraud. It is a breathtaking legacy.
Even with the rules of evidence loosened
in Gallo’s favor, he continued to behave like a cornered Mafioso as he told
scientists who were expected to testify before the new committee that if they
testified it might not turn out too well for them. (SF p.499) He told
one scientists that he might “spill the beans on him.” (SF p.480) Gallo
was a virtual Boston of spillable beans.
The final OSI report on the Gallo affair
was basically a whitewash, a true blue cover-up. Suzanne Hadley described it as
a “version of history” that “parroted the government’s arguments years before
in defense of the blood-test patent.” (SF p.503) She told Crewdson,
“There’s too much pseudoscience in the opinion. They got it from somewhere.” (SF
p.503) Again, what Hadley didn’t grasp was how catastrophically deep the
pseudoscience laid out before her actually was.
When an appeals board reversed the verdict
of the ORI, Gallo was elated. According to Crewdson, Gallo said, “I will now be
able to redouble efforts in the fight against AIDS and cancers. There are
several hopeful new avenues of AIDS research that my laboratory is pursuing.” (SF
p.505) The business of Holocaust II could continue in earnest. The New
York Times reporter, Nicholas Wade, one of the AIDS paradigm’s truest
believers, wrote that Gallo was “the one scientific hero who has yet emerged in
the fight against AIDS.” (SF p.505) With heroes like that, gays, blacks
and anyone suffering on the HHV-6 spectrum illnesses didn’t need enemies.
But John Dingell wasn’t done with Gallo.
His staff attempted to get prosecutors to charge Gallo and Popovic with making
false statements under oath, but between complications involving the statute of
limitations for the crime and problems of involving the jurisdiction the crimes
took place in, that never happened. (SF p.510) Bullet ducked again.
All of this mishegas took its toll on
Gallo’s new boss, Sam Broder, who had succeeded Vincent DeVita. According to
Crewdson, “Since replacing Vince DeVita, Sam Broder had defended and protected
Gallo. Now there were indications Broder, like DeVita before him, was growing
disillusioned. Reportedly, horrified by Daniel Zagury’s use of Zairian children
in his AIDS vaccine research, Broder had ordered Gallo’s name removed from the
pending HHS patent on Zagury’s vaccine. When Suzanne Hadley showed Broder
Gallo’s outrageous statement that the patent had been initiated by Broder
himself, Broder exploded, ‘He said, “That’s bullshit!” Hadley recalled.” As if
that wasn’t enough, according to Crewdson, Hadley used the same meeting with
Broder to tell him that her investigation “had turned up evidence that several
of Gallo’s subsequent articles also contained false statements.” (SF
p.514) Hadley told Broder about a paper Gallo published in 1985 which contained
false statements about the AIDS virus isolates he had in 1982. According to
Crewdson, “The paper was a political exercise, a pollution of the scientific
literature intended to help lay the groundwork for a defense against the
French.” (SF p.515) Crewdson reports that Sam Broder told Gallo that if
he didn’t retire he would order a new NCI investigation of him. (SF p.515)
Suzanne Hadley is quoted by Crewdson as remembering that Broder said to her, “I
told Bob, ‘You’ve degraded the institute, you’ve degraded the public and you’ve
degraded reporters by lying to them . . . . We owe things to the people of
another time. They need to know what things were really like during the era of
AIDS research.’ One of Bob’s biggest sins is his overdriven compulsion to claim
all the credit and to trace it all to his great intellect.” (SF p.515)
As true as Broder’s words were, he was still missing the sin beneath the sin, not
the sin of stealing credit, but the sin of egotistically leading the world down
a deadly misbegotten path, manipulating science and the public into thinking he
had delivered the truth about AIDS to the world. And as far as that sin
was concerned, Broder himself was joined at the hip with Gallo.
As quoted by Crewdson, something else
Hadley remembered Broder saying sizzles with irony: “He was confused out of his
mind. Bob was so thoroughly wrong. The AIDS virus had to fit the retroviruses
as he knew them, and he was wrong. He needed to listen to his data, and he did
not want to do that . . . Bob writes all these historical things that have no
relationship to the way it really was. I told Bob, ‘I have not forgiven you for
this. People are dying of real diseases, and this is not a game.’ . . . Frankly
Suzanne, it was a Nobel Prize run. You guys don’t talk about that, but I was
there, and I know. And frankly he almost got it. And if he had gotten it, he
would have been truly invincible.” (SF p.516) Where to begin? Well,
first of all Gallo’s word of choice for the people this science involved, at
least on occasion (as reported by New York Native), was “fag” which may have had a little something to do with
the level of moral seriousness with which Gallo dealt with the AIDS issue.
Second of all, who is Broder to talk? He was the scientific genius behind the
aggressive pushing of AZT into the bodies of AIDS patients, something akin to
pouring gasoline on a fire.
In 1994 there was a revised settlement
with the French which Crewdson described as “a clear victory for the French.” (SF
p.585) Suzanne Hadley, working for the Dingell Committee, wrote a 267-page
account of the whole matter that according to Crewdson “spared no one” in
assigning culpability “starting with the Department of Health and Human
Services.” (SF p.526) Crewdson writes that the report said that “HHS did
its best to cover up the wrongdoing” and “meanwhile the failure of the entire
scientific establishment to take any meaningful action left the disposition of
scientific truth to bureaucrats and lawyers, with neither the expertise nor the
will essential to the task. Because of the continuing HHS cover-up it was not
until the Subcommittee investigation that the true facts were known, and the
breadth and depth of the cover-up was revealed. . . . One of the most
remarkable and regrettable aspects of the institutional response to the defense
of Gallo et. al. is how readily public service and science apparently
were subverted into defending the indefensible.” (SF p.527) As profound
and disturbing as the report was, it was naively focused on the tail of a far
bigger unseen monster, namely the HIV-is-the-cause-of-AIDS mistake itself and
the entrenched world of abnormal, totalitarian science that it represented. The report was
clueless about the psychotic and deeply biased paradigm at the very center of
Holocaust II. It was commendable for Dingell, Hadley and Stockton to nail Gallo
on the viral theft from the French, but relatively speaking, it was in essence
a successful prosecution of a misdemeanor that missed the exponentially more
important underlying medical and scientific crime against mankind.
To say that Gallo landed on his feet after
this disgrace is an understatement. When he left NCI he had to rough it at the
brand new, built-just-for-him, multi-million dollar research Institute of Human
Virology in Baltimore financed by the state of Maryland. And as one could
expect in the opposite world of Robert Gallo, one of the people he invited to
come work for him at the spiffy new institute was the paragon of great science,
Mika Popovic, a man who will probably take some of Gallo’s juiciest secrets to
the grave with him. Gallo’s ability to either discover things or steal them,
depending upon how you looked at his career, seems to have diminished in
Baltimore. According to Crewdson, “During its first five years of life the
Institute for Human Virology hadn’t come up with any marketable discoveries.” (SF
p.537) AIDS patients were clearly safer with Gallo out of NCI and eating crab
cakes in Baltimore.
Near the end of his account of the Gallo
affair, Crewdson writes his most chilling sentence: “The Popovic-Gallo Science
paper, among the most-cited scientific articles of all time, is laden with
untruths that have never been retracted or corrected.” (SF p.539) In
other words, the very foundation of "Holocaust II" is laden with untruths that
“have never been retracted or corrected.” Every living scientist and doctor
should hand their head in shame. They are the apathetic, compliant “ordinary
Germans” of this period in history. And anyone who describes Science as
a prestigious publication worthy of any kind of reverence at all should put on
a pair of clown shoes.
Crewdson closes his awesome dissection of
Gallo’s deeds and character on a philosophical note: “Being wrong in science is
hardly a sin. Scientists are wrong every day, and their mistakes are what
pushes science forward. What set Gallo apart, was his profound disinclination
to acknowledge his mistakes, preferring instead to ignore them, insist they
hadn’t occurred, blame someone else, or propagate outlandish explanations and
outright fictions that only confused science further and slowed its forward
march . . . . In the end, the most compelling question was one only Gallo could
answer: Had he somehow convinced himself that all the lies were true? Or had he
known better all along?” (SF p.540) Actually, a more fundamental
and
philosophical questions would be whether Gallo was capable of honestly
answering that question or even understanding it. Was Gallo a true
sociopath?
And that leads to the larger historical question about the degree to
which a kind of enabling group psychosis went way beyond Gallo and
underwrote all of
"Holocaust II." It may have taken a whole psychotic village to empower a
Gallo.
While the world owes journalistic genius John Crewdson a debt of
gratitude for laying bare the mind-numbing complexities of Gallo’s scientific
fraud regarding the discovery of the so-called AIDS virus, the larger story
that Crewdson missed, the one he failed to see beneath all the masks that he
did rip off, was the game-changing story that the so-called stolen AIDS virus wasn’t
even the cause of AIDS. While Crewdson was writing his masterpiece, which
was ultimately published in 2002, evidence was accumulating that the other
virus that Gallo claimed to have discovered, HHV-6, actually did play a
major role in AIDS. In fact, the major role. The virus was not an
unimportant pathogen as portrayed by Crewdson in Science Fictions.
The New York Native, the little gay
newspaper that pioneered the Gallo story even before Crewdson got to it,
followed the HHV-6 trail that led to a far bigger and more disturbing story
about AIDS than just Gallo’s appropriation of LAV. While covering HHV-6 the New
York Native broke one of the biggest AIDS stories of all, the breakout of
acquired immune deficiency in the general population which the CDC and the NIH
hid behind the ridiculous euphemism of “chronic fatigue syndrome.” The New
York Native’s reporter, Neenyah Ostrom covered chronic fatigue
syndrome, AIDS and their relationship to HHV-6 from 1988 until the paper went
out of business at the end of 1996.
The parent company of New York Native published
three books on Ostrom’s reporting about the relationship between HHV-6, AIDS
and chronic fatigue syndrome. The first book, What Really Killed GildaRadner? Frontline Reports on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, was
published in 1991. In the book’s introduction, Ostrom wrote “For whatever
reasons—like reluctance to admit the presence of another AIDS-like epidemic
sweeping the nation in the shadow of (and linked to) the official AIDS
epidemic, simple incompetence, or more sinister reasons—health authorities have
tried to deny the very existence of the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic in
the U.S., have tried to prove that the illness of immune dysfunction is caused
by ‘psychoneurosis,’ [and] have delayed for years determining how many cases
actually exist in the country . . . .” (WRKGR p. 10) The next Ostrom
book, 50 Things You Should Know About the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic was
published in 1992. In its introduction, she wrote, “America is facing a health
crisis of unprecedented proportions, a crisis that has been misleadingly
labeled chronic fatigue syndrome. This health crisis has been bungled by
government health officials from the very beginning: It has been ignored,
misrepresented, and investigated ineptly until, as I write this in January,
1992, untold millions of Americans already have contracted this potentially
disabling, AIDS-like illness. . . . CFS is clearly an AIDS-related illness that
puts the entire population at risk.” (P.13-14) The final Ostrom book, America’sBiggest Cover-up, which was published in 1994 was even more uncompromising
in its conclusions. Ostrom attempted to explain why officials refused to admit
a link between AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome: “AIDS patients, and people
who test HIV-positive (whatever that actually turns out to mean), have been so
badly treated, so discriminated against, so scapegoated and demonized that it
is not surprising that there is an almost reflexive recoiling from the
possibility that AIDS is not the narrowly-defined illness that it has been
portrayed as being.” (ABC xvi) She asserted that “Until the denial among
medical professionals about the relationship between the AIDS and chronic
fatigue syndrome epidemics is overcome, however, it is difficult to imagine how
either epidemic can be ended.” (ABC xvi) Had John Crewdson not just taken the
lead on Gallos’s theft of HIV from New York Native, but also followed
the trail of Ostrom’s reporting on chronic fatigue syndrome and HHV-6, he might
have broken a bigger and far more important story.
Two years before Crewdson’s book on Gallo
hit the bookstores, Nicholas Regush’s book on HHV-6, The Virus Within: AComing Epidemic was published. Regush had been a reporter for the Montreal
Gazette as well as an award-winning and Emmy-nominated medical and science
journalist at ABC News, where he produced segments for World News Tonight with
Peter Jennings. Regush’s book covers the history of HHV-6 from its discovery
through a succession of shocking discoveries made by two researchers at the
University of Wisconsin, Konnie Knox and Donald Carrigan. Regush’s picture of
HHV-6 bears little resemblance to the failed Gallo co-factor of Crewdson’s
book.
The HHV-6 that emerges from Regush’s book
should have made the scientific community’s collective head spin. In a series
of experiments on a variety of patients, the two relatively young Wisconsin
researchers showed, without even fully admitting it or shouting it out to the
world, that HHV-6 was the real villain in AIDS. They showed that HHV-6 is
capable of wreaking havoc in both the central nervous system (TVW p.9)
and the immune system itself. Prior research by R.G. Downing had shown that
HHV-6 was capable of destroying T-cells (curiously, the only so-called herpes
virus to do so) which was something that the AIDS establishment insisted on
blaming HIV alone for doing indirectly even though HHV-6 destroyed the cells
dramatically, directly and unambiguously. As Regush pointed out, “Here was a
herpes virus that could destroy T-4 lymphocytes at least in the test tube more
powerfully than HIV.” (TVW p.54) Had Crewdson dug deeper on the HHV-6
story, he would have learned that there are supposedly two strains of HHV-6, an
A and a B strain. And he would have found out that HHV-6A was indeed starting
to look more and more like the significant co-factor in AIDS or even more
surprisingly, like the chief viral
culprit itself. Gallo wasn’t lying about the power of HHV-6. According to
Regush, “In November 1993, Robert Gallo’s lab published data gleaned from
autopsies of five people who had died of AIDS, demonstrating an abundance of
HHV-6 infection. Footprints of the virus were found in areas such as the
cerebral cortex, brain stem, cerebellum, spinal cord, tonsil, lymph nodes,
spleen, bone marrow, salivary glands, esophagus, bronchial tree, lung, skeletal
muscle, myocardium, aorta, liver, kidney, adrenal glands, pancreas and
thyroid.” (TVW p.84) If anything, Gallo was underestimating the power of HHV-6 in order
to keep his beloved stolen virus HIV alive. Ironically, one of the reasons
Gallo didn’t do more work on HHV-6 during the 80s was because he was busy
fending off investigations from Congress and journalists like Crewdson (and
pesky newspapers like New York Native.)
One of the early HHV-6 research projects
conducted by the Wisconsin researchers showed that HHV-6 is a major lung
pathogen in AIDS, a fact that tragically had been largely ignored in the
treatment of AIDS. And one of the most important findings on HHV-6 that could
have an impact on everyone’s health was Carrigan and Knox’s determination that
“Direct infection of the [bone] marrow by HHV-6” was possible (TVW p.62)
According to Regush, their research showed “that HHV-6 could infect—and
suppress—bone-marrow cells.” (TVW p.64)
While Konnie Knox was focusing on HHV-6’s
relationship to HIV, her research actually began the shocking process of
pulling the rug out from under HIV itself. Her work with Carrigan showed that
HHV-6 could also seriously dysregulate monocytes and macrophages, making it a
very creative and dangerous pathogen. (TVW p.68) She made HHV-6 the
subject of her doctoral thesis and Regush reports that she wondered if she was
“throwing herself into the hurly burly of Big Science politics.” (TVW p.69)
Actually, she was throwing herself into the hurly burly of Big Abnormal Science
politics.
Knox started sealing the deal for HHV-6’s
role in AIDS when she studied tissue samples of a group of people who had died
of AIDS. According to Regush, “The results of her experiments gave her a jolt:
all 34 tissue samples of lung, lymph node, liver kidney and spleen revealed
that at the time of death there was active HHV-6 infection as opposed to merely
a biological sign that the virus was ‘latent’ (embedded in tissue).” (TVW p.83)
Her experiment also showed that one of the big AIDS showstoppers, CMV, wasn’t
even as important because she found it active in only nine of the 34 tissue
samples. (TVW p.84) Most alarmingly in terms of the way lung issues had
been treated in AIDS was the fact that she found evidence in some of the
patients that HHV-6 as probably responsible for the destruction of the lungs. (TVW
p.84)
Knox, not knowing the real nature of AIDS
politics, told Regush that she was “amazed that so little HHV-6 research had
actually been done on AIDS patients . . . . It didn’t make much sense.” (TVW
p.85) She was another scientist who had found her way into HIV/AIDS Wonderland.
She didn’t have the right compass for the science of opposite world or the
nasty retroviral and heterosexist politics that had laid its foundation.
The profile of HHV-6 as a virus capable of
destroying the immune system was dramatically increased when, according to
Regush, “various labs exposed HHV-6 as” capable of targeting T-8 cells and when
scientists at the National Cancer Institute showed that “HHV-6 infects and
kills natural-killer cells. These are the immune cells that destroy abnormal
cells in the body, particularly those that are infected by viruses. HHV-6 is
the first virus known to be capable of targeting and seriously damaging such a
vital element of the immune system’s antiviral defenses.” (TVW p. 87)
(The fact HHV-6 was capable of killing natural-killer cells should have alerted
the whole scientific community to the link between AIDS and chronic fatigue
syndrome which are both low natural-killer cell syndromes.)
Knox found that HHV-6 “could cause major
damage during the early development of AIDS,” (TVW p.89) and didn’t
need HIV to do it. According to Regush, “Her autopsy-tissue study had
already shown that macrophages were often depleted in the lungs of HIV-infected
AIDS patients,” and she was determined “to know how HHV-6 was capable of
knocking out those cells . . . . Her tests showed that, besides destroying
macrophages, HHV-6 interfered with the normal functioning of the scavenger
cells by blocking the release of a type of oxidant, a substance that cells
normally generate to attack microbes. Knox noted that HIV was not known to be
capable of this specific type of action.” (TVW p.95) She concluded that
HHV-6 had the potential to destroy the macrophages in the lungs without HIV,
a totally sacrilegious idea in the abnormal science of AIDS. According to
Regush, she dared to wonder heretically if HIV was “doing any killing in the
body, or was HHV-6 the lone assassin?” (TVW p.96)
Knox
also found that HHV-6 was capable of causing brain infection or encephalitis
without any signs that HIV was involved. (TVW p.97) And the same no-show
behavior on the part of HIV occurred in the case of the bone marrow in AIDS:
“Knox’s lab studies demonstrated that HHV-6-infected marrow cells—not the HIV
infected ones—blocked the ability of the marrow to produce mature,
differentiated cells.” (TVW p.97) The same scenario was manifest when
she looked at the brain damage in AIDS patients. Regush writes that “When Knox
studied the brains of six people who died of AIDS and found extensive damage in
four to their nerve fiber sheathe she also detected active HHV-6 infection. The
infected cells were only in areas where the damage had occurred and never unhealthy
tissue. The damaged tissue tested negative for signs of HIV, CMV, and other
microbes. Again, their was only HHV-6.” (TVW p.101) Again, according to
Regush, all of this inspired the very dangerous doubt in Carrigan and Knox
about whether “HIV was even necessary for AIDS to occur.” (TVW p.101)
The pièce de résistance of the Knox and
Carrigan research involved the lymph nodes of AIDS patients. According to
Regush, “the development of AIDS has largely been viewed as a progressive
destruction of the networks of lymphocytes and fibers known as the lymphoid
tissue. AIDS scientists, however, have been unable to associate the presence of
HIV in the lymph nodes with any damage to the tissue.” (TVW p.98) While
the conventional wisdom was that HIV was hiding in the lymph nodes and
destroying them, what Knox and Carrigan found turned the conventional wisdom
upside down. In perhaps their most important study they found that “16
lymph-node biopsies from HIV-positive patients all contained cells actively
infected with HHV-6A. Twelve of 16 patients who had been diagnosed with
progressive disease had more dense infection that the four patients who had
been diagnosed as having a stable condition. Knox and Carrigan also found more
dense infection in areas where the lymph nodes were losing lymphocytes than in
areas free of destructive change or where normal tissue in the nodes was
already being replaced by the formation of scar tissue. HHV-6 was the apparent
cause of the destruction of lymphoid tissue that occurred in these HIV positive
people.” (TVW p.114) Regush didn’t mince words about the implications: “HHV-6
was not only at the scene of the crime, but it appears to have committed the
crime as well.” (TVW p.114) Regush describes Knox and Carrigan as wondering if
they had found a “smoking gun” because “there were no convincing studies
demonstrating that HIV could cause similar pathology.”(TVW p.114) They
submitted their research to The Lancet, but as could be expected,
it was not accepted. It was ever thus during "Holocaust II."
In
the world of Kuhnian normal science
Carrigan and Knox would have had their Nobels by now for showing that
HHV-6 was
the real AIDS virus and was even more important than just that as other
research began to connect it to many other diseases that would turn out
to be
part of an HHV-6 spectrum of disorders. But not in the opposite world of
abnormal, totalitarian science that was dominated by the heterosexist
HIV/AIDS paradigm.
HHV-6 threatened the whole epidemiological house of cards the CDC and
the NIH
had presented to the world. Good luck to future HHV-6 scientists all
over the world when they try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
In an interview with Robert Gallo, Regush
asked him about Knox and Carrigan. Regush reported that “Gallo spoke very
generously about what Knox and Carrigan had accomplished, but he also
emphasized that they work in too much obscurity to obtain any funding. ‘They
have clearly shown that HHV-6 is a powerful pathogen,”’ Gallo said. ‘If they
were headliners at a major university, it would make a huge difference.’” (TVW
p.223) How two scientists who were essentially doing a controlled demolition on
the HIV/AIDS paradigm would ever even hope to be allowed positions of
prominence in a scientific world dominated by people like Gallo requires a huge
stretch of the imagination. As Regush concluded, their research “suggests that
HIV may not always be necessary as a companion to HHV-6 when the herpes virus
is destroying tissue. But even suggesting that in writing would raise the
hackles of HIV researchers. In fact, some AIDS scientists compare any
questioning of the HIV hypothesis as it currently stands, to denial of the
Holocaust. With such emotions running strong in AIDS science, why take a chance
of boldly presenting alternative hypotheses?” (TVW p.224) Unfortunately
for the world, Regush reported that Knox and Carrigan didn’t have the stomach
to go more public with their story or to join forces with the AIDS critics and
dissidents: “Knox and Carrigan, while aware of the issues, want no active part
of this often hostile debate.” (TVW p.224)
It was very unfortunate that the brilliant, tireless
John Crewdson never found his way into this shocking HHV-6 part of the AIDS
story. His expose of Gallo and the purloined retrovirus had caught the eye of
the NIH’s investigative body and Congress itself. Had Crewdson found his way to
the Knox and Carrigan laboratory at the University of Wisconsin and done the
same kind of Pit Bull due diligence on the primary role of HHV-6 in AIDS, he
might have helped bring "Holocaust II" to an early end and everything would have
been different for people on the HHV-6 spectrum. And knowing how Gallo had stolen
HIV, Crewdson might have eventually looked into the allegations that he also
stole credit for discovering HHV-6, which is another story. And just as creepy.Previous HHV-6 University Editorials
June 13, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Another Reason James Curran Should be Asked to Resign from Emory University
When historians attempt to deconstruct the sociopathic science that has given us the cover-up of a major HIV/AIDS Ponzi scheme and a massive epidemic of diseases related to HHV-6 (like AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, etc.), they should look closely at a shocking moment back in the 80s when the CDC's James Curran (now a Dean at Emory University) altered AIDS research data.
In Science Fictions, John Crewdson's meticulous documentation of the frauds of Robert Gallo, the scientist who makes Bernie Madoff look like Mother Teresa, that moment is described. Under political pressure to name something the cause of AIDS, James Curran, then a kind of de facto AIDS Czar, basically did something scientists often do when their data doesn't perfectly fit their hypothesis: he altered it.
Gallo, as everyone now knows, stole the so-called exogenous retrovirus that the French scientists at the Pasteur Institute supposedly found in AIDS patients. Gallo and his toadies then created their own fraudulent test from their stolen French retrovirus and then, in Three-Card-Monte fashion, they had an Americanized test for an Americanized retrovirus. When the Centers for Disease Control compared the French and Gallo tests for accuracy, according to Crewdson, the Pasteur Institute's test was slightly better. According to Crewdson, in typical Gallo style, he wanted the CDC to alter the results so as to reflect a better score for Gallo's version of the test. It was just another day in the sociopathic science of AIDS, so of course James Curran agreed to Gallo's outrageous request.
This is just another reason Emory University immediately should ask for the resignation of James Curran, a scientific crook who should not be the Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health. Unless of course the whole purpose of universities is to turn out sociopathic scientists who can compete against other sociopathic scientists in the brave new world of sociopathic science that AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research have created.
June 10, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
It's time for the students and faculty at Emory University to dump James Curran, one of the people who helped craft the homophobic, racist and sociopathic science of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Why is he the Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health?
The Centers for Disease Control’s James
Curran was one of the chief architects of the original AIDS paradigm. Curran
had the perfect medical background for laying down the formative
heterosexually-biased interpretations of the early data that epidemiologists
gathered about the sick gay men who were thought to be the patients zero of a
new supposedly gay epidemic. Jacob Levinsen described Curran in The Story of
AIDS and Black America: “ . . . Jim Curran, the Chief of the CDC’s Venereal
Disease Control Division was tapped to head up a Kaposi’s Sarcoma and
Opportunistic Infection Task Force. Despite being short staffed and
underfunded, the Task Force managed to bring together experts from diverse
fields like virology, cancer, and parasitic diseases in addition to a small
team of epidemiological intelligence officers, who were the agency’s foot
soldiers for disease prevention. . . . He had done quite a bit of work on
hepatitis B with gay men in the 1970s, and he almost immediately suspected that
the had a similar sexually transmitted and blood borne disease on their hands.”
( The Story of AIDS and Black America) And that suspicion paved
the way for one of the biggest conceptual mistakes in the history of
epidemiology.
According to Shilts’s Band, when
Curran saw the first reports on PCP in gay men, he wrote an odd note to one of
his colleagues saying “Hot stuff. Hot stuff.” (ATBPO p.67) Shilts also
described a rather revealing meeting at a subsequent CDC conference at which
Curran was briefed on the sexual behavior of gay men by a gay physician named
David Ostrow. According to Shilts, “Ostrow mused on the years he had spent
getting Curran and Dr. Jaffe [Curran’s CDC colleague] acculturated to the
gritty details of gay sexual habits. . . . Curran had seemed uptight at the
start, Ostrow thought, but he buckled down to his work. Both Jaffe and Curran
were unusual in that federal officials rarely had any kind of contact with
gays, and the few who did rarely wanted to hear detailed gymnastics of gay sex.”
(ATBPO p. 68) They clearly buckled down to their work a little too
well. With their heterosexual sense of noblesse oblige (venereal division),
these high-level clap doctors gone wild, set out to understand what the
mysterious new gay epidemic was all about. Gay men would have run for the hills
or hidden in basements if they had known what would result from the efforts of
these two quick learners about “the gymnastics of gay sex” who were headed
their way. Again, I must point out, if only the CDC had recognized the 1980
DuBois CFS cases as the actual beginning of the AIDS/CFS/autism pandemic of
HHV-6, the two quick learners might never have gotten their mitts on the “hot
stuff’ that was happening in the gay community. They never would have become
experts on the joy of gay sex.
Curran was married and the father of two
children. Three days into what he thought was the sexually transmitted epidemic
he was examining gay patients and, already, according to Shilts, he “was struck
by how identifiably gay all the patients seemed to be (ATBPO p.70) These
gays were apparently really gay, not the plainclothes kind who could
pass. According to Shilts, these gays “hadn’t just peeked out of the closet
yesterday.” (ATBPO p.71) It may have been the perceived intense gayness
of the first patients—the really gay ones—that resulted in Curran’s huge,
consequential mistake of erecting a mostly gay venereal epidemiological
paradigm that would become the virtual thirty year hate crime against all gays,
both the ones who could pass and the ones who were really gay. It wasn’t
just the patients who were strange. The strangeness of the people who had the
disease would inspire a strange new kind of science, epidemiology and virology
that was in essence “homodemiology.” It was destined to make everything worse
for gays and everyone else who had the bad luck of getting caught up in the
CDC’s paradigm. And that would ultimately even include members of the
heterosexual general population.
Shilts tried to capture Curran’s thought
process when he wrote, “It was strange because diseases tended not to strike
people on the basis of social group.” (ATBPO p.71) He added that “To Curran’s recollection . . .
No epidemic had chosen victims on the basis of how they identified themselves
in social terms, much less on the basis of sexual lifestyle. Yet, this
identification and a propensity for venereal diseases were the only things the
patients from three cities—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—appeared to
share. There had to be something within this milieu that was hazardous to these
people’s health. (ATBPO p. 71) Well, there certainly was something about to
enter this “milieu” that would be extremely hazardous to these people’s health,
and that was Curran himself and his merry band of gay-sex-obsessed groupthinking
epidemiologists who were about to hang the albatross of the venereal AIDS
paradigm around the neck of the entire gay community.
When Shilts discussed Curran confronting
“sociological issues” that were involved in the mysterious illness, it escaped
Shilts that Curran and his associates were themselves sociological (and
political) issues as they plopped themselves in the middle of the gay
community (at a time when the community was most vulnerable and nearly
hysterical) with all of their own peculiar heterosexual and heterosexist
baggage. According to Shilts, “About a dozen staffers from all the disciplines
potentially involved with the diseases volunteered for the working group. They
included specialists in immunology, venereology, virology, cancer epidemiology,
toxicology and sociology. Because the outbreak might be linked to the Gay Bowel
Syndrome, parasitologists were called in. (ATBPO p. 71) The fact that
any illness was labeled “Gay” should probably have been a red flag for the kind
of heterosexist thinking that would soon be rolling across the gay community
like a tsunami.
Once the guiding gay-obsessed premise (an
example of a Arendtian “image“) was set, it was a matter of gay epidemiological
garbage in and gay epidemiological garbage out. Questions with mistaken
premises were about to lead the researchers and their medical victims down a
deadly primrose path. Shilts summed up the basic direction of the inquiry:
“Researchers also sought to determine whether the disease was indeed
geographically isolated in the three gay urban centers. Did the detection of
cases in the three centers make the patients appear to be only fast-lane gays
because gay life tended toward the fast track in those cities? Was the disease
all over gay America but in such low numbers that it had not been detected?” (ATBPO
p. 81) Now we know, of course that there was indeed something else out
there, but not just “all over gay America.” Something wasn’t playing by the
rules of the CDC’s gay-obsessed epidemiology. Something was making even the
heterosexual DuBois Atlanta cases of 1980 ill, and those non-fast-lane, non-gay
cases represented what was going on all over straight general population
America in a whole spectrum of ways. Biased epidemiological premises
have consequences.
There is something almost laughable about
the notion of Curran’s CDC working group going out into the gay world and
asking themselves “What new element might have sparked this catastrophe.” (ATBPO
p.82) One brand new element in the gay community that actually was the most
significant spark for the coming catastrophe that was about to unfold was the
CDC’s own incompetence and heterosexist epidemiology.
Given the way AIDS would evolve into the
kind of abnormal science that doesn’t even require the usual rules of evidence,
common sense and logic associated with real science, it is interesting that
Curran did apply those old-fashioned rules early on when they were needed to
build the venereal AIDS paradigm. Shilts wrote, “To prove an infectious
disease, Curran knew, one had to establish Koch’s postulate. According to this
century-old paradigm, you must take an infectious agent from one animal, put it
into another, who becomes ill, and then take the infectious agent from the
second and inject it into still a third subject, who becomes ill with the same
disease.” (ATBPO p.105) Curran certainly tried to apply some semblance
of the paradigm—or the logic of it anyway—when, by finding people who had AIDS
often had slept with people who also had the disorder, he saw the links as a
kind of epidemiological proof of transmission even though they weren’t strictly
speaking the fulfillment of the animal experimentation inherent in Koch’s
postulate. At least Curran knew the basic rules of science. Unfortunately these
very same rules would subsequently be thrown out the window to maintain the belief
that the retrovirus eventually linked to AIDS was the one true cause of AIDS.
Had those Koch’s postulates been adhered to faithfully throughout the epidemic
we might be calling HHV-6 the virus of acquired immunodeficiency today and
there might have been no Holocaust II to write about.
The CDC, in an evolving and de facto
manner, conducted something that could be called “the Atlanta AIDS/CFS/autism
public relations experiment” at the expense of everyone‘s health. What I mean
by that coinage is a kind of postmodern public health political experiment in
which rather than truly controlling an epidemic by being truthful and effective
and scientific, the public health institutions of the CDC and the NIH tried to
control and manipulate everything the public knew about the epidemic of
AIDS/CFS/autism. It may have been quasi-innocent and simply the product of
unrecognized sexual bias and old-fashioned self-deception when it started, but
it evolved into something far more sinister and destructive. In the early days
of AIDS, as described by Shilts, Curran was seemingly the embodiment of
good-egg innocence when it came to the realization that it would be necessary
for him to figure out some way to get the media’s attention in order to
increase public pressure for providing the funding the CDC needed for AIDS
research. Unfortunately, the manipulation of the media by scientists or public
health officials can—and did—have grave consequences for scientific, medical
and epidemiological truth. In AIDS it became a kind of cancer.
In 1982 Curran appeared before a group of
gay physicians in New York and told them “It’s likely we’ll be working on this
most of our lives.” (ATBPO p. 134) Historians one day will want to probe
deeply into whether he knew anything that everyone else didn’t know at that
point. At the very least, it was as though he was an inadvertent prophet. He
and his colleagues were indeed in the process of screwing things up for many
generations to come. Curran’s mistakes assured that his grandchildren’s grandchildren
will probably still be working on this problem. If they’re not autistic.
Shilts, in another moment of ironic
journalistic naiveté, wrote this about Curran: “As a federal employee Curran
had a thin line to walk between honesty and loyalty” (ATBPO p. 144) when
he was describing the AIDS situation to Congress. Shilts notes that Curran
could not ask Congress for money when he testified, “but he could nudge facts
toward logical conclusions.” (ATBPO p. 144) The nudging of facts would
become an art form at the CDC over the next three decades and sometimes the
facts that had to be nudged were so large they virtually had to be moved with
bulldozers and the conclusions they were nudged towards were always more
political than logical. One could almost faint from the irony of Curran telling
Congress in 1982 (two years after those first Atlanta DuBois cases of immune
dysfunction, “The epidemic may extend much further than currently described and
may include other cancers as well as thousands of persons with immune defects.”
(ATBPO p. 144) Had he or his colleagues at the CDC recognized the DuBois
1980 Atlanta cases as the canaries in the HHV-6 mine, he would have been
talking about millions (if not billions) of cases and he would not have had to
play games with words to get Congress and the White House to do the right thing
financially. One disturbing aspect of his manner of thinking was reflected in
how Shilts summed up his testimony: “With death rates soaring to 75 percent
among people diagnosed with GRID for two years, the specter of 100 percent
fatality from the syndrome loomed ahead, he added.” (ATBPO p.144) It
would be nearly impossible to dial back on the distorted image of the epidemic
he was presenting and frankly, dialing back on anything was something that the
CDC (like the NIH) would turn out to be constitutionally unable to do. That, as
we have said, is another sign that we are living in a period of totalitarian
abnormal science.
Curran’s peculiar attitude towards gays
surfaced revealingly again when Shilts described his refusal to meet Gaetan
Dugas, the unfortunate gay man who would be eternally scapegoated in the echo
chambers of the media as the “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic because he had
supposedly slept with a number of the original AIDS cases: “Jim Curran passed
up the opportunity to meet Gaetan, the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary.
Curran had heard about the flamboyant [flight] attendant and frankly found
every story about his sexual braggadocio to be offensive. Stereotypical gays
irritated Curran in much the same way that he was uncomfortable watching Amos
n’ Andy movies.” (ATBPO p.158) One doesn’t know quite where to begin on
this one, except to note that Curran would be able to use his clap-doctor and
gay-obsessed epidemiology to act on his feelings and beliefs about both
stereotypical and non-stereotypical gays, and every other kind of gay in
between. The way that Shilts described Gaetan Dugas should have been a warning
to the whole gay community of what kind of medical and social treatment was in
store for them: “Gaetan Dugas later complained to friends that the CDC had
treated him like a laboratory rat during his stay in Atlanta, with little
groups of doctors going in and out of his hospital room. He’d had his skin
cancer for two years now, he said, and he was sick of being a guinea pig for
doctors who didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing.” (ATBPO
p.158) Of course when those doctors eventually thought they had figured
out what they were doing—that was precisely when they really didn’t really have
a clue about what they were doing. The Holocaust II era of the gay guinea pig
had only just begun. The CDC’s epidemiology would create a whole new gay
stereotype. Curran’s difficulty in getting researchers to come into the field
was the fallout of the gay and sexual way the frightening disease had been
framed for the public—something that might never have happened if the DuBois
1980 wholesome heterosexual Atlanta cases had been the epidemiological and
virological template for the epidemic rather than the kind of Amos n’ Andy gay
people that made Curran so jiggy with embarrassment that he wouldn’t even meet
with them.
It’s amazing how many people seem to have
been assigned credit (by different sources) for bringing (dragging?) Robert
Gallo into AIDS research. Shilts has Curran on that Washington-slept-here list
too, noting that he said to Gallo when he was receiving an award at a medical
conference in 1982, “You’ve won one award. You should come back when you win
another award for working on AIDS.” (ATBPO p. 201) Bringing Gallo into
the field was like putting a pair of retrovirus-obsessed eyeglasses over a pair
of gay VD-obsessed eyeglasses and expecting to see the epidemic for what it
was. Otherwise known as the blind recruiting the blind.
One of the more grimly amusing passages in
Shilts’s book concerns Curran’s thought about the fears in the gay community
that AIDS would result in gays being put into concentration camps: “Curran
thought the train of thought was curious. After all, nobody had suggested or
even hinted that gays should be in any way quarantined for AIDS. The right-wing
loonies who might propose such a ‘final solution’ were not paying enough
attention to the disease to construct the Dachau scenario. Still, it was
virtually an article of faith among homosexuals that they should end up in
concentration camps.” (ATBPO p. 228) Silly gays. Frankly, who needed
concentration camps or “the Dachau scenario” when you had CDC epidemiology. CDC
epidemiology saved the country a load of money on barbed wire. And Holocaust I,
where gays actually were made to wear pink triangles in real concentration
camps—that was so 1940s.
One of the most unfortunate and tragically
wrongheaded things about Curran is that, according to Shilts, he held his
colleague Donald Francis “in awe, given Francis’s international reputation for
smallpox control.” (ATBPO p.262) As one looks back at the circle jerk
that also got Holocaust I going, one might hypothesize that all holocausts
begin in passionate mutual admirations societies.
Something began to surface during James
Curran’s reign over AIDS at the CDC that bears close scrutiny by any
enterprising historian interested in identifying the institutional roots of
Holocaust II. In 1983, when Susan Steinmetz, an aide to Congressman Ted Weiss,
visited the CDC in an oversight capacity, she was prevented from seeing files
she automatically should have been able to audit as a representative of a
Congressional Committee that had oversight responsibilities on health and the
environment. According to Shilts, she was told by the then CDC Director William
Foege, “she would not have access to any CDC files, and she could not talk to
any CDC researchers without having management personnel in the room to monitor
the conversations. The agency also needed a written, detailed list of specific
documents and files Steinmetz wanted to see.” (ATBPO p.292) Shilts
reported that “Steinmetz was flabbergasted. What did they think oversight
committees did? Their work routinely involved poring through government files
to determine the truth of what the high-muck-a-mucks denied, and then privately
talking to employees who, without the prying eyes of their bosses, could tell
the truth. This was understood, she thought.” (ATBPO p.292) What she
didn’t realize was that the CDC’s de facto little counterrevolution against
science and the ideal of transparency in democratic processes had begun before
her unassuming eyes and this would become business as usual at the clandestine
CDC for the next three decades. The shroud of secrecy (de rigueur in all
abnormal science) that would enable Holocaust II and the cover-up of the CFS,
autism and Morgellons epidemics was descending on the CDC in Atlanta.
While Steinmetz was just trying to find
memos that would contradict the CDC’s public posture that it had enough money
to research the emerging epidemic of AIDS, without realizing it, she had
stumbled onto the fact that the CDC had begun acting more like a government
intelligence agency with vital national secrets—possibly even embarrassing
ones—to keep, than a public health organization that was committed to truthful
science and was accountable to the American people. In essence the CDC was
showing that it wasn’t above any of the legerdemain that any other part of the
government was capable of. It was showing us that it was very much cut from the
same cloth as the government gremlins that gave us Watergate and Vietnam.
Steinmetz wanted to see files that
pertained to budgets and planning, but she was bizarrely told that she couldn’t
see the files because they had patients names in them and that violated patient
confidentiality. It strained credulity to argue that patients names were involved
in organization budgets and planning. and in retrospect, it was a very lame
excuse. This wouldn’t be the first time in Holocaust II that a dishonest
explanation with a fake concern and compassion for patients’ welfare would be
used by those in authority to stonewall the very people who were actually
trying to do something about the welfare of patients. The CDC was
already in a paranoid circle-the-wagons mode that characterizes abnormal and
totalitarian science. According to Shilts, “The CDC personnel, who struck
Steinmetz as peculiarly contentious, wanted to conduct their own review of the
files before letting Steinmetz see them . . .” (ATBPO p. 292) And “as
another demand, the CDC insisted that before any interviews with CDC staff took
place, the agency would screen questions that Susan Steinmetz put to
scientists.” (ATBPO p.292) On the eve of the HHV-6 catastrophe and
Holocaust II, government science was going into the lockdown of abnormal
science. Shilts wrote, “This is getting pretty strange, Steinmetz thought.” (ATBPO
p.292) Strangeness was but a puppy at that point.
This new emerging opposite world of public
health and scientific duplicity and defensiveness didn’t make sense to
Steinmetz’s colleagues back in D.C.: “On the phone, other oversight committee
staffers in Washington confided that they had never heard of an agency so
recalcitrant to Congress . . .” (ATBPO p.292) It got even worse for
Steinmetz at the CDC in Atlanta when, on the second day of her oversight visit,
she was told by the CDC manager who was handling her visit that her “presence
would no longer be permitted in the CDC building and that no agency personnel
would be allowed to speak to her.” (ATBPO p. 293) The stonewalling and
the lockdown were not confined to the CDC in Atlanta. Shilts reported that
Steinmetz also faced new obstacles in her path when “The National Cancer
Institute officials issued a memo demanding that all interviews with
researchers be monitored by the agency’s congressional liaison. At first the
National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease was cooperative, but
then, in an apparent NIH-wide clampdown, information became difficult to
excavate there as well.” (ATBPO p.293) Science and public health in
America were about to play the same kinds of political games that are played in
totalitarian countries. Public health information was about to be totally
controlled by the government.
Curran can himself take a great deal of
personal credit for the HIV mistake. Shilts writes that “During the summer of
1983, Dr. James Curran had grown fond of citing the ‘Willie Sutton Law’ as
evidence that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus. The notorious bank bandit Willie
Sutton was asked once why he robbed banks, to which he replied, “Because that’s
where the money is.” Curran, according to Shilts, would ask “’Where should we
[at the CDC] put our money? . . . ‘Where would Willie Sutton go? He would go
with retroviruses, I think right now.’” (ATBPO p. 331) There is a
revealing amount of cockiness and arrogance in Curran that remind one that
pride goeth before a fall. But one Willie Suttonish thing was certainly true:
retroviruses turned out to be exactly where the big money was for a number of
dishonest and incompetent retrovirologists
It is fascinating to see Shilts catching
Curran red-handed as he lies about the inadequate funding for AIDS. Publicly
Curran would say “we have everything we need,” (ARBPO p.331) but Shilts
was able to use the Freedom of Information Act to locate documents that
“revealed that things were not so rosy at the CDC, and Curran knew it. Even
while he reassured gay doctors in San Francisco, he was writing memos to his
superiors begging for more money.” (ATBPO p. 331) For anymore cognizant
of the overwhelming mendacity that characterized just about everything
concerning Holocaust II, it is especially disturbing to read Shilts’s account
of Curran’s excuse: “‘It’s hard to explain to people outside the system,’ he
said. ‘It’s two different things to work within the system for a goal and
talking to the people outside the system for that goal,’ he said.” (ATBPO
p. 332) Curran was basically making the anti-transparency excuses people inside
of the government always make for talking out of both sides of their mouths.
It’s too bad Shilts didn’t consider the possibility that this character trait
was also reflected in the basic science and epidemiology of AIDS that was being
churned out by the CDC. It would turn out over the next few decades that indeed
government science spoke out of both sides of its mouth.
Curran got the venereal HIV/AIDS paradigm
he and his colleagues wanted, the one that could be expected to materialize
given his background. It wasn’t surprising then, that he said in 1984,
according to Shilts, “Gay men need to know that if they’re going to have
promiscuous sex, they’ll have the life expectancies of people in the developing
world.” (ATBPO p.416) Actually, given the crazy treatments some gay men
were going to be medically assaulted with, he was a true visionary.
As could be predicted, according to
Shilts, “Jim Curran also viewed testing as essential to any long term strategy
in fighting AIDS.” And so the Pink Triangle medical apartheid agenda of testing
and stigmatizing gays as HIV positive (or as an HIV risk group) began in earnest.
And the gay community got specially tailored forms of communication from
Curran. According to Shilts, “Curran was always cautious when he talked to
newspaper reporters, fearful that his observations on the future of the AIDS
epidemic might be fashioned into the stuff of sensational headlines, but he
felt no inhibition with the gay community. Instead he felt his mission was to
constantly stress the gravity of the unfolding epidemic.” (ATBPO p.483)
Of course, while he was giving the gay community the tough love, behind his
epidemiological back was the looming HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe, a situation
which was exponentially worse than anything his little team of clap doctors and
pseudo-epidemiologists could possibly have imagined. Given that it was the CDC’s
AIDS paradigm that in essence scapegoated the gay community for what would turn
out to be everyone’s HHV-6 problem, it is the epitome of irony that according
to Shilts, Curran thought that “the question was not if there would be a
backlash against gays, but when. It might come soon. ‘You should get ready for
it,’ he said.” (ATBPO p.484) How does one prepare for a backlash against
gays? Buy extra canned goods? Bake an extra quiche? It was certainly nice of
him to give the gay community a heads up, but in truth, the pseudoscience, the
incompetent fact-gathering implicit in ignoring the DuBois 1980 Atlanta cases,
and the homodemiology of the CDC, constituted a kind of epidemiological backlash before the
backlash. Curran and his team needed only look in the mirror to see the kind of
anti-gay values that could do far more mischief to the gay community than an
army of right wing loons.
Journalist David Black caught some of the
underlying psychological problems at the CDC in his book The Plague Years.
He wrote, “In fact the CDC, like many physicians and scientists, seemed
embarrassed by the gayness of the disease.” (TPY p.57) We now know only
too well in retrospect is that the best science and epidemiology can not be
conducted in an atmosphere of gay-sex-related embarrassment. Black quoted one
CDC researcher as saying to a visiting gay activist, “This never would have
happened if you guys had gotten married.” (TPY p.57) When the activist
asked if the researcher meant to each other, the researcher said, “To women.” (TPY
p.58) The CDC researchers conducted their epidemiology and science in an
awkward atmosphere of antipathy to gays, surely not a fertile field for
objectivity. According to Black, when he asked Curran to explain exactly what
he means by “‘intimate contact’ [between men] the phrase researchers kept using
to describe the conditions under which the syndrome spread, he seemed
uncomfortable, squeamish. He stammered and glanced anxiously around the room.”
(TPY p.58) If some of Jim Curran’s best friends were gay, they had
clearly done very little to make him comfortable with their sex lives. One
suspects that most of Jim Curran’s best friends were not gay.
One absolutely show-stopping moment in
Black’s rich little book is a criticism that was leveled at Curran: “He started
making up these ‘facts’ from the data as he interpreted it,’ said one unnamed
gay critic of Curran.” Who was that astute gay critic? Please stand up now,
take your bow.
June 9, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
It's time to reconsider the Jane Teas African Swine Fever Virus AIDS Hypothesis
McInnis and Gregg suspect iridovirus — a virus that suppresses the immune system — could be infecting honeybees and keeping them from returning to their colonies. The virus, McInnis said, may have an “AIDS-like effect” on the bees, making them more susceptible to common diseases that wouldn’t normally be fatal to them.“I think this could be earth-shattering information if we’re right. Everybody depends on honeybees to help grow the food that we eat,” said Gregg, who while working at Plum Island treated African swine fever in pigs — a virus similar to the one he’s investigating with McInnis. “Most other people trying to solve this problem are looking at pesticide use. There are very few others who are investigating the possible spread of a virus." (Newsday, June 7, 2016)
Now that African Swine Fever is back in the news in the context of an AIDS epidemic in bees that is causing colony collapse disorder, it's time to reconsider the hypothesis of Jane Teas that African Swine Fever is the real cause of AIDS. What is the relationship of African Swine Fever to HHV-6 and HHV-8? Is African Swine Fever really the trigger for both AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Are American pigs now infected with some new strains of African Swine Fever Virus? There are a number of articles on Jane Teas and her colleague John Beldekas available on the internet. Here is one at Spin Magazine. And here is an AP story that appeared in The New York Times.
June 4, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Before Ron Davis, Ian Lipkin and Maureen Hanson start doing new rounds of CFS hocus-pocus in their laboratories, we suggest they test what could be called the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis.
The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis:
For over three decades, the Centers for Disease Control has been covering up the relationship between so-called AIDS and so-called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by a massive deception and self-deception involving nosology, epidemiology, HIV and HHV/6/7/8 fraud.
Capiche?
(Please read and reread this metahypothesis very, very carefully and make sure you thoroughly understand it before any research commences. Ponder its implications before you even start to form your own hypotheses.)
Good luck testing the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis! If you ignore it may the best CFS hocus-pocus win!
June 1, 2016 HHV-6 Editorial
Ron Davis, CFS Reinvent-the-Wheelism and CFS Virgin Birtherism
Geneticist Ron Davis, who has a son suffering terribly with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is getting involved with CFS research. According to the End ME.CFS Project, "Under the guidance of world-renowned geneticist Ronald W. Davis, PhD., we have brought in top experts in a variety of fields for a bold and new collaborative research project. Our ultimate goal is unlocking the mystery of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and end the suffering caused by the disease. The project’s first study is the ME/CFS Severely Ill-Big DATA Study that is designed to find a clinically useful diagnostic biomarker."
Cool, right? Open the champagne, right? World-renowned? Whoopty do!
Not so fast.
We fear all this smells of "CFS Reinventing-the-Wheelism" and "CFS Virgin Birtherism."
Anyone who comes to CFS and starts throwing around the word "mystery" has a serious ethical problem. Scientists are not supposed to ignore previous work on something they are researching. When they do that in the realm of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you pretty much know you are in the presence of "CFS Reinventing-the-Wheelism." You also know you are in the presence of the kind of naive folks who think that science is not political and government scientists never lie about anything. Poor things. Sad.
There are hundreds of studies about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that make this illness very unmysterious. Painfully so.
Read the work of Hillary Johnson and Neenyah Ostrom and ten years of reporting on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in New York Native.
To call it mysterious is to promote a very Big Lie.
All of the science that has been published on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is bullshit? Says who? A renowned geneticist? One who wears his underpants on the outside of his pants and a cape?
What is mysterious is the cockamamie act of CFS scientists ignoring what has preceded them.What is mysterious is CFS scientists ignoring all the damage HHV-6 is doing to the bodies of CFS patients.
Over the years a number of scientific narcissists (Hello Ian Lipkin!) have entered the field who have basically implied that nobody should worry because now a real rootin'-tootin' scientist has arrived. These narcissists generally are anti-history and anti-intellectual and have have not bothered to do their homework, But then scientists are not paid to read deeply or widely, think or seriously challenge authority. (Read Betrayers of the Truth if you have any doubt about that).
Does Ron Davis have a clue about the sociopathic science that forms the foundation of the CFS and AIDS cover-up? We doubt it. We suspect that his illustrious colleagues are probably clueless, too. A new variation of an old-boy network is not the antidote to an ongoing era of sociopathic science.
One of the nonmysteries about CFS is that it is transmissible. Families come down with it. Orchestras, classes, people who have slept with the same woman who was suffering from CFS. (Go to the index in Johnson's Osler's Web and check out "transmission" in the index.)
To not talk about transmission is to go down the road of "CFS Virgin Birtherism," a belief that somehow, out of nowhere, one suddenly comes down with CFS, a disease that should be called AIDS Lite or AIDS Spectrum Disease, but never is by the politically correct CFS crowd that is trying to control the activist narrative. (They would rather die than talk about the intertwined relationship of CFS and AIDS. Unfortunately, many have.)
To talk about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and AIDS in the same breath results in the kind of exile that Judy Mikovits has experienced. First Mikovits was screwed by the scientific establishment for basically finding AIDS-like retroviral activity in CFS and now she is being screwed by the CFS community for referring to CFS as "Non-HIV AIDS." In a world of sociopathic science she just can win for losing.
The big questions directed at Ron Davis should be "Does your son possibly have a virus or some other agent that he is capable of spreading to you and the rest of your family? Are you already infected and showing the effects of that agent in different ways? Can people who come in close contact with your son develop the disease? Can they then infect other people? Has that agent been spreading for over three decades and are millions of people now on the CFS Spectrum or more appropriately, the AIDS Spectrum? Is your son just one of many millions of infected people who are victims of a pandemic that has been ignored at best and covered up at worst? Are scientists emphasizing genetics actually aiding and abetting a public health cover-up of a contagious illness capable of destroying the immune system?"
If Davis thinks that such questions don't really matter and we just need a genetics genius like him and a team of big names (all male) to ride in on white horses and reinvent the CFS wheel, then we suggest that he could be of more use running around the world with his underpants on the outside of his clothes (he is pictured below). Nothing gets the world's attention more than a world-renowned geneticist wearing his underwear outside of his pants. If his science is as good as his public relations strategies, all CFS patients should make sure their wills are in order.
A renowned geneticist who will save the world.
May 25, 2016 HHV-6 Editorial
The Millions Missing campaign utilizing shoes is perhaps the most effective effort we have yet seen on behalf of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Congratulations to everyone behind it. You're hitting it out of the park.
We have a suggestion.
Everyone involved should now send one of their shoes to Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health (9000 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20892). The other shoe should be sent to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (3012 43rd St NW, Washington, DC 20016).
We have little doubt that every major media outlet in the country would eventually cover this story.
May 24, HHV-6 Editorial
How Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Threatens to Expose AIDS Czar Fauci and the CDC's Perfect Scientific Crime
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers are constantly puzzled by the remorselessly contemptuous manner in which they are treated by AIDS Czar Anthony Fauci and government scientists at the CDC. Hillary Johnson did a wonderful job of capturing that contempt in her masterpiece Osler's Web.
The treatment has been uncanny and never seems to really change. The patients cry, "Why, why, why, why?" To many it makes no sense. Many of the sufferers are white middle class heterosexuals are used to being treated with a modicum of respect from their government and its bureaucrats. They feel a certain amount of white heterosexual privilege and just can't fathom why they are being so ruthlessly disrespected and "disappeared."
The patients don't realize that they are being gaslighted by a grotesque empire of sociopathic science. The patients are treated like they are whiny nuts. When they complain they are almost driven crazy by sadistically being told that they are crazy.
It's a shame that CFS community doesn't understand what is going on. Patients operate from a basis of naive good faith, totally unaware that they are petitioning a system full of all the bad faith and consciencelessness that is characteristic of sociopaths and sociopathic science.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients do not understand that they are potentially ruining and exposing a perfect sociopathic scientific crime. Sociopaths hate when they are recognized for what they are and the sociopaths who are in charge of AIDS are no different from classic sociopaths.
Wikipedia defines a perfect crime: "Perfect crime is a colloquial term used in law and fiction (especially crime fiction) to characterize crimes that are undetected, unattributed to a perpetrator, or else unsolved as a kind of technical achievement on the part of the perpetrator. In certain contexts, the concept of perfect crime is limited to just undetected crimes; if an event is ever identified as a crime, some investigators say it cannot be called 'perfect.'"
By not recognizing exactly what Fauci and the CDC are doing, CFS patients help keep a perfect crime "perfect."
Serious research into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from day one has always pointed to a relationship between Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and AIDS. Anyone who disputes that is either seriously uninformed or lying to themselves. Newbies should start their research with the 1990 paper by Nancy Klimas in which she describes as "a form of acquired immunodeficiency." Hello!
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ruins the perfect crime of systemic AIDS fraud.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to expose the perfect crime of AIDS epidemiological fraud.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to show that AIDS Czar Anthony Fauci has been in charge of one of the most perfect scientific crimes in the history of mankind.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to expose the massive retroviral fraud that has been used to cover up what HHV-6 is and what it does. (This goes for HHV-7 and HHV-8 too.)
When Elaine DeFrieitas detected some retroviral activity in CFS and tried valiantly to sort it out, she came too close to exposing the fraud of HIV and the cover-up of HHV-6 and HERV-K18. She had to be derailed.
The same thing happened to Judy Mikovits when she detected retroviral activity in CFS and got too close to exposing the perfect scientific crime of HIV fraud and the cover-up of HHV-6 and HERV-K18. Mikovits now sadly and pathetically travels around the country doing talk shows and giving interviews in which she describes CFS as "Non-HIV AIDS." CFS patients don't like to talk about her as much as they once did because "Non-HIV AIDS" is just a little too much truth for their tastes. And the AIDS establishment must also be terrified of that expression because it is yet another threat to the perfect scientific crimes that AIDS pseudoscience and pseudo-epidmiology are.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients who treat AIDS as a separate epidemic have basically become accessories to AIDS Czar Fauci and the CDC's perfect scientific crime. The inconvenient truth is that they have become Fauci's useful idiots and his enablers.
Until CFS patients can accept the relationship between CFS and AIDS, the sociopathic science of Fauci and the CDC will continue to roll over them with impunity.
May 21, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Is Ian Lipkin Some Kind of Idiot?
“ME/CFS is a global problem that we need to address – it robs people
of the most productive years of their lives, it causes immunological
dysfunction, profound fatigue, cognitive dysfunction. It really
destroys peoples’ lives. It is underappreciated, it is underfunded,
and with your support we hope to find solutions to this crippling
problem”. ~Dr. Ian Lipkin
If Ian Lipkin doesn't see Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as part of the AIDS epidemic and if he doesn't examine the role of HHV-6 in CFS as well as the endogenous superantigen retrovirus HERV-K18 it transactivates, then he is just playing games with people's lives and money. At best he is an enabler of the socipathic science that has characterized CFS/AIDS research for over three decades. At worst he is just another CFS/AIDS charlatan and rip-off artist.
Lipkin needs the members of the CFS community to play his patsies. Don't oblige him.
May 16, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Dating while Disabled (Uhhhh, with a Contagious Disease)????
Litsa Dremousis has written a an op-ed piece in The Washington Post that raises questions she seems to not even be aware of. The title of the piece, "Dating while disabled: From Day One with someone new, I feel vulnerable" immediately caught our attention.
Ms. Dremousis writes about breaking up with an man who had been her fiance "until two weeks ago." She notes, "when you’re disabled, you feel indebted every day, making dating that much harder than it is for the average person." As we read that sentence we thought, well, yes, especially since you have a contagious illness, Ms. Dremousis. She outlines some of the challenges: "And no matter how fiercely autonomous and intelligent you are, you’re starting each relationship as the one who needs help doing otherwise simple tasks, such as walking downstairs or driving. Even with healthy self-esteem, it’s hard not to feel intensively vulnerable."
We of course wondered about the challenges of the uninfected person without CFS who might end up dating her, someone who might be exposed to a contagious illness that seems to effect every system in the body. Oh, but that's their problem.
Ms. Desmousis is not slacker when it comes to describing CFS. She's not from the "too tired to get out of bed school" of CFS self-description. She writes, " . . . struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome makes me often feel as if I have a powerful flu. I deal with constant temperature fluctuations; extreme sensitivity to light and sound; dangerously low blood pressure; and fatigue so powerful it feels like a Buick is sitting on my chest." And she adds, "I’m unable to stay upright more than a few hours on a good day; for the past several years, I have needed to be wheeled through airports (if you think air travel is a nightmare, try doing it in a wheelchair). And when I’m on a plane or bus, I have to wear a surgical mask because my immune system is so compromised. Twice in recent years, someone else’s cold became my pneumonia."
She writes, "For 24 years I’ve had ME/CFS (formerly known as “chronic fatigue syndrome”), a disabling neuro-immune illness similar in many ways to multiple sclerosis" Imagine if she had written, "For 24 years I’ve had ME/CFS (formerly known as “chronic fatigue syndrome”), a contagious disabling neuro-immune illness similar in many ways to multiple sclerosis and AIDS. "If she had she would have been exiled from the CFS community and The Washington Post would probably not have published the piece in the first place.
But the real bombshell in the piece was what she wrote about Trent, her fiance: "Five days after Trent asked me to marry him, a routine check-up unearthed a brain tumor behind his left ear. A longtime professor, Trent is deeply intelligent and tenacious. We were in love and determined to remain upbeat about his prospects. I took care of him over six months, as we assembled his surgical team, spent a week in the hospital as he underwent and recovered from the successful but complicated brain surgery, and then as he went through months of physical therapy. I was his main source of emotional support, but it took a huge toll on my health."
While we sympathize with Ms Dremousis and Trent, what really turned our head was the possibility that the two of them might have shared something more than their love, namely a virus called . . . drum roll . . . HHV-6. For any newbies visiting HHV-6 University, we have done numerous items on the relationship between HHV-6 and cancer. HHV-6 is very oncogenic. Did we say very?
Did it never dawn on Ms. Dremousis that Trent's brain cancer and her CFS could be virologically related? Is she unread on the subject of CFS. No book in her library by Hillary Johnson or Neenyah Ostrom? No awareness of the New York Native? Really? Ms. Dremousis seems to be some kind of intellectual. She writes, "I give literary readings several times a year and am diligently working on the manuscript for my second book." We suspect she has a library card or access to Amazon.com. What gives?
It is uncanny that Ms. Dremousis notes, "Our relationship became a constant cycle of doctor appointments and medical tests — and the stress eroded the joy we once found in each other. And because everyone asks: Yes, of course we had sex. All the time. Even at my sickest, I’ve been sexually active. I’m disabled, not dead." For anyone familiar to HHV-6, that could be called "sex in an HHV-6 cluster." Otherwise known as the new normal in sex these days, thanks to our NIH and CDC.
The irony burns like Hiroshima when she write, "I remain optimistic. Each relationship I’m in is affected by my health. For instance: Am I strong enough to go to the movies tonight, or should we stay in and watch Netflix? Can we eat breakfast with the curtains open, or are my eyes too light-sensitive this morning? For a relationship to be successful, the person I’m with has to be empathetic and understand that some things are beyond my physical control. Yet so many of these relationships have profoundly enriched my life. I’d be foolish to waste the rest of my life convinced that I won’t find love."
Oh yes, the person she finds had better be empathetic and even downright forgiving because the big unspoken and unmentionable problem is that when she finds love, the person she gets involved with may have found a woman who is infected with a contagious virus that not only can cause Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and cancer but so many other illnesses that this website, which is devoted to reporting on them, now has over 1725 posts (as of this day).
May 15, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
If members of the so-called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community really want to get to the bottom of their epidemic (and sometimes we doubt that is true), they should stop making sob sister documentaries and prancing around with their underwear outside of their clothes. One more boo-hoo story about how awful CFS is will just make the world yawn and say, "Get in line, buddy. We all have problems." The misguided underwear-on-the-outside campaign will only make the patients look silly, but we won't get into that here.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is first and foremost a political matter. Untrustworthy scientists in power are controlling and masking what the public knows about CFS. Anyone who has watched the CFS narrative unfold, in all of its sociopathic glory, knows that what is being hidden from public consciousness is its obvious contagiousness and the intertwined relationship between CFS, AIDS and HHV-6. For more on that we suggest you look at some of the hundreds of posts on HHV-6 University.
Stop whining. Stop being silly. Get political. Face facts. Get real.
If the contagious nature of their illness and the relationship between CFS, AIDS and HHV-6 are too much truth for CFS patients, then Houston, we have a real problem. If CFS patients, researchers and activists can't handle the truth, they're destined to live out the rest of their days in a cockamamie wild goose chase full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.