AIDS: A SECOND OPINION
 by Gary Null

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, June 2000

"By the end of the century, we will know everything there is to know about HIV and nothing about AIDS." --Robert Root-Bernstein

Note: The information on this website is not a substitute for
diagnosis and treatment by a qualified, licensed professional.

In 1984, two new acronyms were indelibly printed on everybody’s minds after the world was told that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was responsible for the Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The belief has remained prevalent up until today with more than 100,000 scientific researchers investigating HIV for the last 15 years and publishing over 200,000 articles in science and medical journals on its relationship to AIDS. The media has kept us updated us on their latest findings, while doctors and educators have continually warned us that our very lives may depend upon "safe sex", since the transmission of this infectious virus is certain to cause AIDS.

What most of us fail to realize is that not everyone accepts the mainstream point of view. A growing number of critics, including leading virologists and Nobel Prize winning scientists, doctors, journalists, and other academicians, question HIV’s relationship to the diseases we term AIDS. Some argue that HIV has never been isolated; therefore, we have no proof of its existence. Others believe that HIV does exist, but that it can’t possibly be doing everything that it is purported to do as it is merely one of 3,000 retroviruses, none of which have ever been proven harmful. What these dissenters have in common is a belief in the need to re-evaluate the HIV = AIDS hypothesis.

 

Arguments Against the Existence of HIV

Some virologists now claim that the microbe accused of causing AIDS has never been isolated and cultured. In other words, it has never been shown to exist. Recent reports from an Australian scientific team, E. Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al have brought this idea to light. In a recent journal Papadopulos reports, "...all the evidence comes from electron micrographs of whole cell cultures, not density gradients. From this evidence, it can be said that cell cultures [contain] a large variety of particles, some of which are claimed to look like retroviral particles. That’s all. None of the particle data has been taken further--no purification, no analysis, and no proof of replication. In these cultures, several research groups, including Hans Gelderblom and his associates from the Koch Institute in Berlin who specializes in this area, have reported not just one type of particle but a stunning array of particles.

"This raises several questions. If one of these particles really is a retrovirus experts call HIV, what are all the others? If the HIV particles originate from the tissues of AIDS patients, where do all the others come from? Which of these particles band at 1.16 gm/ml? If the HIV particles cause AIDS, why doesn’t one or several of the other particles also cause AIDS? Or why doesn’t AIDS or the cultures cause the appearance of the particles? And when it comes to HIV, the HIV experts can’t even agree what is the HIV particle. There are three subfamilies of retrovirus and HIV has been classified by different research groups under two of these subfamilies as well as three different species." ²

In his own work, German virologist Stefan Lanka has reached the same conclusion: "A virus is an easily definable entity. It’s the very stable product of cells...easy to isolate. To characterize a virus, you have to photograph the isolated particle; then you destroy the virus, characterize the proteins of the virus, and photograph the protein. And you do the same with the genetic material of the virus....This has never ever been done with HIV." ³

Science journalist Neville Hodgkinson, author of AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science: How a Virus that Never was Deceived the World (London, Fourth Estate, 1996), is convinced of the evidence supporting this viewpoint as well: "[Scientists] have not proven that they have actually detected a unique exogenous retrovirus. The critical data to support that idea have not been presented. You have to be absolutely certain that what you have detected is unique and exogenous, and a single molecular species. They haven’t got conclusively to that first step. Just to see particles in the tissue, and fail to look for evidence that it is an ineffective virus, is wrong. Are these the particles that cause disease? The proper controls have never been done. There is no evidence, ten years on, that the particles are a new infectious virus." ⁴

If HIV is not a virus, then what is it that scientists have been studying all these years? Apparently, what we have been calling HIV is nothing more than a collection of cellular particles, say these pathologists. Hodgkinson reports that "Most analyses of so-called ‘HIV’ genetic material are based on small segments of the purported virus genome...typically covering between 2 percent and 30 percent of it, since the longer sequences are so rarely found. There is not even any fixed pattern to the composition of these segments--they vary 40 percent or more. No two identical HIV’s have been found, even from the same individual. In other words, there is no evidence for the presence of any unique molecular entity like a virus."⁵ Dr. Lanka adds: "What they are showing to us is the particle in the cells, not the virus particles. We see a huge variety of particles in all cells and tissues. They are designed for export/import. And they are not stable like a virus. Therefore, they cannot be isolated. A virus has to be very stable to leave the cell of the tissues and enter the bloodstream and visa versa. Because a virus is stable it can easily be isolated. This has never been achieved in HIV."

"If you carefully check, you’ll see that the particles always look different. They have different sizes and shapes. And if you read what is written beyond the pictures--not in the lay press, like the New York Times when they say this is the HIV virus, but in the scientific literature--they never would claim this is an isolated virus. They say represent particles produced in the cells." ⁶

Papadopulos-Eleopulos says that since HIV differs in appearance from other retroviruses it cannot function as one: "Gallo and all other retrovirologists, as well as Hans Gelderblom who has done most of the electron microscopy studies of HIV, agree that retrovirus particles are almost spherical in shape, have a diameter of 100-120 nanometers and are covered with knobs. The particles the two groups claim are HIV are not spherical, [there are] no diameters exceeding twice that permitted for a retrovirus. And none of them appear to have knobs....

"All AIDS experts agree that the knobs are absolutely essential for the HIV particle to lock on to a cell as the first step in infecting that cell. So, no locking on, no infection. The experts all claim that the knobs contain a [glyco]protein called gp 120 which is the hook in the knobs that grabs hold of the surface of the cell it’s about to infect. If HIV particles do not have knobs, how is HIV able to replicate?....And if it can’t replicate, HIV is not an infectious particle.

"The knobs problem is not something new. [A] German group drew attention to it in the 1980's and again in 1992. As soon as an HIV particle is released from a cell all the knobs disappear. This single fact has many ramifications. For example, three quarters of all haemophiliacs tested are HIV-antibody-positive. The claim is that haemophiliacs acquired this as a result of becoming HIV-infected from infusions of contaminated factor VIII, which they need to treat their clotting deficiency. The problem is that factor VIII is made from plasma. That’s blood with all the cells removed, which means [that] if there are any HIV particles present in factor VIII they must be floating free in solution. But if cell-free HIV has no knobs those HIVs have no way of getting into fresh cells to infect them." ⁷

Dr. Lanka believes that the discovery of reverse transcription is not proof of a new class of viruses called retroviruses. Actually, this phenomenon, which reverses the flow of genetic material, is commonly seen in cancer and embryonic cells. It is also a process of normal DNA repair. "They are using markers, very different biochemical molecules," Lanka states, "saying that if we can detect them, if we can quantify them, this is proof that the virus must be there. But everything they are measuring, quantifying, characterizing, and presenting as part of HIV are of human cellular origin."

Lanka explains that researchers in the ‘60's and ‘70's detected this then unfamiliar biochemical activity while studying cancer cells in test tubes and jumped to untrue conclusions: "Some scientists...were led to believe that since a certain biochemical function, reverse transcription, with its then unfamiliar mode of action, did not fit the dominant world picture of genetics, it would be explained only through the claim of the existence of a new class of viruses, the retroviruses. The shock of reverse transcription was that it is possible to make genetic substance out of messenger substance, which until then was believed to be impossible....So, tragically, in 1970, the detection of a healing process gave birth to the idea of a new class of viruses, and eventually HIV, because astonishingly researchers were not willing to rethink their models or listen to what nature has to tell them."

Lanka notes that scientists manipulated cultures to produce the results they were looking for. They would mix patients’ cells with cancer and embryonic cells to get high reverse transcriptase activity. On top of that, researchers would heavily stress cells so that the cells would create special proteins that they would not produce normally. This induced a disease-like effect, much like what would happen in patients who stressed themselves with highly oxidizing substances, such as nitrites and antibiotics. He states, "A virus is not needed to explain the conditions we are seeing in AIDS patients. It’s the effect of very oxidative stress." ⁸

Kurt Vanquill, a Harvard graduate doing research in California, gives similar counterarguments to Gallo and Montagnier’s original evidence for HIV causing AIDS: "When Montagnier and Gallo detected reverse transcription activity in their cultures, they concluded that these T cells from AIDS patients were indeed infected with a retrovirus. Unfortunately, reverse transcription activity of normal cells also tends to be promoted by the very cellular conditions to which Gallo and Montagnier subjected their patients’ T cells. Therefore, detection of reverse transcription activity in the T cell cultures of AIDS patients was not proof at all that there was a retrovirus in those cultures.

"The second piece of evidence that Gallo and Montagnier offered in support of the notion that there was a retrovirus in the T cell cultures in their patients with AIDS was that they detected retroviral-like particles in these cell cultures. The important thing to remember is they didn’t identify retroviral-like particles in isolates, i.e. pure HIV, from these cultures. They simply pointed to particles in impure cell cultures and asserted that not only were they retroviruses, but they were a specific retrovirus, HIV.

"Now that really defies all scientific good sense because as even Gallo admits, retroviral-like particles that are actually cellular in origin are, in fact, ubiquitous in cultures, especially when cultures are subjected to the conditions that Gallo and Montagnier used in order to cultivate HIV. Therefore, the identification of these particles in impure cell cultures was not by any means proof positive that those particles were a retrovirus, much less a specific retrovirus, HIV.

"The third piece of evidence that Gallo and Montagnier offered in support of the notion that these T cells cultures from AIDS patients actually harbored a retrovirus was that they identified certain proteins in these cultures as HIV proteins. These HIV proteins were then incorporated into the antibody and West Blot and used to test for HIV antibodies. Unfortunately, Gallo and Montagnier identified proteins in their cultures as HIV proteins simply because these proteins reacted with antibodies from AIDS patients, and not from non-AIDS patients. Unfortunately, because AIDS patients had a high level of circulating antibodies, much higher than in normal, healthy individuals, that meant that AIDS patients were likely to have antibody cross reactions with any particular given protein more frequently than non-AIDS patients. Therefore, the identification of certain proteins as HIV proteins, simply because they reacted with antibodies of AIDS patients and not non-AIDS patients was insufficient proof that these proteins were actually HIV proteins.

Those three pieces of evidence--reverse transcription activity, the identification of retroviral-like particles in impure cell cultures, and the identification of HIV proteins simply on the basis of antibody reactions--were the only pieces of evidence Gallo and Montagnier had in support of their claims to have isolated a retrovirus from their patients’ cultures."

Vanquill adds that subsequent to these isolation experiments, Montagnier and Gallo claimed that they had identified HIV DNA in cell cultures. But objectors ask how could they identify DNA as belonging to a retroviral particle unless they first isolate the retroviral particle and extract DNA from it? Vanquill states, "Two points should be made. First, if this is actually the DNA of an exogenous retroviral particle, there should be evidence of it being a unique molecular entity. Unfortunately, they found that this DNA is wildly variable. There are myriad incommensurable HIV DNA’s, genetic sequence that vary by as much as 50 to 60 percent, indicating that this DNA that they culture out of patient’s T cells isn’t necessarily the DNA of an exogenous retroviral particle." ⁹

French film maker Djamel Tahi says that Montagnier admitted to not isolating the virus in an interview for a documentary about AIDS. Tahi states, "I asked Montagnier, ‘Can you please explain to me how you isolated HIV?’ During the interview, it became very clear that he did not isolate HIV. He found something that looks like a retrovirus. ¹⁰

Lanka says that the tests once used to detect P-24 antigens as proof of HIV is meaningless. He points out that P-24 only represents a class of weight of proteins. There are several hundred different proteins in the body with a molecular weight of P-24; these tests are non-specific and can be detecting any of these proteins. Virologists no longer look for P-24. They have abandoned these tests in favor of genetic tests, which no longer refer to P-24 antigens. ¹¹

Vanquill points out other problems with AIDS tests are reported in an article by Eleopulos et al in a 1993 Biotechnology article called "Is a positive western blot proof of HIV infection?" He states, "Researchers have identified several proteins that they consider unique structural components of HIV, and they have put these proteins in bands on a strip called the western blot. They expose this strip of what is purported to be HIV proteins to a patient’s blood serum. If the patient has any antibodies in their serum that react with any of these proteins, these bands will darken and that patient will be considered someone who has been previously exposed to HIV.

"The Australian researchers point out that the test is not standardized, meaning that different laboratories have different standards for interpreting how many bands actually have to darken in order for an HIV test to be considered proof of HIV infection. In Africa, for example, you only have to have two bands darken before they consider you HIV-infected. In America, you generally have to have three bands darken before they consider you infected. And in Australia, you need four bands. Dissidents joke that if you are HIV-positive in Africa you should move to Australia. There’s a good chance that you may be negative there. What it comes down to is that HIV testing is extremely subjective.

"The second point they make is that the test results are not reproducible. They produce a photograph in this paper of one and the same serum sample and send it to 19 different laboratories. Each time, they come back with a different result." ¹²

Nor is the antibody test proof of the existence of HIV. According to Lanka, a positive reading is merely an indication of antibodies made by one’s own protein, not HIV: "If you have a lot of dying cells in your body, more antibodies are going to be produced against them. You will automatically raise your antibody levels, and you will be said to be positive and then infected." ¹³

Neville Hodgkinson speaks of other problems with the antibody test: "In 1993, I came across an article in the science journal Biotechnology. There was a long review article by the Australian scientists who were questioning the validity of the HIV test. They were doing more than questioning it. They actually went through the various protein components of the tests.

"As you know, the HIV test purports to show the presence of antibodies to proteins that are said to be specific to HIV, this alleged virus infection. The whole validity of something like that depends on being sure that the antibodies that are picked up really do mean the presence of this virus, and nothing else. What the Australian scientists had done was go through the various proteins involved in this test (the proteins from the virus are called the antigens, and the antibodies are the response to those proteins by the body of the infected person.) One by one, they showed that none of these proteins were actually unique to HIV. In every case, there was documented evidence that they couldn’t be. These various proteins and the equivalent antibodies could be explained by other conditions. They lifted quite a wide variety of conditions from the published literature, dismantling the whole idea that this test proved what it said it proved, the presence of a deadly new virus."

Before drawing conclusions, Hodgkinson shared this information with four virologists, expecting to receive criticism, but getting none. He went ahead and printed his article, with no resulting challenge from the scientific or medical community.

Hodgkinson gives an example of how a cross-reactions can occur on an antibody test: A team working from a University in Zaire set out to test the theory that leprosy could be one of the diseases that would count as an AIDS-defining illness in HIV-positive patients. Sure enough they found that a high proportion tested HIV-positive. When they went into it more deeply, they found that it was a protein from the leprosy germ itself that was reacting with the HIV test. ¹⁴

An important part of the definition of AIDS is a gross reduction in T 4 and suppressor 8 cells. While HIV is said to be the culprit responsible for killing these immune cells, this has never been actually proven. Hodgkinson says that according to the Australian scientists, T cells are not being destroyed at all but displaced to other parts of the body: "At the time, they were the only ones saying this, and it seemed a strange idea, but recently there’s been more and more work published by the mainstream acknowledging this fact that the whole idea of the virus killing of the T cells hasn’t been acknowledged by experimental work."¹⁵ Lanka adds, "In the ‘70's, a new test to measure the strength of the immune system came to market. It would count T 4 (or T helper) cells. This was very misleading to doctors who believed that it was possible to measure the immune system by measuring some cells in the blood. This is not possible because only 2 percent of white blood cells are in the blood. If you have a little bit of stress, those 2 percent will immediately be removed into the tissues. This is an important biological operation. When the body thinks it is in a state of alarm, immune function is not needed. It would be a waste of energy. The body needs all its energy in the tissues to react quickly--to fight or run away."

Lanka concludes that T 4 counts are meaningless and mainstream science has long been aware of this: "The T 4 cells of the normal population were never checked because [scientists] already knew. In ‘81, a leading immunologist in the United States said it makes no sense to measure subsets of T cells because they had measured them in the 70's, and they found that T and B cells could be high or low in healthy or ill, young or old people. There was no correlation.

"The original literature says that the normal range for t-cells is between 200 and 3,000, but think about what they are going to tell you if you have less than 500. They will tell you that you are in a dangerous state. It’s very frightening that this has been known in detail since the 70's." ¹⁶

Arguments for a Harmless HIV

While Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Lanka, and others argue that HIV doesn’t exist, others believe differently. Michael Verney Elliot, award winning English journalist and producer of the documentary: The Unheard Voices on AIDS states, "If Montagnier found nothing, then what did Gallo misappropriate? Why was Gallo accused of having misappropriated the virus? Why was it said that there was contamination that took place in Gallo’s laboratory, perhaps with Montagnier’s isolate? If he didn’t isolate anything, how could it be transferred to somebody else’s cultures? The same something has been found in several laboratories all over the world. Several scientists have claimed to have isolated it independently. So, you can’t say it doesn’t exist." ¹⁷

Many scientists accept the existence of HIV but refute the notion that HIV causes AIDS. They argue that HIV is a harmless, noninfectious retrovirus. Furthermore, it is difficult to detect in people diagnosed as HIV-positive and even in AIDS patients. These points were first brought to worldwide attention by the brilliant and outspoken retrovirologist Dr. Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley. A lone voice at first, Duesberg was considered out of touch with the reality of the disease by AIDS research scientists. Now, a growing number of experts in the field have begun to reconsider Duesberg’s belief that HIV does not cause AIDS since the HIV hypothesis continues to remain unproven and the disease has not spread from its original risk groups to infect the population at large.

One of the most puzzling problems is HIV’s contradiction to the viral load theory. Usually a certain percentage of microbes must be present before a disease can manifest, but HIV appears to be excused from this rule, explains Duesberg: "The correlation between the activity and abundance of microbes in disease is very clear. They have to exceed a certain threshold number before they can cause a disease. And they have to kill a significant percentage of so-called target cells. A flu virus, for example, has to kill a certain number of lung cells before you have pneumonia. And a hepatitis virus has to infect a significant percentage of liver cells before you have symptoms of liver disease. HIV is the exception. Here is a virus that "kills"--killing has never been established--less than one in a thousand T cells, and yet it is claimed to be responsible for the loss of all of them."

Duesberg goes on to explain that an imperceptible amount of virus cannot cause an infectious disease: "The bottom line is that if you have a virus and a susceptible cell in the same human body, the two cannot be kept apart for very long. Soon the virus will meet the susceptible cell, like boy meets girl, and they won’t be kept apart for very long. The virus has to find a susceptible cell in order to replicate and survive. So, if such an abundant amount of viruses were around in AIDS patients, as these people keep claiming, you couldn’t have 99.9% of your T cells uninfected." ¹⁸

Journalist Neville Hodgkinson says that a virus should be easy to find without the addition of technological processes: "You never actually got HIV unless you took samples from the patient and put them through a lot of stimulating procedures, adding various ingredients to your culture until you eventually found some signals indicating the presence of the virus. But it was difficult."¹⁹ Researcher Lynn Gannett adds, "This is the only virus for which they use polymerase chain reactor (PCR) technology. They multiply whatever it is they’re measuring. A dear friend, Dr. Robert Geraldo has a great analogy for this. He asks, if you have a dollar bill and you make a hundred photocopies of it, how many dollars do you have? You still have one dollar. You cannot say that if you have this HIV virus in your body and you do this test that it multiplies it so that you have a viral load of 10,000. That’s not truthful." ²⁰

Duesberg provides several arguments against HIV being a sexually-transmitted disease: "HIV is the exception of everything. Here we have a virus that causes disease only after it is neutralized by antibodies. All other viruses do their ugly work before we have a vaccine or we have made our own antibodies. And here’s a virus that only causes a disease ten years after infection, when all other viruses cause it right after infection when they’re most biochemically active....To date, in America, we have had over 750,000 AIDS patients. Every one of them has been treated by a doctors, health care workers, nurses, family members. In the huge literature on AIDS, show me one example of a health care worker or doctor ever getting AIDS from his or her own patient. And this is without a vaccine to protect them."

Duesberg concludes that the idea of HIV being an infectious disease derives from a completely undiscussed and unchallenged assumption that was made implicitly with the HIV hypothesis...."What we don’t emphasize enough," he states, "is that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Geneva Conference, HIV has been found in 30 million people who don’t even have a trace of AIDS." ²¹

Furthermore, while HIV has been correlated with AIDS, there have been many cases of people with AIDS diseases with no evidence of the virus, notes Dr. Charles Thomas, Jr., of the Helicon Foundation, a not-for-profit AIDS organization. Therefore the virus could not possibly be causing AIDS in these cases. ²²

The average person can plainly see that AIDS does not spread like an infectious disease. One famous example is Magic Johnson who was diagnosed as HIV-positive while his wife has tested HIV-negative. Other instances are reported by John Turner, a long-term AIDS survivor and a member of Atlanta’s HEAL: "One close friend of mine lost two lovers to AIDS. His third lover went off the drugs, because of all the toxic side effects, and survived. This friend, who had three lovers in his life, still remains negative. I have another close friend in the same predicament. He has had many HIV-positive lovers and even has one now. He still remains negative."²³ Dr. Lanka adds, "From the very beginning, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) could not find a single case where one person was infected through another, and this person was infecting a third one. There is no study where this kind of transmission has ever been proven. If you look at the rate of positivity among hemophiliac women, there were only 1 in 500 infected." ²⁴

While infectious diseases spread throughout the population at large, AIDS remains confined to its original risk groups. Dr. David Rasnick explains, "Infectious diseases don’t know if you’re black, white, male, female, gay, or straight. HIV deserves a graduate degree from the best universities for making those discriminations. In reality, AIDS is still in almost 9 out of 10 cases affecting males in the United States and Europe. About 86 percent of the latest percentage is male. And 60 percent of AIDS patients in the United States and Europe are gay men. Another third are IV drug users (a code word for heterosexual drug users). Then there’s about 1 percent of pediatric AIDS, 80 percent of which are, according to the CDC, born to mothers who used drugs during pregnancy."

Rasnick adds that AIDS is also unusual in that it mostly strikes 25 to 50 year olds when those most prone to infectious diseases are the very young, whose immune systems aren’t fully developed, and the very old, who have declining immune systems: "People between 25 and 50 are the least prone to infectious diseases. They have fully operational immune systems. Yet the vast majority of AIDS cases in the U.S. and Europe are in people between those ages. There’s virtually no AIDS among teenagers, and teenagers are certainly sexually active. If you had a sexually-transmitted disease, you would find a reasonable fraction of your AIDS patients being teenagers, and they just aren’t there."

Another point made by Rasnick is that while most infectious agents cause the same symptoms, HIV does not: "A flu virus causes the flu, not polio, for example. If you transmit the spirochete of syphilis you get syphilis, not cold symptoms. Yet a gay man with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), one of the AIDS-defining diseases who happened to do his civic duty and donate blood during his so-called ten-year incubation period, passes his blood on to someone else, and you would expect that person to also get KS when this is not the case. Of the 15,000 HIV-positive hemophiliacs in the United States who received blood products from donors with KS, not one came down with KS." ²⁵

AIDS has not become the pandemic once feared, notes chemistry’s Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reactor, a genetic testing device used in AIDS research: "If the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Gallo, and Faucci were right then their predictions would be right. We would have a worldwide pandemic of an infectious, sexually-transmitted disease that heterosexuals and homosexuals would be equally susceptible to. This is the fear that has gotten everyone terrified. You mean we could have sex and get AIDS and die? None of these predictions have come true." ²⁶

Instead the number of AIDS cases have declined, as Hodgkinson points out: "We’ve had absolutely no spread over the past ten years. When the tests first became available, it was estimated that there were 50,000-100,000 HIV-positive individuals in the United Kingdom. In the early ‘90's that estimate drastically declined to about 23,000. That figure has remained steady. Other countries paint a similar picture. There is no evidence of a spread of this condition, and that is a powerful support for the theory that HIV-positivity is not indicative of a new infectious illness spreading among us." Mullis adds that the numbers are inflated because 25 percent of cases they are based on symptoms only and not blood work-ups: "I contacted the CDC and asked them if they did blood work-ups on all the people included in the AIDS figures from day one. The answer was no. About 25 percent of those figures were based upon symptoms. I said there are at least seven other diseases that have the identical symptoms as AIDS, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cytomegalovirus. They kind of shrugged their shoulders and didn’t address the issue."

Mullis also points out that this is not the first time a disease has been mistaken as infectious: "In the early twentieth or late nineteenth century in the south, pellagra was thought to be an infectious disease. In actuality, it was from a lack of niacin because southerners were eating corn instead of wheat. Farmers were taking kids out of their homes and placing them in orphanages. The child would now get some wheat and no longer have pellagra. ²⁷

Hodgkinson adds that while HIV is reported to be rampant in Africa, the continent where AIDS supposedly started, its citizens are not dying at high rates from AIDS: "Perhaps the simplest way of refuting these claims is to point to issues of Time and other news journals three to five years ago. They were running cover stories about the massive threat to the future of people in African posed by HIV and AIDS. These stories were based on estimates of HIV-positivity that were being claimed. It was thought that Africans were in the pipeline of death and that there would be entire wastelands on the continent as a result of that terrible epidemic.

"Just a few weeks ago, Time ran a big cover story on Africa. There wasn’t a single mention of HIV or AIDS in all of the 11 or 12 pages of that article. It was about the great future and the new mood of optimism that is present within that continent." ²⁸

This point is emphasized by Mullis who states: "The World Health Organization studied prostitutes in a little coastal African country above Liberia. They found that 75 percent of the prostitutes were HIV-positive and predicted that five years later half of them would be dead. In five years they came back and there were no bodies to count. Still they’re HIV-positive, according to their tests. Actually, they’re positive due to a cross-reactivity. The conclusion of a paper on this published in Nature was that these people had a special strain of HIV which firstly does not cause any disease and secondly protects you from the strains that are rampant throughout Africa. It even said that we ought to study these people further to develop a vaccine. Even a sixth grader looking at the logic of this would say, ‘Wait a minute. The emperor has no clothes here!’ There’s something seriously wrong with the minds of people who don’t examine direct evidence of their conclusions being wrong." ²⁹

Charles Geshekter, Ph.D. a professor specializing in African studies has taken 12 research trips to Africa and has organized a conference on Rethinking AIDS when he was chair of the History of Science, Pacific Division, a section of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. Professor Geshekter says that AIDS in Africa is a different set of diseases than it is in North America and Western Europe: "You have to go back to the original definition of a so-called AIDS case in Africa. You’ll discover that a World Health Organization conference convened in the Central African Republic, a landlocked country north of Zaire in its capital city, Bangwee, in late 1985. And at that conference a definition of an AIDS case in Africa was agreed to. That is the definition that they are using to count AIDS cases in Africa. The definition itself is decisively different from the definition of an AIDS case in North America or Western Europe. And that definition is simply based on four clinical symptoms which are very widespread and very common throughout Africa because it is, in fact, such an impoverished continent. I, myself, have had all of those four symptoms. They are a persistent dry cough, a high fever, loose stools or diarrhea for 30 days, and a 10 percent loss of body weight over a two month period. I’ve suffered from all those working in the fields of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia. If I were African, I would be judged to be an AIDS case. And so I’m not. So, I’m judged to have traveler’s diarrhea or some such thing. So, if you go and look carefully at what it is exactly that they’re counting, you’ll see that old symptoms that are clearly non-HIV insults have been redefined into an epidemic of so-called AIDS case."³⁰

Dr. Mark Chanley of the Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Texas adds, "It seems to me that when you’re looking for the cause of a disease, you’re looking for commonalities, not differences. AIDS in the United States is characterized by such things as severe immunosuppression and characteristic opportunistic infections like Kaposi’s sarcoma and candidiasis, whereas in Africa it’s associated with other symptoms like wasting disease. [In Africa], they’ve always had the wasting disease and the malaria. Other parasitic diseases come to mind. Having an infection with the HIV virus doesn’t predispose to you to getting these diseases. People in that environment get them because they’re in the environment that exposes them to those sorts of infectious agents....The virus should cause the same disease, and it clearly doesn’t in Africa. They’ve just taken all the old diseases, combined with HIV, and called it AIDS. But a lot of people in Africa just have the same diseases they’ve always had. ³¹

Dr. Phillip Johnson, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has taken an interest in AIDS issues, says that in all probability, we are focusing on the wrong microbe: "If you were to go back and audit the evidence without a prejudice in favor of the reigning theory, the conclusion would be that it’s harmless. A correlation does not prove causation People who are very sick have lots of infections and foreign proteins in their blood. They may test positive for lots of things, but that doesn’t mean that those things are causing their condition." ³²

Dr. Rasnick, who has spent 20 years developing protease inhibitors, including the ones used to stop HIV activity, believes that these drugs are the best proof of HIV not being the cause of AIDS. By inhibiting the enzymes of HIV, protease inhibitors deactivate the so-called cause, yet the condition remains. Research shows that people taking these medicines are still dying from immunosuppressed conditions. Rasnick states, "Protease inhibitors are the most potent inhibitors that I’ve ever seen. They absolutely shut down HIV in the laboratory. If HIV were replicating in a human being, these protease inhibitors would shut it down....When you get no clinical benefit from the drug you have to seriously doubt your hypothesis and think maybe HIV is not the cause of AIDS."³³ A 1994 conference devoted to proteases announced these findings, saying that 400 AIDS patients taking two grams of Sequenivir. Every day over an 18 month period showed no clinical benefit. They did not live longer or improve in any way.

Rather than question the assumption that HIV causes AIDS, Rasnick notes, scientists came up with another explanation, saying that the clever HIV was mutating to inhibit resisting forms. Though speculation has become dogma, Rasnick criticizes the idea, saying that mutations in human beings have never been demonstrated in the scientific literature; mutants are only produced in the laboratory.

Antibodies typically mean that a microbe has been rendered harmless. Vaccines are created on this premise; they introduce antibodies into the system to keep the microorganism latent. With AIDS this rule has been broken and antibodies have been used to predict the inevitability of disease. Strangely, the logic will again change with the introduction of an AIDS vaccine that will inject people with antibodies to HIV. Suddenly, instead of causing sickness and death, the antibodies will offer protection.

Alternative Hypotheses

If HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, then what does? This section explores several theories:

Fear. Imagine going to the doctor and being told that you have 18 months to live. The effect can be devastating. Comparing those who survive an HIV/AIDS diagnosis to those who do not, Mark Conlan notes the importance of one’s state of mind and emotion: ³⁴"So much of what is called HIV/AIDS is conceptual. I think a key element in any program is to not let your mind make you sick. If you genuinely believe that the HIV-positive test result means that you have a deadly virus inside your system that’s going to make you sick with diseases that are going to kill you, then all the nutritional regimens in the world, all the herbal treatments are not going to help you in the long run....You have to get out of the HIV=AIDS mindset and believe that if you are "HIV-positive" without symptoms, then nothing is wrong with you. I would ask myself, ‘Why do I need treatment at all?’ It’s only when you believe that you’re already sick from an HIV infection that you’re doomed. I owe that insight to Michael Elner, the president of HEAL in New York and an experienced hypnotherapist who knows a lot about the mind/body connection."

Conlan urges people who see their diagnosis as a death sentence to work on changing programmed beliefs: "This is the only disease that they tell you about when you are a child. Even five-year-olds absorb the message that HIV=AIDS=death. They don’t know about lung or breast cancer and other serious conditions that they may run across later in life, but the AIDS establishment has been so effective and universal in its propaganda that even children know that if you test positive for HIV you’re going to get AIDS and you’re going to die. It’s an incredibly pervasive social message, and you have to arm yourself with the facts to get beyond it and get out of the HIV=AIDS mindset. If you believe HIV will kill you it will; it you don’t, then that’s your first prerequisite for survival." In keeping with this mission, Conlan’s monthly news magazine, Zenger’s, offers information on alternative views about AIDS. ³⁵

AIDS survivor John Turner is an example of someone who has turned his life around from a paralyzing state of fear to positive well-being through a quest for the truth. Turner states, "At one point, I took AZT for a two-week period out of fear and pressure from my doctor and friends. This was early on in the summer of ‘85 when my doctor told me that I had about six months to live.

"I felt it was my job to start getting as much information as I could. Everything I found told me that no one knew what they were talking about. The summer of ‘88 or ‘89 is when I discovered the paper written by Peter Duesberg. That paper sent me on a quest to start being proactive against the idea that a virus is capable of causing this disease without other causes." Fifteen years after he was first diagnosed with AIDS, Turner reports being a perfect specimen of health.  ³⁶

Lifestyle. Remember the swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn? As a young man, he charmed audiences as Robin Hood and Captain Blood. But by the time the actor had died on his fiftieth birthday, he was so burnt out from a fast life of drugs and heavy drinking that his doctors, upon autopsy, were amazed that he had remained alive for the last five years of his life. Triple the speed of Flynn’s lifestyle, and you speed up the process of self-destruction.

Such is the case with AIDS, which many attribute to a worn down, stressed out immune system caused by drug abuse and a super fast lifestyle. Initially, AIDS was detected in homosexual men who were frequenting bars and bath houses and having multiple sexual partners a night. They were taking massive amounts of antibiotics as a prophylactic against syphilis, and repeatedly coming down with hepatitis and parasitic infections. They drank, smoked, ate poorly, and deprived themselves of sleep. Recreational drugs, such as cocaine, heroine, Ecstasy, and nitrite inhalants were commonplace. Many critics of the HIV theory say that any one of these factors alone could contribute to ill health and that so many of them over a long period of time are likely to result in diseases found in AIDS.

Dr. Frank Buianouckas, a professor of mathematics at City University of New York, and one of the leading forces in the New York HEAL program remembers the scenario: "The people who got AIDS were the free spirits of the 70's. They went around enjoying the new sexual freedoms and picking up microbes for which they had to use antibiotics and other medical drugs. Some friends of mine picked up syphilis or gonorrhea about 25 times and then went through all of the treatments. They also were using antibiotics as prophylactics against venereal disease and recreational drugs, all of which did damage to their systems. So many of the people I knew, who had these HIV-positive diagnoses, fit into that category. ³⁷

Investigative journalist Michael Verney Elliot emphasizes that risk factors related to lifestyle are of central importance, a fact continually denied by the gay community: "Everyone perceives that the risk is the risk of being infected with HIV. But it isn’t. In every known risk group, the risk is of being immune suppressed for other specific reasons. If you ask the question, are we saying that all the people in the known risk groups would be perfectly healthy had it not been for HIV, then the answer is no. But it’s the risks that makes them unhealthy. For instance, drug addicts, we know, are sick people. But we are meant to believe that because they have HIV drug addicts are now dying who wouldn’t have otherwise died. And this, of course, is absolute nonsense because the average age of death of drug addicts in America is about 31, with or without HIV. This is about the same for gay men who have also got HIV but also do a lot of drugs. So the risk is of being immune suppressed for other reasons, not of being infected with HIV....

Elliot reflects on the lifestyle common to a small subset of gay men as a result of the sexual revolution of the ‘70's that lead to sickness: "Why do we accept the HIV virus hypothesis so readily? It’s more convenient I suppose to accept the virus from hell rather than our own foolish behavior which has led us into this situation. I think, for instance, that nobody wants to talk about doing drugs. Gay men do a hell of a lot of drugs. They take all sorts of drugs in the disco scene. They take a lot of aphrodisiac type drugs, etc. And if I mention this to my gay friends they regard me as a stupid old fossil who’s trying to stop them from having a good time. And I say, well, okay, fine, go and have a good time, but then be prepared for when it all goes wrong later on. But you can’t tell gay men not to take drugs because they’ve never been warned that the drugs themselves could actually cause immune suppression. Unless they’ve got the virus from hell, they’re going to stay perfectly well and all live to be 85. You just can’t talk any sense to them. They’re not prepared to admit that it’s the gay lifestyle of the ‘70's which led to the first cases of AIDS.

"In 1982, there was a campaign in The New York Native by the late Michael Calan who along with a colleague wrote an article called, "We know who we are." He was describing the gay scene as it was and saying are we surprised that AIDS has stuck us? Something had to give sooner or later. He was vilified by the gay community in America for having said this because it looked as if he was betraying gay men by saying what gay men were doing. But it takes a gay man to be honest enough to say to other men, ‘For God’s sake, how much longer do you think you can get away with that kind of abuse?’

"Another thing, during the height of the fast-track period in the 70's and 80's, sexually transmitted diseases were just regarded as a recreational hazard. You just got another shot and went straight back to what you were doing before. I talked to a guy once in San Francisco who actually boasted to me that he had gonorrhea 18 times in one year! Now if you can imagine having gonorrhea every three weeks for a year, that’s going some. And I thought how can these people hope to be healthy?"

Elliot says the scenario continues and speaks of a phenomenon currently going on in the United States, called a circuit party: "About 7,000 or so gay men go around to a circuit of towns and throw three day raves where everybody gets absolutely bombed out of their minds on drugs, and lots of sex goes on. As a result, I suspect a lot of these men are going to get very sick. But you cannot say that to them. It’s judgmental. They’ll think you’re trying to stop them from having a good time. But I can see the dangers where they can’t." ³⁸

Neville Hodgkinson adds that "Promiscuous gay men were particularly at risk. They had been exposed to lots of infectious agents. They had often taken antibiotics continuously as protection against renewed bouts of infection with sexually-transmitted diseases. And the passive partners in gay sex, before the days of safe sex, had been exposed to the sperm from sex partners, sometimes thousands of partners, in ways which, according to these scientists, could be very confusing to the immune system. There also had been very heavy drug use within that particular sector of the gay community that had been most at risk. And indeed, the drug-abusing community generally was the other big group where HIV-positivitiy had been detected, another very unhealthy group in most instances, where they had been exposed to blood from sharing needles, repeated infectious because of an unhealthy lifestyle, sometimes malnutrition, and the damaging effects of drugs themselves. And of course, the third group were people who suffered from multiple transfusions, particularly hemophiliacs, who again were people who had had repeated exposure to foreign protein in their bodies. And according to the scientists, it was these repeated assaults on the integrity of the immune system on the individuals at risk that provided adequate explanation of why their immune cells should be sending out these distress signals. And you didn’t need to postulate the existence of a deadly new virus....

"One strong theory about what’s going on in AIDS is that it may be a confusion about what is my own body and what are invaders from the outside. When a person has been exposed to the kinds of risks I was describing for a long period, immune cells may fail to recognize what is friend and what is foe and may begin to destroy cells that are actually part of one’s own body instead of just the hostile invaders from outside. This may be a protective response. The body may see itself beginning to lose important immune cells....This may actually be an attempt to protect immune cells against being killed by the autoimmune process. But exactly what is going on is not clear. It’s a field that needs a great deal of research." ³⁹

Dr. Rasnick states that every AIDS-defining disease has been documented to be drug-related: "There are 20 million chronic drug users in the U.S. The numbers have gone up exponentially from a few thousand in the ‘70's to 20 million right now. Then there are another 50 million part-time drug users. AIDS is the tip of the iceberg of the drug epidemic. It’s analogous to cigarette smoking. Everybody in the U.S. who has lung cancer or emphysema smoked cigarettes for a couple of decades. Yet the vast majority who smoke don’t get emphysema or lung cancer. AIDS is pretty much in that same category. Peter and I cannot find any documented examples of drug-free AIDS cases, although the overwhelming majority of these 20 million chronic drug users don’t have AIDS.

"Kaposi's Sarcoma (KS) appears to be a consequence of breathing in chronic nitrite inhalants, the poppers, because 90 percent of all KS is in gay men, 100 percent of whom have a history of using the nitrite inhalants. As a chemist, I can tell you that nitrites are highly carcinogenic....When these folks pop one of these little vials, they can breathe in a milliliter of amyl nitrite or butyl nitrite. And a milliliter of that stuff is about 10 billion molecules of nitrite for every cell in your body. They’re certainly sufficient to cause serious damage to your DNA or protein. The KS that we see in these gay men is in the upper extremities around the mouth, face, and throat, and lungs. Morris Kaposi never saw this kind of KS. Yet that’s exactly where you would expect to see it in somebody who was breathing in a nitrite inhalant. ⁴⁰

AIDS Drugs. "The HIV hypothesis is the basis for the daily intoxication of 200,000 Americans with DNA chain terminators and protease inhibitors," notes Duesberg. You can’t expect people to live when you are going after the central molecules of life." ⁴¹

While AIDS in the ‘80's was primarily brought on by lifestyle, AIDS of the 90's has become an iatrogenic disease brought on or made worse by immunosuppressive drugs. Dr. Rasnick says, "The HIV antibody test is a reasonably good predictor of people who are going to get AIDS and die but not for reasons that most people think. If you are tested for antibodies to HIV and come back positive your physician will then inform you as such with a death sentence....You can imagine what that does to you psychologically. It’s like voodoo in a way.

"Secondly, the physician will strongly encourage, even to the point of intimidation and threat, that you take anti-retrovirals--AZT, DDI, 3TC--these DNA chain terminators and nowadays protease inhibitors. If you continue to take these lethal drugs, you are certain to become an AIDS statistic. So, if you follow that path from HIV positivity to the drugs, the test is a good predictor of death from AIDS." ⁴²

Hodgkinson adds: "There are a good number of scientists who argue that these treatments are the cause of AIDS because there is no known mechanism by which this purported virus could be doing the damage that’s attributed to it. A steady diet of chemotherapy is a perfectly rational description of why some AIDS patients suffer from terrible muscle wasting and debilitating diseases. It’s worse in many instances than simple immune system failure and vulnerability to infection. The side effects of some of the antiviral drugs that were prescribed in hopes of defeating this illness have actually been a central part of the AIDS syndrome during the second half of the ‘80's and onwards. I’m afraid that they have become responsible for widening the scope of this immune system failure, perhaps to people who wouldn’t have become ill but who, because of testing positive for some reason were put on these drugs." ⁴³

AZT has never been proven safe or effective according to insider Lynn Gannett, data manager for AZT’s phase three clinical trials in Syracuse, New York from 1987 to 1990. The purpose of the study was to see whether people diagnosed as having AIDS would improve with the drug protocol, but this was never determined due to a lack of ethics and concern. The actual goal of the research was to maximize the number of patients enrolled in the studies to increase funding, states Gannett: "Clinicians were so reckless that they actually enrolled a person who was HIV-negative, and they didn’t even realize that until three weeks later...Frequently, directives would come down from higher up, focused on enrolling more people. It’s like they were oblivious to the fundamental reason for the studies, to determine if AZT was safe.

Gannett gives a disturbing example of incompetence that took place during trials for AZT in combination with pentamidine: "There was a woman patient enrolled with a history of heart disease, obesity, and some other serious pre-existing medical conditions in addition to her HIV-positive diagnosis. She probably shouldn’t have been enrolled in the study at all based on her complicated medical history. Early on, the woman developed a toxicity to the AZT. Her lab reports showed severe anemia. There were specific steps to be taken with people showing signs of toxicity. But none of the doctors or nurses paid attention to those explicitly outlined toxicity management steps.

"Because she was displaying toxicity, she should have been brought in for a lab check to see if that toxicity anemia progressed, which it did, but it was not monitored....Nobody seemed concerned about it. By the time her week 24 follow-up visit came around, she was in showing signs of grade 4 anemia, which is most severe. She ended up in the emergency room short of breath and close to drying. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she should have been taken off the experimental drug entirely, but instead was reduced from 1,000 mg of AZT a day to 500 mg a day. Her anemia continued to worsen, and she was taken off the drug entirely three days later. It was inconceivable to me how they were paying so little attention and making arbitrary decisions in violation of the protocol."

Gannett emphasizes that this was not an exceptional case, but rather an example of what routinely took place: "There are other examples such as incompetent nurses not keeping up with scheduling patients to come in and patients not complying with scheduled visits. Patients were supposed to be brought in for laboratory monitoring and interviews every two to four weeks and this wasn’t happening. Wrong lab tests would be ordered so they would have information for lab values they didn’t need, and there would be missing information for lab values that were supposed to have been ordered. Standard forms for capturing out of the ordinary information, such as adverse reactions to medications were rarely filled out. It was impossible to analyze the results of the research data coming out of the Syracuse clinic because it was too full of holes. In all likelihood, this happened in other research clinics as well. You can’t analyze data if you’re breaking the rules left and right. That’s not research; that’s garbage."⁴⁴ As a result, side-effects that people might have been suffering as a result of AZT and other medications were not recorded and could not, therefore, help the final decision-makers.

Gannett has since learned that AZT is highly poisonous to anyone taking the drug long-term. Created in the 60's as a chemotherapeutic agent for treating cancer, AZT was soon shelved for being too toxic, a fact seemingly forgotten by the pharmaceutical industry when a medicine was needed for AIDS. AZT terminates DNA synthesis; in other words, it prevents the replication of cells. As cell renewal is crucial to all biological organisms, AZT is therefore incompatible with life and health. Gannett finds it especially shocking that pregnant women and babies are given AZT as cell replication in these populations is so vitally important. Studies showing AZT’s poor track record can be viewed on the web site called virusmyth.com. ⁴⁵

In his documentary, Michael Verney Elliot calls the early AZT trials "sloppy and perhaps fraudulent." He states, "They were all prematurely terminated before the ill effects of AZT began to be noticed. Subsequently, it was shown that the dosage of AZT being given was a thousand times more toxic than it was ever claimed to have been." ⁴⁶

Recently, protease inhibitors, which contain AZT, have been touted as the miracle cure for AIDS. As deaths from AIDS in the United States were dropping annually before the protease inhibitors were introduced, Gannett surmises that this claim is merely propaganda put out by the mainstream media. These enthusiastic announcements were made within the first few months of marketing, but now, a little over a year later, disturbing side-effects of disfigurement are being observed. Gannett states, "The fancy name that the drug companies have come up with is fat redistribution syndrome. Lumps of fat accumulate on the back of the neck and the shoulder in people who take these drugs. People can’t even lift their heads up straight without bumping into a glob of fat. Imagine how dreadful that must be. As fat migrates to different areas of the body, limbs become toothpick-like while the belly becomes distended." ⁴⁷

When AIDS drugs fail, other indications are looked at as measures of success. Surrogate markers can show whether or not CD4 levels improve. Mullis comments that no one knows whether CD4 cells should be high or low. In some diseases they go up, and in some they go down. Healthy individuals without risk factors for AIDS, including marathon runners, often have extremely low CD4 counts as well. CD4 levels are therefore insufficient surrogate markers. "The immune system is incredibly complicated," Mullis states. "No competent immunologist would tell you that CD4 levels were a sufficient surrogate marker for anything. The FDA is saying you don’t have to show that these drugs help. You don’t have to show that they save a single life. All you have to do is show that a clinical indicator has changed and hope this means it will make someone better." ⁴⁸

The whole policy of betraying the public trust is nothing less than criminal say AIDS dissidents. Will we be seeing huge lawsuits in the future? Probably not. More likely, the scenario will be reminiscent of lawsuits against cigarette companies, where only a few are heard and resolved in deals made behind closed doors. Duesberg sites FDA approval as a reason: "Once the FDA approves [a drug], you can prescribe it for anything. You could prescribe AZT for dandruff and be immune as a doctor." ⁴⁹

Where Did HIV Originate? The Viral Contamination Theory

Some dissidents theorize that HIV infects humans as a result of polio vaccine contamination. Michael Verney Elliot has researched this story and talks about its implications: "I first became interested in HIV and AIDS when I was trying to work out it where it could have come from. We were told that HIV was caused by a retrovirus, HIV, and I thought, how did it get started? There were all sorts of legends about a monkey biting a man somewhere in Zaire. It all sounded a bit strange. So, I started to look into the possibility that HIV had been a contaminant in polio vaccines.

In the late 1950's up until 1962, polio vaccines were contaminated with a virus called Simian Virus 40 (SV 40). SV 40 was known to be highly carcinogenic when put into human cell culture. When injected into small laboratory animals, it could cause tumors. It looked as though the polio vaccine manufacturers had made a gigantic blunder and given a lot of children SV 40.

"I wondered if the same thing could have happened in this case with a monkey retrovirus. So I did a little bit of research....I came across a paper written by a man named Walter Kyle, who is a lawyer in America specializing in compensation claims. He wrote a piece in The Lancet-- I believe it was the 7th of March 1992--where he stated that it has been known by the American Government since 1976 that retroviruses contaminated polio vaccines. That year, two men working with biologics in the United States were examining batches of polio vaccine under electromicroscopy. They discovered retroviral particles, or what appeared to be retroviral particles, which were subsequently confirmed to be type C RNA viruses--that’s virology speak for retroviruses. I wondered how this could have happened and started digging around a bit.

"The whole thing goes back to the Simeon Virus 40 panic. In 1960, when the SV 40 was first discovered, it was realized that millions of children had been given live and killed virus vaccine and that they might be infected. It was decided that they ought to stop using rhesus macaques, that were a natural host for SV 40. They switched to a different species. On the advice of Mike Hillerman, they decided to import African green monkeys and make those cell tissues used in the production of vaccines.

"It wasn’t until 1985, after almost a quarter of a century using these African green monkey cells, that we realized that African Green were infected with at least three retroviruses. Two of them happened to be the closest relatives of the two human retroviruses that are considered to cause disease. That’s HTLV 1, which is thought to cause adult T cell leukemia in humans discovered by Robert Gallo in 1980 and HIV which was discovered by Luc Montagnier in 1983. So, it does seem a bit of a coincidence that the two closest relatives of human retroviruses that we’ve found so far to be in a single species of monkey, which happens to be the chief species used in the manufacture of polio vaccines." ⁵⁰

Promoting the Myth

Although open-minded inquiry is the hallmark of science, with AIDS this has not been the case. In 1984, then secretary of state, Margaret Heckler announced at a press conference that Robert Gallo had discovered HIV as the probable cause of AIDS. (French virologist Luc Montagnier is now given credit for this discovery.) Overnight, the word probable was dropped from accounts of this pronouncement, and the war against HIV as the sole cause of AIDS began. The cause was determined even before any scientific papers on the subject were published.

Fifteen years and 50 billion dollars later, with 100,000 MD’s and Ph.D’s working around the clock, the AIDS orthodoxy has failed to cure even one AIDS patient, notes Peter Duesberg: "What we have done is untold harm to the American taxpayers and to those at risk for AIDS or those infected by HIV," he asserts. "I think everybody should now reconsider that the underlying hypotheses for this effort against AIDS might be flawed." ⁵¹

It would be simple and cost effective to test alternative theories if it were not for a conflict of interests, Duesberg states: "The NIH is saying only experts understand AIDS. And who are they? They’re the people who have worked on HIV, whose careers are completely based on HIV, and worse than that, almost all of them have huge commercial interests associated with it. They have companies; they have patents; they make megabucks. It’s much more profitable than their university research. So, those are the judges.

"These people can afford to send you to Jupiter. But they cannot afford to give $50,000 to Peter Duesberg or somebody else with an alternative hypothesis, like the one to test for drugs as a cause of AIDS. To prove them wrong would mean that they would risk losing their good reputation and their standing in the scientific community as well as their companies." ⁵²

Nobel prize winning chemist, Kary Mullis originally accepted the hypothesis that HIV was the probable cause of AIDS but started to realize something was amiss when he began intensive research of his own. Two years later, Mullis concluded that the HIV hypothesis was originated as a ploy to generate huge funding dollars from the government. He states, "If you’ve got an epidemic, you get money from the federal government. If you don’t have an epidemic and you study infectious diseases, who cares?....We weren’t seriously burdened by any infectious diseases in the United States until they made up this business about AIDS. If people were to say this disease is not going to spread and it’s probably due to behavior, Congress wouldn’t have funded AIDS research for two billion dollars a year."

Mullis also notes that the HIV hypothesis rests on a shaky foundation. Commenting on how scientists view Gallo, Mullis says, "Why did we think that just because Bob Gallo says, ‘Gentlemen, we’ve discovered the cause of AIDS that it’s so? It’s not sufficient to publish a meager, little scientific paper somewhere. That isn’t enough to spend billions of dollars and to ruin so many lives. This whole thing is based on a flimsy little statement from a guy who is known to have lied about a lot of other stuff. So why are we trusting him on this? If he was a witness in a courtroom we wouldn’t trust his testimony. We’ve caught him in too many lies. We don’t trust him anymore." ⁵³

Duesberg and Mullis’ arguments go unheeded by the mainstream scientific community as an article in Yale Scientific explains: "Both Duesberg and Mullis have emphasized that the papers of Montagnier, Gallo, or others do not provide any scientific justification that HIV causes a disease. They asked for such papers but none was forthcoming. In his California Monthly interview, Mullis tells how he began to think there was ‘something fishy’ about the evasive answers he was getting to his questions. He tells about the way he confronted Montagnier in San Diego, after Montagnier had given a talk on AIDS. Mullis ‘noticed that Montagnier hadn’t said one word about why we ought to think HIV is the cause of AIDS.’ After the talk Mullis asked Montagnier directly for a scientific reference, and Montagnier admitted that none existed.

"Duesberg wrote a letter dated 11 February, 1993 to Harold Jaffe, Director of the HIV/AIDS Division at the CDC. In that letter, Duesberg asked: ‘Exactly which papers are now considered proof or, if there is no proof, the best support for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis?’ Not a single specific paper was mentioned in Jaffe’s reply. Jaffe only gave what he viewed as epidemiological evidence."⁵⁴ Once honored and embraced by the scientific community, these men are now viewed as being out of touch with reality."

For 28 years, Duesberg was never turned down for a grant. But once he became an advocate against the HIV hypothesis, his world changed: "Once you have no more grants, you’re essentially finished as an experimental scientist. You hurt for another two years, and then it’s over. My lab was filled with students and my papers were popular at meeting. I got awards and was elected to the academy. Nothing is left. I’m alone in the lab with no more grants and I’m only teaching undergraduate lab courses. This is what happens if you don’t conform in this country." ⁵⁵

The plight of Duesberg serves as an example to others who would dare to speak out and express skepticism. Dr. Phillip Johnson notes, "For anybody more junior and more outspoken, it would be a death sentence. So they just don’t do it." ⁵⁶

Any debate among scientists is not tolerated from the organizations in charge of how we view AIDS, observes Rasnick, who says that the NIH is run like the military: "I had assumed that the NIH, even though it was government- operated and funded, was a scientific organization where there is free and open discourse. I knew upper administrators in the CDC, for example, the surgeon general, had military ranks. A disturbing revelation was learning that the same scenario is true at the NIH. For example, Anthony Faucci has a military rank and uniform as do all the other big shots there.

"There’s no tolerance of criticism in a military organization. There’s no free discourse and debate. The military and scientific setting are completely incompatible, and the military orchestration always dominates....When you have a military structure, you can completely stifle any discourse, criticism, debate that goes counter to national policy. And the national policy as of April 23, 1984 was that AIDS was an infectious disease caused by a retrovirus which Robert Gallo discovered.

"The NIH is also the principle funding source of medical academic research in the U.S. They are it. Peter Duesberg and most other academics send their research proposals to the NIH. This military organization filters through what they’re willing to accept and what they’re not. That explains how a dynamic research community, open to discourse, debate, and criticism, vanished in the era of AIDS." ⁵⁷

Professor Charles Geshekter adds that it serves no advantage to the authorities to participate in an open debate: "From what I would consider to be the inherent flaws and weaknesses in the HIV=AIDS infectious theory, I think what would happen would be that the public would see that the emperor has no clothes. And I think that you would see that the notion that the HIV infectious viral theory as science would be exposed for the ideology that it really ha become. I don’t think it could withstand a close, careful questioning. Further evidence of that is the way that those of us who are dissidents have had our views censored or not given a public forum to express those views. And so, if I were in the Gallo Ho camp, the last thing I would want would be an open, unfettered, robust exchange of scientific ideas. ⁵⁸

Mark Conlan, editor and publisher of the health magazine Zenger’s and co-founder of HEAL in San Diego, an AIDS activist organization, notes that open dialogue is discouraged because the HIV hypothesis serves so many powerful interest groups: "For the handful of government scientists who started the HIV/AIDS model, it serves the purpose of keeping them on a funding stream. In the early 1980's, a group of virologists were being threatened with having their cancer research program funding terminated and latched onto AIDS as a way to keep themselves in business and on the government gravy train. They lobbied the Reagan administration to have their view that AIDS was caused by a virus declared scientific truth.

"For the private pharmaceutical companies that bankroll a lot of the AIDS organizations, it’s an incredible profit generator. One company that manufactures protease inhibitors built two entire factories just to take care of production. Plenty of people are making enormous amounts of money.

"For the gay community, it’s been a validation. In the 1980's, when the view was represented that AIDS was due to toxic habits, like drugs use and repeated antibiotic treatments for sexually-transmitted disease, people in the gay community got very upset at being blamed. People felt they were being victimized for being gay. So, when the HIV model was politically proclaimed, the leadership of the gay community, with a handful of courageous exceptions, seized on it and said we don’t have to re-evaluate our lifestyle; it’s a virus.

"Then there was an enormous amount of sympathy. You got to see Liz Taylor wearing red ribbons. Gay celebrities, like Elton John, came out of the closet because they wanted to be identified with the fight against AIDS.

"And it’s been an enormous source of income for the gay community. In fact, a lot of gay people are earning a livelihood from HIV--working for AIDS organizations, offering HIV treatment and prevention programs, taking care of people with AIDS. Most gay publications used to be supported by ads for gay bars. Now they’ve been replaced with ads about AIDS. Ad after ad is for HIV clinics or new drugs. Whenever a new drug gets approved, its makers will buy a three to five page spread in a gay publication, using pictures of wonderfully athletic people taking the drug. Way down in the fine print you’ll read that there is no information that this drug actually improves the quality of length of life....

"Finally, I’d say that [HIV] is like a religion. It’s given people, gay people in particular, a way to make sense of the world, a way to make sense of the fact that until recently quite a lot of people were coming down with these bizarre illnesses and dying well before their time. Like any other religion its been adopted as a belief, and people really don’t want to have to look at it all over again and ask themselves was that really what was going on? Or was it something else? They believe, it satisfies them, and they integrate that into their lives." ⁵⁹

In the twentieth century, science has indeed taken on the power religion once had. The media and the public tend to accept the official point of view coming from the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control as if it were coming from a great deity. Dr. Schoch comments, "We assume these people know things and speak the truth. It’s very difficult to challenge them on their own terms. They’re given the benefit of the doubt by journalists because they do know some things that we do not know. But they are not and should not be above skepticism and criticism." ⁶⁰

Dissenting Journalists

Like scientists, investigative journalists who want to do explore the issues surrounding AIDS find that they have a difficult to impossible task. Often they are shot down by the authorities before their ideas can gain momentum. Neville Hodgkinson, former science editor for The London Times (a newspaper equal to our own New York Times), speaks of his experience: "I have been on a long journey with this because I was first reporting on AIDS back in the ‘80's. During that decade, I was telling the story from the conventional perspective, saying that this terrible syndrome was the result of an infection from a new and deadly virus. And I was writing about the hopes for a vaccine and drug treatment. [Then] I heard that a challenge had been mounted to the idea that HIV causes AIDS by an American scientist, Peter Duesberg...and I looked at those arguments very closely."

Believing that scientific inquiry was an open-minded process, Hodgkinson was unpleasantly surprised to learn that his two-page article, questioning the assumption that HIV causes AIDS, was met with hysterical response rather than reasoned argument. The mainstream community called him grossly irresponsible for expressing contrary views. He was told that dissention was not acceptable during such a terrible health emergency as people might give up their "safe sex" precautions which, in turn, might cause many more deaths. Besides, he must be wrong as all but the tiniest handful had come to an agreement upon this issue.

The article also had the effect of making Hodgkinson a focal point for scientists who had started to question the HIV theory, but who were finding it impossible to publish their work in the lay or professional press: "They were writing to me, sending me unpublished articles, telling me that they too were concerned about the hypothesis. I realized quite quickly that this wasn’t a view just confined to a very small group of scientists. Quite a few of them in various parts of the world were questioning the theory but were unable to get their voices heard." ⁶¹

Dr. Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, author of Censored 1998 (Seven Stories Press), and professor of Sociology at Soma University in California expresses deep concern over the media’s lack of openness and objectivity: "There are a number of scientists in the country who have signed a national petition to reassess the direction of AIDS research. They’re not sure that HIV, in fact, causes AIDS....That’s an interesting story. And it’s a story that the mainstream media has ignored. Rather, they have accepted the model that this virus is catchable through sexual intercourse and that it will ultimately cause AIDS.

"The media in this country has totally ignored Dr. Duesberg’s point of view that HIV may not be the actual cause of AIDS. Here we have a renown virologist saying something now for ten years with a number of other scientists backing up that position, and he’s not being given attention by the media. He has literally been blackballed from any public discussion in the open media marketplace of ideas in regards to this issue. This [lack of openness on the part of the media] is a concern that I have as a sociologist."

Dr. Phillips attributes the problem to the American media being owned by less than a dozen major corporations whose aim is to entertain the upper middle class and cater to advertisers. Since significant money is being spent on HIV research and prevention programs, to question the legitimacy of this might be perceived as threatening and result in the withdrawal of advertising dollars. Phillips concludes, "The idea that HIV causes AIDS becomes a sacred symbol that you don’t question or discuss." ⁶²

A handful of journalists and editors in this country have taken the position of wanting to inform the public. Geneticist Dr. John MacDonald, editor of the Genetica magazine agrees that it is imperative for the mainstream to openly debate issues surrounding AIDS, and has become proactive in that direction: "I read articles about Dr. Duesberg and his claim that he was not given access to journals. That prompted me to write to him because I think if science is going to work all points of view must become public and debated on scientific grounds....Even if there are points of view that we do not believe to be true at the present time, that does not give us the right to exclude them from the public domain. Science can only work if there is an openness [where] all ideas are exposed to the scientific community and the scientific community is allowed to test them. I think it’s very dangerous for editors of journals and others to exclude based on their own personal views as to whether a point of view is correct or not. I don’t feel that’s our role. Our job is to get different ideas out to the public."⁶³ An upcoming issue of Genetica will publish an article by Duesberg and a reply by an establishment AIDS researcher, a unique event and a step in the right direction.

Steve Allen, a journalist who has been an affiliate for ABC and CBS and who has filmed two documentaries on AIDS--HIV: The Surrogate Marker and HIV Equals AIDS: Fact or Fiction--speaks of the difficulties journalists have when they want to do more than act as public relations representatives: "I began to realize in 1992 that no one was questioning the powers that be. Essentially, all the information that was coming from the government was going right out over the air. Practically nobody was asking any objective questions and those journalists who were being criticized and often blacklisted or censored.

Pressure is put on journalists whenever they challenge HIV=AIDS that doesn’t allow us to publish or produce or otherwise get the information out there. Very often, you’ll research a story, interview a lot of people, present facts, and it will meet some editorial gate someplace, and the information is just shut down. That happened to us in 1992. We took a piece out to Creative Artists in Hollywood that we thought was very exploratory, very objective, and balanced. We presented arguments from both sides of the issue of HIV. They said, ‘We find the information very compelling, but we can’t use it.’ It’s that kind of stuff that has a lot of people stuck in the corner. They have the inability to get their information out there and for that reason, they just don’t cover it." ⁶⁴

AIDS activist and journalist Mark Anderson comments on the lack of fair representation by the media: "It’s not the job of journalists to be advocating one scientific point of view or another, but I think it’s their job to make sure that those who are advocating scientific points of view different from the dominant paradigm be given their time on the air or their space on the page.

"The evidence that the dissidents are presenting is persuasive. I don’t think that it is something that you can look at and ten minutes later it’s an open and shut case. I think it’s a very credible perspective. You have to remember that it’s precisely this sort of debate that drives science forward. Without it, you can’t have new ideas and perspectives. What’s it about if you’re not looking for new ideas and new insights?" ⁶⁵

Dr. Russell Schoch, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a journalist who has written about AIDS for Newsweek says that, in the usual scenario, anyone offering an alternative to the mainstream perspective in any area of western medicine is automatically relegated to the margins: "There are very few independent journalists who question anything about AIDS, and it’s not only AIDS. An important point is this is western medicine as a whole. From Alzheimers to ulcers, you can find various contests about the nature of the disease, the cause of the disease, the treatment or cure of the disease. But they are rarely talked about in the mainstream press. AIDS is one very glaring example of the lack of conversation about the contests that go on." ⁶⁶

What Does the Future Hold?

Dissidents from the AIDS community continue to ask, "Is HIV the virus that kills people or is it something else?" Yet their voices remain unheard. Some of the leading critics wonder if it will ever be any different. Hodgkinson states, "The Perth scientists are not alone. There are other virologists throughout the world saying that they have a point. We should be facing up to this. But it’s too awful for the AIDS mainstream to contemplate that they could have gotten it wrong at that base level after all those years of work and the antiviral drug approaches. After all, millions of people have been told they’re infected with a deadly new virus on the basis of the HIV test. Supposing that’s wrong. It’s a huge burden of responsibility.

"It’s almost as though the world of science and medicine itself, which is a very proud and well-meaning world, wants to do good. It wants to make money, but it wants to do good too. People working within it have professional standards and it’s almost as if to contemplate the possibility of such a damaging error is too much to face. For that reason, the good scientists who are raising these questions are being marginalized. There may be something of a breakthrough coming but, up until this point, nobody from the mainstream scientific world has been willing to take on such a radical challenge to the HIV approach to AIDS." ⁶⁷

Journalist Steve Allen speaks of the importance of keeping the public truthfully informed: "I think the biggest problem we have had is that the public at large is not aware. If the American public knew how flimsy and scientifically bankrupt the entire argument is that supports the HIV=AIDS hypothesis is, then they wouldn’t support it. But I still find that ten years after Peter Duesberg has released his first articles in Science that most people have no idea that this is going on. If there’s one point we need to get across to everybody it’s that we need to challenge all this stuff." ⁶⁸

Professor Geshekter believes that there "irresponsible fear mongering on the part of the media" will intensify in the next few years to make it seem as if an AIDS pandemic is taking place in Africa because the next AIDS Conference is scheduled to take place there in the year 2000. To correct the misinformation campaign, Geshekter looks to the media and to websites to truly inform the public domain. ⁶⁹

Dr. Rasnick contemplates the sociological significance of AIDS: "The founding fathers of this country were excellent students of human nature. They knew that one of the best ways to compensate for human nature was to have free and open discourse, debate, and dialogue. That’s why we have freedom of speech in the First Amendment of the Constitution. The way to check various allegiances is to have diverse allegiances so that you have a really healthy, robust dialogue and debate going on. Then no one dominates.

"It used to be this way in science. Now we’ve stifled and pretty effectively done away with open discourse in the scientific community as well as in the media. That’s what we have to address. We have to promote the diversity that we’re all getting away from with the creation of big industry and the homogenization of the media.

"AIDS is the best example of institutional collapse in our society. We have to address the structure of the information flow in society. Who has access to the truth? Who determines what truth is? It’s much bigger than AIDS. But AIDS gives us the best example of what’s wrong. And I hope that if we study it properly and in enough depth that we will realize that it is an institutional problem. It’s not a problem of a couple of renegade scientists who have gone wrong with a bad theory. It’s much bigger than that. And I hope that’s where the analysis gets directed. We should use AIDS and its numerous documented failings to ask ourselves, how could this happen?" ⁷⁰

Endnotes

1. Robert Root-Bernstein, Transcript: The AIDS Catch, 1990, Meditel Productions Ltd, Chennel.
2. E.Christine Johnson interview with Papadopulos-Eleopulos, "Is HIV the cause of AIDS?" Continuum 5(1), Autumn 1997.
3. Gary Null interview with Dr. Stefan Lanka, 7/15/98.
4. Neville Hodgkinson, AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science: How a Virus that Never was Deceived the World (London, Fourth Estate, 1996), p.375.
5. Neville Hodgkinson, "The origin of the specious," Continuum, 4(3), September/October 1996, pp.17-18.
6. Gary Null interview with Dr. Stefan Lanka, 7/15/98.
7. Christine Johnson interview with E. Papadopulos-Eleopulos, "Is HIV the cause of AIDS?" Continuum, 5(1), Autumn 1997.
8. Gary Null interview with Dr. Stefan Lanka, 7/15/98.
9. Gary Null interview with Kurt Vanquill, 7/20/98.
10. Gary Null interview with Djamel Tahi, 7/7/98.
11. Gary Null interview with Dr. Stefan Lanka, 7/15/98.
12. Gary Null interview with Kurt Vanquill, 7/20/98.
13. Gary Null interview with Dr. Stefan Lanka, 7/15/98.
14. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
15. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
16. Gary Null interview with Dr. Stefan Lanka, 7/15/98.
17. Gary Null interview with Michael Verney Elliot, 7/27/98.
18. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg, 7/23/98.
19. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
20. Gary Null interview with Lynn Gannett, 7/16/98.
21. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg, 7/23/98.
22. Gary Null interview with Dr. Charles Thomas, Jr., 7/7/98.
23. Gary Null interview with John Turner, 7/21/98.
24. Gary Null interview with Dr. Stefan Lanka, 7/15/98.
25. Gary Null interview with Dr. David Rasnick, 7/13/98.
26. Gary Null interview with Kary Mullis, undated.
27. Gary Null interview with Kary Mullis, undated.
28. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
29. Gary Null interview with Kary Mullis, undated.
30. Gary Null interview with Dr. Charles Geshekter, 7/27/98.
31. Gary Null interview with Dr. Mark Chanley, 7/20/98.
32. Gary Null interview with Dr. Phillip Johnson, 7/7/98.
33. Gary Null interview with Dr. David Rasnick, 7/13/98.
34. Gary Null interview with Mark Conlan, 7/21/98.
35. Zenger’s is available by subscription for $25 a year (sponsorships are available for$10 per issue or $100 per year and include a free subscription). To order, write to Mark Conlan, P.O. Box 50134, San Diego, CA 92165.
36. Gary Null interview with John Turner, 7/21/98.
37. Gary Null interview with Dr. Frank Buianouckas, 7/21/98.
38. Gary Null interview with Michael Verney Elliot, 7/27/98.
39. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
40. Gary Null interview with Dr. David Rasnick, 7/13/98.
41. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg, 7/23/98.
42. Gary Null interview with Dr. David Rasnick, 7/13/98.
43. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
44. Gary Null interview with Lynn Gannett, 7/16/98.
45. Gary Null interview with Lynn Gannett, 7/16/98.
46. Gary Null interview with Michael Verney Elliot, 7/27/98.
47. Gary Null interview with Lynn Gannett, 7/16/98.
48. Gary Null interview with Kary Mullis, undated.
49. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg, 7/23/98.
50. Gary Null interview with Michael Verney Elliot, 7/27/98.
51. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg, 7/23/98.
52. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg, 7/23/98.
53. Gary Null interview with Kary Mullis, undated.
54. Serge Lange, "HIV AIDS: Have we been misled?" Yale Scientific, Fall 1994, p.11.
55. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg, 7/23/98.
56. Gary Null interview with Phillip Johnson, 7/7/98.
57. Gary Null interview with Dr. David Rasnick, 7/13/98.
58. Gary Null interview with Dr. Charles Geshekter, 7/27/98.
59. Gary Null interview with Mark Conlan, 7/21/98.
60. Gary Null interview with Dr. Russell Schoch, 7/21/98.
61. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
62. Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Phillips, 7/17/98.
63. Gary Null interview with Dr. John MacDonald, 7/21/98.
64. Gary Null interview with Steve Allen, 7/27/98.
65. Gary Null interview with Mark Anderson, 7/27/98.
66. Gary Null interview with Dr. Russell Schoch, 7/21/98.
67. Gary Null interview with Neville Hodgkinson, 7/14/98.
68. Gary Null interview with Steve Allen, 7/27/98.
69. Gary Null interview with Dr. Charles Gishekter, 7/27/98.
70. Gary Null interview with Dr. David Rasnick, 7/13/98.