“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
Winston Churchill

While writing November 5th’s entry about the current ‘avian flu’ scare I got a strong sense of deja vu. The scenario seemed all too familiar – widespread panic in the face of potential annihilation, and all arising from the spectre of a disease based on the most flimsy and tenuous of scientific rationales.

We’ve been here before.

The rationale employed to explain the logic of HIV ‘infection’ runs counter to all other instances of viral infection. The usual reasoning says that an asymptomatic individual who tests positive for a viral antibody is regarded as having met, successfully overcome, and consequently acquired some degree of immunity to that infection. However, in the case of AIDS, the presence of HIV antibody (which is what an HIV test determines) in an asymptomatic individual is interpreted as meaning that the person who tests positive has active infection which they are highly likely to die from at some unspecified future date 5-12 years or more hence.

Viral infections are, by and large, associated with acute manifestations of disease – ie. self-limiting conditions that arise as a direct result of infection, have a well-defined characteristic symptom picture and disease progression, and end either in recovery or death. The only infection with proven direct association with the HIV virus is a fairly mild flu-like illness that soon passes off. To connect this virus with the wholesale collapse of the immune system a number of years later, which manifests in a variety of ways (hence ‘syndrome’) with different timing and progression in each individual, seems remarkably tenuous, to say the least. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now defines AIDS as comprising no less than 26 different diseases. All this from one virus?

Supposedly the virus remains active in the body after all the outward symptoms of infection have resolved (something that usually indicates that infection has been successfully dealt with), steadily working away over a period of around 5-12 years chipping away at the ability of the immune system to discriminate between self and other, so that eventually it fails to protect itself against incoming threats. Proposed causative mechanisms such as this theory usually take years of observation, testing, and a lot of work from a large number of people to establish and then confirm, particularly if they run counter to general consensus on viral behaviour. In the spring of 1984, when Robert Gallo announced – with a fair amount of professional publicity behind him – that he had found the cause of AIDS, he hadn’t published a single paper that even claimed to seriously prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS (and he’s now backtracking to say that it can’t be the only cause) and no other researchers had verified his conclusions.

Adequate proof usually requires that the virus be observed in action, doing what it’s claimed it does, yet the virus is so hard to detect that its ‘presence’ can only be confirmed by the existence of the antibody. The absence of a virus and the presence of its antibody is, of course, just the situation you’d expect to find if the infection had been successfully dealt with …

AIDS was also predicted, on the basis that it was a viral infection, to decimate the western world. This hasn’t happened. In the West it’s predominantly restricted to those whose immune systems are severely compromised by immunosuppressive lifestyle choices, including recreational IV drug use (which extends to the children of IV drug users), haemophiliacs and other transfusion recipients, and those on prolonged anti-viral therapy.

The result of the HIV explanation of AIDS causation was that billions of government research dollars were pumped into the development of an HIV vaccine. This is also illogical. Why give those with HIV antibodies a vaccination to encourage the development of something they already have?! And phenomenally expensive drugs like AZT are being prescribed to people for the rest of their lives who have nothing wrong with them apart from an HIV-positive blood test result.

Respected virologists (notably Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a pioneer in the discovery of retroviruses, and Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) have repeatedly challenged the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. Duesberg actually thinks AZT, along with long-term recreational drug use, may be among the principal ongoing causes of the syndrome in the West.

Peter Duesberg

Thanks to the enormous amount of fear and anxiety generated by the spectre of a latent viral disease just waiting to wipe out most of the western world, US federal funding of AIDS research runs at around $7 billion per annum, which is more than even cancer research gets. Nice work if you can get it.

Further reading:

• Duesberg’s 9 reasons for his conclusion that HIV is not the cause of AIDS
• Michael Tracey – Mere smoke of opinion: Aids and the Making of the Public Mind
• For more on what lay behind the HIV=AIDS publicity circus, see this interview.

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it would be such as oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Leo Tolstoy