WHAT CAUSES AIDS? It's An Open Question (June 1994)

WHAT CAUSES AIDS? It's An Open Question By Charles A. Thomas Jr., Kary B. Mullis, & Phillip E. Johnson

Most people believe they know what causes AIDS. For a decade, scientist, government officials, physicians, journalists, public-service ads, TV shows, and movies have told them that AIDS is caused by a retrovirus called HIV. This virus supposedly infects and kills the "T-cells" of the immune system, leading to an inevitably, fatal immune deficiency after an asymptomatic period that averages 10 years or so. Most people do not know-because there has been a visual media blackout on the subject-about a longstanding scientific controversy over the cause of AIDS. A controversy that has become increasingly heated as the official theory's predictions have turned out to be wrong.

Leading biochemical scientists, including University of California at Berkeley retrovirus expert Peter Duesberg and Nobel Prize winner Walter Gilbert, have been warning for years that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. The warnings were met first with silence, then with ridicule and contempt. In 1990, for example, Nature published a rare response from the HIV establishment, as represented by Robin A. Weiss of the Institute of Cancer Research in London and Harold W. Jaffe of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Weiss and Jaffe compared the doubters to people who think that bad air causes malaria. "We have . . . been told," they wrote, "that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) originates from outer space, or as a genetically engineered virus for germ warfare which was tested in prisoners and spread from them. Peter H. Duesberg's proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS at all is, to our minds, equally absurd." Viewers of ABC's 1993 Day One special on the cause of AIDS-almost the only occasion on which network television has covered the controversy-saw Robert Gallo, the leading exponent of the HIV theory, stomp away from the microphone in a rage when asked to respond to the views of Gilbert and Duesberg.

Such displays of rage and ridicule are familiar to those who question the HIV theory of AIDS. Ever since 1984, when Gallo announced the discovery of what the newspapers call "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS," at a government press conference, the HIV theory has been the basis of all scientific work on AIDS. If the theory is mistaken, billions of dollars have been wasted-and immense harm has been done to persons who have tested positive for antibodies to HIV and therefore have been told to expect an early and painful death. The furious reactions to the suggestion that a colossal mistake may have been made are not surprising, given that the credibility of the biomedical establishment is at stake. It is time to think about the unthinkable, however, because there are at least three reasons for doubting the official theory that HIV causes AIDS.

First, after spending billions of dollars, HIV researchers are still unable to explain how HIV, a conventional retrovirus with a very simple genetic organization, damages the immune system, much less how to stop it. The present stalemate contrasts dramatically with the confidence expressed in 1984. At that time Gallo thought the virus killed cells directly by infecting them, and U.S. government officials predicted a vaccine would be available in two years. Ten years later no vaccine is in sight, and the certainty about how the virus destroys the immune system has dissolved in confusion.

Second, in the absence of any agreement about how HIV causes AIDS, the only evidence that HIV does cause AIDS is correlation. The correlation is imperfect at best, however. There are many cases of persons with all the symptoms of AIDS who do not have any HIV infection. There are also many cases of persons who have been infected by HIV for more than a decade and show no signs of illness.

Third, predictions based on the HIV theory have failed spectacularly. AIDS in the United States and Europe has not spread through the general population. Rather, it remains almost entirely confined to the original risk groups, mainly sexually promiscuous gay men and drug abusers. The number of HIV-infected Americans has remained constant for years instead of increasing rapidly as predicted, which suggests that HIV is an old virus that has been with us for centuries without causing an epidemic.

No one disputes what happens in the early stages of HIV infection. As other viruses do, HIV multiplies rapidly, and it sometimes is accompanied by a mild, flulike illness. At this stage, while the virus is present in great quantity and causing at most mild illness in the ordinary way, it does no observable damage to the immune system. On the contrary, the immune system rallies as it is supposed to do and speedily reduces the virus to negligible levels. Once this happens, the primary infection is over. If HIV does destroy the immune system, it does so years after the immune system has virtually destroyed it. By then the virus typically infects very few of the immune system' s T-cells.

Before these facts were well understood, Robert Gallo and his followers insisted that the virus does its damage by directly infecting and killing cells. In his 1991 autobiography, Gallo ridiculed HIV discoverer Luc Montagnier's view that the virus causes AIDS only in the company of as yet undiscovered "cofactors." Gallo argued that "multifactorial is multi-ignorance" and that, because being infected by HIV was "like being hit by a truck," there was no need to look for additional causes or indirect mechanisms of causation.

All that has changed. As Warner C. Greene, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, explained in the September 1993 Scientific American, researchers are increasingly abandoning the direct cell-killing theory because HIV does not infect enough cells: "Even in patients in the late stages of HIV infection with very low blood T4 cell counts, the proportion of those cells that are producing HIV is tiny-about one in 40. In the early stages of chronic infection, fewer than one in 10,000 T4 cells in blood are doing so. If the virus were killing the cells just by directly infecting them, it would almost certainly have to infect a much larger fraction at any one time."

Gallo himself is now among those who are desperately looking for possible co-factors and exploring indirect mechanisms of causation. Perhaps the virus somehow causes other cells of the immune system to destroy T-cells or induces the T-cells to destroy themselves. Perhaps HIV can cause immune-system collapse even when it is no long present in the body. As Gallo put it at an AIDS conference last summer: "The molecular mimicry in which HIV imitates components of the immune system sets events into motion that may be able to proceed in the absence of further whole virus."

But researchers have not been able to confirm experimentally any of the increasingly exotic causal mechanisms that are being proposed, and they do not agree about which of the competing explanations is more plausible. When The New York Times interviewed the government' s head AIDS researcher, Anthony Fauci, in February, reporter Natalie Angier summarized his view as a sort of stew of all the leading possibilities: "It [HIV] overexcites some immune signaling pathways, while eluding the detection of others. And though the main target of the virus appears to be the famed helper T-cells, or CD-4 cells, which it can infiltrate and kill, the virus also ends up stimulating the response of other immune cells so inappropriately that they eventually collapse from overwork or confusion." No other virus is credited with such a dazzling repertoire of destructive skills.

Perhaps it is the HIV scientists who are collapsing from overwork or confusion. The theory is getting ever more complicated, without getting any nearer to a solution. This is a classic sign of a deteriorating scientific paradigm. But as HIV scientists grow ever more confused about how the virus is supposed to be causing AIDS, their refusal to consider the possibility that it may not be the cause is as rigid as ever. On the rare occasions when they answer questions on the subject, they explain that "unassailable epidemiological evidence" has established HIV as the cause of AIDS. In short, they rely on correlation.

The seemingly close correlation between AIDS and HIV is largely an artifact of the misleading definition of AIDS used by the U.S. government' s Centers for Disease Control. AIDS is a syndrome defined by the presence of one or more of 30 independent diseases-when accompanied by a positive result on a test that detects antibodies to HIV. The same disease conditions are not defined as AIDS when the antibody test is negative. Tuberculosis with a positive antibody test is AIDS; tuberculosis with a negative test is just TB.

The skewed definition of AIDS makes a close correlation with HIV inevitable, regardless of the facts. This situation was briefly exposed at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam in 1992, when the existence of dozens of suppressed "AIDS without HIV" cases first became publicly known. Instead of considering the obvious implications of these cases for the HIV theory, the authorities at the CDC, who had known about some of the cases for years but had kept the subject under wraps, quickly buried the anomaly by inventing a new disease called ICL (Idiopathic CD4+Lympho-cytopenia)--a conveniently forgettable name that means "AIDS without HIV."

There are probably thousands of cases of AIDS without HIV in the United States alone. Peter Duesberg found 4,621 cases recorded in the literature, 1,691 of them in this country. (Such cases tend to disappear from the official statistics because, once it's clear that HIV is absent, the CDC no longer counts them as AIDS.) In a 1993 article published in Bio/Technology, Duesberg documented the consistent failure of the CDC to report on the true incidence of positive HIV tests in AIDS cases. The CDC concedes that at least 40,000 "AIDS cases" were diagnosed on the basis of presumptive criteria-that is, without antibody testing, on the basis of diseases such as Kaposi's sarcoma. Yet these diseases can occur without HIV or immune deficiency. Perhaps some of the patients diagnosed as having AIDS would have tested negative, or actually did test negative, for HIV. Physicians and health departments have an incentive to diagnose patients with AIDS symptoms as AIDS cases whenever they can, because the federal government pays the medical expenses of AIDS patients under the Ryan White Act but not of persons equally sick with the same diseases who test negative for HIV antibodies.

The claimed correlation between HIV and AIDS is flawed at an even more fundamental level, however. Even if the "AIDS test" were administered in every case, the tests are unreliable. Authoritative papers in both Bio/Technology (June 1993) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (November 27, 1991) have shown that the tests are not standardized and give many "false positives" because they react to substances other than HIV antibodies. Even if that were not the case, the tests at best confirm the presence of antibodies and not the virus itself, much less the virus in an active, replicating state. Antibodies typically mean that the body has fought off a viral infection, and they may persist long after the virus itself has disappeared from the body. Since it is often difficult to find live virus even in the bodies of patients who are dying of AIDS, Gallo and others have to speculate that HIV can cause AIDS even when it is no longer present and only antibodies are left.

Just as there are cases of AIDS without HIV, there are cases of HIV-positive persons who remain healthy for more than a decade and who may never suffer from AIDS. According to Greene's article in Scientific American, "It is even possible that some rare strains [of HIV] are benign. Some homosexual men in the U.S. who have been infected with HIV for at least 11 years show as yet no signs of damage to their immune systems. My colleagues . . .and I are studying these long-term survivors to ascertain whether something unusual about their immune systems explains their response or whether they carry an avirulent strain of the virus."

The faulty correlation between HIV and AIDS would not disprove the HIV theory if there were strong independent evidence that HIV causes AIDS. As we have seen, however, researchers have been unable to establish a mechanism of causation. Nor have they succeeded in confirming the HIV model by inducing AIDS in animals. Chimps have repeatedly been infected with HIV, but none of them have developed AIDS. In the absence of a mechanism or an animal model, the HIV theory is based only upon a correlation that turns out to be primarily an artifact of the theory itself.

In light of the importance of the correlation argument, it is astonishing that no controlled studies have been done for three of the major risk groups: transfusion recipients, hemophiliacs, and drug abusers. Two ostensibly controlled studies involving men's groups in Vancouver and San Francisco purportedly show that AIDS developed only in the HIV-positive men and never in the "control group" of HIV negatives. These studies were designed not to test the HIV theory but to measure the rate at which HIV-positive gay men develop AIDS. They did not compare otherwise similar persons who differ only in HIV status, did not control effectively for drug use, and did not fully report the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases in the HIV-negative men. The research establishment accepted these studies uncritically because they give the HIV theory some badly needed support. But the main point they supposedly prove has already been thoroughly disproved: AIDS does occur in HIV-negative persons.

According to the official theory, HIV is a virus newly introduced into the American population, which has had no opportunity to develop any immunity. It follows that viral infection should spread rapidly, moving from the original risk groups (gays, drug addicts, transfusion recipients) into the general population. This is what the government agencies confidently predicted, and AIDS advertising to this day emphasizes the theme that "everyone is at risk."

The facts are otherwise. AIDS is still confined mainly to the original risk groups, and AIDS patients in the United States are still almost 90-percent male. Health-care workers, who are constantly exposed to blood and bodily fluids of AIDS patients, have no greater risk of contracting AIDS that the population at large. Among millions of health- care workers, the CDC claims only seven or eight (poorly documented) cases of AIDS supposedly developed through occupational exposure. By contrast, the CDC estimates that accidental needle sticks lead to more than 1,500 cases of hepatitis infection each year. Even prostitutes are not at risk for AIDS unless they also use drugs.

Far from threatening the general heterosexual population, AIDS is confined mainly to drug users and gay men in specific urban neighborhoods. According to a 1992 report by the prestigious U.S. National Research Council, "The convergence of evidence shows that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is settling into spatially and socially isolated groups and possibly becoming endemic within them." This factual picture is so different from what the theory predicts, and so threatening to funding, that the AIDS agencies have virtually ignored the National Research Council report and have continued to preach the fiction that "AIDS does not discriminate."

Not only is AIDS mostly confined to isolated groups in a few U.S. cities, but HIV infection is not increasing. Although a virus newly introduced to a susceptible population should spread rapidly, for several years the CDC has estimated that a steady 1 million Americans are HIV positive. Now it appears that the figure of 1 million is finally about to be revised-downward. According to a story by Lawrence Altman in the March 1 New York Times, new statistical studies indicate that only about 700,000 Americans are HIV positive, and the official estimate will accordingly be reduced sometime this summer.

While HIV infection remains steady at this modest level in the United States, World Health Organization officials claim that the same virus is spreading rapidly in Africa and Asia, creating a vast "pandemic" that threatens to infect at least 40 million people by the year 2000, unless billions of dollars are provided for prevention to the organizations sounding the alarm. These worldwide figures, especially from Africa, are used to maintain the thesis that "everyone is at risk" in the United States. Instead of telling Americans that AIDS cases here are almost 90-percent male, authorities say that worldwide the majority of AIDS sufferers are female. With the predictions of a mass epidemic in America and Europe failing so dramatically, AIDS organizations rely on the African figures to vindicate their theory.

But these African figures are extremely soft, based almost entirely on "clinical diagnoses," without even inaccurate HIV testing. What this means in practice is that Africans who die of diseases that have long been common there---especially wasting disease accompanied by diarrhea-are now classified as AIDS victims. Statistics on "African AIDS" are thus extremely manipulable, and witnesses are emerging who say that the epidemic is greatly exaggerated, if it exists at all.

In October 1993, the Sunday Times of London reported on interviews with Philippe and Evelyne Krynen, heads of a 230-employee medical relief organization in the Kagera province of Tanzania. The Krynens had first reported on African AIDS in 1989 and at that time were convinced that Kagera in particular was in the grip of a vast epidemic. Subsequent years of medical work in Kagera have changed their minds. They have learned that what they had thought were "AIDS orphans" were merely children left with relatives by parents who had moved away and that HIV-positive and HIV-negative villagers suffer from the same diseases and respond equally well to treatment. Philippe Krynen's verdict: "There is no AIDS. It is something that has been invented. There are no epidemiological grounds for it; it doesn't exist for us."

Krynen's remark calls attention to the fact that AIDS is not a disease. Rather, it is a syndrome defined by the presence of any of 30 separate and previously known diseases, accompanied by the actual or suspected presence of HIV. The definition has changed over time and is different for Africa (where HIV testing is rare) than for Europe and North America. The official CDC definition of AIDS in the United States was enormously broadened for 1993 in order to distribute more federal AIDS money to sick people, especially women with cervical cancer. As a direct result, AIDS cases more than doubled in 1993. Absent the HIV mystique, there would be no reason to believe that a single factor is causing cervical cancer in women, Kaposi's sarcoma in gay males, and slim disease in Africans.

The HIV paradigm is failing every scientific test. Research based upon it has failed to provide not only a cure or vaccine but even a theoretical explanation for the disease-causing mechanism. Such success as medical science has had with AIDS has come not from the futile attempts to attack HIV with toxic antiviral drugs like AZT but from treating the various AIDS-associated diseases separately. Predictions based on the HIV theory have been falsified or are supported only by dubious statistics based mainly on the theory itself. Yet the HIV establishment continues to insist that nothing is wrong and to use its power to exclude dissenting voices, however eminent in science, from the debate.

Like other leaders of the scientific establishment, Nature Editor John Maddox is fiercely protective of the HIV theory. He indignantly rejected a scientific paper making the same points as this article. When Duesberg first argued his case in 1989 in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the editor promised that his paper would be answered by an article defending the orthodox viewpoint. The response never came. The editors of the leading scientific journals have refused to print even the brief statement of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, which has over 300 members. The statement notes simply that "many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis" and calls for "a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis."

Genuinely controlled epidemiological studies of all the major risk groups:homosexuals, drug users, transfusion recipients, and hemophiliacs. The studies should employ an unbiased definition of AIDS. Too often we have been told that HIV always accompanies AIDS, only to learn that this is so because AIDS without HIV is named something else. The studies should be performed by persons who are committed to investigating the HIV theory rather than defending it. There is reason to suspect that properly controlled studies of transfusion recipients and hemophiliacs in particular will show that the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases is independent of HIV status.

An audit of the CDC statistics to remove HIV bias and thereby allow unprejudiced testing of the critical epidemiological evidence for the theory. Every effort should be made to determine how many AIDS patients were actually tested for antibodies and the testing method that was employed. Because even the most reliable antibody test generates many false-positive results, researchers should try to validate the tests by examining random samples of AIDS patients to determine whether significant amounts of replicating HIV can be found in their bodies. Statistics have been kept as if the purpose were to protect the HIV theory rather than to learn the truth.

Research focusing on the cause of particular diseases rather than the politically defined hodgepodge of diseases we now call AIDS. The cancer-like skin disease called Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) is one of the best-known AIDS-defining conditions, but leading KS and HIV experts Marcus Conant and Robin Weiss now say that dozens of non-HIV KS cases are under study in the United States and that KS is becoming much less frequent in gay male AIDS patients than it formerly was. Conant, Weiss, and other AIDS researchers now frankly attribute KS to an "unknown infectious agent" rather than to HIV, but KS is nonetheless still called AIDS when it occurs in combination with HIV. Duesberg attributes KS in gay males to the use of amyl nitrates (poppers) as a sexual stimulant. His theory is eminently testable, and it ought to be given a fair chance. Another example: Hemophiliacs in the age of AIDS are living longer than they ever did in the past, but they still often die of conditions related to receipt of the blood concentrate called Factor VIII. Research published in The Lancet in February confirms earlier reports that symptoms diagnosed as AIDS are best treated by providing a highly purified form of Factor VIII. Researchers should study the role of blood-product impurities in causing disease in hemophiliacs, without the distortion that comes from arbitrarily assuming that HIV is responsible whenever an HIV-positive hemophiliac becomes ill.

A critical re-examination of the statistics for AIDS and HIV in Africa and Asia. Researchers should perform new, controlled studies of representative African populations to test the relationship of confirmed HIV infection to the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases. It will not do to rely upon "presumptive diagnoses" or extrapolations from single antibody tests that are now well known to generate many false positives.

The HIV establishment and its journalist allies have replied to various specific criticisms of the HIV theory without taking them seriously. They have never provided an authoritative paper that undertakes to prove that HIV really is the cause of AIDS-meaning a paper that does not start by assuming the point at issue. The HIV theory was established as fact by Robert Gallo's official press conference in 1984, before any papers were published in American journals. Thereafter, the research agenda was set in concrete, and skeptics were treated as enemies to be ignored or punished. As a result, the self-correcting processes of science have broken down, and journalists have not known how to ask the hard questions. After 10 years of failure, it is time to take a second look. *

Charles A. Thomas Jr., a biochemist, is president of the Helicon Foundation in San Diego and secretary of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis. Kary B. Mullis is the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique, for detecting DNA, which is used to search for fragments of HIV in AIDS patients. Phillip E. Johnson is the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Several replies to the article have been published, as a reply by the authors. You find them here (see original for link).

Court rules HIV not proven to cause 'AIDS'.
(WHY DID THE U.S. MEDIA HARDLY REPORT THIS?)

After years of claims by the AIDS establishment that a link between HIV and immune supression had been established a High Court found the claim without merit and a unfounded deception. This is the first legal trail of the HUV/AIDS hypothesis and a historic defeat for AID$ Inc.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson

The United Nations Centre for Human Rights, United Nations Office at Geneva
8-14 Avenue de la Paix
1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
To all Heads of Government and all Heads of State

To all NGOs

Legal proceedings against the "Deutscher Bundestag", the Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany: Because of the intentional continuation of acts of killing and manslaughter (§ 220a StGB Germany) by the German Parliament.
During the last six years proofs have been collected for the following actions that have taken place inside Germany:

The State intentionally is using non-valid tests to persuade healthy persons to take a deadly long-term medication. The persons, being healthy before being tested die during the long-term-medication. The German Parliament, since years intentionally is securing that this crime continues.
Course of Events on January 15th 2001 at the District Court (Landgericht) of Dortmund:

Judge Hackmann announced the statement of the "Bundesgesundheitsbehörde", the Federal German Health Authorities, which says that in connection with AIDS there has never been isolated a virus (Dr. Marcus, Robert-Koch-Institute (RKI) Berlin). The judge figured out that the German Bundestag had been backing the lie of the Federal Health Authorities (RKI, Dr. Marcus, 9.3.95) about a successful isolation of a virus in connection with AIDS in the course of a petition (Art. 17, Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, Pet. 5-13-15-2002-010526).

The trial was based on actions of the defendant which were caused by the misleading statement made by the RKI (Dr. Marcus) on the 9th March 1995, that there were photographs of the isolated HI-virus inside the publications of Montagnier (1983) and Gallo (1984). The judge proved the untruthfulness of this statement using Dr. Marcus‘ statement itself. The court imposed a suspended sentence of 8 months of jail because of attempted coercion of the authorities to adhere and act according to law and order.

The document of the German Bundestag DS 12/8591 holds proof that the Bundestag had already known in 1994 that neither Montagnier (1983) nor Gallo (1984) had isolated any virus in connection with AIDS. Based on this the Bundestag safeguarded the persistent lie of the AIDS information campaign (RKI) from 9th March 1995 about the successful isolation of a virus in connection with AIDS. As a consequence of non-tolerating this lie and because of non-tolerating the deadly consequences of this lie, the trial took place on 15th January 2001.

It is impossible – as far as laboratory conditions are concerned – to develop a valid Virus-antibody-test, if the virus has not been isolated before. Every layman understands that an individual proof for an infection with a virus is impossible, if the existence of the virus has never been generally proven. This knowledge of the German health authorities, that the tests are not validated, can be proven via the authorities‘ documents themselves. The error concerning the test’s validity is spread and supported by the authorities – against better knowledge.

With two more petitions the Bundestag safeguarded the default of the responsible authorities, not to carry out the law (§63 AMG, Stufenplan II), to do studies and observations to protect persons taking the AIDS-Medicine, the chemotherapy AZT (Pet. 5-13-15-2002-058744 and Pet. 5-13-15-212-023567a).
The health authorities and the Bundestag know that there will be no test method to prove an HIV-Infection, as long as HIV has not been isolated. And there is no doubt that AZT – as well as the HIV-medications in general – are deadly themselves when used as long-term-medication.

In the course of the proceedings of the petitions the Bundestag created an apparent peace of law – by means of deliberately untruthful statements. President of the German Parliament Wolfgang Thierse regards untruthful behaviour of this kind (as shown by the Bundestag) as being justified by the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court). A videotape documenting an interview (28th June 1995) shows that his predecessor in office, Prof. Rita Süssmuth did know, that there had never been any proofs for a virus in connection with AIDS and that there are no proofs for the claims of infectivitiy.

Still pending in the Bundestag is the petition Pet. 2-14-15-212-02608. It is lodging a complaint against the legal authorities, which stayed passive after getting the attention of the proofs for these act of killings. Enclosed with the complaint were so many proofs, which had made it necessary for the Bundestag to take actions right after perusal, to stop the continuation of these acts of killings by the state. Within the last six months every single member of the German Bundestag was informed six times via mail about these acts of killing by the state.

The intention of the German Bundestag to safeguard killings by the state after gaining insight into the facts must be regarded as proven, especially because of the fact that several petitions were rejected by means of untruthful statements. The German Bundestag and every individual member of the Bundestag intentionally safeguards acts of killings by the state by deliberately misleading the public. Healthy people are intentionally lead into a deadly medication via tests with invalid results - and then die.

The criminal law of the BRD and especially § 220a StGB (Genocide) protects citizens from act of killings organised by a state which is deliberately misleading the public. It also protects the citizens binding the legal authorities to take actions after perusal. The prosecuting attorneys attended the trial on 15th January 2001 at the Landgericht Dortmund and learned about the facts – in front of the public. Their passivity afterwards serves as a further proof for their further intention in this matter. (LG Dortmund, Ns 70 Js 878/99 14(XVII) K 11/00)

Karl Krafeld and Dr. Stefan Lanka, Dortmund and Stuttgart, 14.3.2001
Science, Medicine and Human Rights (Wissenschaft, Medizin und Menschenrechte e.V.), Germany
Albrechtstr. 17, D-44137 Dortmund, 0711 2220601, Lanka@free.de

HIV/AIDS: SCIENCE OR RELIGION ?
By David Crowe
March 3, 2003

“When religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine, now when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.”

-Thomas Szasz
There appears to be little in common between the beliefs of medieval Christianity and modern science. We learned in grade school how the open exchange of ideas was suppressed back in the dark ages, and how learning was discouraged in favor of dogmas handed down hierarchically from the religious elite to the peasants through several rigid, filtering layers.
We also were taught that scientific thought is now advanced by egalitarian, intellectual, public debates between people who rise to the top of the scientific community through their intelligence, careful experimentation, open exchange of ideas and information, use of the scientific method and hard work. Everyone, we copied off the blackboard, is now exposed to rapidly evolving scientific theories rather than rote learning of the catechism of an immutable religious dogma.

How We Learn About Scientific Beliefs

Is there a problem in how we learn about the superiority of modern thought? Are we actually guilty of rote learning ourselves, accepting what we were told because it makes us feel superior to those ignorant peoples of centuries ago? Do we believe, without questioning, because the conclusions of science both support our hopes for the future as well as sending shivers up our spine as our darkest fears of the unknowable are realized? Can we claim that we hold a scientific belief when we just believe what we were told?

How do the majority of people, those outside the scientific elite of our society, learn about new scientific theories and, perhaps more importantly, decide whether to accept or reject them? Their beliefs about HIV and AIDS, for example, cannot be based on a critical examination of the evidence because so few have ever read even a single scientific paper. Is there really much difference then, between a medieval peasant being told that sinners will spend eternity burning in Hell, and an ordinary citizen of this country being told that if he or she has sex without a condom they risk contracting a fatal virus?

Ossification Of Beliefs

Early Christianity was an informal religion, with few written religious texts of its own. Jesus, for example, often taught through parables, folksy stories with a moral lesson, such as the Sower and the Seed or The Prodigal Son, rather than through recitations of dusty texts. Yet, within a few hundred years the Christian church had accreted layer of dogmas, many with little grounding in the founding principles of the church.
Celibacy, for example, was not part of early church doctrine, and some religious scholars believe that it was originally designed to stop the practice of some priests, of handing down their position and church property to their children. This leakage from the bottom of the hierarchy threatened the whole hierarchical structure. Yet, from this beginning, celibacy became a strongly defended Catholic dogma.

One of the dogmas of modern living is that HIV causes AIDS. It also did not start this way. In the first papers by Robert Gallo (not a man known for bashfulness) he only stated that HTLV-III (what he called HIV then) "may be the primary cause of AIDS"[Gallo, 1984]. Stephen Epstein, in his 1996 book "Impure science" [Epstein, 1996] shows how this tentative hypothesis became accepted fact through the emboldening of scientists who referenced it. Only 3% of papers published in 1984 used Gallo's papers to support an explicit, unqualified assertion that HIV caused AIDS. By 1985, 25% of scientific papers. And, by 1986, 62%. Epstein found this trend even when the Gallo papers were the only ones referenced! Hypothesis became fact by repetition.
Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for his invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) once echoed Gallo by starting a paper with the sentence "HIV is the probable cause of AIDS", and then went searching for a reference to support it. He read the original Gallo and Montagnier papers, found them lacking, so started asking his colleagues in his lab, and at conferences. They either said he didn't need a reference for the statement, got angry or, like Luc Montagnier, just looked uncomfortable and walked away [Duesberg, 1996].
One would think that a debate over such a fundamental point of medical science would be a big news item, but it only rarely surfaces in the news, and then often as a `Man bites Dog' story. One of these times was early in the days of Duesberg's dissidence. Another, more recently, was when South Africa's President Mbeki started asking questions about the cause of AIDS, and even established a Presidential Commission to investigate. Coverage of dissenters is usually written from the perspective that any sane person would disagree, just as a journalist might provide coverage of a flat earth society conference. Journalists focus on individuals, giving the impression that there are only a handful of renegades.

Those who believe and defend HIV/AIDS dogmas play on a weakness of journalists - there is no news if nothing new is happening. If top scientists claim that it is beneath their dignity to debate to such a preposterous notion and refuse to comment further there simply is no story. Journalists who get nosy can be told that it is irresponsible to dredge up hypotheses that were disproven years ago (which already makes the journalist feel inadequate, because they won't know of these debates, because they never happened) and that, besides, such `reckless' reporting will only make people give up safe sex, which will cause immeasurable loss of life, all because of the reporter's selfish desire for a scoop.

Another popular assumption is that HIV rapidly results in AIDS, and AIDS rapidly results in death. It is not clear exactly when and why this belief arose, because AIDS is still a fairly young disease. Although there is a high associated death rate, obviously not everyone diagnosed with AIDS dies of the disease, some may die of traffic accidents, suicide, adverse drug reactions and perhaps some will die of old age.

CDC statistics up to 1997 documented a 92% death rate [CDC, 1997] among people diagnosed with AIDS before 1981. But, a footnote to this chart indicates that "Reported deaths are not necessarily caused by HIV-related diseases". CDC definitions of pediatric AIDS exclude recovery by definition, once a child is diagnosed with `AIDS' they must keep that label, even if they fully recover from the AIDS-defining condition [MMWR, 1994].

Other research notes that the average time from HIV infection to AIDS is about 10 years, both in North Americans with access to drugs [Munoz, 1997] and in malnourished Africans with no access to these `life saving' compounds [Morgan, 2002].
A few researchers have studied so-called Long-Term Non-Progressors (LTNP), people who are HIV-positive but who remain healthy for many years without antiretroviral drugs.

This information does not support popular assumptions about HIV and AIDS, so it is simply brushed aside.

HIV/AIDS `facts', as with so many medical `facts', often get created through consensus meetings. With AIDS, this means that a group of medical doctors, public health officials and researchers get together and decide on guidelines for testing or treatment for men, for women, for adolescents or for children. By inviting only those who accept the `drugs into bodies' philosophy of AIDS, it can be ensured that a pro-drug spin will be published, and that fundamental assumptions will not be questioned.

This unscientific declaration then becomes the `standard of care', and doctors below the authors in the hierarchy are virtually compelled to work within this newly created box or risk being accused of malpractice. Yet, the impact of financial conflicts among the writers of the consensus position is rarely considered, nor the impact of the selection process (if it is even made public).

“There would never be any public agreement among doctors if they did not agree to agree on the main point of the doctor being always in the right.”

-George Bernard Shaw

Language
Language was used by medieval Christians to prevent communication of anything except the most simple religious concepts to its adherents. It was not until the 1960's, for example, that the Catholic church stopped using Latin in its masses. Language is a protective barrier around a hierarchical organization. The early church was concerned that if people listened to religious text in their native language, they might form their own opinions about theological issues. How much better to provide a ritual with familiar sounds, but no real meaning.

Three different branches of Christianity used three different languages, not one of which was understood by the average churchgoer. The Roman Catholics used Latin, the Eastern Orthodox used Greek, and the Egyptian church used Coptic. Worse than this, in the middle ages, many priests did not even speak Latin, and consequently mumbled in a way that would have been incomprehensible even to the few who did understand the language.

Well into the 20th Century much science was still published in Latin. Scientists still use Latin or Greek to develop their own terminology, which is legitimate if they are truly defining a novel concept. However, you walk into a doctor's office with muscle pain, and leave with Myalgia - have you been diagnosed or bamboozled? If you walk in with a runny nose and leave with a prescription for Rhinorrhea medication, are you better off?

While the bulk of language in medical science may be unintelligible to most people, scientists need to communicate through a carefully designed public subset of their language. What is `dumbed down' to the level of the man in the street can be very manipulative.
The words `potent' or `powerful', for example, are often used to describe toxic medicines, particularly for Cancer and AIDS. These imply that the drugs have a powerful effect on the disease. Yet, this is obviously not true, because drugs for neither Cancer nor AIDS ever completely eradicate the disease. Cancer patients are told they are in remission, not cured, and signs of HIV can usually be found in people with AIDS, even when they have been taking drugs for a long time. [Saag, 1999]

These drugs do, on the other hand, have a very potent and powerful on the patient. They can cause an amazing array of side effects including serious anemia requiring blood transfusions, muscle wasting, bone rotting (osteonecrosis in polite company), heart attacks as well as pancreas and liver failure [aras.ab.ca, 2003]
There is a special mini-language used to describe patients. They can be classified as Naïve, Experienced or Compliant. A Naïve patient is not one who is stupid, but one who has never taken drugs before. An Experienced patient is the opposite, someone who has taken lots of AIDS drugs.

Good patients are not only Experienced, but also Compliant. They take their drugs when they are supposed to, and never miss a dose. Presumably they don't whine and complain about side effects either, but just carry their cross heroically to the grave.
Scientists often fight over names. Brontosaurus is no longer the official name of a dinosaur because, although that name had been used since 1879, it was many years later discovered that the name Apatosaurus had been given to the same fossil in 1877. The naming purists won out. Brontosaurus is history.

In the case of HIV, politics played a much bigger role than even historical precedence.
Gallo originally claimed that HTLV-I (Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus I) was the cause of AIDS. This was a bit hard to swallow, because he had previously been claiming that it caused uncontrolled replication of lymphocytes (cancer), and now was claiming that it caused the death of this type of cell. He didn't even bother trying with HTLV-II, which has only ever been detected in one person. So, he changed the `L' in HTLV from Leukemia to Lymphotropic (which merely means `attracted' to lymphocytes) and claimed that he had discovered a new virus, the probable cause of AIDS, and it was in the same family as his previous two viruses.

This, he claimed, should be called HTLV-III.
Montagnier, of the Institut Pasteur, called his discovery LAV - Lymphadenopathy (lymph node disease) Associated Virus, due to the characteristic swollen lymph glands in many people with AIDS. He also claimed that this was the probable cause of AIDS.
The name HTLV was doomed when it became clear that Gallo had covertly used Montagnier's cell cultures to ‘discover’ his virus. Gallo had so much political power, however, that calling it LAV, a direct slap in his face, would have been impossible.

An agreement between US President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac became the official history of a simultaneous discovery, although many knew that this was a fabrication. Based on this, HIV, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, became the consensus name. This had the added advantage that it solidified the association between the virus and the Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome.
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
-George Orwell

Another example of the importance of naming occurred around 1994, when it was widely agreed that Kaposi's Sarcoma was not caused by HIV, but by another virus called Human Herpes Virus 8. [Chang, 1994] This is very interesting, because this skin cancer was one of only two diseases that started the whole AIDS thing in the first place, and now it turns out that it was not caused by HIV, even though KS is still an AIDS-defining condition, and HIV supposedly still causes AIDS. The name HHV8 simply was not adequate, so the new name KSHV - Kaposi's Sarcoma Herpes Virus was invented. Now, everybody would know that the causal link between the virus and the disease was a `fact' just by speaking its name. Presumably, not many people are going to read the literature and wonder why about one-half of some age groups of schoolchildren in Egypt, where the disease is quite rare, have antibodies to KSHV? [Andreoni, 1999]

Censorship
Dogmas requires censorship, because otherwise people will be exposed to a variety of opinions, and people have a nasty habit of not always picking the `right' one. They must be protected from this.
I once took a moderated internet news group called sci.med.aids seriously, and tried to start a civilized discussion regarding whether HIV caused AIDS. The news group was established to allow a wide-ranging, open discussion of all issues related to the science of HIV and AIDS. Its moderators, well-meaning folks that they are, have standard codes for various types of rejections. There are codes to reject spam, advertising, abusive language, badly formatted posts and, most interesting to me, one that effectively bans any discussion of the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS.
In 1996, I requested opinions on Dr. Peter Duesberg's just published book "Inventing the AIDS Virus" [Duesberg, 1996]. The posting was rejected. I then attempted to post a question asking for evidence that HIV causes AIDS. It was also rejected using their special code for the "HIV<>AIDS" debate.

To eliminate the possibility that I was just not good enough or scientific enough to post on this group, I wrote the most obsequious email about an unnamed sick friend, superficially in praise of modern AIDS researchers. I ensured that the posting had absolutely zero scientific content. It was posted on the group in a flash. I quickly got a response from a researcher looking for startup funds for a new therapy, an offer to send me a free audio tape that could save my friend's life, a vaccine researcher probably looking for trial participants and an oncologist offering to treat my friend.

After a couple of days I told the newsgroup that it was all a hoax. Even that posting was rejected ... because it "concerned the HIV<>AIDS debate".
More recently, and more seriously, myself and a Ukrainian Statistician, Vladimir Koliadin, have attempted to get raw data from the CDC on all AIDS cases, excluding, of course, personal identifying information. We wanted to see if we could find trends in the data that would contradict the commonly quoted belief that AIDS drugs have improved the health and increased the life span of HIV-infected people. Even though we were only asking for data that we knew they had (as much of it had been published for years up to 1997), after a number of emails back and forth, we were finally told that "we are quite short staffed and have to prioritize requests". [CDC, 2001]

The Concorde clinical trial found little or no benefit to the early use of AZT, and also little value in the use of CD4 cell counts to measure `progression' to AIDS. The problem with this trial was that it was intended to compare the early prescription of AZT with later prescription (i.e. after the diagnosis of AZT). We asked for data that would allow us to analyze trends in health prior to the first use of AZT, as opposed to their analysis that included the use of AZT in the `placebo' arm. They recently wrote to us and told us that they did not think that we could add any value to the analyses that they had recently performed [Darbyshire, 2003], even though we have reviewed their papers, and nothing like our proposed analysis appears there.

Treating raw data and other products of a research project as the private property of investigators is a common form of censorship in medicine. In Science Fictions , John Crewdson describes how Gallo would only share his reagents with researchers who were unlikely to be critical, and often forced other researchers to agree to significant restrictions on what they could do with them [Crewdson, 2002]. In the `Bluestone' affair, Erdem Cantekin, a member of a research team attempted to release data that showed that antibiotics were not effective for treating ear infections, but instead found his career derailed after the leader of the same research team counter-attacked. [Crossen, 2001; Bell, 1992] A recent survey of life scientists found that data withholding is a significant impediment to the free flow of information, and that it is more likely to occur when commercial interests are present. [Campbell, 2002]

Hierarchies
Hierarchies are common methods of arranging complex organizations, whether religions, governments, companies or medical research.
Hierarchies control decision making, define and refine dogmas, and put limits, sometimes extremely tight, on legitimate dissent. Even today, in the Catholic church (and others), only the leadership at the top can make policy changes, others have to work within the system.
Members of the hierarchy benefit from the status and wealth that it provides them, but they are also aware that they can easily be expelled if they become a threat. Any one person is expendable. Even popes have been deposed. This may be why people within hierarchies are so conservative. They know that they have much power, but also know that if they use it in unexpected ways, they are liable to find themselves with a knife in the back - literally or figuratively.

Entering a hierarchy requires special training which, in the case of medicine, involves medical school or graduate school. Schmidt's 2000 book Disciplined Minds contends that graduate school is designed more to squeeze highly intelligent people into their place in the scientific hierarchy, than it is to provide a place and time for open exploration of science. He believes that the `comprehensive examinations' that are part of most curriculums are designed not to test knowledge, but rather to determine whether the student is prepared to submit to the system by completing a highly demanding project that may be completely meaningless to them.

The hierarchy in HIV/AIDS is revealed by examining how the information on HIV/AIDS flowed down to us from Robert Gallo, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. After registering his claim with the US patent office (which already had Montagnier's claim, but was having `difficulty' processing it) reported his discovery to his boss, Margaret Heckler, who then announced that American scientists had found the probable cause of AIDS at a press conference. Then they reported their results in an unprecedented four papers in the prestigious journal Science. Then the floodgates opened as the non-scientific media reported on the press conference and provided diluted summaries of the scientific publications. Although we have been virtually drowned in information on HIV and AIDS since then, the flow of information has been very clearly downhill, with us, the general public, the the bottom, receiving much, but without permission to transmit much.

Perfect Evil
The concept of a God who (dis)embodies Perfect Goodness is found in many religions. But, equally important to some religions, is the notion of Perfect Evil - Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Devil.
The contrast between Capital `G' Good and Capital `E' Evil strengthens a hierarchical organization, because everything within the organization is classified Good and everything opposed to it is Evil. The more serious the external threat, the less attention is paid to internal deficiencies.

We know that we live in a world of shades of grays, not black evils and white goodnesses. But, moral decisions are so much easier to make if one simply has to choose between perfect Good and perfect Evil.
Medieval Christianity made people's decisions a lot easier by creating a fallen angel - Satan - to take the rap for everything bad that happened or that threatened the power of the hierarchy. People who did evil things, worshipped other Gods, worshipped the same God in a different sect, or who were trying to reform the church from inside, could easily be accused of being `possessed' by the Devil.

Perfect Evil means that you never have to stop and say "Sorry". Whether burning Joan of Arc at the stake or killing Infidels in battle you didn't have to worry about the commandment - "Though shalt not kill". That does not apply to the eradication of Evil.
Striking a blow against the Devil is more important than saving the life of the person possessed. If they cannot be reclaimed for the forces of Goodness by persuasion, they must have the devil beaten out of them. If this kills them, it also kills Evil.

HIV is the modern day Perfect Evil. It stands with a small, select group of fatal diseases, such as cancer and Ebola. People who are told that they are possessed by HIV are immediately shaken to the core and often, in a sense, die right on the spot. If they beg for hope, they are usually told that they can only save themselves by religiously taking doses of antiretroviral drugs. When the illnesses come, whatever their cause, they are now programmed to blame them on HIV.
“It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.”
-George Bernard Shaw
HIV is the trump card of disease. If you have HIV nothing else matters. If you are an IV drug abuser and you have Tuberculosis AND you test HIV-positive, then HIV caused your Tuberculosis, which is now classified as AIDS. But, if you are an IV drug abuser and you have Tuberculosis and you DON'T test HIV-positive, then taking drugs caused your Tuberculosis. Of course, when you think about it, if drug users get TB without HIV, then at least some of the HIV-positive drug users didn't get sick from HIV.
HIV makes risk analysis trivial. If you are an HIV-positive mother, you will be warned that breastfeeding doubles your risk of infecting your baby, and that therefore you MUST formula feed your baby. You won't be told that doubling your risk actually means that 86% of babies will NOT be infected by breastfeeding [Dunn, 1992]. And, research by Coutsoudis [Coutsoudis, 1999] showed that exclusive breastfeeding might be associated with no extra risk.
How is the very significant health risk of formula feeding compared with the risk of HIV infection? Very simply, it isn't. Since HIV is fatal, every baby who is HIV infected will die. Every formula fed baby, on the other hand, might die or might not. Pedantic types, like me, point out that 100% of babies have to be formula fed in order to benefit (if it is a benefit) only the 14% [Dunn, 1992] of them who will be infected (if that is the right term). This means that the benefits of preventing HIV infection must be 7 times greater than the risks of the formula feeding that is being prescribed.

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