AIDS
| Junk Science
[ AIDS:
Scientific or Viral Catastrophe? - part 1 ]
Disillusionment Over Antiviral Drug Treatments
To escape embarrassment over the failed predictions, AIDS experts have argued
that anti-viral drug treatments are responsible for the decline in AIDS. This
is hard to reconcile with the fact that the decline started well before the
more recent drug treatments were introduced; or with the unsatisfactory record
of these treatments.
AZT, the early "gold standard" of treatment, is now widely
understood to have killed more patients than it helped (that is putting it
kindly - there has been minimal evidence of help, beyond a broad, temporary,
anti-microbial effect). The longest and most thorough trial of the drug, the
Anglo-French Concorde trial, found 25% more deaths among those treated early
than in those for whom treatment was deferred. The difference would almost
certainly have been larger if the deferred treatment group had been a genuine
control and had been kept AZT-free. The drug made no difference in terms of
progression to AIDS or Aids-related illnesses. In a separate analysis of data
from the first year there was a slight advantage to being in the
immediate-treatment group; this lost statistical significance by 18
months.[76] Despite intense efforts by the drug’s manufacturers to minimise
the significance of these results, AZT is now known to have caused much harm,
and possibly many thousands of deaths.
Similar high hopes, followed by
disillusionment, accompanied a "hit hard, hit early" policy
introduced in 1996 – a policy of attacking the virus with cocktails of
several antiviral drugs, including a group called protease inhibitors. Stories
abounded of AIDS patients rising from their sickbeds like Lazarus, and there
were proud boasts that HIV was on the run at last. But as with AZT, this was
more wishful thinking than sound science. People with AIDS suffer many viral
and other infections, and the drug cocktails gave relief to some of these, but
giving the drugs to people simply on the basis of their “HIV” positivity
was to prove another disaster. For several years it was left to the dissident
network to report unexpected deaths on the drugs, but eventually the “hit
hard, hit early” policy was reversed in February 2001 US Government
guidelines acknowledging "unanticipated toxicities".[77] Drug
companies were also ordered to stop advertising their antiviral drugs with
images that imply they cure AIDS (such as photographs of “robust individuals
engaged in strenuous physical activity”) or reduce its transmission. This
reversal came a year after an article by American journalist Celia Farber that
began, "In 1996 a scientist claimed he'd found a way to defeat AIDS. In
the wave of euphoria that followed, a batch of new drugs flooded the market.
Four years later, those drugs are wreaking unimaginable horror on the patients
who dared to hope. What went wrong?"[78] The article was reluctantly
accepted as accurate by veteran AIDS activist Larry Kramer, previously a
strong advocate of the anti-viral drug approach as a means of tackling AIDS.
Treatment guidelines published in the Journal
of the American Medical Association in July 2002[79] acknowledge that “The
future of antiretroviral therapy rests with the development of new drugs that
will result in simpler, more effective, and less toxic regimens along with
development of an improved understanding of innate immune system responses.”
The authors assert in the first paragraph of this document that “potent
antiretroviral therapy has resulted in dramatic reductions in morbidity and
mortality, and health care utilization”, and offer three references to this
claim. But according to Dr David Rasnick, an organic chemist who worked in the
US pharmaceutical industry for more than 20 years, all three references are to
observational studies and not to actual clinical trials. “This is
crucial,” he writes. “Only clinical trials can show whether or not drugs
actually work. To date, there are no drug clinical trials that show people
taking the anti-HIV drugs live longer or at least better lives than a similar
group of HIV-positive people not taking the drugs.”[80]
Some of the most experienced mainstream AIDS
researcher/clinicians, as well as dissidents such as Rasnick, had long
predicted that “hoopla” over antiviral drugs could lead to disappointment
and danger. Jay Levy, M.D., a professor in the department of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco, commented in 1996: “…get any
virologist aside and they’ll say this is not how we are going to win, it’s
high time we look at the immune system”.[81] Two years later he wrote:
“These drugs can be toxic and can be directly detrimental to a natural
immune response to HIV. This effective antiviral immune response is
characteristic of long-term survivors who have not been on any therapy.”[82]
Donald Abrams, professor of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital,
revealed in a 1996 interview: “In contrast with many of my colleagues, I am
not necessarily a cheer-leader for anti-retroviral therapy. I have been one of
the people who’s questioned, from the beginning, whether or not we’re
really making an impact with HIV drugs and, if we are making an impact, if
it’s going in the right direction…I have a large population of people who
have chosen not to take any antiretrovirals. They’ve watched all of their
friends go on the antiviral bandwagon and die, so they’ve chosen to remain
naďve [to therapy]. More and more, however, are now succumbing to pressure
that protease inhibitors are ‘it’. We are in the middle of the honeymoon
period, and whether or not this is going to be an enduring marriage is unclear
to me at this time.”[83] The marriage should by now have been annulled but
it is immensely hard for physicians to acknowledge that they could have been
harming their patients, and it is also difficult for “HIV” experts to lose
such an important plank in their defence of the beleaguered virus theory of
AIDS.
Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives is a support
and research organisation founded in the US by a group of people diagnosed
HIV-positive “who live in health without AIDS drugs and without fear of
illness”.[84] Christine Maggiore, the founder, a former awareness educator
for prominent AIDS groups, began to scrutinize AIDS science after a series of
tests she took fluctuated between HIV-positive, negative, and indeterminate.
In line with Abrams’s observation, she had also noticed that her ill and
dying colleagues were the ones following doctor’s orders. She says that
carefully considered choices “keep me and hundreds of other unmedicated HIV
positives defiantly alive and well”.[85] The organisation supports a growing
network of groups and affiliates in America, Brazil, Canada, Kenya, Namibia,
Nigeria, Mexico, South Africa and Zambia.
A face-saving shred of benefit for the HIV
belief system seemed to have been found when it was shown that use of AZT in
pregnancy could cause fewer children to be born testing positive. However,
since we do not know the meaning of "HIV" antibodies, we do not know
what this means in terms of the babies' health. Rasnick, who for several years
has been the most active of the US AIDS “dissidents”, told President
Mbeki’s inquiry into AIDS science in South Africa in July 2000 that he had
"scoured the literature" for evidence of tangible benefit, with zero
results.[86] Several studies have shown harm, including a major Italian survey
which found that children born to mothers treated with AZT in pregnancy were
more likely to get severely sick and die by the age of three than those whose
mothers were left untreated.[87] AZT’s proven toxicities include severe
muscle pain, weakness, and atrophy; heart muscle changes and malfunction; bone
marrow suppression, with consequent anemia and loss of all types of blood
cells; liver failure; and broad-ranging and sometimes irreversible loss and
poisoning of mitochondria, the energy factories within our cells. The drug
also leads to permanent DNA damage, and studies in mice and monkeys have
raised concerns that babies exposed to AZT will face an increased risk of
cancer later in life.[88]
Nevirapine, the other antiviral drug heavily
promoted by AIDS activists in Africa as essential in curbing mother-to-child
transmission of HIV (and by others who sought to batter President Mbeki when
he questioned orthodox thinking on HIV and AIDS) has similarly not been shown
to have any clinical benefits, and has been shown to carry a high risk of
toxicity.[89]
Triumph or Tragedy? Scientifically, the HIV
Theory Has Failed to Deliver
In scientific terms, the HIV hypothesis has
failed to deliver. The predictions of spread to which it gave rise have not
materialized, and the drug treatments it spawned have disappointed, despite
billions spent on research. It is not known how HIV harms the immune system,
and there is uncertainty over its very existence. The blood test is
non-specific (although serendipitously, its very non-specificity has helped
protect blood supplies against the broad range of pathogens that can cause
“HIV” antibodies to become elevated), as are the “viral load” tests.
The search for a vaccine is never-ending despite (or possibly because of) a
commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars in US federal monies. Over the
past 15 years, worldwide, more than 30 candidate vaccines have been tested in
early-phase trials involving about 10,000 people. Out of these, only two are
proceeding to phase III trials, and these are beset with difficulties.
According to the WHO, the main stumbling blocks are lack of information about
how best to measure protective immunity, the variability of HIV strains and
lack of a good animal model.[90] According to Eleopulos, “a vaccine is never
going to happen. It can’t, because without HIV isolation, you do not know
what you are dealing with.”[91]
In social terms, the HIV theory has produced
some real benefits. The democratising of the threat of AIDS brought the world
together in a way that has been profoundly beneficial for gay men, now
considerably more accepted and valued in society than they were 20 years ago.
Along with the red ribbon, "HIV/AIDS" has also become a symbol of
unity and compassion. Perhaps it even served the West by providing a diffuse
"enemy" against which to focus hostile energies released following
the fall of the Soviet Union.
As Eleopulos acknowledges, the condom and clean
needle campaigns will also have had value. Lifestyle changes implemented
within a certain section of the gay community, previously at great risk,
probably lie behind the huge diminution in AIDS in most of Europe, along with
greatly reduced dosages and increased awareness of the toxicity of AZT.
Whatever the cause of AIDS, many studies have demonstrated clear risks
attached to anal intercourse and needle sharing. Animal studies show that
transmissible AIDS-like diseases can be induced - without any exogenous
infection - when the immune system is thrown into confusion through certain
immunisation procedures (these have involved injecting female mice, previously
mated with genetically distinct males, with lymphocytes from those males).[92]
There may be a genetic mechanism in AIDS akin to the "jumping genes"
phenomenon, but involving transfer of genetic information out of the cell and
in exceptional circumstances, from person to person.
To Rudolf Werner, professor of biochemistry at
the University of Miami Medical School, such studies support the idea that
AIDS is essentially an autoimmune disease.
"We still know very little about
autoimmunity and how it works," he says. "Introduction of foreign
protein into someone else's system quite clearly upsets that person's immune
system. We need to learn much more about immunological tolerance and
autoimmunity."[93] Anti-lymphocyte autoantibodies are present in 87% of
HIV-positive patients and their levels correlate with clinical status.[94]
Werner agrees that although AIDS drugs have been credited for the reduction in
AIDS deaths, “there is no scientific evidence that these toxic drugs prolong
life.” In a letter published by The Miami Herald (July 18, 2002) headed
“Does the HIV virus really cause AIDS?”, he points to a study showing that
the time between becoming HIV-positive and the time of death was identical in
a Uganda group who received no AIDS drugs and a US group who did. “Since
most people in the Uganda study were malnourished and multiply infected,
doesn’t that suggest that antiretroviral drugs reduce life expectancy? …
Unfortunately, the government suppresses alternative explanations of AIDS.
This dogmatic approach certainly will lead to a medical disaster.”
The exclusion of research into other possible
causes of AIDS that accompanied the establishment of the HIV paradigm may
already have cost many lives, through failure to provide more effective advice
on prevention and treatment. The efforts of those calling for a scientific
reappraisal of the "HIV" hypothesis have usually been met with
indifference and on occasions, abuse. In common with Duesberg, I have been
called a "pariah of my profession" for broadcasting flaws in AIDS
science to the public, bypassing the silence on this subject maintained by
most mainstream scientific and medical journals and their supporters in the
mainstream media. When Duesberg persisted in challenging the HIV theory he was
derided by former colleagues, refused renewal of a $350,000 “outstanding
investigator” award from the National Institutes of Health and “all but
exiled from American science”, as Rasnick puts it. Rasnick, who is perhaps
the most persistent as well as articulate of the US dissidents, wrote in 1997:
“As a scientist who has studied AIDS for 16 years, I have determined that
AIDS has little to do with science and is not even primarily a medical issue.
AIDS is a sociological phenomenon held together by fear, creating a kind of
medical McCarthyism that has transgressed and collapsed all the rules of
science, and imposed a brew of belief and pseudoscience on a vulnerable
public.”[95]
The Perth group has also suffered pervasive
censorship, in which the AIDS mainstream has simply refused to enter into any
discussion of their work. They were given satellite symposium time to present
their case at the 1998 International AIDS Conference, in Geneva, as a result
of intense lobbying by patient advocates, and against the wishes of the
scientific committee; out of about 12,000 delegates, some 15 attended. That
was at least an advance on the behaviour of organisers of the Berlin
conference four years previously. "Dissidents" who persisted in
setting out their literature on an unused table were ejected from the
conference, and told that they would be arrested and deported from Germany if
they returned.
However, the biggest tragedy arising from the
HIV paradigm has been the marketing and acceptance worldwide of an unvalidated
diagnostic test, represented as demonstrating infection with a lethal virus.
Millions are suffering the stigma and fear associated with this "HIV
disease" diagnosis. Continents and sub-continents are being encouraged to
switch scarce resources into fighting what may be a mythical enemy. As
Papadimitriou remarked to me, of AIDS in Africa, "Why condemn a continent
to death because of HIV when you have other explanations for why people are
falling sick?"
WHO experts are so convinced of a pandemic that
they multiply the AIDS cases registered with them many times over to reach an
estimate of the "actual" level. Furthermore, the multiplication
factor has been regularly increased, as discovered by Christian Fiala, an
Austrian physician who has spent years researching AIDS epidemiology,
including a fact-finding mission to Uganda and Tanzania. In 1996, reported
cases in Africa were multiplied by WHO statisticians by 12 to reach estimated
totals; in 1997, by 17; and over an 18-month period in 1997/1998, by 47.[96]
UNAIDS, which brings together seven United
Nations agencies, including WHO, in a joint programme on AIDS, is doing work
with huge potential for helping Africa by campaigning for debt relief and
other forms of emergency aid. But it risks destroying the value of its efforts
by tying them exclusively to the HIV/AIDS paradigm, increasingly questioned
within Africa itself. By urging African finance ministers to devote more
domestic funds to AIDS activities, "notwithstanding the weak fiscal
situations in many of the worst affected countries in Africa",[97] it may
exacerbate the real problems, which as South Africa's Thabo Mbeki has
indicated are mostly related to poverty. UNAIDS has actually spelled out that
it wants resources programmed for welfare, education, rural development and
other health purposes to be redirected into HIV/AIDS care and prevention.
In the South African context, this would be
particularly disastrous. Dr Sam Mhlongo, professor of primary health care and
family medicine and chief family practitioner at the Medical University of
Southern Africa, Pretoria, a member of Mbeki's Advisory Panel on AIDS, points
out that 50 years of apartheid have left half the population of South Africa
with no access to sanitation and clean drinking water. Sub-standard housing,
shacks and overcrowding favour the risk of massive infection and re-infection
with tuberculosis (added to AIDS-defining criteria in 1993). Starving and
malnourished children are particularly susceptible to respiratory and
gastro-intestinal infections and septicaemia. "Long before Luc
Montagnier's HIV/AIDS 'discovery', Professor John Reid of the Durban Medical
School noted that 50% of black children in rural areas of South Africa died
before the age of five," Mhlongo writes.[98] "The commonest causes
of death amongst these black infants were recorded as bronchopneumonia,
dehydration and diarrhoea."
"Apartheid conditioned people not to see;
when it comes to AIDS many still will not open their eyes," he says.[99]
What Mhlongo sees, in eastern and southern Africa, is chronic protein
deficiency, a breakdown in civilian services, rising incidence of TB and
malaria, declining prices for agricultural output, high inflation and
unemployment, displacement by civil violence, and cutbacks in government
services due to economic adjustments mandated by the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank. "There is no need to conjecture the mysterious
antics of some retrovirus from the rainforest that supposedly jumped from
monkeys to humans."
In the earlier years of AIDS, after US, British
and French scientists successfully marketed the "deadly new virus"
concept and the tests and treatments that went with it, the perception that
there was a public health emergency made it hard for dissenting views to be
expressed. Today, the silence may owe as much to the power of commercial
interests, along with embarrassment over the failures of AIDS science, as to
any altruistic motives. Perhaps also it is easier on the West’s conscience
to keep blaming an epidemic of a deadly new virus for an increase in immune
deficiency in less-developed countries than it is to acknowledge the effects
of worsening poverty consequent on economic restructuring,[100] crippling
debt, and the after-effects of decades of socially destructive policies
towards black people such as under the apartheid regime.
A reasoned response from the scientific
community to the full range of evidence that has mounted against the HIV
theory is overdue.