By DAVID RASNICK, PhD

Visiting Scientist

University of California at Berkeley

During my 25 years as a scientist I have watched science go from being one of the most ennobling and enriching of human activities to being a dangerous and ineffective machine.

As a young scientist I paid attention to how my older and more experienced colleagues went about the business of being a scientist. You could not help seeing the energy, passion, enthusiasm, and just plain joy of being a scientist and putting wonderful questions to each other and Nature. The science that I know and remember is in a word: exhilarating.

By its nature science is one of the most democratic of human activities. But it is a democracy of a special kind. Scientific discourse is not limited to privileged individuals, nations, races or world-views. All scientists are equal participants. Thus, science is democratic in its freedom of thought and activities.

But scientists have recognized over the centuries that majority opinion does not determine what is true. Scientists do not vote on what is true (this was more true in the past). As scientists we accept that what is true is independent of whether we believe it or not. Nature is the ultimate judge of what is true.

One of the most important and wonderful consequences of being a scientist is that we can change our minds when the evidence shows that we are wrong. I’m not saying that we do this easily. We fight vigorously for our views but eventually yield to superior argument and evidence.

This democratic science was possible when it was the activity of independent individuals. Sadly, democratic science has been replaced by the billion dollar institutions of government and industrial science. The direct consequence of this shift is that now "truth" is determined by majority opinion. Institutional science has murdered freedom of thought and discourse. Science is no longer the individual search for enlightenment and understanding but has become an instrument to further the particular goals of government and industry.

Like most scientists, I was taught in school that science is a self-correcting activity. All hypotheses, no matter how precious, were put to the grindstone of the scientific process, which was designed to preserve what was true and destroy what was false. But this delicate state of affairs was possible only when science was free—or, in fact, when science was broke, before the tragic union of government and science ushered in by the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.

Nuclear physicist Ralph E. Lapp, a researcher and adviser on the Manhattan Project, remembers what science was like before the shift: In those days no scientist ventured to ask the federal government for funds. He gathered together what money he needed from private sources or earned extra pay as a consultant to pay for his own research. But mostly he acted as a jack-of-all-trades and built his own equipment. Graduate students were required to take machine-shop practice and learn glass blowing. If he needed Geiger counters he made them himself, and he wired his own electronic circuits.

Before World War II, research and development funding for the sciences, public and private, amounted to about $250 million per year. Since 1980, US taxpayers have spent more than $93 billion on AIDS alone . And what have those billions bought?—a culture of conformity, whereby only HIV research is funded, creating the appearance that all researchers believe HIV is the cause of AIDS.

The forced unanimity of thought is not restricted to democracies. In The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko , Russian historian Zhores Medvedev describes the rise to power of an autocratic Soviet pseudoscientist, who over a period of decades corrupted and nearly destroyed Soviet biology and agriculture. Medvedev concludes that "monopoly in science by one or another false doctrine, or even by one scientific trend, is an external symptom of some deep-seated sickness of a society." The general acceptance of Lysenko’s perverted scientific theories—designed to undermine Western science, primarily Darwinism—was heavily promoted by the government-supported media. "The peculiarities of [the Soviet] press," Medvedev writes, "made possible popular support for one or another scientific trend selected by the political leadership, and complete suppression of the opposition."

Medvedev easily could have been describing the way the public-health institutions of the United States have commandeered the AIDS debate. Because the NIH and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, control funding of virtually all academic research on AIDS, they can with impunity cut off funds to dissenting voices. Editors of peer-reviewed journals are pressured not to publish papers critical of the HIV hypothesis. Journalists who interview dissenting scientists are denied access to government sources, and accused of acting "immorally." The result is a world in which the once-cherished process of scientific criticism is treated as social deviance—and punished as such.

In defending the purchased consensus, HIV researchers use statistical methodologies shown by their inventors to be invalid and conduct experiments without any controls. They take causes for effects, correlations for causations, and constants for variables. Most important, they haven’t stopped AIDS. What they have done successfully is instilled fear into human sexual relations—an amorphous fear, which most AIDS professionals as well as journalists argue has been valuable.

I doubt even George Orwell could have imagined that an autocratic regime would be able to successfully equate sex with death at the end of the millennium.

George Orwell warned us. He even got the date right. The year 1984 saw the birth of the HIV insanity—complete with techno-babble and AIDS-Speak.

The contagious, HIV hypothesis of AIDS is the biggest scientific, medical blunder of the 20^th Century. Which makes it the biggest embarrassment that the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and hundreds of thousands of individuals who have built their careers and reputations on HIV will have to deal with in the years to come. I have come to realize that the magnitude of this embarrassment is the main obstacle to exposing the simple, clear and obvious fact that the central axioms of AIDS are false:

1) AIDS is not contagious.

2) AIDS is not sexually transmitted.

3) HIV does not cause AIDS.

4) The anti-HIV drugs are killing people.

It may come as a surprise that there is not even one study in the vast scientific, medical literature showing:

1) that a group of HIV-positive adults or children live shorter or poorer quality lives than a similar group of adults or children who are HIV-negative, or

2) that a group of HIV-positive adults or children who take the anti-HIV drugs live longer or better quality lives than a similar group of adults or children who are HIV-positive and do not take the drugs.

To counteract the natural reaction of utter disbelief, I pose a simple challenge that should undermine your confidence in the central axioms of AIDS. Come up with the name or names of the person or persons who are documented to have shown that HIV causes AIDS, or that AIDS is contagious, or that it is sexually transmitted, or that the anti-HIV drugs actually promote life and health. The task is not to find a list of people who have made these claims. That list is a long one. No, the task is to come up with the names of the people who have produced the evidence that shows those claims to be true or at least likely.

I have studied AIDS from the very beginning and I have not been able to find those names or the documents that contain the evidence supporting the axioms of AIDS. What’s more, I do not know anyone who has found the names or documents.

The answer depends on when and where you ask the question. For example, in the USA we have a total of four definitions of AIDS that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officially uses. The CDC has lumped together some 30 old, well-recognized diseases and conditions and now calls them AIDS-defining. However, there is a problem.

How does one know if pneumonia, diarrhea, wasting, dementia, cervical cancer, T-cell loss etc. is AIDS?—or just plain pneumonia, diarrhea, wasting, dementia, cervical cancer, T-cell loss etc?

Antibodies and a definition to the rescue!

If a person in the USA or Europe has any of these old diseases or conditions and has antibodies to HIV, then that person has AIDS. However, if that person has the same diseases or conditions but does not have antibodies to HIV, then that person has just plain-old pneumonia, diarrhea, wasting, dementia, cervical cancer, T-cell loss etc.

In Africa, the situation is quite different. We have a fifth definition of AIDS for Africa that differs from that for the USA and Europe. HIV was added to the US definition of AIDS in the mid 1980s but the African definition does not include HIV. Since 1985, all you need to be listed as an AIDS case in Africa is to suffer from fever, diarrhea, persistent cough, and greater than 10% loss of body weight . In the mid 1990s, TB was added to the definition of AIDS in Africa.

The 1993 definition added the first non-disease category as a full-blown case of AIDS in the USA: antibodies to HIV and fewer than 200 CD4 cells per microliter of blood . Over the past 5-6 years half or more of all new AIDS cases in the USA come under the non-disease category of the 1993 definition . These unfortunate individuals show no symptoms of disease or they would have come under an earlier definition of AIDS according to the CDC’s rules. In fact, the CDC reports that 61% of all new AIDS cases in 1997 had no symptoms of disease (see Table 12, ref. ). The CDC stopped reporting this information after 1997. Now they report only antibodies to HIV.

None of the so-called AIDS tests is approved by the FDA to either diagnose AIDS or HIV. The antibody tests are approved to screen blood products for the presence of antibodies to HIV proteins. The ELISA antibody test specifically warns that pregnancy is a common source of false positive results. The viral load test was approved to monitor anti-HIV therapy but not to diagnose AIDS or HIV. These test are being abused and should be outlawed.

The instructions that come with Abbott’s ELISA test for antibodies to HIV clearly states that:

"AIDS and AIDS-related conditions are clinical syndromes and their diagnosis can only be established clinically. [ELISA] testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS… . The risk of an asymptomatic person with a repeatedly reactive [positive] serum developing AIDS or an AIDS related condition is not known" .

The same is true for the Western blot (a fancy antibody test):

"The significance of antibodies [to HIV] in an asymptomatic individual is not known" .

The third paragraph of the instructions that come with Roche’s PCR viral load test states that:

"The AMPLICOR HIV-1 MONITOR Test is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV infection" .

Despite the arbitrary linkage by definition, the AIDS and HIV epidemics do not correlate with each other. Instead, since 1985, when both could be quantified simultaneously, AIDS and HIV have moved in different directions in the US and Europe. In the US, the HIV epidemic has been steady at about one million from 1985 to 1995, with a small downward adjustment since 1996 (Fig. 1A) . New HIV infections have even declined fivefold from 1985 to 1993, based on over 50 million blood donations collected during that period (Fig. 2A) . By contrast, during the same period, AIDS has increased from a few dozen cases to over 50,000 annually until it started to decline after 1992 (Fig. 1A).

In Europe, a steady half million individuals were positive between 1988 to 1995 (Fig. 1C) . In Germany, the number of new infections declined about twofold during the same period in which AIDS rose from no cases to 2000 per year (Fig. 2B) .

Since the American and European AIDS and HIV epidemics move in totally opposite directions, the HIV hypothesis cannot explain AIDS. Moreover, the steady state of infection proves that HIV is an old, long-established virus in the US and Europe .

Thus, AIDS patients have neither HIV nor an AIDS-specific disease, nor any one of the 30 AIDS-defining diseases, nor even immunodeficiency, in common. However, by definition they all share antibodies against HIV.

The first anti-HIV drug approved for use in adults and children by the FDA in the United States is the DNA chain-terminator AZT (Fig. 3). AZT is pure poison. It was designed in the 1960s as a potential chemotherapy for cancer. However, AZT was so toxic in animals that it was not even patented and never used in humans. In addition to AZT, there are a number of other DNA chain-terminators that are used in adults (d4T, 3TC, ddI, etc.). These drugs all work the same way: they get incorporated into growing DNA chains and stop DNA synthesis. That’s how the DNA chain-terminators kill cells: they stop DNA synthesis.

The consequences of terminating DNA synthesis are severe. I recommend reading the insert that comes with a bottle of AZT to get an idea of how toxic the drug is (Fig. 3). The manufacturer, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, warns the physician and the patient not to confuse the toxic effects of AZT with AIDS-diseases. The reason for this warning is no mystery. AZT causes dementia (AIDS defining), certain lymphomas (AIDS defining), muscle wasting (AIDS defining), severe immune deficiency (AIDS defining), diarrhea (AIDS defining), life-threatening anemia, abortions, birth defects and the list goes on .

The summary of results from a 1993 state-of-the-art conference showed that the effect of treatment on the most popular surrogate, the CD4 cell count, did not accurately predict the effect of treatment on the clinical outcome, that is, progression to AIDS or time to death .

The use of the CD4 (T-cell counts) as a surrogate marker of disease progression was also criticized by the authors of the Concorde Study, the largest clinical trial evaluating the use of AZT:

"The results of Concorde do not encourage the early use of zidovudine [AZT] in symptom-free HIV-infected adults. They also call into question the uncritical use of CD4 cell counts as a surrogate endpoint for assessment of benefit from long-term antiretroviral therapy" .

In the Concorde Study, there was a 25% higher mortality rate among those who took AZT early compared to those who took the drug later. The pressures to use AZT treatment in asymptomatic persons with HIV were not supported by this and other long-term clinical trials .

A decade later, in February 2001, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) warned doctors to limit use of anti-HIV drugs and not prescribe them to asymptomatic HIV positive people . The NIH changed the treatment recommendations because of the toxicity of anti-HIV drugs—they were clearly doing more harm than good.

It is true that fewer people are dying of AIDS every year. But the reduced mortality is not due to the anti-HIV drugs.

The CDC’s statistics show that the number of new AIDS cases peaked around 1992-93, and have been going down ever since . For example, the number of AIDS cases in San Francisco December, 2000, was at the level of 1982, which is close to zero . Therefore, deaths-due-to-AIDS must peak following the peak in AIDS with or without treatment. The spontaneous decline in new cases of AIDS and the 1993 definition change that includes large numbers of healthy people as full-blown AIDS cases are responsible for the steep decline in the mortality rates due to AIDS. When well over 50% of all new AIDS cases are people with no symptoms of disease, the mortality rate for this supposedly 100% fatal disease must plummet.

I have scoured the literature for evidence that the anti-HIV drugs actually prolong the lives, or at least improve the quality of the lives, of the children given these drugs. In short: I could not find any support for either possibility.

To begin with, not one study that claims health benefits of anti-HIV drug-treatment included any control groups , i.e. HIV negative children or mothers from similar backgrounds, or HIV positive children followed over time who were not given the drugs.

However, when control groups that did not receive the anti-HIV drugs were included, the devastating toxic and lethal effects of the drugs were manifest. Below are representative examples of the published studies.

The paper by R. E. McKinney et al. entitled "A multicenter trial of oral zidovudine in children with advanced human immunodeficiency virus disease" acknowledges the shortcomings of not using controls :

"Although no control group was available for direct comparison, the improvement in the children in this study closely paralleled the observations in controlled studies of adults receiving zidovudine [AZT]."

That is, in addition to no control groups, this study showed that AZT has similar effects in children as in adults. We have previously documented that AZT accelerates the deaths of those taking that drug compared to HIV positive people who do not take AZT . By inference, the same could be expected for children given AZT.

Further on, the authors state that, "Children treated with zidovudine [AZT] continued to have bacterial and opportunistic infections. The effect of the drug on the frequency of these events could not be assessed because of the lack of control groups."

In other words, AZT did them no good. The lack of control groups is not exceptional but is actually policy. The excuse given for the lack of control groups is that it is unethical to include them. Most people believe that previously approved anti-HIV drugs actually promote health and well-being because of their willful ignorance of the fact that there is no evidence to support that belief.

There are many other wonderful quotes from this paper but I want to leave it and move on after adding that in the study of 88 children, "One or more episodes of hematologic toxicity occurred in 54 children (61 percent)—anemia in 23 children (26 percent) and neutropenia in 42 (48 percent)"—all directly caused by AZT.

Ricardo S. de Souza et al., in their paper entitled "Effect of prenatal zidovudine on disease progression in perinatally HIV-1-infected infants" , state that:

"Our results suggest that maternal treatment with [AZT] may influence the course of disease among perinatally infected infants. In this retrospective study, the risk of RPD [rapid progression of disease] was five to six times higher among infants born to [AZT] treated compared with [AZT] untreated mothers."

"After adjusting for prematurity and maternal clinical characteristics, RPD was three times more likely to occur in infants born to [AZT] treated compared with findings in [AZT] untreated mothers."

Moreover, Figure 1 of the paper clearly shows a dose response for the toxic effects of AZT treatment during pregnancy. The earlier the mother began AZT treatment while pregnant, the sooner her HIV positive child got sick and died compared with the HIV positive children born to HIV positive mothers who did not take AZT during pregnancy.

Then we have L. Kuhn, et al. in their paper entitled "Disease progression and early viral dynamics in human immunodeficiency virus-infected children exposed to zidovudine during prenatal and perinatal periods" , saying that:

"Prenatal and perinatal [AZT] exposure were associated with 1.8-fold increased risk of progression to AIDS or death after adjusting simultaneously for all variables associated with disease progression…. Restricting the analysis to children born after April 1994 (date of public release of the results of ACTG 076), [AZT] exposure was associated with 2.5-fold increased risk of progression to AIDS or death after adjusting simultaneously for the same variables."

"Steady improvements in prognosis of [HIV] infected children unexposed to [AZT] were observed in each successive birth cohort, but infected children exposed to [AZT] lagged behind these temporal changes. Our results are from a well-characterized and prospectively followed cohort of US HIV-infected children and are consistent with recent results from the Italian Registry for HIV Infection in Children"—the next reference below.

The Italian study entitled "Rapid disease progression in HIV-1 perinatally infected children born to mothers receiving zidovudine monotherapy during pregnancy" reveals even more of the tragic consequences of treating pregnant women with AZT:

"The probability of developing severe disease at 3 years of life was significantly higher in children born to [AZT+] mothers…than in those born to [AZT-] mothers…. The same pattern was observed for severe immune suppression: the probability of developing severe immune suppression was significantly higher in children born to [AZT+] mothers…than born to [AZT-] mothers…. Finally, survival probability was lower…compared with children born to [AZT-] mothers…"

In short, if a mother takes AZT during pregnancy, her newborn is much more likely to get severely sick and die by age 3 than a newborn whose mother did not take AZT during pregnancy.

Another example is the paper by O. A. Olivero et al. entitled "Incorporation of zidovudine into leukocyte DNA from HIV-1-positive adults and pregnant women, and cord blood from infants exposed in utero" :

"We show here that [AZT] is incorporated into leukocyte DNA of most individuals receiving [AZT] therapy, including infants exposed to the drug in utero.… [F]urther study of the biological consequences of [AZT]-induced DNA damage in the human population is warranted."

Another example from the literature of pediatric anti-HIV drug studies is the paper by L. L. Lewis et al. entitled "Lamivudine in children with human Immunodeficiency virus infection: A phase I/II study" .

Again, there were no control groups in this study. The authors acknowledge that the nucleoside analog reverse transcriptase inhibitors, including the study compound Lamivudine, act as DNA chain terminators. There is no data in the paper showing that the drug does anything good for the children. On the contrary, among 90 children in the study, "11 children had been withdrawn from study for disease progression [in other words, it didn’t work for them] and 10 because of possible lamivudine-related toxicity, and 6 had died."

In short, about 1/3 of the children clearly did not benefit from the drug and there was no report of children who benefited other than the lab reports stating that p24 and viral load decreased. Those lab tests were the only positive indicators that the drug did anything desirable from their perspective.

Another example in the pediatric literature is by M. W. Kline et al., entitled "A randomized comparative trial of Stavudine (d4T) versus zidovudine (ZDV, AZT) in children with human immunodeficiency virus infection" .

I quote: "Until recently, zidovudine (ZDV, AZT) was considered the drug of choice for initial therapy of symptomatic HIV-infected children. Unfortunately, therapy with ZDV sometimes is limited by intolerance, toxicity, or HIV disease progression."

In other words, AZT doesn’t work. The study showed that Stavudine and AZT were comparable. So, Stavudine is no advance over AZT.

Another example is by M. W. Kline et al., entitled "A phase I/II evaluation of Stavudine (d4T) in children with human immunodeficiency virus infection" .

"Thirty-five of 37 subjects experienced serious clinical adverse events, including infection (33 subjects), lymphadenopathy (19 subjects), hepatosplenomegaly (15 subjects), chills and fever (12 subjects), and development of an AIDS-defining condition (four subjects)."

"Clinical adverse events of lesser severity that were reported by more than 20% of subjects included rhinitis (76%), cough (70%), diarrhea (68%), rash (62%), nausea and vomiting (51%), abdominal pain (43%), anorexia (41%), respiratory disorder (38%), headache (35%), pharyngitis (32%), pruritis (30%), pain (22%), peripheral neurologic symptoms (22%), and nervousness (22%)."

In the last paragraph of the paper, the authors had the temerity to conclude that, "stavudine appears to hold promise for treatment for HIV infection in children. Its pharmacokinetic properties are consistent and predictable, and it appears to be remarkably well-tolerated and safe. Although our study was not designed to assess the drug’s efficacy for treatment of HIV infection, preliminary clinical and laboratory evidence of activity was observed."

One can only wonder if the authors were talking about their own results.

The last incredible example is by P. A. Pizzo et al., entitled "Effect of continuous intravenous infusion of zidovudine (AZT) in children with symptomatic HIV infection" .

The authors studied 21 children. "Transfusion was required in 14 patients because of low levels of hemoglobin. Dose-limiting neutropenia occurred in most patients who received doses of 1.4 mg per kilogram per hour or more."

"The major limitation of the therapy was hematologic toxicity—a decrease in both the hemoglobin concentration and the white-cell count."

"Regardless of the starting dose, nearly all patients had a transient drop in their neutrophil counts within 10 days of the initiation of AZT therapy."

Both anemia and neutropenia are inevitable consequence of AZT poisoning. And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse there is this incredible statement:

"In three of the five children who died, evidence of a response to AZT, particularly neurodevelopmental improvement, was present at the time of death."

That is the ultimate example of "the operation was a success but the patient died" cliché.

(a) In 1997, A. N. Phillips and G. D. Smith stated in the New England Journal of Medicine that:

"No randomized trials in asymptomatic patients have established that those treated early survive any longer than those for whom treatment is deferred. Extended follow-up of patients in one trial, the Concorde study, has shown a significantly increased risk of death among the patients treated early. The suggestion is that the situation is different for combination therapy. But where is the evidence…?"

"There is no more hard evidence now of the benefits of early therapy than there was in 1990. We need new randomized trials to determine whether the notion that was probably not true in the era of [AZT] monotherapy–that early therapy prolongs survival as compared with deferred therapy–is now true."

(b) Jay Levy, the third scientist to identify HIV (University of California San Francisco), had this to say in 1996, the year HIV protease inhibitors were approved by the FDA :

"…can one really report a 50% increase in survival based on only 6 months of treatment and results that reflect 4.8% (treated) vs. 8.4% (untreated) of the subjects studied?…With all the hoopla about antiviral drugs, and you 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"

In 1998 Jay Levy was even harsher in his criticism :

"The clinical state (if the person is without symptoms) is not a major detriment [to administering anti-HIV drugs]: it is the [viral load] numbers that appear to decide the therapeutic course. I take issue with that approach."

"[T]hese 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. …[T]he current antiviral therapies…do not bring about the results achieved by a natural host anti-HIV response. This immune response, observed in long-term survivors, maintains control of HIV replication without the need for antiviral treatment."

(c) Don Abrams, who runs the world’s largest AIDS hospital in San Francisco said this to a group of medical students at UCSF medical school :

"In contrast with many of my colleagues…, I am not necessarily a cheerleader 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 chose to remain naive [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…"

(d) In 1997, a year after the FDA approved the first HIV protease inhibitor, the NIH Guidelines to physicians for the Use of Anti-retroviral Agents in HIV-Infected Adults and Adolescents had this to say:

"The physician and the patient should be fully aware that therapy of primary HIV infection is based on theoretical considerations, and the potential benefits…, should be weighed against the potential risks."

"[N]o long term clinical benefit of treatment has yet been demonstrated."

(e) In 1997, the warning that came with a bottle of the Merck HIV protease inhibitor Crixivan states:

"Crixivan is not a cure for HIV or AIDS. People taking Crixivan may still develop infections or other conditions associated with HIV. Because of this, it is very important for you to remain under the care of a doctor."

"It is not yet known whether taking Crixivan will extend your life or reduce your chances of getting other illnesses associated with HIV. Information about how well the drug works is available from clinical studies up to 24 weeks."

(f) In 1997 Anthony Fauci in the New York Times admitted that:

"There is an increasing percentage of people in whom, after a period of time, the virus breaks through. People do quite well for six months, eight months or a year, and after a while, in a significant proportion, the virus starts to come back."

The Times said that "No one knows the true extent of the problem, but Fauci estimates that when these cases of ‘viral breakthrough’ are accounted for, the failure rate of the new drug cocktails may eventually run as high as 50 percent."

Fauci’s failure rate was really 100% in the AIDS cases that actually have symptoms of disease. Recall that since 1993, 50% of AIDS cases (as mentioned above) have no symptoms of disease .

The tests being administered to diagnose either AIDS or HIV do not detect either and are being abused. Doctors are misguided in their efforts to intimidate people to submit to the HIV antibody tests and, if positive, to take the poisonous anti-HIV drugs that have not been shown to do more good than harm. Especially disturbing is the growing practice of coercing HIV positive women into taking the anti-HIV drugs during pregnancy and giving the drugs to newborns and children.

The leading cause of AIDS-defining diseases and conditions in the USA and Europe is the chronic use of recreational and prescription drugs.

Here is a list of the general prescription drugs that can cause all AIDS-defining diseases said to be due HIV: chemotherapy for cancer, cyclosporin A and similar drugs for organ transplants, anesthesia for surgery, surgery by itself, antibiotics, steroids, tranquilizers, blood transfusions & clotting factors .

Chronic use of recreational drugs (e.g., heroin, cocaine, amphetamines etc.) can also cause all of the AIDS-defining diseases said to be due to HIV . A thorough discussion of how drugs cause AIDS can be found at www.duesberg.com.

What was new in the 1980s in the USA was not the diseases but who were getting them. In the early days only gay men 25-50 years of age were listed by the CDC as AIDS cases. Today, drug-using gay men still make up close to two-thirds of all new AIDS causes in the USA. The remaining third is heterosexual drug users.

Pediatric AIDS cases amount to only 1% of the total , and 80% of them were born to mothers who admitted to using recreational drugs during pregnancy .

The fact that in the early days only gay men between 25-50 got AIDS led to the assumption that AIDS had something to do with sex—in particular, gay sex. To this day that is the only connection between sex and AIDS.

This early "connection" between gay-sex and AIDS led the NIH to jump to the conclusion that AIDS was caused by a new infectious agent, later to be called HIV. However, it turned out that sex has nothing to do with AIDS. What all the gay men with AIDS had in common was a history of chronic use of recreational and prescription drugs. It was the chronic use of these drugs that caused the acquired immune deficiency in the gay men.

For a detail explanation of how drugs cause AIDS see "The AIDS dilemma: drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus" Genetica 104: 85 (1998), Duesberg & Rasnick. You can find this paper on the internet at www.duesberg.com under what’s new.

Malnutrition is the world’s leading cause of AIDS-defining diseases and is the principal cause of the "AIDS-defining diseases" of Africa .

Malnutrition also causes the profound loss of T cells and inversion of T-helper to T-suppressor populations said to be characteristic of HIV-caused AIDS .

The fever, diarrhea, persistent cough, weight loss, and TB (the AIDS-defining disease of Africa) are the diseases of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, bad water etc. that have plagued the continent for generations.

In the past we were honest about the diseases of poverty and sent CARE packages with food and useful medicines to Africa. But today we send condoms and AZT, preach safe sex, and conveniently blame HIV for everything from diarrhea and infant mortality to Coca Cola’s lost revenues.

Since there is no evidence that AIDS is contagious, sexually transmitted, or caused by HIV, why do we read in the newspapers or see on the television everyday a growing litany of AIDS horrors and HIV statistics? Why do virtually all doctors and public health officials profess their unswerving allegiance to the dogma of HIV and the axioms of AIDS? The answer is simple once you see it.

Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry because advertising works. As noted above, since 1980 American taxpayers have spent over $93 billion on AIDS . You can buy almost unanimous support for just about anything with that amount of money. The $93 billion does not include the billions of dollars that the drug companies have spent on their AIDS-targeted products and the billions more in revenues they have pocketed from the sale of those products. By way of comparison, American taxpayers spent $22 billion to put twelve men on the moon. We got our money’s worth—we got to the moon. However, we have not yet saved the life of even one AIDS patient with those billions of dollars, and the first success is not in sight.

The tens of billions of HIV dollars support the more than 100 thousand doctors and scientists who have built their careers and reputations by simply accepting the HIV dogma and the axioms of AIDS. What these 100 thousand HIV scientists and doctors have not done with that money, however, is produce the evidence that shows that the AIDS axioms are scientific facts or at least likely to be true. As Peter Duesberg has often said about AIDS funding, "they could spend billions to study HIV on the moon if they wanted, but they can’t afford $50,000 to prove themselves wrong."

If you think big science is devoted to the free exchange of ideas and committed to open debate you are in for a rude awakening. One thing critics discover very soon is that the high priests of HIV dogma rarely if ever address the specific criticisms of the AIDS axioms. Instead, they do everything possible to silence their critics.

Terminating grant support to dissident scientists who question HIV dogma and the axioms of AIDS is the auto-da-fé of our day. To save their careers most scientists stop asking embarrassing questions and proselytize themselves before the golden idol of HIV. The courageous (or stubborn, depending on you point of view) few who stick to their principles are forced to scrape up the money any way they can to do their research. Our lab, for example, relies on the generosity of wealthy individuals, private foundations, general donations, and we have even started a company in the hope that it will provide a long-term source of funds for our research.

But even if you get the money to do the work, you won’t be able to get your results published in American scientific or medical journals and you will no longer be invited to professional meetings. If you publicly question HIV dogma too loudly you risk ad hominem attacks and are accused of being a homophobe, or of encouraging people to stop taking AZT and the other DNA chain-terminating drugs (to which I plead guilty), or of causing people to stop using condoms.

Since the middle 1980s the United States has been engaged in a kind of medical McCarthyism, where anyone who asks questions about the HIV dogma is punished as a heretic. Those who are seen talking with a dissident are warned that they risk their careers and reputations if they continue. Even heads of state are not immune to threats and intimidation.

South African President Thabo Mbeki continues to receive intense personal attacks because he included on his AIDS Advisory Panel last year a number of scientists and physicians from around the world who dispute the mainstream dogma of AIDS. Having failed to silence Mbeki, the AIDS establishment has orchestrated an international campaign to portray him as insane because he insists on getting answers to some very simple questions:

1. Why is AIDS in Africa so completely different from AIDS in the USA and Europe?
2. How does a virus know to cause different diseases on different continents?
3. How does a virus know if you are male or female, gay or straight, white or black?

Journalists who interview dissidents almost never see their work published or broadcast, they are no longer invited to mainstream meetings, and are vilified by former friends and colleagues.

On page 709 of his book Challenges , Serge Lang, the legendary Yale mathematician and member of the National Academy of Sciences, describes his unsuccessful effort to publish his commentary on Richard Horton’s (editor of The Lancet) review of Peter Duesberg’s book Inventing the AIDS Virus published in the New York Review of Books. Since the New York Review of Books would not publish his commentary, Lang sent a letter to the editor of The Lancet concerning the HIV scandal but it was turned down. He then sent a check along with his letter to have it published in the advertisement section of the journal. Yielding to Lang’s persistence, the editor of The Lancet finally published Lang’s letter (in the letters to the editor section) and returned his check.

There are countless more stories of censorship, intimidation, and financial and professional manipulation. But the discordant data still sits there, indestructible and unresolved.

With so many careers dependent on, and billions of dollars invested in, the HIV dogma and the axioms of AIDS, it is easy to see what is at stake. If some or all of the AIDS axioms are false (I’m certain that all of them are false), then we are faced with the biggest blunder of the 20^th Century. It would require superhuman courage and integrity on the part of numerous government officials and the directors of the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control, and of countless physicians, scientists, health care workers, journalists, celebrities and average citizens, to admit that they made a big mistake—that they got it all wrong about AIDS.

Many informed critics think that the billions of dollars at stake is the biggest roadblock to ending the AIDS insanity. That money is certainly a formidable weapon in the service of the HIV/AIDS establishment. However, I think it is simple human embarrassment that is the biggest obstacle to bringing this insanity to an end. It is the fear of being so obviously and hopelessly wrong about AIDS that keeps lips sealed, the money flowing and AIDS rhetoric spiraling to stratospheric heights of absurdity.

The physicians who know or suspect the truth are embarrassed or afraid to admit that the HIV tests are absurd and should be outlawed, and that the anti-HIV drugs are injuring and killing people. We are taught to fear antibodies, and to believe that antibodies to HIV are a harbinger of disease and death ten years in the future. When you protest this absurdity and point out to health care workers that antibodies are the very essence of anti-viral immunity your objections are met with either contempt or embarrassed silence.

The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Medical Research Council, and the World Health Organization are terrorizing hundreds of millions of people around the world by their reckless and absurd policy of equating sex with death. Linking sex to death has put these organizations in an impossible situation. It would be intolerably embarrassing for them to admit at this late date that they are wrong, that AIDS is not sexually transmitted. Such an admission could very well destroy these organizations or at the very least put their future credibility in jeopardy. Self preservation compels these institutions to not only maintain but to actually compound their errors, which adds to the fear, suffering, and misery of the world—the antithesis of their reason for being.

With AIDS, perhaps the most devastating effect of this new antiscience is in the realm of clinical trials. Most drugs that are approved by the FDA must complete three phases of human clinical trials—phase I for toxicity, phase II for short-term effectiveness, and phase III, the most vital, for the ultimate measure of morbidity and mortality (that is, whether the drugs actually benefit patients).

In order to satisfy the requirements for licensing, however, two phase III protease inhibitor clinical trials were initiated: a 1,200-patient Boston-centered study and a 3,300-patient trial in Europe. (With AZT, only the Europeans kept their study going long enough to see the true results, despite the fierce protestations of activists and health care workers. In the end, the so-called Concorde study gave us the answer about AZT—not only did the drug not work, but there was a 25% higher mortality rate among those taking AZT compared to those that didn’t .)

But the protease inhibitor studies were all stopped well before their designed completion dates. On February 25, 1997, a Boston Globe headline trumpeted: AIDS Trial Terminated; 3-Drug Therapy Hailed. The article reported that 63 of the 579 Boston trial subjects receiving two drugs had died or developed new AIDS-associated illnesses, while only 33 of the 577 individuals receiving the new three-drug "cocktail" had died or gotten sicker. It also mentioned that, as late as mid-January, 1997, a "peek" at the results of the two drug regimens had concluded that they had not "yet diverged enough to warrant stopping the study."

When the triumphant results were reported, Fauci dramatically announced that the trial had provided evidence that combination treatments including protease inhibitors "can reduce the risk of death" from AIDS.

You don’t have to be a scientist to follow the logical difficulties here. It seems highly unlikely that between mid-January 97 and mid-February 97 the data had changed enough to stop the phase III trial. Even the leader of the Boston trial admitted that there was no statistical difference between the deaths in the two treatment groups. When the study was concluded, there were eight deaths among those taking three drugs, compared with 18 deaths among those taking two. Using these mortality figures at face value is like stopping a basketball game in the first quarter as soon as your team is leading and declare victory. As everyone knows, the lead can oscillate back and forth throughout the game. The same is true of clinical trials.

In short, we don’t know if the combination therapies work to "reduce the risk of death," because it has not been proved. So why did Fauci and his allies halt the phase III trial before it yielded statistically significant results?

Protease inhibitors were internationally hailed as miracle drugs in 1996, without the benefit of proof. As long as phase III trials were under way, they posed a dangerous uncertainty. A completed trial that resulted in an unsatisfactory result would be difficult to explain away. From the HIV/AIDS establishment’s perspective, the safest course of action was to stop the game, declare victory, and hope nobody would call them on it.

AIDS research has become a virtual puppet for the titanic, symbiotic forces of industry and government. I recently attended a small, elite conference focusing on the "chemotherapy of AIDS," where 43 of the 100 people present were pharmaceutical company representatives who ran to the phones after each session to call in the results. During one session, I asked a leading proponent of cocktail therapies how the patients receiving the cocktails were doing. He said that some were healthy enough to work. Then I asked whether, during the course of therapy, the 20 individuals did better, stayed the same, or got worse. He did not answer. It was an embarrassing moment for the audience. Then I asked: "Your patients should have done better, right?" Again, he was speechless.

Even more disturbingly, one presenter suggested that "clinical endpoints are dead" in phase III trials. In other words, he believes that clinical trials will no longer use morbidity and mortality as endpoints—they will no longer be designed to determine whether drugs actually work. The excuse given for dropping phase III clinical trials is that they are unethical and too costly; we are henceforth supposed to assume that the drugs under evaluation reduce morbidity and mortality before this has actually been demonstrated.

To date, there is still no clinical trial that has proved that the protease inhibitors—either taken alone or in combination with other antiviral drugs—reduce the mortality or improve the quality of life of AIDS patients.

Alexis de Tocqueville 170 years ago had anticipated the underlying political and sociological bases of the AIDS Blunder. Instead of trying to recreate his magnificent achievement, below I quote from his masterpiece Democracy in America. Here is Tocqueville’s illuminating analysis of the tyranny of conformity .

"I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America."

"In America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them. It is not that he has to fear an auto-da-fé, but he is the butt of mortification of all kinds and of persecutions every day. A political career is closed to him: he has offended the only power that has the capacity to open it up. Everything is refused him, every glory. Before publishing his opinions, he believed he had partisans; it seems to him that he no longer has any now that he has uncovered himself to all; for those who blame him express themselves openly, and those who think like him, without having his courage, keep silent and move away. He yields, he finally bends under the effort of each day and returns to silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth."

"Chains and executioners are the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but in our day civilization has perfected even despotism itself, which seemed, indeed, to have nothing more to learn."

"Princes had so to speak made violence material; democratic republics in our day have rendered it just as intellectual as the human will that it wants to constrain. Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us. You shall keep your privileges in the city, but they will become useless to you; for if you crave the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not grant it to you, and if you demand only their esteem, they will pretend to refuse it to you. You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity. When you approach those like you, they shall flee from you as being impure; and those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in their turn. Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death."

"[T]he power that dominates in the United States does not intend to be made sport of…. The slightest reproach wounds it, the least prickly truth alarms it; and one must praise it from the forms of its language to its most solid virtues. No writer, whatever his renown may be, can escape the obligation of singing the praises of his fellow citizens. The majority, therefore, lives in perpetual adoration of itself; only foreigners or experience can make certain truths reach the ears of the American."

"It is true that courtiers in America do not say ‘Sire’ and ‘Your Majesty’—a great and capital difference; but they speak constantly of the natural enlightenment of their master; they do not hold a competition on the question of knowing which one of the virtues of the prince most merits being admired; for they are sure that he possesses all the virtues, without having acquired them and so to speak without wanting to do so; they do not give him their wives and their daughters so that he may deign to elevate them to the rank of his mistresses; but in sacrificing their opinions to him, they prostitute themselves."

"Two things are astonishing in the Untied States: the great mobility of most human actions and the singular fixity of certain principles. Men move constantly, the human mind seems almost immobile."

"When once an opinion has extended over the American soil and has taken root, one would say that no power on earth is in a position to extirpate it. In the United States, general doctrines in the matter of religion, of philosophy, of morality, and even of politics do not vary, or at least they are modified only after a hidden and often insensible travail; the coarsest prejudices themselves are effaced only with inconceivable slowness in the midst of this friction of things and men repeated a thousand times."

"What struck me in the United States is the trouble one experiences in disabusing the majority of an idea it has conceived and of detaching it from a man whom it adopts. Writings or discourses can scarcely succeed at this; experience alone overcomes it; sometimes it must be repeated."

Anyone who knows my friend and colleague Peter Duesberg, and what he has endured and suffered simply because he persists in exercising not only his constitutional rights but also his rights as a human being, can’t help but think of him when reading Tocqueville’s words.

I plagiarize Alexis de Tocqueville shamelessly in the next three paragraphs by replacing religion with science, but I hope to honor his genius in the process.

As long as a science finds its force in the sentiments, instincts, and passions that one sees reproduced in the same manner in all periods of history, it defies the effort of time, or at least it can only be destroyed by something that is its superior. But when science is slave to a particular fashion of thought or the interests of government and industry, it becomes almost as fragile as all the other powers on earth. Alone, science can hope for immortality; bound to ephemeral powers, it follows their fortune and often falls with the passions of the day that sustains them.

In uniting with different political powers, science can therefore contract only an onerous alliance. It does not need their assistance to live, and in serving them it can die. When governments seem so strong and laws so stable, men do not perceive the danger that science can risk by uniting with power.

Insofar as a nation takes on a democratic social state, and societies are seen to incline toward republics, it becomes more and more dangerous for science to unite with authority; for the time approaches when power is going to pass from hand to hand, when political theories will succeed one another, when men, laws, and constitutions themselves will disappear or be modified daily—and this lasting not only for a time, but constantly.

The late UC Berkeley professor Paul Feyerabend agrees with Tocqueville that "the time is overdue for adding the separation of state and science to the by now quite customary separation of state and church. Science is only one of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, too pushy, and too dangerous to be left on its own" .

Uncovering Watergate now seems trivial compared to what it will take to expose the 16 years of fraud, incompetence, and flagrant lying that have been going on behind a veil of scientific and medical jargon, credentials, and expertise.

President Clinton did his bit to thicken the protective fog encasing the AIDS Blunder. Last summer he declared AIDS to be a risk to the national security of the United States. That action allowed at least three additional federal institutions to play a direct role in maintaining and protecting the fiction of a global AIDS pandemic. These institutions are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). The involvement of the FBI, CIA, and NSA in AIDS represents a far greater threat to our freedoms than to HIV.

The most astounding thing to me about all of this is that the greatest threat to our democracies has turned out not to be goose-stepping soldiers in camouflage but rather the chronic fear peddled by white-coated scientists and physicians squandering billions of taxpayers’ dollars annually and their sycophants in the media.

Ultimately, the AIDS blunder is not really about AIDS, nor even about health and disease, nor even about science and medicine. The AIDS blunder is about the health of our democracies. I think it is highly unlikely that the AIDS blunder could have occurred or been maintained in a healthy democracy where continuous discourse and debate of all important issues is vigorous and healthy, where criticism flourishes and critics are cherished as national treasures.

The only way we can free ourselves from the AIDS blunder and bring an end to the tyranny of fear is to have an open international discourse and debate on all aspects of AIDS. We will have to come up with some minimally embarrassing ways to do this, perhaps modeled on South Africa’s Truth Commission set up to heal the wounds caused by Apartheid. Anger will be a natural response to facing the enormity of the scandal of AIDS. Anger has its place but it should be put aside quickly. It is a mistake to focus on villains and on whom to punish. The AIDS blunder is a sociological phenomenon in which we all share a measure of responsibility.

The AIDS blunder has taught me that a healthy democracy demands that its citizens keep a skeptical, even suspicious, eye on its institutions in order to prevent them from becoming the autonomous, authoritarian regimes they are now. The AIDS blunder shows that we need to rethink and restructure our institutions of government, science, health, academe, journalism and media. We must replace the National Institutes of Health as the primary gatekeeper of research funding with numerous competing sources of funding. We must restructure the peer review processes of scientific publishing and funding so that they do not promote and protect any particular dogma or fashion of thought or exclude competing ideas. A robust and mean investigative journalism must be revived, rewarded and cherished.

The AIDS blunder goes to the very core of our democracies. If we continue to be hoodwinked by techno-babble and institutional blather, and allow ourselves to be manipulated by cheap sentimentality and red ribbons then freedom and democracy will slip through our fingers.

Finally, as citizens we must take back the authority and responsibility for our own health and well being and that of our democracies.

References