HIV, the Profitable ParadigmDavid H. Tyson
Why should anyone be skeptical of the
prevailing paradigm of an infectious AIDS caused by a retrovirus, HIV? After all, many doctors certainly appear to be convinced of the veracity of this paradigm. Flocks of adherents are evident in the scientific community. The press is impressed. The media is amazed. And all this belief continues unabated now fifteen years after the discovery of HIV. How much of the taxpayers' money have we channeled into HIV research? 40, 50, 60 billion? We as a people are not in the habit of throwing that kind of money down the rat hole of theoretical error. Therefore the paradigm is proven, proven by the eleven figures on the bottom line. Or, at least, such is the fervent hope of the allocators of that eleven figure sum. It may be worrisome to a few that the AIDS epidemic has never materialized. The prediction made twelve, thirteen years ago of as many as ten million Americans dying of AIDS has never even remotely manifested. I assume we understand the scientific principle which states that a theory, in order to be useful, must accurately predict observed phenomenon. Why has this principle been set aside with HIV? Why has the definition of AIDS required continual manipulation to permit even a remote correlation with observed phenomenon? The inescapable fact which eventually dawns on any objective investigator is that our federally funded health institutions lie. I don't suppose there are many Americans who have much faith in the honesty of politicians. Those who do are usually regarded as gullible fools. So it doesn't seem to me difficult at all to entertain the notion that the National Institute of Health, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may not be cloaked in a magical cape of truthfulness either. Especially when there is the crisp crackling of a billion bucks in funding generated by a global plague panic.
Three lines of political inquiry inform
my opinions on HIV: 1) The genesis of this paradigm, coming, as it did, from the National Institute of Health, which had been under tremendous pressure to produce results... The paradigm emerged not from the debate of scientists and the duplication of laboratory experiments. It came into the global consciousness at a press conference, from the lips of a retrovirologist, a loser in the War on Cancer, named Bob Gallo. 2) The money trail left by pharmaceutical corporations, most conspicuously Glaxo Wellcome, in their bid to get the poisonous AZT approved by the FDA... The fraudulent trials which were conducted, the abrupt termination and the distorted conclusions which were drawn do not inspire my faith. Nor do the contrary conclusions of subsequent trials, most notably the Concorde. 3) The fact that more than 5000 million dollars in funding and 16 years of the most intensive microbial investigation in the history of medicine have not produced a cure or even a reliable treatment... It seems to me that even those of a non- skeptical nature might be led to question the theoretical underpinnings of such massive failure.
In addition to political suspicions my
skepticism is fed by intelligent and compelling challenges to the HIV/AIDS theory. I should outline briefly the nature of these challenges and the qualifications of their authors. Peter Duesberg is perhaps the best
Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, the
Australian biophysicist, whose name almost no one pronounces correctly on the first attempt, has been challenging the HIV theory about as long as Duesberg. She has experienced similar difficulties publishing her rigorous and incisive work. Once the scientific world fell under the spell of HIV and the money started gushing out to those who would rescue us from this global peril, few journals would glance at a dissident viewpoint. However, she persisted. One discovers, in science and elsewhere, that those with important insights who are initially ignored double and then treble their efforts to communicate that glittering particle of the truth which they have perceived. Or, at least, those we hear about do so. Papadopulos-Eleopulos and the Perth Team were given an opportunity to present their reassessment of the paradigm at the 12th AIDS Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1998. With a satellite link she was telecast live to the proceedings. She proceeded to go over in a step by step manner the laboratory techniques used by Montaigner and Gallo, critiquing the errors in their reasoning and lacunae in their arguments for the isolation of an entity, HIV. Apparently, the great embarrassment of an admission of misfunded research to the tune of many billions was more than executives in the AIDS establishment could bear. They retreated into a denial of the evidence, from whence they have not emerged, arguing, unconvincingly, that the Perth Team was critiquing old data. Old data, indeed! However, the data critiqued is the basis for the paradigm on which subsequent data emerged. Thus our vaunted "scientists" are revealed as mere mortals and not possessed of any more "objectivity" than your average weasly politician. The Perth website has some cool audio interviews here.
If you are the sort who is swayed by
statistics and epidemiology you might be interested in the Ukrainian, Vladimir Koliadin. Vladimir Koliadin Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at the Kharkov Aviation Institute, in the Ukraine, and a member of the American Mathematical Society. Koliadin brings the powerful tools of mathematics and statistical analysis to bear on the existent data. Following the fundamental precepts of scientific investigation he formats the competing hypotheses in such a way as to analyze their predictions and compare them with the developed data. For instance, in a paper entitled HIV AND MORTALITY IN AFRICA Koliadin places the HIV causation theory against competing theories which claim that HIV is merely a marker of a challenged immune system. Thus the causation theory and the marker theories are seen to predict different statistical outcomes in the measured population. Koliadin uses a study called Two-year HIV-1-associated mortality in a Ugandan rural population, which was published in Lancet v.343, pp. 1021-1023 (April 23, 1994). He points out that both the causation and the marker theories would predict a higher prevalence of mortality in the HIV+ group. But what about the HIV- group? Might there be some insight to be gained from examining the mortality amongst those who test HIV-? If indeed the causation theory is correct, Koliadin notes, then the mortality observed amongst the HIV- group would be a normal mortality. In other words, those who tested HIV- would be expected to die at a rate consistent with the normal mortality for a region. A rural population in Uganda might be expected to have a somewhat higher mortality than, say, the United States in the year 1983. What was the mortality in the United States in 1983? It was 1.5 per 1000. If, however, the marker theories had the greater validity we then should expect the HIV- group to have a lower than normal rate. And, in fact, this is the reality that the statistics bear out. Mortality amongst HIV- Ugandans is 1.38 per 1000, lower than the 1.5 per 1000 observed in the U.S. in 1983 and, I would imagine, significantly lower than what would be considered normal for rural Uganda. It is thus incontrovertible that HIV is not a driving factor in mortality, not a driving factor in AIDS, and that the marker theories predict observed phenomenon better than the causation theory. For a more comprehensive discussion of the significant errors informing the conventional wisdom see the Koliadin article here.
After learning something of the
political soil in which the HIV fantasy took root, one might question the climate in which it flourished. How is it that we have been so misled into squandering our precious resources on such an errant hypothesis? Why have so many otherwise sensible Americans fallen for this folly? Why are so many clear scientific demonstrations of the inadequacy of this HIV paradigm ignored, while far-fetched, contradictory and, indeed, deadly solutions embraced? A scholarly treatment of these topics lies beyond the scope of the few remarks I might make here. Some initial observations, however, would indicate that 1) they don't know, 2) they don't care and 3) it is widely believed that the government takes care of that complicated stuff. I did not myself ponder these issues until they leapt into my lap. Until recently I accepted the paradigm that HIV caused AIDS, that this virus was transmitted through bodily fluids, that once infected an inevitable death sentence was the contingency to be expected. It was my resolve merely to grasp the science of the perceived epidemic. I was astonished to discover that this science does not exist, no epidemic exists and that an infectious AIDS is a myth perpetuated for profit and to further the agendas of those who would repress our sexuality.  TORONTO |
