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Durban Declaration Rebuttal

Commentary

AIDS Serum Testing Halt is Called For

*Not all agree, but some scientists say the role of the HIV virus is not well enough understood to develop a vaccine

by John Hanchette
Gannett News Service
September 10 2000

Artlington, Va.- Several scientists are calling for a moratorium on all HIV vaccine research and clinical trials until the true infecting mechanism of AIDS disease is clarified.

The request-described here yesterday at an international conference on vaccination policy- will appear in the October issue of vaccine, a science journal whose articles are peer-reviewed. The eight authors of the article describe the vaccine currently being tested as "unsafe" and presenting "a clear and present danger to recipients." They urge development of a "new, more effective and less dangerous AIDS vaccine strategy."

Howard Urnovitz, chief scientist of the Chronic Illness Research Foundation in Berkeley, California, and a speaker here at the International Public Conference on Vaccination 2000, attacked the recent "Durban Declaration" that supporters of the vaccine had hoped would quiet dissent on the issue. Urnovitz called it "a farce"- and insisted it is based on murky research that proves little about how HIV occurs.

The Durban Declaration- a commentary published two months ago in the science journal Nature and signed by 5,000 scientists around the globe, including nine Nobel Prize winners- flatly stated that the evidence AIDS is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 virus is "clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous."

The World Health Organization estimates HIV has infected 50 million humans so far- and has killed 16 million. Its scientists claim 16,000 new cases of HIV infection occur daily.

Several large government grants have been made to universities, private labs and pharmaceutical companies in recent years to develop an HIV vaccine for clinical testing in the US, Europe, Africa and Australia.

The US health establishment and high-ranking scientists in the Clinton administration backed the Durban Declaration. Sandy Thurman, the White House's top AIDS official, said at the time "I don't think there's a doubt" that the HIV virus causes the disease- a belief once almost universally accepted by researchers.

But the moratorium article's lead author, Dr. Veljko Veljkovic- head of research at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Belgrade- held: " the most promising vaccine candidate, now in phase three clinical trials is not only inefficient but is actually harming the health of those who take it. The HIV vaccine is unsafe."

Urnovitz said he is "shocked and dismayed that so many prestigious scientists, including Nobel laureates, would sign a document calling for the end of a scientific debate. Instead of closing the debate, it should be intensified."

Authors of the Vaccine moratorium article- who include University of Kentucky microbiologist Heinz Kohler and Tulane University immunologist Emmett Johnson- note the late Dr. Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine and one of the most prominent scientists of the 20th century, believed there was "no basis for testing andy HIV vaccine in human beings either before of after infection."

Sabin stressed in his writings that effective vaccines so far only confer lasting immunity against diseased transmitted solely by "cell-free viruses that produce a primary natural infection"- not the newly discovered retroviruses that carry an enormous amount of cellular particles and are the subjects of HIV research.

It would be "disastrous," Sabin wrote in 1993, to test HIV vaccines on humans without previous evidence that such vaccines can protect against infection involving such intracellular viruses.

Urnovitz said the literature cited in the Durban Declaration as compelling proof that HIV is the undisputed and sole cause of AIDS "is based on unsatisfactory science" including a 1999 Harvard study- done without controls- that purported to prove that a simian virus closely related to HIV caused AIDS when injected into three rhesus monkeys. The baby monkey died of AIDS, said the paper, and the two adult monkeys were very sick from it.

Urnovitz noted at the conference here that the original paper admits the anemic baby monkey was actually euthanized by the researchers, and that the two adult monkeys were never proven to have AIDS, but something similar to chronic fatigue syndrome.

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Here is a website for the Arlington vaccine conference. Interesting HIV link slamming the Clinton administration for playing politics with "AIDS vaccine".

http://www.909shot.com/conferenceintro.htm



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