The following are selected postings from a motherjones.com discussion forum in the Health section. Feel free to go there and add your views to keep the discussion lively. Do the HIV dissidents have a point? A growing group of so-called AIDS dissidents claim HIV is a myth promoted by the pharmaceutical industry to sell high-profit, highly toxic drugs. Are they provoking needed debate, or pushing a dangerous theory? Kristopher Soule - 07:22am May 23, 2001 PST (#1 of 42) Pardon me while I laugh at them There are also people who claimn that the holocaust never happened, Elvis is alive, Hitler is too, and the only thing an alien wants to do is stick something up your ass. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. On a more serious note however, HIV is the disease, AIDS is the term used for the extreme decrease in the immune system. WHile it is true that it sometimes takes years for someone to go from HIV+ to AIDS, the two seem to be linked. I haven't seen a report of an AIDS case that wasn't preceded by HIV. Neva Hilliard - 09:53pm May 25, 2001 PST (#3 of 42) I've Wondered... I'm 42, please don't ask me to tally the number of friends and acquaintances I and my friends have lost to this horrible disease called AIDS. I will tell you this, though. The first of my friends, my dearest friend, tested positive for HIV way back in 1982 - but he outright REFUSED to accept it as a death sentence. He stopped smoking and using alcohol, eating red meat and dairy products. He took no medications and he lived a fairly "normal" life for years, experiencing only a few disruptions to his health, 2 incindences of pneumonia, and a nasty viral infection that left him in a weakened state for some weeks. Twelve years later, though, in 1994, the doctors insisted that he start on the medications available at the time. I watched him grow weak and lethargic, sick and incapacitated within a few short months. He seemed to gravitate between the hospital and his home, after that. He had to give up his job, go on disability. For two years, he dealt with perpetual nausea and dizziness, weight loss and bloat, lack of appetite and finally, a dementia that frightened all of us. He died in July 1996, shortly after two years on medications that have were already known to be toxic to humans... Through my grief, I've wondered, I've really wondered what it was that really caused his death... Anthony Gargano - 02:35pm May 27, 2001 PST (#8 of 42) PEOPLE DIED OF AIDS BEFORE THE MEDICATIONS Saying that people die of AIDS because of medications is silly since many people died of opportunistic infections before the medicines were ever developed. While I agree that the pharmaceutical companies are reaping profits from these medications and are acting in a socially irresponsible manner - I don't think it is fair to say that the medicines cause the disease. kEvin pseudonymous - 03:48pm May 31, 2001 PST (#18 of 42) Junk science keeps people down. There is *NO* credible research supporting the proposition that AIDS has causes other than HIV. I've seen junk science from people who couldn't get published in peer reviewed journals and I've seen obsolete research from the 80's which correctly (at that time, almost 20 years ago) deemed determination of HIV as the cause of AIDS as inconclusive. Since the initial mass outbreak and decades of subsequent research, the early studies have been bolstered by reams of data. The initial determinations were inconclusive (although they did point to HIV as the cause) because they lacked sufficient sample size. Unfortunately AIDS spread very quickly and the number of victims quickly reached numbers where the statistics were undeniable. If AIDS deaths resulted from other causes, there would have been deaths from AIDS where the victim was not HIV+. HIV infection rates are relatively low among the most at risk groups in an absolute sense (the highest infection rates reach 25%) and if there were behavioural or environmental factors that caused AIDS, you would expect a proportionate number of deaths to occur among HIV- individuals. This hasn't occurred. There have been *NO* deaths diagnosed as AIDS related in which the victim has been confirmed HIV-. The historical cases of Caposi's sarcoma (the predatory viral cancer which is often the actual cause of death in AIDS victims) where tissue samples were preserved showed HIV infection. Every autopsy in which AIDS was diagnosed as the cause of death has shown HIV infection. There are some unrelated conditions which impair the immune system, but they do no reduce T-cell counts into the single digits like HIV does. Charlatans and wishful thinkers have seized upon other immunosuppressive conditions as "proof" that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, but they can only do this by ignoring that the death toll is exclusively among the HIV+. It's appropriate to air the views of the dissidents, but failing to challenge their ignorant and self-serving presentation of the data is going to cause increased infection and increased deaths. Superstition has a body count. Rod Knoll - 06:22am Jun 12, 2001 PST (#24 of 42) Founder/AIDSRealityCheck.org A Reality Check First of all, I want to offer my kudos to motherjones.com for FINALLY coming down on the "right" side of this discussion (no pun intended!). There are some confusions expressed by those critical of the dissidents, however. Chief among them is the claim that we fail to explain how people died BEFORE the so-called "anti-HIV" drugs were introduced. I respond by saying you defenders of the mainstream have FAILED to *READ* enough of what we dissidents have written. Unlike the "AIDS" industry we are NOT proposing that there is a single cause of a syndrome as complex-and as evolving-as "AIDS". The "AIDS" industry is the monolith, here; we dissenters are the "multi-factorialists". There are clearly and always have been MANY different causes of this amorphous thing we now call "AIDS". Poppers-remember them?-are chief among the "immune-suppressive" elements that contributed to the advent of "AIDS". Please see: http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/jlpoppers.htm for an overview of poppers. Also see http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/epmedhypo.htm and http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/epkaposi.htm for just two studies from the medical literature that explore the evidence from medical science that shows poppers are immune suppressive and carcinogenic. Much like poppers abuse, antibiotics were often overused and abused by a certain segment of the gay male population. A simple glance at CDC statistics on deaths from "AIDS" in the U.S.(see the table on page 31 of this link: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats/hasr1102.pdf for more information) reveals an interesting fact. LESS THAN 6% of all deaths from "AIDS" occurred PRIOR to the approval of AZT in 1987. And, in twenty years of CUMULATIVE data on "AIDS", only 425,000 Americans have died from ALL the various diseases that have been lumped together and called "AIDS". About that many die EVERY YEAR from smoking-related problems. Another myth is that, prior to the approval of AZT, medical science was somehow in the "dark ages" and "AIDS" patients were not receiving ANY pharmaceutical products. While there may not have been any "anti-HIV" drugs then, "AIDS" patients were indeed given systemic chemotherapies for KS as well as continous antibiotic consumption done in a hypothetically "prophylactic" or preventive manner. Now, please don't shout that these things could not possibly be responsible for "AIDS" in Africa BEFORE reading about what causes so-called "AIDS" in Africa: http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/africa.htm DITTO for so-called pediatric "AIDS": http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/kids.htm Try to stop thinking in a MONOLITHIC manner! As for non-HIV "AIDS", see the following link for evidence of this not-so-rare phenomenon: http://www.healtoronto.com/problems.html#weak Also, how can one say that "HIV" is THE cause of "AIDS" when our good ole CDC has allowed "AIDS" to be diagnosed in people who test "HIV"-**NEGATIVE**!! See the following study on so-called hemophiliac "AIDS" for a discussion of the ludicrously circular definition(s) of "AIDS": http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/ephemophilia.htm Yet another myth that needs to be shattered is that scientists who are dissenting on "AIDS" have not been able to publish ANYTHING in the medical literature. This is NOT true! The dissenting "AIDS" scientists have reviewed the EXISTING medical literature that has been published by the "AIDS" establishment. We dissidents use the SAME data the "AIDS" industry uses. We get it from THEM! But, we obviously come to different conclusions based upon these data. Lastly, this is NOT a popularity contest or an election; try to get out of that mindset, too. This is *SCIENCE*. So what if the dissidents have not published as many articles as the sellouts in the "AIDS" industry? What should matter is what the dissidents SAY, not how often they get to say it. Galileo himself once said that "In science, the authority embodied in the opinion of thousands is not worth a spark of reason in one man."
Neva Hilliard - 03:14pm Jun 3, 2001 PST (#20 of 42) Don't get your opinions from the corporate media Some of the "opinions" posted here read like the result of "education by corporate media." When posting your condemnation of the AIDS dissidents, I suggest you also post your medical credentials. By the way, the NOBEL PRIZE chemists who are among the dissidents would laugh at being called "ignorant." Try this novel approach - turn off the television, throw away the newspapers, and find out what you can before the internet turns corporate, too. http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index. Mike Hanson - 07:37am Jun 11, 2001 PST (#22 of 42) "Liberals can be used to great effect for our cause, they are usefull idiots" Vladimir Ilich Lenin "I am not a dictator, Those that call me one do not understand the principles of socialism", Joesph Stalin 1932 happy birthday AIDS The AIDS epidemic can be accurately described as a product of the gay rights movement of the 1970s, inevitably concentrated in the very centers of gay life in America -- San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles -- and impossible to conceive without the presence and agitations of the radical gay movements that directly preceded it. It was the gay radical left that defined promiscuous anal sex with strangers in public urban environments – the primary cause of the AIDS epidemic – as "gay liberation." It was the gay movement that thought nothing of the massive epidemics of amoebiasis, rectal gonorrhea, syphilis, and hepatitis B that swept through gay communities in the decades preceding AIDS, producing astronomical infection rates and depleted immune systems in the process. It was the gay movement that regarded any intrusion by public health authorities to close the public sexual gymnasiums called "bathhouses" as a "threat" to gay liberation (both before and after the onset of AIDS). It was the gay left that successfully prevented reporting, testing, contact tracing and other public health methods that had been proven effective in combating epidemic diseases in the past. It was the gay left that blocked government prevention programs from targeting at-risk communities (using the same lie as the Times writer -- that "AIDS is an equal opportunity disease"), and it was the gay left that persuaded government officials instead to put all the anti-AIDS eggs in the basket of incredibly expensive and – as everyone can now see – completely ineffective "education" campaigns. These campaigns were ineffective because – out of considerations of political correctness – they did not specify anal sex as the primary sexual transmission route and were addressed not to those who were specifically at risk, but to "everyone," and thus in effect to no one. The late Michael Callen, creator of the organization "People With AIDS," and a pioneer of candor in the midst of these lies, described how he had come to New York as a young man from the sticks and heard gay radicals like the writer Edmund White address audiences in the gay community on the subject of sexual liberation. White told one such audience that Callen was in that "gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society." As a young romantic listening to this siren song of the left, Callen’s natural response was to think: "Every time I get the clap I’m striking a blow for the sexual revolution." The ever-courageous Camille Paglia pointed out some years ago the obvious truth: "Everyone who preached free love in the Sixties is responsible for AIDS. This idea that it was somehow an accident, a microbe that sort of fell from heaven – absurd. We must face what we did." [Apparently the above paragraph was plagiarized from David Horowitz, the rabid, radical, right-wing columnist is a frequent contributor to Salon.com.] Michael Callen explained exactly what "we" did: "Some of us believed we could change the world through sexual liberation and that we were taking part in a noble experiment. Unfortunately as a function of a microbiological … certainty, this level of sexual activity resulted in concurrent epidemics of syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, amoebiasis, venereal warts and, we discovered too late, other pathogens. Unwittingly, and with the best of revolutionary intentions, a small subset of gay men managed to create disease settings equivalent to those of poor Third World nations in one of the richest nations on earth." It was a tragedy that those who pioneered in the establishment of gay rights should have been addicted to a radical illusion that they could also change the world – including the laws of nature. But that is what happened. This left went on to exert a controlling influence on the battle against AIDS, which sabotaged it from the start and has been directly responsible for the killing fields left in its wake. Mike Hanson - 07:13am Jun 12, 2001 PST (#25 of 42) "Liberals can be used to great effect for our cause, they are usefull idiots" Vladimir Ilich Lenin "I am not a dictator, Those that call me one do not understand the principles of socialism", Joesph Stalin 1932 Martin Maloney Did I cut and paste a large piece of David Horowitz's lastest column, duh. Many of my postings, about 10% are cut and paste. As are many others from other contributors. By the way I got it from www.frontpage.com, not that soon to be defunct rag Salon. Just so I do not offend all the self important lit majors, I will be sure to give credit for any future cut and paste. Interesting though, you never responded to the piece. Was it a shade to brutaly honest for you? Martin Maloney - 06:13pm Jun 12, 2001 PST (#26 of 42) Response to Horowitz I just emailed the following letter to the editor to Salon.com. Given their hostility to the HIV/AIDS dissident position, I will not be flbbergasted if they don't publish it. * * * * What a surprise -- yet another self-righteous, sanctimonious, fag-dissing snit from the poison psyche of David Horowitz. Marching in lock-step with the likes of Jerry "God Will Not Be Mocked!" Falwell, Horowitz just can't get his mind off sex, sex, sex. It is truly ironic that his views mesh with the position of the so-called "gay left" that he denigrates. In that mindset, gay men were the victims of an unfortunate co-incidence: Just when gay men reached sexual liberation, along came a nasty killer virus. Again the focus is on sex, sex, sex. Neither side is willing to examine the non-sexual components of the "party animal" lifestyle of many urban gay males, which evolved in the 70s. Think drugs, drugs, drugs. In addition to prodigious amounts of alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine, designer drugs like Ecstasy, and even heroin became gay chic. Whereas in the mid-60s, the majority of gay men regarded those who smoked marijuana as carven dope fiends, ten years later, those who limited themselves to marijuana once again found themselves out of the mainstream, for exactly the opposite reason. Let's not forget the volatile nitrite inhalants, popularly known as "poppers." Marketed back then as "room odorizers," those little brown bottles were unbiquitous; in any gathering of gay males, one couldn't avoid the "dirty sweat socks" stench of popper fumes. (They are now undergoing a resurgence of popularity, marketed as "video head cleaners" and "leather cleaners." DaveB - 09:59am Jun 13, 2001 PST (#27 of 42) Propaganda at it's finest! All one has to do to believe that HIV doesn't exist or cause AIDS is to go to www.virusmyth.com and read their propaganda. No scientifc studies of any kind can be found there. But it is full of lots of rhetoric that will appeal to anyone who wants to be in denial about HIV and AIDS! Dave Rod Knoll - 10:44am Jun 13, 2001 PST (#28 of 42) Founder/AIDSRealityCheck.org DAVE B's career All one has to do is go to some of my links provided in my earlier post to see that Dave B. is the one who is in denial about the "fact" that "No scientifc studies of any kind can be found" on www.virusmyth.com. But thanks as always, Dave, for providing us with another opportunity to point out the facts. You have quite a history of these tactics on the virusmyth.com webboard. You are fooling no one of intelligence... Rod Knoll AIDSRealityCheck.org http://www.AIDSRealityCheck.org Frank Lusardi - 09:08pm Jul 20, 2001 PST (#37 of 42) How could they all be wrong? From David Rasnick (http://www.polder.net/aids/index/drasnick.htm): Russell Schoch, editor of California Monthly of UC Berkeley, lead me to a very important book: "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt, published by Rowman & Littlefield, Inc. The subtitle is: "A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives." I used to be asked "How could they all be wrong?" That question of course refers to the fact that virtually all scientists and doctors accept the obviously and hopelessly wrong contagious/HIV hypothesis of AIDS. Indeed, how could they do that? Why do they still do it? "Disciplined Minds" gives the best explanation of how it is that so many professionals can be so wrong and it does that without even mentioning AIDS once. As a group, professionals are perhaps the least independent thinkers in society. Their training and credentialing produces conformists who maintain and protect the status quo. Their very careers depend on it. I recommend this book to anybody who is asked or wants to know "how could they all be wrong?" angelica duarte - 10:37am Jul 21, 2001 PST (#39 of 42) Try walking in my shose I am glad that things are not always one sided. God did not make us to be robots. We have a mind and we have the right to choose. What dose not make sence to me in reguard to this HIV=AIDS=Death is this man, Robert Gallos credability and evidance. He has been the cause of many doctors tampering with peoples lives. The irony of this whole thing is that when a doctor convicts a person with beeing HIV+ he can not proof beond a resonable dought that he is indeed ifected but it sentenced to life on AZT without parole. And if your are a woman your childen can be taken from you because you don't inoxicate them with AZT. I think thin is unconstitutional. We live in a country were we have the right to choose but a lot of your freedoms are taken away from you once you are HIV+. Someone please help!!!!!!! Robert Johnston - 05:54pm Jul 21, 2001 PST (#41 of 42) HIV?? A popular fiction. The power of HIV over the collective psyche is so great that even seasoned AIDS dissidents are generally unable to construct arguments without referring to the mythical virus as though it were a fact. HIV is so woven into the semantic fabric of our discourse that it seems nearly impossible to speak of AIDS without it. ("AIDS" is another dubious though more tangible construct: a Frankenstein compared to the "HIV" poltergeist.) Perhaps dissidents need to work harder at a basic revision of the discourse, rather than breathing life into "HIV" for the sake of argument. The media mantra "...HIV, the virus that causes AIDS..." has certainly proven it can bypass the brain's normal cognitive functions. I think we need to undo the trance by finding language that objectifies "HIV" and "AIDS" as fiction and false construct respectively. "HIV" is a popular fiction that serves as both scapegoat and tool of social control. "HIV" research and tests are no more science than the methods the Inquisition used to identify witches and heretics. It is an Orwellian irony that, since 1984, "HIV" has become the most renowned virus on earth although no one has been able to capture a specimen and conclusively identify the terrible beast. The best "HIV" laboratories went looking for it in the best samples of "pure HIV" and found nothing but cellular debris [Virology 1997; 230(1)]. Even the "HIV" test kit manufacturers are at a loss for a gold standard: "At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence and absence of HIV-1 antibody in human blood. Therefore sensitivity was computed based on the clinical diagnosis of AIDS and specificity based on random donors" "Do not use this kit as the sole basis of diagnosing HIV-1 infection" "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" Most remarkably, Dr. Luc Montagnier, the "discoverer of HIV", revealed in an interview that he had never achieved purification of "HIV": On July 17th 1997, the French investigative journalist Djamel Tahi interviewed Professor Luc Montagnier in camera at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Montagnier was asked, "Why do the EM (electron microscope) photographs published by you [in 1983] come from the culture and not the purification?". His reply was, "There was so little production of virus it was impossible to see what might be in a concentrate of the virus from the gradient ["pure virus"]. There was not enough virus to do that. Of course one looked for it, one looked for it in the tissues at the start, likewise the biopsy. We saw some particles but they did not have the morphology typical of retroviruses. They were very different. Relatively different. So with the [unpurified] cultures it took many hours to find the first pictures. It was a Roman effort!…" Djamel Tahi: When one looks at the published electron microscope photographs, for you as a retrovirologist is it clear it's a retrovirus, a new retrovirus? Why question HIV and AIDS? The Yin & Yang of HIV The debate between the Perth group and Professor Robin Weiss on the existence of HIV  TORONTO
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