Health Education AIDS Liaison, Toronto
The Controversy
"If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific
documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at
least with a high probability. There is no such document."
- Dr. Kary Mullis, Biochemist, 1993 Nobel prize for chemistry
HIV has never been proven to cause AIDS.
The HIV/AIDS hypothesis states that HIV is a unique human retrovirus that
causes disease by destroying CD4 T-cells of the immune system faster than
the body can replenish them. This states two assumptions that have never
been proven. First, HIV has never been
been isolated according to the standards for retroviral isolation established
in 1973 at the Pasteur Institute. For this reason, the validity of the "HIV tests" is
highly questionable. The test detects antibodies to proteins that are claimed
to be specific to HIV, but the test cannot be checked against a "gold standard":
purified HIV. Secondly, as Dr. Kary Mullis points out, there
is no scientific evidence that proves how HIV causes AIDS. 15 years of HIV research, over
50 billion dollars spent and more than 100,000 scientific papers written and we are still without
this basic piece of evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis.
Serious controversy over what causes AIDS began over 12 years ago with with Dr. Peter Duesberg's publication in the 1987 March 1st edition of Cancer Research. From the beginning, public health authorities have clung desperately to the HIV=AIDS hypothesis for political reasons and to avoid embarrassment:
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES
Office of the Secretary
Washington D.C. 20201
April 28, 1987
MEDIA ALERT
An NCI grantee scientist, Dr. Peter Duesberg of California / Berkeley, has published a paper
in a scientific journal which concludes that the HTLV-III / HIV virus identified by Dr. Gallo
and Dr. Montagnier is not the cause of AIDS and that the disease is caused by "a still
unidentified agent" which may not even be a virus.
Inexplicably, the paper was published in the March 1 edition of Cancer Research,
and gives a non-specific credit to Dr. Robert Gallo and others, but nobody within the
Department or the news media seems to have been aware of it until it was disclosed Monday,
4 / 27, by a gay publication in New York City.
Dr. Duesberg has been an NCI grantee doing research in retroviruses and oncogenes for 17
years and is highly regarded. He is the recipient of an "outstanding researcher" award from
the Department. The article apparently went through the normal pre-publication process and
should have been flagged at NIH. Failing that, it should have caused a splash on publication
nearly two months ago.
Playwright, gay activist and Department critic Larry Kramer is currently bringing it to the
attention of the media, but it really hasn't taken off yet. I know for instance he has talked to
Tom Brokaw about it. There has been one call to CDC from Newsday and none to the press
office so far.
This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy ( if this isn't the virus, how do
we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything about transmission? How
could you all be so stupid and why should we ever believe you again? ) and we need to be
prepared to respond. I have already asked NIH public affairs to start digging in to this.
Chuck Kline
Cc:
The Secretary
The Under Secretary
Chief of Staff
Assistant Secretary of Health
Surgeon General
Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs
The White House
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The defensive and censorious attitude and complete lack of concern for free scientific inquiry expressed in this letter is now the standard response to any questioning of the idea that HIV=AIDS. It helps explain why so few people have even heard that there is a controversy about what causes AIDS.
Listed below are links to articles chosen because they serve as an excellent introduction
to the controversy over the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. For a more in depth overview, consider the Essential Readings list on the References page.
 You Can Test HIV-positive and
Not End Up
Suffering from Aids
The Star (South Africa) 1 March 2001
Current tests are distinctly dodgy, as is the whole HIV theory, writes
Dr Val Turner. "Where then do HIV antibodies come from? Are they really due to a retrovirus
or is there some other agency at work and common in African countries?"
 AIDS: Is Anyone Positive?
By Neville Hodgkinson
The European, June 22, 1998
An excellent introduction to the current state of the HIV/AIDS controversy with some historical background. Currently consided "best short summary" by HEAL Toronto. Hodgkinson was formerly a reporter for the Sunday Times of
London, where he wrote a series of stories challenging the HIV theory.
After a change of editors, he left the paper and eventually wrote the book
AIDS; the failure of contemporary science endorsing the
"HIV has never been isolated" view.
For more background Conspiracy of Silence, a 1994 article by Hodgkinson in The Sunday Times (London), reports on the network of highly-qualified "dissidents" who argue that the HIV hypothesis is at best unproven, at worst discredited.
Dissenting on AIDS
The Case Against the HIV-Causes-AIDS Hypothesis
By Kary B. Mullis, Phillip E. Johnson & Charles A. Thomas Jr.
The San Diego Union-Tribune 15 May 1994
This was the first article in the popular press to outline the argument against HIV causing AIDS. Much more damning evidence has cropped up since then.
What is AIDS?
By George Kent
Continuum Summer 1999
There are many serious debates underway relating to HIV/AIDS, including the question of whether HIV has really been isolated and whether it really causes AIDS. My purpose here, specifically and narrowly, is to review the issues surrounding the definition of AIDS itself. The premise of this essay is that there is little point in debating the causes of something if there is no clear and agreed specification of what that thing is.
Rethinking AIDS
By Huw Christie
from Big Science: Index on Censorship 3 1999
A whole industry, involving big business, political interests, personal ambition and large sums of money, has evolved around AIDS. Its pronouncements go largely unchallenged within the scientific establishment, and those who dare criticise or question orthodoxies are silenced.
A paradigm under pressure
By Gordon Stewart
from Big Science: Index on Censorship 3 1999
Censorship of AIDS research is as weird, and as dangerous, as the disease itself.
Chronology of AIDS Dissent
from the Harvard Teach-In on AIDS and Alternative Theories
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Fatal Distraction
By Celia Farber, Spin June 1992
In a deathly conspiracy of silence, the medical establishment is ignoring
powerful evidence that HIV doesn't spread sexually, and it may in fact be
harmless. Celia Farber reports.
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The Yin & Yang of HIV
By Valendar F. Turner and Andrew McIntyre
Nexus Magazine Vol 6, 4-6, 1999
SUMMARY:
The notion that HIV/AIDS is infectious and sexually transmitted is based on a
relationship between antibodies claimed specifically induced by a retrovirus
HIV and particular diseases in certain risk groups. However, the HIV theory
has been challenged for well over a decade in many scientific publications,
principally by Peter Duesberg from the USA and Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos
and her colleagues in Australia. Failure of HIV/AIDS to spread beyond the
original risk groups, and particularly to Western heterosexuals, especially
non-drug using prostitutes, signals that the HIV theory of AIDS is in need of
urgent reappraisal. This has serious implications for both the way science has
been conducted and public health policy and planning. The HIV theory has
cost billions of dollars and locked in enormous amount of energy in research
by thousands of scientists worldwide. So far, it has yet to save a single life.
There is an urgent need to establish a truly independent, and distinguished
international committee to review the current theories and those that
challenge them. There needs to be a co-operative but urgent reassessment of
AIDS.
Interview with Peter Duesberg
By Bob Guccione, Jr., Spin Sept. 1993
Professor Peter Duesberg of the US National
Academy of Sciences contends that HIV would be the only human retrovirus
to cause illness, and it doesn't. He sees no serious evidence that HIV is anything but a harmless passenger. Is he the heretic the
medical establishment claims, or a 20th - century Galileo? Bob Guccione, Jr.
tries to find out.
10 Scientific Reasons Why HIV Cannot Cause AIDS
A "Cole's Notes" version of the "Duesbergian" argument (for those who believe in "HIV").
Is HIV the Cause of AIDS?
Eleni Papadopulos Eleopulos interviewed by Christine Johnson Continuum Autumn 1997
 |
Eleopulos presents a quite different view of why HIV cannot cause AIDS. She argues, contrary to Duesberg, that HIV has not been properly isolated. Therefore, there is no way of being sure what the "HIV test" is testing for. Worse still - "HIV" may not really exist as a foreign infectious entity. Not entry level stuff; you might want to consult Paul Philpott's Isolation 101: The Basics for help following Christine and Eleni. |
Gallo Investigated
According to the draft report of a three-year investigation by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations there was a "continuing coverup" by successive U.S. administrations of scientific misconduct (fraud?) by Gallo and other American scientists in the "discovery" of the "AIDS virus" and the invention of the "AIDS test". The bottom line is Gallo was forced to admit claims that he had isolated HTLV 3b (HIV) the "probable cause of AIDS" were fraudulent. Luc Montagnier (Inst. Pasteur, France) confessed the much the same in a 1997 interview with Djamel Tahi.
If It's Not HIV, What Can Cause AIDS?
by Christine Maggiore
Contrary to popular belief, HIV is not necessary to explain acquired immune deficiency and the illnesses associated with AIDS. To understand why this is so, it is first necessary to understand what AIDS is.
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Q & A with
Christine
Questions and comments challenging those who challenge the HIV/AIDS hypothesis
are thoughtfully addressed by Christine Maggiore of Alive & Well, LA's leading purveyor
of "dangerous information". |
HIV, the Profitable Paradigm
By David 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."
The author and his family survived a tragic collision with the HIV paradigm.
The Limits of Science
By Anthony Liversidge
The Cultural Studies Times, Fall 1995
In science, as in life, truth is not always value-free. AIDS as a case study in how careerist
politics corrupts science and what can happen to those who run against the grain of popular consensus.
How could they all be wrong? Doctors and AIDS
Anthony Brink
A response sometimes heard to the expression of doubt about the integrity of
the HIV-AIDS paradigm as a medical model for understanding disease incidence
is, "How could all the doctors in the world be wrong?" There are many
possible answers to this question. One might point out that historically,
unanimity has never guaranteed the soundness of medical constructs, and
examples of this abound.
Conventional Wisdom: Words from the Mainstream
"The patients who have done the best are those who have lived long enough to realize that my previous advice was incorrect." --Brian Gazzard, MD
Paul Philpott: A Medical Student BLACKLISTED!
by Mark Gabrish Conlan
When Paul Philpott decided to switch his graduate-school major from engineering to medicine in the early 1990’s, he naïvely believed he was entering a field in which independent and creative thought, if not encouraged, would at least be tolerated and met with understanding and reason. He soon discovered that modern Western medicine relies on orthodoxies which are hammered into the heads of students with the intensity of a Fundamentalist preacher reciting the Ten Commandments — and a similar degree of tolerance for dissent. And nowhere is the authoritarian, dictatorial nature of Western medicine and bioscience more absolute than in the field of AIDS — as Philpott discovered in the incidents he recalls.
FAILED HYPOTHESES
How popular consensus and the medical establishment have often stubbornly clung to the wrong ideas.
Any medical dictionary will tell you that influenza is caused by a virus or that scurvy results from lack of vitamin C - both pieces of common knowledge. Less well known is the fact that the majority of doctors and scientists started out with the wrong ideas about these and many other diseases. It is often the case that what becomes common knowledge has first to be argued by a lone dissenting voice against huge resistance. Science is regularly reminded that Nature is oblivious to democracy. Derek Freeman, who challenged Margaret Mead on Coming of Age in Samoa, once said, " To seek to dispose of a major scientific issue by a show of hands is a striking demonstration of the way in which belief can come to dominate the thinking of scholars." The prevailing hypothesis, in the long run, is a matter of natural selection - not popular opinion.
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