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AIDS: BAD SCIENCE OR HOAX?

GOVERNMENT LIES ABOUT PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING -- WHY NOT ALSO AIDS?

© Copyright 1993 by Frederick Mann, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

INTRODUCTION
This report is dedicated to Mr. T.C. Fry, who first persuaded me to question the "HIV causes AIDS" hypothesis through his book The Great AIDS Hoax. Mr. Fry is a giant in spreading the principles and practices of superhealth and individual freedom. He is best known as a mentor of Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, the authors of the best-selling book Fit for Life.

Mr. Fry has been an inspiration to me, especially as a successful disseminator of the most useful information - which almost by definition deviates from "conventional wisdom" to the most extreme degree. A characteristic of the most useful information tends to be that it differs most from what is commonly believed. Of course, the most important characteristic of useful information is that its application produces superior results. Because the most useful information is so different from what is commonly believed, it also tends to be the most difficult information to communicate successfully. Mr. Fry has demonstrated how to do it. As a result of his success, there are thousands of people all over America, and quite a few in the rest of the world, who enjoy superior health and greater freedom.

Mr. T.C. Fry is a bright beacon in a sometimes dim world. For free details on his products and services write to American Health Sciences Institute, 1108 Regal Row, Manchaca, TX 78652-0609.

One purpose of this report is to shine a light on AIDS, to persuade you to think differently about AIDS. Another purpose is to persuade you that the drug AZT is deadly and to reduce the number of people being killed by AZT. A further purpose is to persuade you to reduce - or even eliminate - drugs ("legal" and "illegal") from your life, thereby improving your health, possibly extending your life. If you want to become superhealthy, I recommend Report #09: How to Achieve Superhealth.

If you are one of my "favorite friends" - people committed to the growth of personal freedom - I would like for you to see that the AIDS hoax is a tremendous blessing in disguise. It is a formidable weapon we can use to expose government and to reduce the power of the corrupt bureaucrats (political and medical) who trample on our freedoms, and take our lives with bogus "medicines" like AZT. You may be able to see that the AIDS hoax is just a microcosm of government as a whole.

Chapter 1
DR. DUESBERG AND AIDS

Who is Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D.?
Dr. Peter Duesberg is a very brave man, uncompromisingly committed to the truth as he sees it. He is also one of the most rational authors, whose writing I have had the privilege to read. He has systematically, thoroughly, and completely demolished the notion that the "Human Immunodeficiency Virus" (HIV) causes "AIDS." I venture to say that any critical thinker (as opposed to unthinking believer) who reads the paper AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors by Peter H. Duesberg (Associate Editor: D. Shugar) is likely to become somewhat skeptical of the unsupported dogma that HIV causes "AIDS."

Dr. Duesberg, born in Germany in 1936, earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. He is one of the foremost virologists in the world. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, elected in 1986 for his pioneering work with retroviruses, including the isolation of the first oncogene and his discovery that influenza viruses readily change by recombination because they contain multiple chromosomes. He was the first to map the genetic structure of retroviruses. He is a pioneer in cancer-gene research.

Dr. Duesberg is also the recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health, charging him with the mission to "venture into new territory" and "ask creative questions."

On the basis of his experience with retroviruses, Dr. Duesberg has challenged the virus-AIDS hypothesis in the pages of such journals as Cancer Research, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, and Research in Immunology. He has also been interviewed for numerous newspapers, magazines, and radio and television programs for his perspective on modern virus hunting.

In a letter published in Nature (Vol. 358, July 2, 1992) Dr. Duesberg wrote: "...I am advancing my hypothesis very much at my own expense. Since I challenged the virus-AIDS hypothesis, which is entirely unproductive in terms of public health benefits, I have been excommunicated by the retrovirus-AIDS community with noninvitations to meetings, noncitations in the literature and nonrenewals of my research grants, which is the highest price an experimental scientist can pay for his convictions."

Fortunately, Dr. Duesberg is not alone in questioning the prevailing AIDS-orthodoxy. A group of about hundred people has been formed to draw attention to the need to reappraise the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. They are signatories of the statement:

The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis came into existence as a result of our efforts to get the following four sentence letter published in a number of prominent scientific journals. All have refused to do so.

"It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken."

More than half the group have M.D. or Ph.D. degrees. They publish a monthly newsletter Rethinking AIDS. The publisher is A. James Trabulse, 2040 Polk St #321, San Francisco, CA 94109; fax: (415) 775-1984; annual subscription: $20.

The paper AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors by Peter H. Duesberg (Associate Editor: D. Shugar) can be ordered by sending $15 to Dr. Peter Duesberg, Univ. of California, Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology, 229 Stanley Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720.

1988 Spin Magazine Article
In 1988 Spin magazine published a series of articles on AIDS. One of the articles, including an interview with Dr. Duesberg, is reprinted here with permission from Spin magazine, Vol. 3, No. 8, published by Camouflage Publishing Inc., 6 W. 18th Street, New York, NY 10011.

A.I.D.
by Celia Farber

The HIV virus is thought to be the cause of AIDS, but there's strong evidence that it isn't. The frightening truth is that no one knows for sure, and few scientists are admitting it. Are precious time, money and lives being lost while we fight a harmless virus?

HIV is called "the AIDS virus," and medical experts have made it the keystone of their battle against AIDS, building all their efforts to fight the disease around it. But what if they're wrong? According to Professor Peter Duesberg of UC-Berkeley, years of time and millions in research dollars have been wasted on the belief that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the cause of AIDS. The real cause of AIDS, Duesberg says, is still unknown, and HIV is just a latent, and perfectly harmless, retrovirus that most but not all AIDS patients happen to carry.

"To say that HIV is the cause of AIDS is to cast aside everything we know about retroviruses," says Duesberg, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who has been studying retroviruses for twenty years. The HIV theory, he says, is inconsistent, paradoxical and absurd - little more than a by-product of a decade-old search for a retrovirus that could be called the cause of cancer.

HIV was hastily postulated as the cause of AIDS in 1984, when a National Institute of Health (NIH) scientist named Robert Gallo identified it as HTLV-III, the third strain in a family of viruses believed to have originated in Africa. Gallo, who was made director of the National Cancer Institute's search for the cause of AIDS in 1982, was propelled by several provocative links between HTLV-III and the disease. Most strikingly, something was stripping AIDS patients of their protective white blood cells known as T-cells, and HTLV-III was found to attack these cells. Gallo was unable to isolate the virus, however, because once it destroys a T-cell it mysteriously disappears. So he measured its presence by testing for HTLV-III's antibodies. Antibodies were detected in 80 to 90 percent of the AIDS patients tested. With no other plausible cause in sight, Gallo's virus, later called HIV, became "the AIDS virus" and Gallo was soon entangled in a lawsuit filed by the Pasteur Institute in Paris who also claimed to be the first to isolate it. While scientists raced to develop a test that would detect HIV, and people all over the world worried about whether they had been infected, important scientific rules and standards were completely ignored.

One such standard measure, used to determine whether a particular micro-organism is the cause of a disease, is a set of three laws known as Koch's postulates.

The first law says that the suspected micro-organism has to be present in all cases of the disease. HIV is not. Between ten and twenty percent of all AIDS patients show no traces of HIV whatsoever, not even its antibodies. Another law says that the micro-organism must be able to be taken from a host, animal or human, and further spread in pure culture. This cultivation can only be done in 50 percent of all AIDS patients. The third law says that inoculations of pure cultures of the micro-organism into animals must produce in them the same disease. HIV has been injected into thousands of laboratory animals, and not one has developed AIDS.

Peter Duesberg is so convinced that HIV alone cannot cause AIDS, that he told his old friend Gallo that he wouldn't mind being injected with it. His argument is compelling, and he has been waiting for almost a year for anyone in the scientific community to come forward and refute it. No one has. Many won't even speak with him. Spin did.

SPIN: You have defied the entire medical establishment by claiming that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. What convinces you?
DUESBERG: Koch's postulates were postulated at a time when we couldn't do what we can do now. Now we can detect things at lower concentrations and activities, and we are falling into a trap where we are saying that they are critically relevant. The incidence of the virus HIV is so low that Koch would never have seen it. This is what they [today's scientists] are overlooking. That the "AIDS virus" is at incredibly low concentrations and activity. That's why I am saying that HIV can't be the cause of a fatal disease, because it is so inactive. In fact, HIV is found in far more healthy humans than sick humans. This is very embarrassing to many people. They'd rather ignore it.

For a parasite or a virus to be pathogenic [disease-causing], it has to meet three criteria:

One. It must be biochemically active. In other words it must do something to get something done.

Two. It would have to affect or intoxicate more cells of a host, an animal or a human, than the host can spare or regenerate. Stated otherwise, you would only suffer from influenza virus if it kills or infects a significant portion of your lung cells, the polio virus if it gets into your nervous system, or if the hepatitis virus takes hold of a large part of your liver. You wouldn't notice an infection that involves 0.01 percent of your cells. That would be what you would call a latent infection. We all get them. Most of us have a latent tuberculosis infection, for example.

Three. The host must be genetically and immunologically permissive. It has to let it happen, so to speak. It has to accept the pathogen. It cannot be immune to it.

The HIV virus, the so-called AIDS virus, does not meet one of these criteria. For instance, the virus is never active - not only in those who have no symptoms, but also in those who develop full-blown AIDS and die from it. Even in people who are dying of AIDS, the virus is hardly detectable, measured only by locating its antibody. An antibody to a virus is like a vaccination; it has been traditionally, and still is, the ultimate weapon against a virus. It is an indication of a past disease, not of a future disease. If you have antibodies, you should be congratulated. You are safe. You don't have to worry about it any more. But somehow, they have convinced the public to believe that the disease is yet to come, which really makes no sense; it's absurd. Once the antibody is made, the show for the virus is over. The time for the virus to strike and cause disease is before immunity, not after immunity.

That's why vaccination works. Now, that's what we find in the patients. If you look for direct evidence of the virus, there is very little. It is only possible to isolate the virus in 50 percent of the patients.

SPIN: What is the difference between isolating the virus and detecting it?
DUESBERG: Detecting the antibody to the virus is what you can do in 80 to 90 percent of all cases. So 10 to 20 percent don't even have antibodies. With polio or hepatitis, you can isolate copious amounts of virus. Here, it is different. You have to use techniques which were developed to detect or activate so-called latent viruses, viruses that are not active. It involves taking millions of cells from a host, in the form of tissue culture, an expensive method, and then when they are removed from the immune system of the host, you add some uninfected cells. Then you wait a couple of weeks and hope that during that time, something kisses awake the sleeping beauty, the resting AIDS virus. If one of them in that time becomes active, the whole culture will become infected, because now there is no immune system. By then you have amplified or multiplied the tissue culture enough to detect it in a cell culture, and then you can say "Aha! I have isolated the virus." All you have really done is, out of billions of cells you have activated at least one virus. But in 50 percent of all AIDS patients, not even that much can be done. Even in millions of cells, you cannot activate one virus. That's how low the viral content is.

For direct biochemical evidence of the virus, we look for the so-called pro-virus, a DNA copy. Biotechnology has developed a technique of detecting one gene in a billion cellular genes. By this method you find HIV in no more than 15 percent of the AIDS patients. And whatever virus is there is mostly inactive.

So then, HIV is only found in one of hundreds of thousands of cells. And even if the virus does kill those cells, its impact is minimal. The virus takes one or two days to infect one T-cell out of tens of thousands. That's 0.1 to 0.01 percent of your T-cells. But you normally regenerate about five percent of your T-cells every two days. They die and you get new ones. So the effect of HIV killing the T-cells is like poking a needle in your finger and losing a minute amount of blood every day. It's just totally inconsistent with what we know about that virus that it could possibly explain the depletion of T-helper cells.

There's one more inconsistency - retroviruses need a division in order to replicate. Unlike all other viruses which kill cells when they replicate, retroviruses need the mitosis - the living cell. That makes it very difficult to explain how this virus could be responsible for the loss of T-cells. It is impossible already, on the basis of its inactivity, and the low numbers of cells it infects. Retroviruses like HIV need living cells in order to replicate.

SPIN: How is it possible for the entire scientific community, in the face of a serious epidemic, to turn their backs on scientific dogma and accept, without scrutiny, that this is the AIDS virus?
DUESBERG: It gives a lot of comfort to say here's the virus and this is the cause. If you say who's done it you'll feel much better, even if it's a monster. If you really want to talk about it, there is more behind it. There is a lot of vested interest behind it. Retrovirologists have generated a whole reserve army of people, thanks to the so-called virus cancer program which was generated in the Nixon era. Like polio, we thought, now we'll get rid of cancer.

There is a reservoir of people who have been looking for cancer viruses for the last couple of years and haven't found them. But they really have made names and careers for themselves, and have developed tremendous skills - and I'm one of them. We are the veterans of the virus cancer program, and we are looking for a cause - but we haven't really found one. So you show us a new windmill and we are marching. And that's what's happening with the AIDS virus. I have worked with retroviruses for twenty years and I came more and more to the realization that they are not quite as important as the retrovirologists would have liked them to be.

SPIN: How has your theory been received - or I should say not received - by the scientific community?
DUESBERG: Those who are really direct targets of this - who are working closely with it and making these major claims that HIV is what causes AIDS - have not responded at all directly. And indirectly, well, I know them. Like Bob Gallo, for instance, we are old friends. I spoke to him two weeks ago, and he said, "With friends like you, who needs enemies?" And he literally runs away from me. Usually when you challenge a major hypothesis, you get a rebuttal, but here it's total avoidance. They don't want to talk, they don't want to be seen by me. A few examples: I was at the National Institute of Health (NIH) two months ago, in the same building where Gallo works. We went to the movies, and I said, "Look Bob, I really don't believe these claims. I am really convinced now that it can't be so. You have to find another explanation." He's certainly not a shy person, but ever since, he just doesn't want to be seen arguing or talking about it with me, not even at a party. There was a party with mutual friends of ours who invited us because they wanted to see us debate it, and he refused to come. We were both invited to a memorial meeting for a colleague. Gallo said, "Is Peter Duesberg coming? Because if he comes, I don't want to come on the same day." It's very strange.

SPIN: If it is not the virus, do you have a theory about what causes AIDS?
DUESBERG: First of all, when we say, what could cause AIDS, we should say, what could cause the multiple symptoms that are now are called AIDS? I think we are doing a major disservice by using that catchy word AIDS. Such divergent symptoms are all disguised under this one term. A lot of things can go wrong when you lose your immune system. They say that the AIDS virus kills the immune system and then you get all these opportunistic diseases. But one of the symptoms of AIDS is dementia, one is Kaposi's sarcoma, another one is lymphoma, or leukemia, or pneumocystis carinii or diarrhea. Some of these are consistent with immune deficiencies. But dementia is not caused by an immune deficiency, and certainly not lymphoma or Kaposi's sarcoma. Tumors are not known to be consequences of an immune deficiency. So, the first thing I would say is that I don't think we are looking at a disease entity. We are not looking at polio, or pneumonia, or hepatitis, or surgical cancer - all defined diseases. We are looking at a bank of old symptoms. Not one of them is new. And I think it is highly unlikely that they are all caused by this virus, particularly in view of how inactive it is.

So, I think we have to go back from the bench to the patient and see what AIDS is in the first place. And once we have a better picture of what AIDS is, we can go back and figure out whether it is caused by a virus or even a germ. I for one doubt that it is even a germ, that is, a contagious agent - something that can be transmitted. Casual contact is not enough to cause this disease. To get AIDS, you need intimate contact, that is, contact that involves the exchange of human cells. Once you have exchanged human cells, you have exchanged as much as you can possibly exchange. And also, it has to be done many, many times before the disease is transmitted. This exchange excludes almost nothing, and it certainly doesn't prove the germ theory. A virus, by definition, is a '"cell-free infection," something that can be transmitted without transmitting cells - from sneezing or towels or whatever.

SPIN: Has there ever before been a virus that depended on the transfer of cells?
DUESBERG: No. All viruses can be transmitted cell-free. The virus can sit and wait somewhere, on a toilet seat or something, or whatever you touch. Some are more difficult than others to transmit, like herpes virus, which you can get by kissing, or Epstein-Barr virus. But that is still not enough for AIDS. Other viruses, like polio, measles, or flu, can be transmitted in a swimming pool - highly cell-free.

SPIN: Do you think AIDS could be caused by environmental factors?
DUESBERG: I think lifestyle has a lot to do with it. AIDS stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and most of us, being so trained to think in biological terms, immediately jump to the conclusion that it must be a virus or a bacterium. But "acquired" doesn't mean it is biologically transmitted. You can acquire lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, and a number of diseases, as well as immune deficiencies, from shooting up heroin, and even from anal intercourse. It's not great for your health to do that every day.

SPIN: But the puzzling question is, why so suddenly? Why are so many people getting sick and dying now?
DUESBERG: There are a few things that can make it look like all of a sudden you have a disease, but it may not be as new as it sounds. One thing is that homosexuality has become acceptable and highly visible. Certainly in places where they concentrate and gain a lot of confidence, like New York or LA, it becomes more obvious. Fifteen years ago, they could have died, and the cause of death would be pneumonia or Kaposi's sarcoma or whatever. Now it is called AIDS. Whatever they were doing, the frequency went up. The drugs had become chic and much more readily available, the bathhouses had become more accessible and the whole lifestyle more concentrated. Once you concentrate it, you see things that you wouldn't see had they been scattered around. The definition of AIDS keeps widening, and now they count almost all infections as AIDS. You see, there is no such thing as a germ that would prefer Rock Hudson over Cheryl Tiegs. I think for a virus, they certainly would look exactly the same. But there is an absolute preference for boys here. [Female] prostitutes have the same number of dates as promiscuous homosexuals, I assume, but they're not getting it [from sexual contact]. There must be something else, something related to that lifestyle.

SPIN: Are there other scientists who are working with theories similar to yours, or are you the first?
DUESBERG: Well, judging from the letters I received, which were mostly from other scientists, there are many who agree. I did not get one letter that said, "You are full of it," or "You're crazy." And I am waiting for it. I would welcome it. I would like to debate somebody who would be willing to challenge me. The editor of Bio-Technology [Dr. Harvey Bialy - now (1993) also editor of the newsletter Rethinking AIDS] called me and said, "I have read your work and heard about you, and I am beginning to believe now that you might be right. Write me an editorial. I really want to bring this out, and see whether or not anybody has a rebuttal." He had spoken to a number of people and never gotten an answer to my question. It's a funny situation. There are a lot of vested interests here. It's very difficult to move once you have such a huge machine going.

SPIN: And imagine the consequences of admitting that it was the wrong virus, or the wrong cause, after all these years. Everything would go right back to zero.
DUESBERG: Not only back to zero, we would also be at a considerable deficit of time and money. That is a very real contributing factor - money. Scientists researching AIDS are much less inclined to ask scrutinizing questions about the etiology [cause] of AIDS when they have invested huge sums of money in companies that make money on the hypothesis that HIV is the AIDS virus. William Haseltine and Max Essex, for example, who are two of the top five AIDS researchers in the country, have millions in stocks in a company they founded that has developed and will sell AIDS kits that test for HIV. How could they be objective? Gallo stands to make a lot of money from patent rights on the virus. His entire reputation depends on this virus. If HIV is not the cause of AIDS, there's nothing left for Gallo. If it's not a retrovirus, Gallo would become irrelevant.

The stakes are too high now. Ten years ago, when they were lower, theories could be exchanged and examined more rationally. This cannot be done now. Gallo's lab works so closely with the news media. Every progress report from their laboratories is discussed by Dan Rather and Barbara Walters, Newsweek, and Time magazine. Every little observation is in all newspapers. To say that now, maybe, the antibody wasn't worth committing suicide for or burning houses for, would be very embarrassing.

SPIN: Obviously, you must consider the mass testing for HIV antibodies to be an absolute farce.
DUESBERG: Oh yes, of course. The whole thing is a hoax. A group of reporters from England came here to do a documentary about dissenting AIDS theories, and they were told that Gallo would not discuss HIV.

SPIN: Did you really tell Gallo that you wouldn't mind being injected with HIV? Has anyone tried to take you up on that?
DUESBERG: Oh yes, we joke about it, and I say, "Give it to me. As long as it's not from Gallo's lab, I'll take it!"

Despite SPlN's repeated attempts to reach Gallo, he was unavailable to respond to comments by Duesberg and others concerning his research and personal ambitions. A research associate in his office, who asked not to be named, said that Duesberg's statements regarding Gallo's royalties are unwarranted, and that claims that Dr. Gallo was avoiding Duesberg are "ridiculous."

Researchers like William Haseltine and Max Essex are angered by Duesberg's insinuation that their objectivity might be swayed by their financial enterprise. "I deeply resent the implication that my business investments have affected my work," says Haseltine, although he confirms his and Essex's business arrangement with Cambridge Bio-Science, a company that sells HIV testing kits.

"Clearly HIV causes AIDS," Gallo has said." Anyone who says it doesn't, doesn't know the facts."

The question is, whose facts? And why are certain facts integrated and others ignored?

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that of all AIDS cases registered in New York and San Francisco after 1985, 93 percent were never confirmed to be HIV-positive. [emphasis added]

* End of Spin Article *


In the August 1993 issue of Liberty magazine, the book Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus by Robert Root-Bernstein was reviewed by Brian Doherty, under the heading "Lies, Damn Lies, and AIDS Research":
"Even journalists who write about AIDS heretics are not immune from reprisals. One writer for the Miami Herald was fired for criticizing AZT after a letter-writing attack from Martin Delaney, director of Project Inform, an AIDS activist group. Project Inform - which is funded by Burroughs-Wellcome, the developers of AZT, whose sales depend on the HIV hypothesis - makes a practice of attacking the reputations and jobs of journalists who publicize questions about the hypothesis. Delaney circulated a six-page diatribe containing personal attacks on the AIDS heretics, accusing Spin's Celia Farber of spreading misinformation and of being a threat to public health. He even argued that she should be prohibited from writing about the subject."

Liberty is a leading libertarian journal. Send $5 for a sample copy to Liberty, Dept. T/L, PO Box 1181, Port Townsend, WA 98368. For a one-year subscription (6 issues) send $19.50; for two years (12 issues) send $35.00. Or call 1-800-321-1542.

Chapter 2
HOW AND WHY THE HOAX PERSISTS

Report #03: How to Improve Your Information provides essential reading material on handling new information.

Sometimes there are people - like the manufacturers of AZT - who profit from bad information. Such people tend to go out of their way to prevent the communication of the useful information that exposes their bad information. They don't want people like Celia Farber to communicate information that would harm them.

During this report it will become clear that there is a huge "AIDS" industry that depends on bad information for its existence and its billions in income.

It is probably axiomatic that anyone who uses underhand or violent methods (including political or religious censorship) to prevent the communication of information, is dependent on the perpetuation of bad information.

The most useful information is usually the most difficult to communicate!

Overcoming the Semmelweis-Reflex.
The Semmelweis-reflex is the automatic rejection of the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment - see Report #03: How to Improve Your Information.

You may think that in the enlightened age of 1993 humans no longer suffer from the Semmelweis-reflex. This could be a mistake. During the past seven years Dr. Duesberg has repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that the HIV-AIDS hypothesis produces no health benefits. He has proposed a plausible alternative hypothesis - that seems obvious to his supporters. He has written articles and scientific papers. He has received some media attention. Yet the "establishment" automatically rejects what he says, without thought, inspection, or experiment.

The Bicameral Mind Hypothesis
I recommend reading the article on How To Increase Your Consciousness, because it provides important information for understanding the evolution of human consciousness, and will help us understand why so many AIDS researchers and physicians cling to the HIV-AIDS hypothesis despite the fact that it produces no health benefits...

Are our 40,000 AIDS researchers and millions of health professionals around the world slavishly obedient to the HIV-AIDS hypothesis because it has been decreed by "authority?" Or are they true believers who dare not think differently, who must prove the hypothesis "right" at all cost? Who has the courage to ask, "In nine years this hypothesis has produced no results, maybe we should question it?" What would a conscious individual do?

Suppose there are two competing hypotheses to explain the cause of the "AIDS-defined diseases." The first hypothesis says that the diseases are caused by the individual's behavior: drugs, promiscuity, diet, whatever. The second hypothesis says that the diseases are caused by something from outside the individual, a kind of "external authority" - for example, an invading virus. Given the bicameral model of the mind, which hypothesis would most people choose?

The "Free Compulsory State Education" Hoax
The details of this hoax are provided in the article: On Education.

It is because of the main result of state "education" - unthinking individuals - that the perpetrators of the AIDS hoax have been able to cash in to the tune of billions. Meanwhile the unthinking victims swallow hook, line, and sinker what they are fed by "authority" - and if they take AZT, they pay for their gullibility with their lives!

It is quite reasonable for the average person to accept the "HIV causes AIDS" story. With a few exceptions, we have consistently been fed the same story by the media, government officials, and health professionals. But what about scientists and physicians? They know the mechanism of vaccination. They know that the presence of antibodies invariably indicates immunity: the immune system has successfully neutralized the microbe and rendered it harmless. They know about Koch's postulates and that HIV doesn't satisfy any of the criteria for an infectious agent. They must realize that a hypothesis which in nine years has yielded no results might be suspect.

Why doesn't a significant portion of the 40,000 AIDS researchers and millions of health professionals around the world question the HIV-AIDS hypothesis? Could a major reason be that "compulsory education" has destroyed their ability for critical and independent thought?

Two Modes of Survival: Working and Stealing
As described in How You Are Being Economically Raped: What You Can Do About It, the first imperative of human behavior is: Survival or self-preservation. The second imperative is: Obtain the means for survival through the least effort. There are two basic ways to obtain the methods of survival: Working and Stealing. Working is called the economic method. Stealing is the political method. In short, people would rather steal than earn a living, if they have a way to do so easily.

Consider the possibility that by accident or design the HIV-AIDS hypothesis has become a "formula to steal." Activists and the media pressure governments to provide taxpayer money to solve the "AIDS problem." Billions are provided every year. More than 40,000 AIDS researchers receive the means for their survival this way. The manufacturer of AZT rakes in $350 million a year from AZT sales. Biotechnology companies do a roaring business in selling "AIDS test" kits. And latex companies sell more rubber gloves and condoms. The "AIDS problem" continues year after year. For the most part, nothing of value is being produced. The phalanx of vested interests will do everything to maintain the status quo. They are basically a mass of professional parasites.

Dr. Duesberg's funding is being cut off because he challenges the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. In his book Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, Robert Root-Bernstein writes that many of his colleagues privately agree with him that the hypothesis is wrong, but they refuse to say so in public because they fear losing their funding as well.

Chapter 3
THE AIDS HOAX

Elements of the AIDS Hoax

Duesberg's Demolition of the "HIV-AIDS" Hypothesis
In the paper AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors by Peter H. Duesberg, the commonly held hypothesis that HIV causes "AIDS" is, in my opinion, convincingly and completely demolished. The following points are excerpted from Dr. Duesberg's paper:

Germ Theory vs. Toxin Theory of Disease
Having personally nearly died from malaria as a 3-year old, the germ theory of disease is no stranger to me. Malaria is generally considered to be caused by any one of three parasites: "plasmodium malariae," "plasmodium vivax," and "plasmodium falciparum." These parasites are carried by mosquitos. In parts of Africa and Asia, if you are bitten by a mosquito you may get malaria. Bubonic plague is caused by the bacterium "pasteurella pestis," carried by rats. The germ or bug theory of disease has been very useful in understanding and curing many diseases.

The hypothesis that the HIV virus causes "AIDS" is a manifestation of the germ theory. Probably, many of the members of the "HIV-AIDS establishment" swallow this hypothesis, not because they're in it just for the money and don't care a hoot about the victims killed by AZT, but because they are stuck in the germ theory and can't think themselves out of it.

There is also a toxin or pathogen theory of disease. According to this theory, certain diseases are caused by the gradual build-up of poisons (toxins or pathogens) in the body, particularly within cells. The gradual build-up of toxins in the body may stem from long-term intake of alcohol, nicotine, recreational drugs, medical drugs, and junk-food. The build-up of toxins gradually pollutes the body (often weakening the immune system) to the extent that the body becomes susceptible to all kinds of infections, as well as afflictions like cancer and heart disease.

Another theory might be called the mind theory of disease, according to which diseases are caused by your mental and emotional states. The mind and toxin theories are covered in Report #09: How to Achieve Superhealth.

A possibility that warrants serious investigation is that a person who practices optimum thinking, diet, exercise, relaxation, resting, and sleeping, greatly reduces the risk of infection. It is quite conceivable to me that if I had practiced an optimum diet during the first three years of my life, malaria would have been little more than a minor inconvenience, rather than a life-threatening disease.

Duesberg's Drug-AIDS Hypothesis
The paper Aids Caused by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors by Peter H. Duesberg (Associate Editor: D. Shugar) states, "Here the hypothesis is investigated that all American and European AIDS diseases, above the normal background of hemophilia and transfusion-related diseases, are the result of the long-term consumption of recreational and anti-HIV drugs."

[I would venture that in addition to drugs, any toxic substances in the diet - particularly from processed food - including from pesticides and fertilizers - could contribute to immunodeficiency. This issue is covered in Report #09: How to Achieve Superhealth.]

Consequences of the Virus-AIDS Hypothesis
In terms of health benefits, the result of the virus-AIDS hypothesis is zero.

A huge "AIDS-industry" has been created. There are more than 40,000 AIDS researchers. They receive billions in taxpayer money every year. Biotechnology companies make fortunes from selling "AIDS-test kits." The manufacturer of AZT has a gross income of $350 million per year from AZT sales.

Rather than tell victims to change their behavior, the pretended "authorities" tell them to use clean needles and even hand out "free" needles to them. No moral judgment is being passed here about drug users or homosexuals - one way or the other. The point is that the pretended "authorities" continue spreading their AIDS lies, with the result that the real causes remain generally unknown, and prevention and successful treatment don't occur.

More than 50 countries restrict entry to people who have tested HIV-antibody-positive. In Cuba 600 antibody-positive people are quarantined. Antibody-positive people are being discriminated against in other ways.

A positive "AIDS test" has a devastating and debilitating psychological effect on most people. They see it as a "death sentence." It may lead them to effectively commit suicide by taking AZT.

And so, people continue to die - particularly those on AZT. No cure is in sight. The media are supplied with a stream of sensational stories. More and more money is demanded. As Kurt Vonnegut said, "And so it goes."

Interview with Dr. Duesberg
The following interview with Dr. Peter H. Duesberg by Karen Reedstrom appeared in the February 1992 issue of Full Context (A Publication of the Objectivist Club of Michigan), 2317 Starr Rd #D1, Royal Oak, MI 48073 (annual subscription: $20), and is reprinted with permission.

Q: Give us a brief history of the AID syndrome, and how the retrovirus HIV was blamed for causing AIDS.
Duesberg: The AID syndrome is a collection of twenty-five diseases. They're all previously known diseases, and their incidence was observed to be on an increase mostly in twenty to forty-five year old males in the 1980s, the majority of these men were homosexuals and a good part of them, like a third, were intravenous drug users, and then a small number of hemophiliacs and recipients of transfusions. It was debated until eighty-four as to whether this increase in these old diseases, that are now collectively referred to as AIDS diseases, was due to an infectious agent, that is to say was AIDS infectious and contagious, or was it due to some chemicals or some drugs. As you know, diseases can be caused in previously healthy people either by some infectious agents or else by chemicals, toxins, and drugs. You can distinguish between those two causes by asking who is getting those diseases in the population and what do these people have in common. And it was decided on those grounds, in eighty-four, that a virus was the cause (that it should be an infectious disease) and that this virus would be transmitted sexually or by blood transfusions or by sharing needles.

Q: Why did they think it was a virus?
Duesberg: That is a good question. The evidence was ambiguous. Because AIDS patients injected drugs, were sexually very active, or received transfusions, an infectious agent was suspected. But there were also people in the Centers for Disease Control, in the early eighties, who argued that aphrodisiac drugs like amyl nitrites or poppers were causing AIDS. They specifically mentioned that the homosexual community used aphrodisiac drugs in large amounts to facilitate anal intercourse and also as a psychoactive drug. Those two possibilities were kicked around, and then it was decided in eighty-four, mainly by, I would say, a large group of very influential scientists, namely the retrovirologists to which I belong, that AIDS was caused by a virus. It's a group of virus researchers who had studied these viruses as possible causes of cancer in the last twenty years, and they have learned a whole lot in terms of virology and how these viruses infect cells and how they replicate. But they have not been able to demonstrate that these viruses really cause any human cancer. So here's a whole generation of scientists who have done a lot in the field, but have not been able to place any of their viruses as a human pathogen, as a clinically relevant infection.

Q: So they had a virus looking for something to do?
Duesberg: Exactly, a lot of virologists, highly decorated, well-known people, who would have liked nothing better than to be clinically relevant at some time in their career. That's what all scientists dream about, medical and biological scientists, that they make a finding that is relevant to all of us. They have good intentions after all, and here they were not able to place that virus in a position that it would be relevant clinically to humans as a cancer agent. So they thought if that isn't the case why not try AIDS. Therefore the proposal that a virus was the cause of AIDS was immediately popular with a large group of scientists.

Q: What about the scientific method, how was that applied?
Duesberg: Not all that much; really the only argument in favor of the virus hypothesis was correlation, that is the correlation between the virus and AIDS. Many AIDS patients carried that virus. More accurately, it wasn't the virus that was correlated, but it was the antibody against that virus. That is a significant distinction.

Q: Why is it that they have this particular virus, that other people don't?
Duesberg: Other people do have that virus, but AIDS patients have it more often, than other people. That is essentially the only argument in favor of the virus-AIDS hypothesis.

Q: Why is that?
Duesberg: That's a great question. My answer would be that this is a marker for what you would call AIDS risk behavior or for clinical AIDS risks. Now let me explain to you what that means. Risk behavior is officially defined as people who are injecting intravenous drugs, or who have very many sexual contacts, or who are hemophiliacs, or are recipients of transfusions. Those are considered at risk for AIDS. Now if you are promiscuous, that is if you have sexual contacts with many people, you pick up all microbes that these people might have. These could be venereal diseases, but could as well be other diseases. If they have hepatitis you're likely to get hepatitis from them. You're likely to pick up cytomegalovirus or herpes virus, sometimes even tuberculosis. These are infections that are not primarily sexually transmitted, but they can be picked up, if you have many sexual contacts. Among them is HIV; it's another virus that they pick up. Microbes are picked up even more readily by those who inject unsterile street drugs with unsterile equipment, or receive transfusions, unless the blood is specifically screened. They inject unsterile drugs - street drugs - that they are buying from dealers somewhere, so they pick up all sorts of contaminants, including HIV. In addition they also share injection equipment, simply because they don't or can't pay for fresh equipment. And in addition intravenous drug users often use prostitution to pay for drugs.

Q: Does it have any symptoms?
Duesberg: HIV, by itself, causes no disease whatsoever in most infections. In a few cases there is evidence, but not very strong evidence, that the primary, initial infection may cause a flu-like symptom, a mononucleosis-like symptom.

Q: I remember the news media saying that the HIV virus came to America from a flight attendant, and that originally the virus came from monkeys in Africa. Is that true?
Duesberg: That is an anecdote. There is no evidence at all to support that hypothesis. It is a cute story and it is the basis for a book by Randy Schilts in San Francisco. It's called And the Band Played On. He popularized the story that it came from Africa, and a flight attendant picked it up there, and spread it in the homosexual community within a couple of years before the tests were available. But there are very strong arguments against this story, and these arguments come from epidemiology. Epidemiology is the science of how a virus is distributed in a population. Now if a virus or a microbe or anything is newly introduced into a population of 250 million Americans, it will spread exponentially. It will initially infect a few, and then it will infect many, many more. Exactly like the anecdote you cited from the book of Randy Schilts. It would behave exactly that way. The reality is that it doesn't behave that way at all! Ever since the virus can be tested, with Gallo's famous AIDS test which measures antibody against the virus, one million Americans were infected by HIV in 1985 and one million Americans are infected in 1991.

Q: Couldn't this be a result of safer sexual practices and changes in life style?
Duesberg: If you believe in Santa Claus we'll talk about that in a minute. The number of infected people in seven years has not changed at all. It's exactly the same number. One million people. That is an infallible indication, and I'm really emphasizing infallible, that this "epidemic" of HIV - I'm not referring to AIDS - is very old in this country. It has been here probably long before Gallo and everyone else has been here. If a virus or a microbe is newly introduced into a reservoir of two hundred and fifty million sexually active people it is going to spread very fast, until it saturates the susceptible pool, and then it slows down, and people will die or become resistant or whatever. It certainly is not going to stay at one million out of two hundred and fifty million, and not change not even one decimal point in seven years. That is a very strong argument that this is a very old virus infection in this country. Particularly since there is no vaccine or drug to stop the spread of HIV! The point against virus control by safe sex programs is that in 1985 nobody talked about safe sex. The safe sex program only came out two or three years ago, or four years maybe. In addition, safe sex doesn't seem to work very well, and there are fairly strong indications for that. The number of babies born in America has gone up, not down; and believe me, as far as I'm informed, safe sex is not going to generate any babies! Plus the number of conventional venereal diseases - gonorrhea, syphilis, for example - is on an increase, not on a decrease. That says that the majority of people do not practice safe sex, or not enough safe sex to make a difference. When the number of babies is going up, and conventional venereal diseases are going up, anything that is sexually transmissible should also be going up, and HIV does not go up. So something else must be the cause of AIDS.

Q: Before we get to that, let's discuss the discovery of the AIDS virus. First we heard a media presentation of a fellow named Gallo, and then there was a Frenchman that said he discovered it. Could you tell us a little of what happened there?
Duesberg: The virus, that is called now the AIDS virus, was initially discovered by Montagnier, a researcher of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. A year later Gallo claimed he had discovered it independently; that was advertised at a press conference in Washington, April '84. And then it became the official cause of AIDS.

Q: Didn't Montagnier originally send Gallo the virus?
Duesberg: Yes, he did.

Q: But Gallo didn't give him any credit?
Duesberg: Well, he gave him a lot of credit. He said he discovered the same virus independently; that is actually the ultimate compliment. He liked it so much that he copied it completely!

Q: Is Gallo under investigation right now?
Duesberg: Yes, he is, for over two years.

Q: What is he under investigation for?
Duesberg: They are investigating first the charge that the virus is not his isolate, but is the isolate from Montagnier, and second they want to determine whether this was an accident or fraud.

Q: Let's go through Koch's Postulates and see how AIDS stacks up. Now tell us a little bit about Koch's Postulates, what they are, and then we can go through them.
Duesberg: Well, Koch's Postulates are the classical rules or laws to prove that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease. They're in Webster's Dictionary. They're very basic, classical rules for the causes of disease.

Q: Have they ever been disproven?
Duesberg: No. No. Never. They can't be disproven, like gravity can't be disproven, or Pythagoras or Euclid has never been disproven.

Q: Let's go through the postulates. Number one says, that the germ must be found in the infected tissues in all cases of the disease. How does HIV follow that?
Duesberg: Well, actually not if you analyze it carefully. In many AIDS cases it is there. But there are all AIDS diseases in all risk groups - that is to say Kaposi's sarcorna in homosexuals, and tuberculosis in drug addicts, and other infections in hemophiliacs - in the absence of HIV. They have come up with a rather clever way to step around this problem for the virus-hypothesis. They have defined AIDS as one of twenty-five known diseases provided they occur in the presence of HIV. We call tuberculosis AIDS only if HIV is found, if it's not found it's called by its old name - tuberculosis. Or if you find Kaposi's sarcoma in a homosexual, in the absence of HIV it's called Kaposi's sarcoma; in the presence of HIV it's called AIDS. You diagnose dementia in a junkie, in the absence of HIV he has just dementia. He's nuts, in other words. If he has also HIV, they call it AIDS. Therefore, by definition, the correlation is actually 100 percent. The disease, the syndrome, is defined by the hypothetical cause of it. But that kind of definition ignores strong evidence against the HIV, namely we have the same diseases in the same risk groups without HIV. In this regard it does violate the first postulate of Koch. We have not a natural coincidence between HIV and AIDS because you would call the same disease a different name if HIV is absent.

Q: As far as a person has lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma are they infected by HIV too?
Duesberg: Not even in people who are HIV-positive do you ever find any HIV in Kaposi's sarcoma, nothing. There are people with Kaposi's sarcoma with HIV and without HIV, but even in those with HIV there is no HIV in the Kaposi's sarcoma.

Q: What about postulate number two, the germ must be isolated from other germs and from the host body. How does HIV compare to that rule?
Duesberg: There is again a similar qualification. If you can't isolate it, can't find antibodies, then they will say so; therefore it isn't AIDS. It's the same old disease. Another point here is relevant. It is so difficult - sometimes it is impossible - to isolate HIV, even from people who are antibody positive, because so little virus is there. It barely meets Koch's Second Postulate by the letter, but not in the spirit. The spirit of Koch's Second Postulate meant that there was plenty of virus or microbes around causing a disease, and therefore it wouldn't be a problem to isolate it.

Q: When you find that a person has an antibody to a disease doesn't that mean the body has already killed off that disease?
Duesberg: Absolutely. It has killed the microbe off, or it has restricted it to what is called latency or inactivity. That is what vaccination is all about.

Q: Don't the doctors know this? Don't they understand this?
Duesberg: They do understand it, and they make additional assumptions to accommodate that, if you point it out. Usually they don't talk about it. If you point out, what you just mentioned, that there are antibodies and that there's no virus around, they say well this is a special virus and these are special antibodies, antibodies that do not neutralize the virus.

Q: Are there other viruses that act like that?
Duesberg: I've never seen one. And I think they haven't mentioned one either. It's simply a new virus that we have to study that's full of surprises.

Q: Postulate number three is that the germ must cause the sickness when injected into a healthy host. They've done experiments with chimpanzees; how does HIV stack up then?
Duesberg: They have all remained healthy consistently. There's not even one example where the disease has occurred.

Q: How about postulate number four, the same germ must once again be isolated from the newly diseased host.
Duesberg: Obviously this is moot if the previous one cannot be met. I mean if you would get the disease on injection then that would be a question, but if you don't then there's no need to re-isolate the virus.

Q: So it doesn't really stack up with these classical postulates.
Duesberg: Not at all. I mean barely with the first and barely with the second. The first one because the definition is made to accommodate it within the first postulate; and the second one because people have tried over and over to extract it from one cell or another even if there's hardly any virus present. So you could say formally the first and the second, but HIV fails entirely on the third and the fourth. And one could also add that even the second one is only met by artificial and very expensive laboratory procedures.

Q: Tell us a little about HIV. What kind of virus is it, and what does it do to a cell?
Duesberg: HIV is called a retrovirus, as we mentioned earlier. That is a type of virus that actually does relatively little to a cell in general. In general it does not kill a cell, it doesn't alter a cell's behavior very much. It's a rather benign parasite. It is in fact the most benign parasite that we have ever learned about.

Q: What exactly is a definition of a retrovirus?
Duesberg: A retrovirus is just another virus that happens to have a particular type of replication mechanism. It has a genome that is made out of RNA but it converts that RNA genome into DNA. And DNA is the same material as the cellular chromosome. During the course of replication it changes its RNA to DNA. That's why it's called a retrovirus, because this process is normally going only in the direction from DNA to RNA. DNA is converted into RNA all the time in the normal cell in a human being or an animal or a plant or a bacterium, but in this virus it also goes the other way; it goes from RNA to DNA. Therefore it's called a retrovirus. Then this retroviral DNA becomes part of the cellular DNA.

Q: There's many different kinds of retroviruses. HIV affects what kind of cell?
Duesberg: HIV affects many types of cells, but like most retroviruses you find it mostly or primarily in blood cells. But it can affect other cells as well. It can affect epithelial cells, and it can affect skin cells.

Q: Say you have these host T-cells, and they are harboring a dormant HIV. And the T-cells can be isolated from the body and artificially stimulated in the laboratory with compounds to reactivate the latent virus in the cell. How long can the virus be dormant in T-cells, and what causes it to reactivate in the laboratory or in the body?
Duesberg: It can be dormant forever, as long as the T-cell is there it can be dormant in that T-cell.

Q: Why is it dormant? What does that serve for the virus?
Duesberg: It is one way for a virus to survive. Either a virus is very active, killing a lot of cells and producing a lot of offspring, and then the immune system will catch it because it is very active and visible; or it keeps an extremely low profile; the immune system does not see it then. It hangs in there as long as the host is alive, and stays on and gets slowly transmitted from a mother to a baby.

Q: So it reactivates then in another organism?
Duesberg: Yes, that's one strategy for a microbe to survive, to keep a very low profile without making much fuss, or another would be to be very active.

Q: If it can be dormant in the body, is it possible for it to show up years later? They say that you can carry HIV ten years, then it shows up and you're sick.
Duesberg: It is possible, yes; but in reality that is hardly ever happening. In most AIDS patients the virus does not "show up," but it continues to remain dormant. It doesn't do anything that it hasn't done before, that is, in other words, nothing. It doesn't do anything during AIDS, and it doesn't do anything before AIDS.

Q: There are microbes, like chicken pox, that initially infect the host, and some of the virus reaches the spinal cord and resides there for years. When the host is under stress, it reappears as shingles. Can HIV or some other agent do the same?
Duesberg: That is a mechanism of how a virus could spend a long time asymptomatic and then become symptomatic and cause a disease. That's a good theory of how AIDS could happen 10 years after infection by HIV, but it doesn't happen that way. That's the problem with HIV. HIV does not become active, at least not become consistently active, in AIDS patients. There are a few cases of moderate activity that have been described, but in the majority of AIDS patients, HIV is just as dormant as it is in people who have no disease at all. So it's not like the chicken pox or the herpes virus. These viruses may become active later on; sometimes they become what is called reactivated. That happens, but it doesn't happen with HIV.

Q: AIDS has also been compared to feline leukemia. Is this accurate; how are they different or similar?
Duesberg: Feline leukemia isn't AIDS, and there are very serious questions whether feline leukemia has anything to do with the "feline leukemia virus." I mean as a cause.

Q: You said, in the Policy Review article, that retroviruses do not kill cells and are poor candidates to blame serious diseases on.
Duesberg: Yes, exactly right. They are not killing cells. They essentially never kill cells. In fact the opposite is often true, they make cells grow further than normal. The reason why they are suspected to cause diseases like feline leukemia is their replication strategy which , as we already discussed briefly, is to convert their RNA into DNA, and then to get that DNA integrated into the chromosome of the host cell, then it's a part of the cell. So that strategy only pays off if the cell survives; if the cell dies in the process of integration the virus would die with it. That strategy wouldn't pay off.

Q: Is it true that the microbes known as mycoplasmas can cause immune suppression, weight lost, diarrhea, and chronic debilitation in animals; in other words, AIDS-like symptoms; and that mycoplasmal infection has been found in diseased brains, livers, and spleens of AIDS patients, as well as in HIV-negative patients displaying similar symptoms? If so, could a mycoplasmal infection be the cause of AIDS, such as Montagnier has been postulating?
Duesberg: I'm not familiar enough with mycoplasma pathogenesis to truly give you a good answer to that question. As far as I know, from the little bit that I've read, mycoplasma is very common in humans, very common; and hardly ever causes any diseases in most people. It's rather ubiquitous and it's mostly non-pathogenic. AIDS is restricted to very few people, to very specific groups of people; that wouldn't be compatible at all with a mycoplasma that is ubiquitous in the population. It has to be something that is restricted to the people who get AIDS, and that's not the case with that virus.

Q: So if HIV isn't causing AIDS, what is? What's your theory?
Duesberg: My theory is that AIDS is not infectious at all. AIDS is caused in this country primarily by recreational drugs and by AZT. There will always be a normal background of the 25 AIDS diseases in the population. But what's above that background, the ninety percent of that which is now called AIDS is solely the consequence of the long term consumption of recreational drugs, such as cocaine and heroine and poppers and quaaludes and angel dust and speed and ice and many of these psychoactive drugs, whatever they're called - and of AZT which is given to people who have HIV as an anti-HIV drug.

Q: Describe a little bit, so as to put into context for our readers, the lifestyle of these homosexuals, and a little of the history of how this syndrome has started.
Duesberg: AIDS in homosexuals and also in drug users became known first with the sexual liberation and as the drug epidemic escalated after the Vietnam War. Those two had quite a bit to do with each other because the sexual liberation, particularly for gays, was aided or accompanied by the consumption of a lot of psychoactive drugs. That made it psychologically easier to practice what used to be an unacceptable form of sex, and made it also technically easier. So drugs were used a lot by SOME homosexuals. One should always qualify that. It's not every homosexual who was practicing so-called risk behavior, that is to say had many hundreds of sexual contacts per year using lots of chemicals. That was and is restricted to a small group, but those are the groups that are at risk, and those are the groups that developed AIDS.

Q: Can you tell us a little about the amylnitrites, what they do and cause?
Duesberg: The amylnitrites and quite a few other drugs are preferred by homosexuals, rather than heterosexuals, because they actually facilitate anal intercourse.

Q: How do they that?
Duesberg: The nitrites, specifically, relax the smooth muscle, and they also give a psychological rush or a high, so you're psychologically uninhibited and also physiologically, because essentially the anus contracts when it is entered. If you take these drugs it's much easier. These drugs - nitrites - were traditionally prescribed for spasmic conditions like angina or heart attack. Now they are used also as aphrodisiacs by homosexuals. They are used even to this date much more by homosexuals than by heterosexuals. Heterosexuals don't use them because they don't need them for this purpose.

Q: So they're taking these poppers. Is this what is causing these weird cancers?
Duesberg: That has been published. There is a very good correlation between the use of poppers and the incidence of Kaposi's sarcorna and also pneumonia in homosexuals. The more they have been used the more Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumonia has been observed. As they have used less of it (because it has been largely advertised that they may be bad for your health and may be responsible for some of these diseases) the incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma has declined among AIDS patients.

Q: Is that because of less use of amylnitrites?
Duesberg: Yes, at least there is a very strong correlation. That is a good indication that this was the cause. In fact, the sale of nitrites has been banned by the Senate two to three years ago, as result of these studies which have shown these correlations between the use of nitrites and Kaposi's sarcorna and pneumonia in homosexuals.

Q: One of the major things people talk about is the suppression of the immune system that lets people get all these weird diseases. What is it about the drug addict or some homosexuals that suppresses the immune system?
Duesberg: That is hardly studied by anybody, unfortunately. I could make some suggestions, because we see drugs only as a criminal problem in this country, although it is the most serious health problem developing here now. We hardly ever see it as a medical problem. We never hear that drugs are bad for our health. We're only supposed not to use them because this is somehow too much fun, I assume. We're told to use "clean needles" by the AIDS doctors, but we're never told not to use drugs. It's a very strange message that the AIDS caretakers are sending out. When you say use "clean needles" that implies that it's okay to take drugs; make sure your injection equipment is clean. The literature for a long time has pointed out that the long-term consumption of drugs, not a weekend or two, but five or ten years of drug consumption, causes exactly the same diseases that are called AIDS now. The immune deficiency, the dementia, the wasting syndrome, the night sweat, the fevers, the mouth infections, all of these diseases were observed in long term drug users. How could that be? I could speculate. These could be the direct effects of the drugs that need to be studied; but there are certainly a lot of indirect effects which could be easily understood. If you buy cocaine or heroin, for an addict it costs you a hundred dollars a day on the average. Unless you are immensely rich that will hurt your budget seriously. Soon you will not be able to spend your money on a balanced diet, on good food, you won't go to the stores any more, you won't go to the restaurants any more. You only have a little money left for junk food. Also, when you are high on drugs, they suppress many of your normal physiological reactions. Some people get addicted using them as diet pills. You don't want to sleep; you don't want to eat. You have a totally different lifestyle under drugs. Malnutrition and lack of sleep and tension, all of which are associated with drug consumption, are traditionally the classical reasons for immune deficiency. Immunity depends very much on giving the immune system time to regenerate and giving it food to regenerate. It needs for that proteins and vitamins, not just junk food and some coffee and some sugar.

Q: So it wears you body down gradually?
Duesberg: That is correct, yes.

Q: What about the people in Africa, they're saying that it's not just homosexuals, that men and women are dying like flies. That's what we hear.
Duesberg: Epidemiologically and clinically AIDS is a totally different story in Africa. The African AIDS diseases are shared equally by men and women, in the same numbers. The African AIDS diseases are ninety percent different from the AIDS diseases here. In Africa ninety percent of AIDS is so-called slim disease (an old African disease), fever, diarrhea, and tuberculosis. Those are the AIDS diseases in Africa. And they have been African diseases all along. They are directly the result of protein malnutrition, parasitic infections, and poor sanitary conditions. Those are the problems in Africa, and those are the people who get AIDS. That's why men and women get it there and children and adults, and it has nothing to do with recreational drugs or AZT there. It's an old African problem. The only thing that is different in Africa from here is that HIV is rather widespread in Africa, and it's very rare in this country.

Q: Why is that?
Duesberg: Because the virus happens to be more common there than here. Retroviruses seem to be that way. We know that from studying retroviruses in animals. Some strains of animal have lots and lots of retroviruses, and in other strains you have very few. Ten to twenty percent of the central African nations carry the HIV virus; but in this country it is less than one percent.

Q: How is it transmitted there?
Duesberg: Exactly like here from mother to children.

Q: So if a person dies of a slim disease and they are not HIV-positive, they're said to have died of slim disease; and if they die HIV positive they're said to have died of AIDS?
Duesberg: Yes.

Q: So is this a case of having a theory and making the facts fit the theory?
Duesberg: That is exactly what is happening.

Q: Doesn't sound too scientific to me.
Duesberg: Yes, it's a lot of wishful thinking in this case more than ever. We are paying for it dearly; we are paying the high price for AIDS research, and we get no benefits whatsoever, in terms of public health. Nobody is going to be saved; the spread of AIDS is not going to be predicted, it's totally wrongly predicted; we don't have a vaccine to stop it, we don't know how to deal with it. We don't practice science, but wishful thinking.

Q: There's an argument about AIDS in Africa as a virus-caused disease, that there are two pockets of traditional male-to-male sex practitioners. One among Swahili Arabs and the other among some West Africans who have been influenced by an immigrant culture. While there is no AIDS among the rural people, AIDS has developed among a third group of homosexuals, the young men who roam international hotels in Africa's big cities. These people are not malnourished. Could some agent have been transmitted to them?
Duesberg: This is always a good question, but I would like to know what that agent would be which is only transmitted to young homosexual men in Africa, but not to anybody else in Africa.

Q: Could it be that they're taking drugs in the cities?
Duesberg: I would say that is quite possible, if they are gay prostitutes or sex workers or whatever it's called. In international hotels in Africa I'm sure they use drugs just as much as in the international hotels in Los Angeles or New York.

Q: What about the case of Ryan White and the woman in Florida who contracted AIDS from her dentist? What did they die from if it wasn't long-term drug taking.
Duesberg: Ryan White died of hemophilia and AZT. The man died from unstoppable internal bleeding; he was a severe hemophiliac, and the hemophilia couldn't be stopped any more. Unfortunately, he was also on the AZT. I think for a half a year.

Q: So that was the coup de gras?
Duesberg: That is certainly helping anybody to die, the AZT is inevitably toxic. It's an inhibitor of DNA synthesis, which is the central molecule of life. It will kill all growing cells that take up AZT. So he had hemophilia and AZT. The poor man had no chance of surviving. Kimberly Bergalis had HIV, and like probably many other women in the world, also had a yeast infection. Now remember how AIDS is defined, a known disease found in the presence of HIV. This combination was found in Kimberly Bergalis. Now her diagnosis was not a yeast infection, but AIDS. The most serious consequence for her was that now she was treated with AZT. And she died about a year later.

Q: Tell us a little bit about AZT. This is a drug that they say prolongs the life of AIDS patients. What is AZT and how does it work?
Duesberg: AZT is an analog of one of the four building blocks of DNA. DNA is a long molecule. It's like a train built of many, many cars, that particular car AZT looks like another car, but it has no second link on it. It has a link on the front, but not in the back. When AZT comes into a growing DNA molecule instead of a regular car the DNA molecule is terminated, and the cell dies. If the DNA cannot be completed, the cell will die. Everything that incorporates it will die. Microbes will die; humans will die, anything will die. So you continue to kill off blood cells and immune cells, cells that are already in short supply for AIDS patients - the cells in the bone marrow and in the intestines. These will constantly be killed off. This is why AZT-treated people suffer from anemia and nausea and eventually die. Nobody can tolerate that for very long.

Q: How is it supposed to help you?
Duesberg: The theory is that this will also kill the virus. It is like hunting bunnies with neutron bombs. When you throw a neutron bomb into a forest, all bunnies are going to be dead, but the forest won't look the same as you did before you threw that neutron bomb on it. That's what you're doing, killing many more human cells than HIV. And there is no proof at all that the virus is even causing AIDS.

Q: So it's the old joke, unfortunately, of in order to kill the virus you have to kill the patient first.
Duesberg: That is more true in this case than for anything else I've ever heard; because, you see, there is no proof that the virus is causing AIDS. Even in people who are infected by the virus and are dying from AIDS only one in five hundred cells is ever infected by that virus, one in five hundred. AZT, which is the drug that is getting into the cell and stops the DNA synthesis, can't tell apart an infected from an uninfected cell. It's not that smart; it's just a little chemical. So in order to kill just one virus-infected cell five hundred good cells have to be killed first. The toxicity index of that drug even in killing HIV-infected cells is incredibly high. It's like you have a terrorist in Michigan, and he is in a block with five hundred people. You put poison in the drinking water. You will kill the terrorist, but five hundred innocent people will die with him.

Q: So you're saying Magic Johnson, who is now taking AZT, is going to die for nothing?
Duesberg: He would die from AZT if he continued to take it. I understand from a friend here who knows him fairly well that he got numerous letters in response to Tony Brown's program - see Duesberg, talk to Duesberg, stop taking AZT it's going to kill you. And he has now stopped taking AZT for that reason.

Q: Has he talked to you?
Duesberg: He didn't talk to me, but he talked to other people. I think he's very strictly guarded; he's very inaccessible, guarded by his doctors and agents. Apparently he's truly concerned about taking AZT, and he's not taking it any more. That's what I understand.

Q: He's been a spokesman for AIDS safe sexual practices. Wouldn't he be a good person to get a hold of and tell to get this information out?
Duesberg: He would be a very good person, because he is so prominent now, but I have done what I could for these people who have approached me. I gave them all the material I had available, and they have tried, I assume. I think he is very well guarded. But he has stopped taking AZT. I can't vouch for it, because I have no first-hand information.

Q: Your theory is not something we've heard on the television or anything. Are there other scientists that are agreeing with you on this?
Duesberg: There are scientists agreeing with me. There is a group of over forty scientists, essentially led by Charlie Thomas, a former Harvard professor now in San Diego, who has formed this group, and their purpose is to get out a petition to have an open investigation of this hypothesis that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Q: In one of the articles you sent me, you said that there were no control studies on the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS. Are you or anyone else planning one?
Duesberg: One of the stated goals of this group is that they would like to do a control study initially with hemophiliacs, and find out whether hemophiliacs with and without HIV have a different incidence of AIDS.

Q: You also sent another article where you say that, "The science of virology is dead."
Duesberg: Well, see infectious diseases make up less than one percent of the death in the western world now. They're no longer very important causes of disease. And viruses, particularly, are not claiming too many victims. They're not serious health threats any more. The last frontier in the virus field was the polio epidemic in the fifties, and we terminated that very well with a vaccine. The microbes and the bacteria are pretty well controlled by antibiotics. That is what I meant when I said, that viruses are dead. They're no longer a serious challenge to the public health, of this country. The real problems now are drug consumption and AIDS and cancer and aging; those are the problems we have to get a handle on.

Q: You made an interesting statement in that same article, that according to the usual scientific method a hypothesis remains a candidate until it is disproven, and how unfortunately that can have serious consequences, in particular, if it is a candidate for a way to confront disease. This seems to have been what's happened with AIDS.
Duesberg: Exactly, they call this the candidate and treat with AZT; and if it's not the candidate they're killing with AZT. Even if it is the candidate they're killing with AZT, but at least they have a more legitimate reason for killing.

Q: What's the percentage of people who are on AZT now, who will be killed off by AZT?
Duesberg: It must be a fairly high number. You could calculate from the sales figures. About eighty thousand Americans take AZT, every single day, only because they are antibody-positive.

Q: Wow. Are there people who are HIV-positive that have lived a long time?
Duesberg: Oh, yeah. There are numerous people. There are a million Americans HIV positive ever since we had the test. That's now for eight years. So most of them are still alive; they have lived at least eight years. They are the so-called long-term survivors. You can only say for sure that it's for eight or ten years, but it may be for as many years as these people would have lived anyway. All of those are people who have not taken any drugs. In Africa, as I said, the virus is endemic for a long time in millions of healthy people. As I pointed out earlier, if a virus, as HIV, is as constant and fixed to a constant population as this one, it has to have been in the population for a very, very long time. People probably can live a total full life with that virus like with any other latent retrovirus.

Q: You say that you are willing to be injected with HIV if you can get nation-wide coverage, but the scientists say it can take ten years or more to develop AIDS. Would this be a useful demonstration?
Duesberg: Its use would be quite limited. You're absolutely right; I don't know what they would say ten years from now.

Q: You could live to be ninety, and be hit by a train; and they'd say: Duesberg hit by train; died of AIDS!
Duesberg: Exactly right! They take anything that happens to anybody with antibodies to HIV: look that's AIDS!

Q: I have two questions that a doctor wanted to ask you. The first is: there is evidence now that B-cells and T-cells have built-in programmed death genes, that they are killed off on a genetic basis normally in the body when their functions have been fulfilled. Two kinds of lymphomas or blood cancers, B-cell follicular lymphoma and mouse T-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia, are examples of blood cancers where the death genes are turned off because of translocatians. How do you feel about the idea of the death of T-cells in AIDS being somehow abnormal activity of a death gene? In other words, does the abnormal lifestyle that you postulate causing AIDS result in genetic damage that can abnormally turn on a death gene and therefore kill off T-cells prematurely leading to AIDS?
Duesberg: Well, you wouldn't have to go to a death gene, and I don't think there is a good chance that we have a death gene to begin with. This is rather speculative science, that such a gene exists. But I mean you can kill a cell with AZT or amylnitrites. You don't need a death gene for that. You can kill a cell by not feeding it or by giving it poppers. You don't need a death gene for that. There is no evidence of such a gene, or specific activation of such a gene. Just like in junkies, a toxin can kill a cell directly; you don't need to go through a particular gene.

Q: His other question is that there was a family in southern California, the husband was a marine, the wife was oriental. She needed an emergency caesarian section, and because of blood loss she was given a transfusion. Eventually she died of AIDS; both her children, that were born after the transfusion, died of AIDS; and the husband died of AIDS he contracted from her. The husband sued the government, and settled for three million just before he died. What are your thoughts about that family's situation, and the transmission involved, and how does it fit in with your theory of AIDS?
Duesberg: Well, I can't, of course, tell you what they died from. We would have to see what meant AIDS in these cases. They had HIV; so HIV was probably transmitted by these transfusions. So whatever they died from would have been called AIDS. Did they all die with the same diseases? Did they all die from dementia? Or did one of them die from diarrhea and the other one die from dementia and another from Kaposi's sarcoma and lymphoma? If they all, at least, had the same symptoms it would be consistent with a common cause. But if one of them had dementia and the other had diarrhea, it would be just another artifact of the HIV definition of AIDS. That's what we have to look at. These are after all only anecdotal cases. Cases that fit the theory but don't prove it! We have a large country to pick anecdotal cases from. You have to see that against a background of 250 million Americans. You will always find a story where, in the same family, a husband, a wife, and a baby all die in the same year with or without HIV. But then if you want to know if that is due to a common infectious agent, we would have to know first whether they had a common disease.

Q: Your theory sounds really logical to me, to just a sensible person, to a person who doesn't know much about virology. Why aren't we hearing about this? Why don't we hear about this on the media? This is a big story.
Duesberg: I think it is a very big story, and it could save instantly, a huge number of lives. It could instantly discontinue a lot of suffering, and it could save the taxpayer a lot of money, and we don't hear about it. I think you would be better qualified to answer that question than I am. I can only point out to you what I suspect; I can point to the scientific and commercial investments of a large group of scientists, the retrovirologists, who want to score in terms of a clinical disease, and are not going to give that up unless they really have to. Unless they're really defeated.

Q: So there are big bucks involved?
Duesberg: There are strong commercial interests on the part of many of these biotechnology companies who are doing AIDS tests and antibody tests and making AZT, and are making hundreds of millions of dollars on that. There are further interests on the part of the news media. The news media have all bought into the story; it was a windfall for them to sell a weekly story on anal intercourse and drug injection and viruses and how horrible it is and how many more people are going to die. It makes a cheap and easy story that everybody wants to read, rather than for a science writer having to go to a laboratory and have to understand about the death gene, that you mentioned, (which is probably nonsense to begin with) and how that works and why that works and to sell it to a public that just gets another boring science story. But, if you touch it up with gay bath-house anecdotes and anal intercourse and lots of sexual contacts, then it's juicy reading and everybody gets excited; so the newspapers also love it.

Q: What about the government, they're the ones who approved AZT, and I heard that it was not under the most rigorous scientific testing. The gay people were protesting outside that place and they just pushed it right through.
Duesberg: That's unfortunately the case. An infectious cause, rather than drugs was found, because otherwise they would be blamed for their lifestyle. I think they would be much better off facing the truth, and saving many more lives. But they would then lose the support and the sympathy of the majority of the heterosexuals, who would say, if you kill yourself with drugs and screwing around in bath houses, that's none of my business, but you do it to yourself; it's your problem.

Q: What do you think would happen if all this came out? Who would lose?
Duesberg: The medical establishment would lose seriously. It would lose face a lot. It would be a serious thing for them, because so many have advanced this theory and acted accordingly. They would have to say, I'm sorry we got it wrong; we have to step back, and somebody else has to find the right direction. It would be a serious embarrassment in the first place. A lot of people would have to be replaced, and there would be many other serious consequences. The scientists would have to step back. The law suits would come up, particularly about AZT poisoning. Different tests would be necessary. If they do that in a government, they elect a different president or have a different general and a different ideological campaign.

Q: You noticed there was something wrong somewhere, because you have a background in retroviruses. You spoke up. What have been the consequences to you, has it helped your fame any?
Duesberg: Well, yes, fame to some degree, but the price is pretty high. I'm known, but so is Hitler.

Q: That's not a good comparison!
Duesberg: I'm just giving you a hint. Fame, yes, but not necessarily to my advantage right now.

Q: What price have you paid?
Duesberg: One, for example, is that they won't renew my research grant from the National Institutes of Health. That will be terminated. [One of the members of the committee that terminated Dr. Duesberg's grant is a long-time mistress of Dr. Gallo and the mother of one of his children!]

Q: How long do you have?
Duesberg: I have one year to go. If I find some support from somebody, I could continue but if I don't then I'll be dead. Not totally dead, but it will be very difficult for me to maintain my laboratory, or to have students, or to write papers.

Q: On campus, what has the reaction been?
Duesberg: I have a few supporters, some enthusiastic and some good supporters, and I have a lot of enemies who say it's embarrassing to take this position for Berkeley and you're a non-conformist and controversial, and you give us a bad reputation, and you are confusing the students, and you are weird and negative.

Q: So you went from being an award-winning scientist, discoverer, lauded by your colleagues and now you're mud.
Duesberg: Yes, now I'm somewhat ostracized or black-balled.

Q: Don't these people want to come out and debate you?
Duesberg: No. They don't, the opposite is true. They run away when offered a chance to debate, meet, or confront me.

Q: To wind up the interview, what are your views or hopes for the future, as far as yourself, as far as your work?
Duesberg: It's a crucial thing. If I can pull it through, it will be bright and brilliant; if I can't pull it through, if I don't get enough research support to survive, then it will be dim.

Q: This seems a classic case, you're kind of like Galileo.
Duesberg: It is a classic case, and it is a case where a clear decision is ahead. It's either yes or no, but it could be a long time, maybe longer than I can last.

Q: If you could have looked ahead and seen what would happen to you, would you still have followed the same course?
Duesberg: I may probably do it again, yes. That's the way I am. I probably would have done a few things differently, but I thought my colleagues would be more honest about these things, more direct about it, rather than evasive.

Q: With government-sponsored science, do you think that there is more of a chance of this kind of thing occurring?
Duesberg: Yes, definitely. This is actually, unfortunately, a bad consequence of mega-science. The government actually sponsors its own projects, more than investigator-initiated science now. They determine that HIV is the cause of AIDS, and there's the money to prove it, or study it. You're not asked to help to solve AIDS; you're given a project and work on it. If you have another idea about it, you will be denied support, in fact be ostracized and ex-communicated, as I am.

Q: So truth is not as important as getting sensational results, or getting more money from the government?
Duesberg: Yes, you have to go with the pack. You have to conform in order to survive in your field now.

Q: And you're not part of the pack.
Duesberg: It's not a good thing to do if the field is not moving in the right direction. That was a good thing to do with the Apollo project when we went to the moon. We knew it could be done. It would take so much money and so many contracts and so many things to do to get there. But if you don't know what the cause of AIDS is, to continue moving in one direction with three billion dollars is actually counter-productive because it excludes, it eliminates, all original, alternative ideas.

Q: So government-sponsored science tends to make that happen, where truth is not as important. Do you see this happening in other sciences too?
Duesberg: I can't judge about other sciences too well. I am feeling it might be somewhat that way in physics too, to some degree. But the truth is more easily determined in the other sciences than in the medical sciences. Medical sciences are kept, on purpose, somewhat atheoretical and confusing. They say it's too complex to give a simple answer.

Q: Why is that?
Duesberg: Well, you cannot test it. Koch's third postulate would say, okay, do the experiment and prove that HIV causes AIDS in humans. You cannot. They would say that is unethical, you can't do an experiment on humans. Even a controlled trial of AZT is now considered somewhat unethical in the hope that AZT might in fact help.

Q: Have you found as a researcher, that you have to produce papers to get the grants coming in? For example, a great scientist like Darwin who, when he was 25, did all his basic research, and when he was an old man, finally published. Do you think a person like Darwin today could get funding over a long period of time for something that controversial, where it would take a long time and the results may never appear?
Duesberg: It's possible. I don't know Darwin well enough, but, it's not impossible to get an idea funded like Darwin's. I understand he was controversial in his lifetime, very controversial, but I think it is more likely that he would succeed because he doesn't interfere with any commercial and medical interests. It's just a competing hypothesis. But here with AIDS we are talking about a pharmacological industry; we're talking biotechnology; we're talking about a huge establishment of researchers which are totally dependent on the virus hypothesis for their survival and a medical establishment that has conducted millions of AIDS tests and has treated a hundred thousand with AZT. Remember the international conference in San Francisco, one and a half years ago, there were 15 or 20 thousand people who only study HIV. They wouldn't let me or anybody else in. So, that type of opposition didn't exist in Darwin's days. There were a couple of other professors who were arguing with him, and there were some religious arguments against his view, but it wasn't as formidable as it is now. There is a global conformism in science, enhanced by faxing and speedy publications, and telephones, and computers that create a global conformity that is very difficult to challenge.

Q: Have you considered, instead of getting a grant from a government agency going into a private research and development for various companies?
Duesberg: Yes, I'd love to, but I think they too would go along with the AIDS business because there is a huge commercial AIDS market. You see the academic sciences, essentially all of my peers, have become very commercialized too. Most successful academic scientists are actually commercial scientists. Most of my peers are consulting, owning companies, or have stocks in companies. They are selling their science. They have commercial profits from their science, but they present their research as if it is a non-commercial, pristine, academic enterprise.

Q: And why haven't you done that?
Duesberg: Because what I have to say is not marketable. You don't make money by saying you should stay off drugs. You make much more money by making a drug for the drug. Then you have business.

Q: Well, any concluding words to our audience?
Duesberg: Well, they should take my words into consideration, and make a decision whether a free science like the one I am still practicing should be continued in this country, or whether we should conform entirely with the National Institutes of Health and the government. That is my appeal to them.

Q: That's a good appeal.
Duesberg: If some support could be found for truly free science, guaranteed the academic freedom as it used to be, that would be a great step for the American people, for the health of the American people.

Q: And people don't have to worry about becoming HIV-positive from sex. That's been a scare, a real scare, to everybody actively dating.
Duesberg: Sex, I think, has not become any more dangerous than it was in the last three billion years of life. There are some dangers with dating, but they're not new ones.

* End of Interview *


More About AZT
Dr. Duesberg claims that the "AIDS-defined diseases" are primarily caused by drugs, including AZT. He calls AZT "AIDS by prescription." Currently (August, 1993) about 200,000 are taking AZT. If Duesberg is right, all these people will die from AZT if they continue to take it. Do we have a case here of "iatrogenic extermination" on a grand scale?

Russell Schoch, in an article in Newsweek (August 17, 1992), under the heading "Dad, I'm HIV Positive," writes about how his son, a hemophiliac, became HIV-positive:

"But Peter Duesberg... - one of the world's leading retrovirologists - says that HIV is a profoundly conventional retrovirus, incapable of killing its host; not more than one in 500 T cells is ever actively infected by HIV. "Infection" at that rate cannot hurt the body. Such damage is equivalent to a nick on the face while shaving. In response to these facts, AIDS researchers have put forth more than a dozen complicated mechanisms to explain how HIV does its damage. None has stuck.

And then there is the treatment. AZT is currently being given to tens of thousands of both symptomatic and asymptomatic people who carry antibodies to HIV. Magic Johnson and Arthus Ashe [since deceased] are taking AZT. Ryan White, who also suffered from hemophilia, was given AZT until he died. So was Kimberley Bergalis. The U.S. Government says AZT is effective in prolonging the lives of those infected with HIV, and it claims that double-blind clinical trials back up this contention.

But in three recent books, I found a different story. Business writer Bruce Nussbaum, in Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against AIDS, details the cozy arrangements among government, business and science in the eventual marketing of AZT. John Lauritzen, an independent scholar, in Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story, chronicles how scientific principles were compromised by the unblinding of the clinical trials of AZT. Gay activist Michael Callen - who has been HIV-positive for a decade - claims in Surviving AIDS that the only long-range survivors are those who have not taken AZT. I will urge my son not to take this medicine."

In The Lancet (Vol. 339, March 28, 1992) Dr. Duesberg wrote:

"In another response to my Lancet letter and to Meditel's programme broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on Feb 12, Dr Freestone (March 7, p 626) defends the Wellcome product AZT against our challenges. We had pointed out that AZT, as a chain terminator of DNA synthesis originally developed for chemotherapy, is inevitably toxic. Further we argued that it cannot be a rational antiviral drug because only 1 in 8000 leucocytes are infected in AIDS and AZT cannot distinguish between infected and uninfected cells. Freestone cites results of the Wellcome-sponsored study on which the US licence is based. He notes that the primary end-point was death (1 in 145 AZT, 19 in 137 placebo), an end-point "little subject to observer error or bias". However, 30 of the AZT recipients (but only 5 of the placebo recipients) were kept alive only by blood transfusions to compensate for severe bone marrow toxicity. Thus the number of AZT recipients who would have died from anaemia if untreated was 30, which is more than the AIDS deaths and anaemias in the placebo group (19 + 5). Moreover, in 34% of AZT recipients but in only 6% of controls, the lymphocyte count fell by over 50%. 66 AZT recipients (25 controls) had severe nausea. Muscle atrophy, due to termination of mitochondrial DNA by AZT, was seen in 11 and 3, respectively...

Independent studies of AZT in AIDS report much higher death rates than 1 in 145. A French study of 365 AIDS patients revealed no benefit 6 months after the start of AZT but identified new AIDS diseases and leucopenia in about 50% and death in 20% within 9 months. That study is the largest of its kind. An Australian AZT study in 308 AIDS patients reported 30% mortality within 1-1.5 years, and one or more AIDS diseases, including pneumonia and candidosis, in 172 (56%) within less than 1 year...

It seems that AZT causes potentially fatal diseases, such as anaemia, leucopenia, and muscle atrophy, in healthy HIV carriers and AIDS patients; that it causes these diseases in symptom-free carriers within a year, whereas HIV is said to cause AIDS diseases on average only 10 years after infection..."

In his paper AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors, Dr. Duesberg reports:

Implications of Dr. Duesberg's Work
In the June/July 1992 issue of MSDC Physician (MSDC = The Medical Society of the District of Columbia), Editor-in-Chief Richard A. Ratner, MD wrote an article under the heading "Duesberg: An Enemy of the People?", from which I quote:

"...If Duesberg is correct, it will ignite a firestorm, not only in the politics of science but in the politics of everyday life. It will pick the scab off a barely healing laceration on the body politic, causing it to open even wider.

The dispute about the discovery of the HIV virus has already become one of the uglier chapters in the recent history of science. Doubts persist about whether Dr. Robert Gallo and his team in the U.S. discovered the virus independently of Dr. Luc Montagnier and his French team or whether they "discovered" the virus sent to them by Dr, Montagnier.

What happens if we ultimately conclude, courtesy of Duesberg et al, that the virus doesn't even cause the disease - that it is virtually an artifact...?

Those now acclaimed for their hypothesis that HIV behaves atypically for a retrovirus would then be seen as hacks rather than heroes for having tried to squeeze AIDS into the Procrustean bed of an infectious disease.

What if evidence then turned up that in fact some members of the AIDS establishment had caused Duesberg to lose his grant? Cries of "suppression" and "coverup" would compound the mess, possibly leading to investigations and the ruin of reputations. The loss of confidence of Americans in their scientists and perhaps, by extension, their physicians, could rival their current disillusionment with politicians.

But all this would be a tempest in a teapot compared to the effects upon the community at large. The social consensus on AIDS that we have reached after some painful years... is based on a kind of no-fault view of the disease: that it is caused by a virus, is sexually transmissible, doesn't discriminate by gender or sexual preference, and could strike any of us who don't practice safe sex.

This contrasts with the Pat Buchanan school of thought that prevailed when AIDS was first recognized and seemed limited to homosexuals: it was an affliction visited upon degenerates and they deserved what they got...

People's attitudes began to change, it seems to me, only when they realized that all of us were at risk. Poignant tales appeared about complete innocents becoming ill: newborns, young henophiliacs, unknowing wives of bisexuals and drug addicts.

This change to a more empathetic view from a harsh, moralistic one was catalyzed by the discovery of the HIV virus. It allowed us to understand AIDS as a communicable disease of viral origin rather than as the mysterious illness-without-a-cause that stimulated fear and loathing among the masses. Even lacking a cure we were reassured to know what kind of animal AIDS was; and when AZT came along, allegedly useful in prolonging the lives of AIDS victims, we all cheered.

But what if the theory were all wrong? Imagine the jolt to the psyches of ordinary people as their leaders told them: oops, sorry about that. AIDS isn't caused by the virus after all but by people systematically poisoning themselves with recreational drugs in pursuit of sexual pleasure. What would happen to the reservoir of goodwill painstakingly built up for the victims of AIDS?

Suddenly the moralists would be ascendant again: AIDS... would once again be the fault of those who repeatedly insult and abuse their own bodies. Money would dry up for AIDS research and go back to researchers in other diseases.

AZT would be withdrawn from the market, and, if Duesberg is right, the number of cases of AIDS would drop, except among those continuing to abuse substances. Someone would sue the government for allowing the use of a "cure" worse than the disease - which would now be seen as hastening the disease and guaranteeing its fatal outcome. Sympathy would be reserved for those who became ill because of AZT, and costly "reparations" to these people and their families would be made.

Major changes would once again affect the practice of medicine. If HIV itself were no longer considered a pathogen, the latex industry would be hard hit as the utilization of both rubber gloves and condoms would plummet. The contretemps about AIDS "testing" would die out since the presence of HIV antibodies would be of no pathological significance...

Indeed, if Duesberg's work were anything less than a serious scientific challenge to the HIV-AIDS hypothesis it would have to be considered dangerous rabble-rousing because of the tremendous discord it is likely engender. As it is he has been villified; many consider him to be motivated by homophobia or other base motives.

It would be no surprise to learn that there are many who would like to brand Duesberg, like the courageous Dr. Stockman of Ibsen's great play, "An Enemy of the People." (For those who never read or don't remember this great work, the good Doctor refused to cover up the fact that the town's natural springs and its major source of tourist revenue was dangerously polluted.) For there are many people, whether in science or in latex, who are comfortable nonetheless - with things as they are and stand to lose reputations, money, credibility, and political power if he is right.

If Duesberg is wrong, let him be proved wrong. But if Current AIDS theory and policy is wrong, let's not do what we did with the Shah of Iran: suppressing dissent and propping him up until all was truly lost. To err is human, but to perpetuate error through self-delusion is to break faith with those who trust us with their lives."

In a letter to the editor, Charles A. Thomas, Jr., Ph.D., President of the Helicon Foundation, wrote:

"...You are quite right, there will be widespread implications and recriminations when the full magnitude of this scientific-political mess is exposed.

That "HIV causes AIDS" has never been properly established. No serious scientific publication can be found (by any of us) that sets forth the reasons HIV causes AIDS. Apparently no scientist has attempted to do so..." (MSDC Physician, September 1992).

Chapter 4
A BLESSING IN DISGUISE

The AIDS Hoax: a Weapon to Discredit Government and Promote Freedom
The AIDS hoax is a blessing in disguise for lovers of freedom. It follows the classical pattern of government hoaxes. A "problem or crisis" is perceived. It is played up in the media. A bogus "solution" is proposed. Money is demanded. The problem is made worse. More money is demanded. A huge bureaucracy or industry is created to "solve the problem." The problem is made worse. More money is demanded. People are told that no "solution is in sight." The victims are brainwashed into helplessness.

The AIDS hoax is so special because:

The Microsoft Analogy
To understand the phenomenal opportunity available to us, it will help to examine what made the meteoric growth of Microsoft possible.

Microsoft is a computer company that sells software to make computers more effective and efficient. We could regard Microsoft's products as "computer success programs." At the time Microsoft was founded, its potential could have been measured by the difference between how effective and efficient computers were at that time and how much more effective and efficient they could become. Another measure of Microsoft's potential was the number of new computers that would be bought because they would become cheaper, more effective, and more efficient. Capitalizing on this potential enabled Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, to become a billionaire and the richest man in America.

Our organization is in the business of identifying, developing, marketing, and implementing "human success programs" - programs that enable humans to operate more effectively and efficiently. Our potential vastly exceeds that for Microsoft when it was founded. Practically all humans suffer from debilitating "human failure programs" in some areas of their lives. As measured by certain social statistics, such as rates of crime, suicide, drug addiction, divorce, personal income, etc., western civilization is gradually declining or collapsing. In other words, human failure programs are gradually defeating human success programs.

The other side of the coin is that the decline of western civilization represents an increasing potential for organizations such as ours and for you personally. The worse it gets, the greater our potential and opportunity!

Of course, you and I - and everybody else - suffer from human failure programs that prevent or restrain us from fully capitalizing on the potential. Improving our own programs is the highest priority. How? Study the other reports available here!

Two Perspectives
It is vital to grasp the difference between these two perspectives:
(a) Things are terrible and getting worse. We have the most corrupt government in history. It is impossible to transform government and society. Government deficit spending is out of control, like an unstoppable runaway train. Our currency is being destroyed. Crime, rape, drug addiction, suicide, etc. rates go up year after year. Civilization is collapsing. Nothing can be done by anybody. It is totally hopeless.

(b) Things are pretty bad and getting worse. Nobody seems to know what to do. That's good because it provides phenomenal opportunities to the few individuals who can figure out what to do. The gap between what is and what could or should be is a measure of the potential and opportunity available to me. What can I do to bridge the gap? More specifically, what valuable products and services can I provide to bridge the gap in such a way that both my customers and I profit?

If you adopt the first perspective, then the bigger the gap, the more daunting, impossible, and hopeless the task seems. But if you adopt the second perspective, then the bigger the gap, the happier you are. The gap measures potential and opportunity.

Political Approach vs. Business Approach
Traditionally, people have seen the gap between what is and what could or should be as a political problem. They have sought political solutions to the problem. They have attempted to create some kind of political organization to solve the problem. They have defined a cause and attempted to persuade people to "fight for the cause." They may have gained many recruits and activists.

The activists were expected to contribute time, money, and effort to the cause. Generally, the activists were not paid for all their work. They did it "out of the goodness of their hearts." Major motives for throwing in their weight may have been: recognition, a sense of belonging, pleasure of social interaction, pride at being involved with a "great cause," etc. All that is the political approach.

The business approach is different. It starts with the basic question: What valuable products and services that will bridge the gap can I provide? Other questions follow: Can I make this a profitable business? Can I involve other people so they can also make a profit? Who should I attempt to market my products and services to? How do I market my products and services?

I believe that business dynamics are vastly more powerful in solving societal problems, than political dynamics. The problem with the latter is that it might take many years before there are any concrete results. Activists tend to suffer burnout and disillusionment.

With the business approach, as soon as you sell the first little product or service you have a tangible result. In getting the business off the ground you learn all kinds of lessons that you would never learn in the political approach. You learn that your efforts need to create value. You learn how to persuade people to pay you for your products and services. You learn how to get people to recognize that your products and services are valuable. You learn about numbers; for example, you might have to mail to 100 prospects to gain one new customer. You learn about money management. You learn about taking appropriate risks. If you don't learn these things fairly quickly, your business fails.

With the political approach, you don't learn very much and you don't learn very quickly. You may invest 10 hours a week and several thousand dollars over a period of 10 years in some "great cause" before you realize that there really was no hope of success from the outset. Such a realization could be devastating to your psychological well-being.

A Real Life Example
In The Arizona Republic of August 8, 1993 there appeared an article about teacher Adele Jones from Georgetown, Delaware. She was fired for refusing to lower her standards. The charges were "incompetence and subordination." She flunked more students than the principal ordered her to flunk.

The problem with Ms. Jones was that she operated on certain standards. To pass, a student had to satisfy a standard of proficiency. She worked very hard to teach her students. She was the first teacher to arrive in the morning and rarely left before 6 pm. She gave students her home number so they could call her for assistance with their homework.

The students loved Ms. Jones. After her firing, about 300 students demonstrated with placards with phrases like, "I support Ms. Jones." One student said, "I'm proud of my 92 average! Why? Because I earned it. Probably it's the first time I had to earn a grade."

Sounds to me like Ms. Jones was the only honest and competent teacher in the school. She stood out like a healthy thumb. She really cared and was determined to do a good job despite the corrupt education system. So she had to be fired.

Now Ms. Jones could launch an "education reform group" to try to fix the education system. This would be the political approach. John Taylor Gatto (see the article On Education) would say that no matter what she did, no matter how much money she raised, her chances of success would be zero.

My friend Gene Lehman is a former high school English teacher. He gave up teaching in government schools in frustration over the teaching methods he was compelled to use. He didn't start an "education reform group." He developed some innovative learning techniques and materials. For 10 years he has been operating a mail-order business from his home, selling learning materials to families and groups in almost all 50 states. He also publishes a newsletter. He provides products and services to bridge the gap.

Gene's operation is called LUNO: Learning Unlimited Network of Oregon. Here are some extracts from his brochures:

"LUNO cuts through all barriers, physical or psychological, to learning. LUNO does not replace existing schools, teachers or learning programs but challenges all to work together to promote unlimited learning in an atmosphere of freedom and creativity. LUNO seeks no authoritarian control over participants or manner of participation. LUNO relies on no special support or subsidies from government or institutions.

LUNO challenges all levels, structures, ideas and practices. Unlike schools and other institutions that are structured to maintain and extend control, LUNO challenges all imposed controls and psychological barriers that frustrate freedom or limit learning. LUNO is open to all fields of learning, all styles and procedures, all people and ideas.

LUNO challenges all institutions of learning and every teacher and learner to take maximum personal responsibility and to strive for maximum achievement in whatever direction constructively fulfills individual potential.

When we consider that education is the most important, the biggest business going, that learning is a lifelong activity, should we waste time debating whether, when, where or how natural learning is better than artificial learning?

As long as we look to others to do what we should do for ourselves, we can always find some institution, expert, friend or relative to blame for our personal problems. But should we instead blame ourselves? Are we being massively programmed into such an addictive dependence on outside technology that we easily become obtusely oblivious of our inner needs, feelings and potential? [Can you relate this paragraph and the next to the bicameral mind model (in How To Increase Your Consciousness)?]

Why do people put their trust in established borders, military and police protection, and leaders who promise to take care of everything and everybody in exchange for liberal executive privileges? Why have people lost their sense of self-reliance, abandoned their common sense, inherited traditions and creative intuition and turned to experts who claim knowledge beyond the ken of ordinary mortals? Why are people so easily manipulated into living or dying for some promised reward (material or spiritual), so easily intimidated by force or threat (either internal or external, real or fabricated), so alienated from life itself? [Can you relate this paragraph to the AIDS hoax and other government hoaxes?]

If the world is to survive accelerating disintegration with some sense of civility and security, people everywhere must work out ways to bridge the gap between top and bottom. Most immediately, people on all sides, at all levels, must overcome inherited, learned or imposed stereotypes of what is within or without their immediate milieu. Then we must concentrate on the ongoing, never-ending problem of working out a mutually beneficial accommodation; we must explore new relationships and develop tactics that don't rely on force, fraud or exclusive privileges.

The greatest force keeping people mired in place is fear. First there is the fear of learning something unpleasantly disturbing [relate to AIDS hoax?], then there is the fear of changing, and finally the fear of failing. These fears are systematically implanted and nurtured by institutions [relate to IRS?] and shrewdly manipulated by people in power. But fear may finally have pushed the world to a pivotal point at which learning is being widely recognized as more than information (or disinformation), change is acknowledged as unavoidable and the courage to risk everything for basic values is growing from the bottom up." [emphasis added]

You can contact Gene Lehman at LUNO, 31960 S.E. Chin St., Boring, OR 97009, USA; tel. (503) 663-5153.

What Gene Lehman says and does pretty much encapsulates what our own organization stands for: Rather than busting our guts trying to reform existing institutions we simply create our own institutions such as LUNO to help solve our problems and satisfy our needs. Rather than seeking special support or subsidies from government, we develop, market, distribute, and deliver products and services that prove their value in the marketplace.

The areas of greatest problems - like "AIDS" - are also the areas of greatest potential and opportunity. More so than Microsoft's Bill Gates, we have the prospect of becoming millionaires and billionaires, providing the products and services that will transform the world, bridging the gap between what is and what could or should be. From the other reports you can find out exactly how.

Meanwhile people are dying of AZT and other drugs. Please help get this report to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. You may be able to save a few lives. 200,000 people are taking the killer drug AZT.

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