DEBATING AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS Drug Controversy
By Anthony Brink
========================
Sourced
FOREWORD BY MARTIN WELZ
DEDICATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
AZT: A MEDICINE FROM HELL
AZT: A MEDICINE FROM HEAVEN (Dr D J Martin)
AZT AND HEAVENLY REMEDIES
[1] Dr Martin scolds the editor of the Citizen from a high horse.
[3] AZT and muscles.
[10] AZT and bone marrow.
[14] What does AZT do for opportunistic infections?
[15] Does AZT have “long lasting beneficial effects”?
[16] What did the Concorde trial in Europe reveal about AZT?
[17] The invention of HAART cocktails.
[18] Does AZT prolong life – or shorten it?
[19] The grim findings of the Claude Bernard Hospital study in France.
[21] Pressure from the manufacturer to sweeten the Concorde findings.
[22] Does AZT “improve quality of life”?
[26] AZT and the liver.
[30] AZT, foetal toxicity and birth defects.
[37] Is AZT safe for neonates and children?
[39] Are the ‘side effects’ of AZT different from AIDS?
[40] How well do untreated HIV-positive people do?
[41] How are children exposed to AZT in the womb affected?
[43] What did the introduction of AZT do for the AIDS death rate in the US?
[44] What cancer risks are posed to babies of mothers treated with AZT?
[49] Does AZT reduce HIV transmission from mother to child?
[50] AZT and the ‘AIDS experts’ at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital.
[51] A precedent for AZT: Diethylstilbestrol.
[52] Cancer again.
[56] AZT, nerve damage and dementia.
[58] AZT and hearts.
[59] AZT and eyes.
[60] A lesson from Japan.
[61] More cancer.
[66] AZT and needlesticks.
[67] Why AZT can never in principle prevent HIV infection.
[70] AZT and rape victims.
[72] MRC president Dr William Makgoba and the South African experts.
[73] Big-shots overseas.
[74] The National Minister of Health on AZT.
[75] Charlene Smith cheerleading AZT.
[84] The puzzling GlaxoWellcome HIV-AIDS Helpline.
[86] Mbeki and D P leader Tony Leon debate AZT for rape victims.
[88] The New York Times on ‘African AIDS’.
[89] Mbeki replies to Leon in his Oliver Tambo Memorial Lecture.
[90] South African journalists slap down the government’s concerns.
[93] Don’t take HAART - the latest research reports.
[111] A Pellagra parable.
[112] ACT UP founder Larry Kramer speaks about HAART.
[113] A withering indictment of AZT by the Perth group.
[114] AZT, Jewish weddings and soccer riots.
[115] GlaxoWellcome’s feeble response to the Perth group critique.
[116] Mbeki chides the ignorant MRC president and Nature correspondent.
[118] The lazy pharmacology professor who let the President down.
[124] The AZT campaign peters out, and Nevirapine moves in.
[125] AZT and its coy advocates.
[126] Justice Edwin Cameron and medical miracles.
[130] AIDS Law Project director Mark Heywood sounds off.
[134] Dr Neil McKerrow’s caring cures.
[135] Mbeki answers an appeal by a judge, church leaders and an AIDS expert to provide AZT to pregnant women.
[136] Mbeki explains his reservations about AZT.
[138] Journalists react to Mbeki’s grasp of the triphosphorylation problem.
[139] Mandela on Mbeki.
[140] The calomel calamity.
[141] Conclusions
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
WHY THE ‘AIDS TEST’ IS USELESS AND PATHOLOGISTS AGREE
THE AIDS APOSTATES
THE POPE OF AIDS
HOW COULD THEY ALL BE WRONG? DOCTORS AND AIDS
AN AIDS CASE
ILLUSTRATIONS
Foreword
By Martin Welz
The upside of democracy is that every citizen has the right of access to information, the right to express, exchange and debate different points of view and, finally, to a vote. The downside, of course, is that each citizen is burdened with the responsibility of having to think for himself. That, in a nutshell, is what the investigative magazine noseweek is about, and why, prompted by the author of this book nearly two years ago, noseweek published a series of articles titled Rethinking AIDS.
For the first time South Africans were exposed to a critical re-evaluation of HIV and AZT undertaken by a number of very eminent scientists.
Clearly, many South Africans, reared in a society where for half a century they were forbidden to think for themselves, now find it too onerous a responsibility. They long for the quick fix. If AIDS is a problem, there must be a pill for it - which the government must pay for. Anyone, be it politician or pharmaceutical company, who is prepared to offer them that assurance, no matter how recklessly, is eagerly assumed to be right - because that lets us off the hook and instantly makes us feel good. The fact that it may not make the AIDS sufferers feel any better is, apparently, of no consequence.
Conversely, anyone who raises questions about AIDS exposes our vulnerability, and clearly makes many people, including the president of the South African Medical Research Council and the editor of the Mail and Guardian, very, very angry. Some abandon any attempt at thought - such as Sunday Times writer Laurice Taitz, who, in reporting the AZT controversy, gaily took it upon herself to declare to her readers: “the truth is the drug is not toxic.” Read this book and you will know why I say the Sunday Times clearly does not take AIDS seriously when it assigns a writer of Ms Taitz’s intellectual ability to the subject. And that when Dr William Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council, declares he has read nothing critical about the effects of AZT on infants, this is a reflection not of the state of science on the matter, but of his own arrogant indolence.
Anthony Brink is a citizen who takes his rights and his responsibilities seriously. He has written a book for every intelligent citizen to read. If you are not a member of those professions, do not be intimidated by the medical and pharmacological terminology. Simply stick with the argument. It is devastatingly clear.
Reading this debate about AZT between Brink, a Pietermaritzburg advocate, and Dr Des Martin, president of the Southern African HIV-AIDS Clinicians Society, leads one to reflect on the question: “What is an expert?” Dr Martin may have the credentials of expertise, but Brink has the intelligence, investigative zeal and adherence to the principles of scientific enquiry that make for authority on this subject. He has tracked and digested every important reference to AZT in contemporary medical literature. The result is a comprehensive and alarming review of the findings of medical researchers on the clinical use of the drug.
AZT was originally prescribed in high doses on its own as a therapy for people who tested HIV-positive. Other journalists have reported the fraudulent nature of the clinical trials on which this usage was based. When independent, much larger trials eventually showed that when HIV-positive individuals who showed no sign of illness used AZT, it significantly increased, rather than decreased, their chances of developing AIDS - and of dying - this regimen was quietly dropped. That this has not yet become a major medical scandal is testament to the power and resources of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoWellcome, and, by extension, the industry as a whole.
Now there are new, even more dangerous claims made for AZT, supported by well-funded lobbies. Anthony Brink demonstrates the sort of ability and dedication needed to properly scrutinise those claims. If you have any better information and arguments, let me know.
Martin Welz
Editor, noseweek
Cape Town.
Dedications and Acknowledgements
To Thabo Mbeki, President of the Republic of South Africa, for his sterling moral and political leadership in the AZT controversy in South Africa; to Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, National Minister of Health in South Africa, for equal integrity and political courage; to Dr Ian Roberts, former special advisor to the Minister of Health, for passing this debate on; to my family for enduring a completely preoccupied and distracted husband and father during the hundreds of hours stolen from them to research and write this work; to my late father Robin Brink, whose enthusiasm for his medical negligence law practice seems to have infected me with a similar interest in medical malfeasance; to Arthur Wilke, my late grandfather by marriage, who developed my fascination for microbiology as a boy; to journalists Martin Williams, Martin Welz, Martin du Plessis, Vivienne Vermaak and Albertus van Wyk for their commitment to ventilating the little-known facts about AZT in South Africa; to John Lauritsen, Michael Ellner, Celia Farber and Joan Shenton for pioneering exposes of the drug; to Dr Manu Kothari, Professor of Anatomy at Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College, King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India, for the deepest spiritual and intellectual inspiration; to my friend in politics, Lluis Botinas of Barcelona, Spain, executive director of Plural-21, for amour-piercing discussions about the ideological and metaphysical substrates of modern medicine that made the AZT disaster not merely possible but its logical consummation; to Ivan Illich for Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, perhaps the most incendiary book I have ever read; to Dr Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, for kind encouragement - fundamental disagreements about ‘HIV’ notwithstanding; to Dr Val Turner, consultant emergency physician at the Royal Perth Hospital, for invaluable friendly advice and guidance throughout this project; to Dr Todd Miller, molecular pharmacologist at the University of Miami, for similar help; to Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, biophysicist at the Department of Medical Physics, Royal Perth Hospital, everything. Finally, to my very many unnamed friends in this subject world-wide for your personal support and assistance, and for all that you have done, and in many cases sacrificed, to bring the terror to an end.
Preface
By Anthony Brink
In the David Lynch movie Blue Velvet, Geoffrey Beaumont returns to visit his friendly middle-American hometown Lumberville. Dawdling around in a field he comes across a severed human ear. He finds himself drawn into investigating a surreal criminal netherworld, and is propelled towards dreadful discoveries. For me, stumbling on to AZT has been a bit like that, and my enquiry into the history and pharmacology of AZT has been a Carrollian tour through a chamber of horrors. It’s not the first time that medicine has gone mad, but I think that in time the entry of AZT into the apothecary will be judged the gravest pharmaceutical disaster since the days of strychnine, arsenicals, and mercurous chloride.
Having interested South Africa’s leading investigative journalist Martin Welz in AZT and other problems with the HIV-AIDS paradigm, I was commissioned in October 1998 to write an article for his whistleblowing journal noseweek. After I had done so, Welz decided to publish a general introductory article featuring AIDS sceptic Nobel laureate Kary Mullis first, and to go to press about AZT in a later issue (see January 2000 edition). At this time an intense public controversy was raging about the economics and morality of the South African government’s decision not to provide AZT to rape victims and HIV-positive pregnant women. The angry condemnation that the government drew for this decision from AIDS activists, journalists, opposition politicians, doctors, health workers and others was premised on the conviction that AZT was a life-rescuing miracle drug. The look of it was that desperate supplicants were being denied the sacrament. As the ensuing debate did not concern the drug’s safety or efficacy, I thought publication of my critique shouldn’t be delayed so I sent it to several South African newspapers. Martin Williams at the helm of the Citizen took the lead and published AZT: A Medicine from Hell on 17 March 1999.
South Africa’s leading AIDS treatment authority, Dr Desmond Martin, rose to the piece and mounted a rebuttal two weeks later, entitled AZT: A Medicine from Heaven.
My rejoinder AZT and Heavenly Remedies was printed the following day. I thereafter revised and extended it substantially to incorporate discussion of important papers in the medical press excluded by the newspaper’s space constraints, as well as a torrent of research papers published subsequent to our newspaper debate. Dr Martin’s contentions about the ‘AIDS epidemic’ are treated separately in Appendix I to my reply.
After reading this debate, South African President Thabo Mbeki caused a local and international furore when on 28 October 1999 he ordered an enquiry into the safety of AZT. The following month, Dr Helen Rees and Dr Precious Matsoso, respectively the president and director general of the South African Medicines Control Council, received copies of both this debate and of the seminally important examination of the molecular pharmacology of AZT by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, published in a special supplement to the journal Current Medical Research and Opinion in mid-1999. This paper is discussed at the end of my reply to Dr Martin in my literature review AZT and Heavenly Remedies. Neither the toxicity data discussed in this debate nor the Perth group’s explosive review seemed to have made any impression on these ladies. On 11 May 2000, Dr Rees responded to a warning issued by the European Medicines Evaluation Authority concerning “life-threatening skin and liver reactions” and other “potentially lethal side effects” of Nevirapine (Viramune), currently being marketed aggressively in South Africa. After the deaths of several black women on antiretroviral trials (including Nevirapine), she remarked nonchalantly that “many AIDS medications could cause liver and other problems. ‘But the combination therapy can make a huge difference to people’s lives’.” One wonders how the Medicines Control Council would have reacted had the victims been white. To her great credit, when she learned of the deaths, South African Minister of Health Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang intervened directly and terminated the trials. Incredibly, “an uproar in South African medical circles” was reported in response to her move to prevent the deaths of more women. (On Sunday 13 August 2000 she announced that she had declined to make Nevirapine available to HIV-positive pregnant women, and directed that it should not be used outside approved research environments.)
Dr Tshabalala-Msimang has rejected two reports on AZT by the MCC on the grounds that they deal inadequately with the drug’s toxicity. On 15 March 2000, in the course of a radio interview, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the failure of a third report to address the issue of AZT’s long term risks, and said that she had commissioned further investigation. But from the minister’s forthright negative public statements on AZT and the even stronger sentiments emanating from Mbeki’s office, it would seem to be ‘game over’ for those calling on the government to buy and supply it to pregnant women and rape victims.In preparing the manuscript I decided to retain its original case-answer-reply debate format for two reasons. First, AZT: A Medicine from Hell serves as an easy introduction to the subject and a handy summary of the case against the drug, which I elaborate in my detailed reply to Dr Martin under the title AZT and Heavenly Remedies. Second, AZT: A Medicine from Heaven stands as an authoritative statement of the case for AZT by South Africa’s leading AIDS doctor and academic AIDS expert. This lends balance to my treatment of the subject, and better equips readers to form their own conclusions. The research papers discussed in AZT and Heavenly Remedies are cited in an informal manner for the lay readership I had in mind, but they are sufficiently identified to enable any interested reader to locate them. Excerpts from the literature are precisely quoted however, and I have retained American spelling and journal house-styles regarding the use of upper and lower case in the titles of papers.
Concerning my polemical style and sardonic tone, I should explain that I wrote with politicking in mind. (It’s a trick I picked up from Galileo. Unable to sell his discovery of the moons of Jupiter to his peers, he took to pamphleteering to the lay public instead.) This is because, after some dismal early encounters, I realised the futility of engaging with ‘the experts’, and decided to bring this appallingly dangerous drug to the attention of our political leaders and investigative journalists instead. My apprehensions were confirmed by the responses of ‘the experts’ to Mbeki’s extraordinary initiative in directing an enquiry into the safety of AZT. On their own showing they hadn’t examined the important recent medical literature on AZT with which the President was au fait and which founded his concerns, and they condemned him ignorant of it. Among them are Dr William Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council, and South Africa’s most eminent pharmacologist, Professor Peter Folb of the University of Cape Town. Consulted by Nature correspondent Michael Cherry to comment on the Perth group paper after Mbeki sent it to Cherry and asked him whether he’d read it, Folb contributed a disgracefully glib, uninformed, unreferenced, and tendentious opinion. Mbeki fittingly rejected it.
How South Africa’s leading medical experts failed to meet their responsibilities to President Mbeki and to the South African public in the AZT controversy is a tale told in the latter part of AZT and Heavenly Remedies. We’ll also have a look at the performance of some prominent journalists, AIDS activists, church leaders, the leader of the official opposition in parliament, and a constitutional court justice. And finally, Mbeki’s remarkable knowledge of AZT’s pharmacology and his insights into the inarticulate dynamics of the controversy are revealed in his own words, in letters and interviews quoted in full. He also gives the world an exemplary lesson in democracy in practice – the importance of independent enquiry, and the dangers posed by unthinking deference to ‘the experts’ in any institution or profession, especially the buffoons who run the medical show here.
No thanks from me to South Africa’s AIDS activists and Human Rights lawyers, all of whom have looked away - one of whom said that she could not afford to examine the issues raised by me or she would be out of a job, and another who opined that I was a public menace and should be killed.
I’m frequently asked why this subject seized my interest. At heart I’m a science geek. I had a provisional patent when I was ten, and was keenly interested in chemistry and microscopy as a boy. From impressive experiments with high-explosives to triple-stained microscopic slides and photomicrographs of blood, assorted microbes and cross-sections of my grandmother’s appendix, I drifted into audio electronics and equipped a recording studio and concert sound rig with most of the gear home-made. On my father’s ill advice, I took Latin at school but biology has long been my fascination. Part of it has been that the more I read and the more I reflect on it, the more textbook biology drifts from fact and begins to resemble the holy doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, supporting aggressively defended commercial and professional empires. I’m also one of those annoying inquisitive types with little respect for ‘authority.’ Being interested in cancer, the immune system and all that, I closely followed the drama of HIV-AIDS from the very beginning. Having accepted everything I read about it hook, line and sinker for years, I was inspired to examine the scientific foundations of the infectious AIDS paradigm afresh when I discovered in late 1996 that two of the most accomplished biologists in our time, Nobel laureates Walter Gilbert and Kary Mullis (discussed in my piece The AIDS Apostates) did not subscribe to it. That led me on to AZT. An irresistible imperative then possessed me. I couldn’t just carry on with my picnic while a child was drowning, so I jumped in. Or to mix metaphors, it was like finding a grave in my garden, and then more the deeper I dug. Or watching good neighbours carted off by secret police, never to be seen again. Not the kind of thing one can walk away from. Not me anyway.
After the conclusion of my brief newspaper debate with Dr Martin, I was moved to amplify my reply to him by the publication of a sudden flood of papers during the rest of 1999 and in 2000 - all with serious implications for the continued medical use of AZT, but none of which were surfacing in the public discourse about the drug. The death of a legal colleague after a single month’s course of AZT in combination with a similar drug 3TC was an added impetus. That’s how this book grew, its thread ripped undone and a new patch sewn in every time another paper on AZT came out in the medical press. And with every development in the controversy on the home front. It’s updated to September 2000.
Because I amplified AZT and Heavenly Remedies considerably after it was printed in its original form, I thought it proper to afford Dr Martin an opportunity to respond. I wondered what he would make of the Olivero papers on the transplacental carcinogenicity of AZT, the Ha, Blanche and De Martino papers on AZT’s foetal toxicity (and many more have since come in), and the vast survey of the literature on AZT and analysis of its pharmacology by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, which decisively debunks its manufacturer’s claims. Dr Martin’s colleague, fellow virologist Dr John Sim, intercepted the invitation, declined it, and proffered a sympathetic psychiatric diagnosis that I suffer mental perturbation. For an amusing exercise in Foucaultian deconstruction, Dr Sim’s response is a priceless little treasure, and I have put it up as Appendix II.
On 28 June 2000, Cape Town architect Richard Hepner, the editor of the Health Independent, asked Dr Martin again whether he would like to refute or comment on my extended reply, AZT and Heavenly Remedies - specifically the kernel of it, an excerpt I had prepared entitled Is AZT safe for babies? He declined the offer and said he stood by his piece AZT: A Medicine from Heaven, and suggested that Hepner simply publish it again. Offered the same opportunity, fellow AZT advocate Professor Gary Maartens at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town asked Hepner, “What’s in it for me?” and likewise declined it.
The value of this work, I hope, has been to systematise a large body of clinical and research data on AZT, render it in prose transparent to non-experts and to launch it into the popular domain. I daresay the ‘AIDS experts’ could learn a thing or two from it too, but for reasons you’ll see, I’m not optimistic. For locating the papers I’ve cited, all credit to David Crowe, Peter Duesberg, Bryan Ellison, Celia Farber, Billi Goldberg, Neville Hodgkinson, Matt Irwin, James Jerome, Heinrich Kremer, John Lauritsen, Todd Miller, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, David Rasnick, Val Turner, and Penn Xarwalyczha.
ANTHONY BRINK
Pietermaritzburg,
South Africa
arbrink@iafrica.com
September 2000
AZT: A Medicine from Hell
By Anthony Brink
October 1998
The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is,
the higher his reputation soars, even amongst powerful princes.
Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536), Dutch humanist.
National Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma has been condemned by just about everyone recently for her heartless decision not to make a drug called AZT available at State expense to HIV-positive pregnant women. It reduces the risk, so it’s said, of the transmission of HIV from mother to child. Politicians and journalists from left to right have joined moist-eyed, hand-wringing doctors in pleading for the free provision of AZT to these women, their babies cruelly deprived and doomed to die, they say.
In all the fuss about the minister’s decision on AZT, no one, it seems, has stopped to ask, “So what the hell is this stuff anyway?”
In 1964, a chemist called Jerome Horwitz synthesised a sophisticated experimental cell poison for the treatment of cancerous tumour cells (1). It was called Suramin, or Compound S. Its formal title is 3’-azido-3’-deoxythymidine - zidovudine for short - but everyone knows it by its nickname, AZT.
It works like this. Thymidine is one of the four nucleotides (building blocks) of DNA, the basic molecule of life. AZT is an artificial fake, a dead ringer for thymidine. As a cell synthesises new DNA while preparing to divide in order to spawn another, AZT either steals in to take the place of the real thing, or else disrupts the delicate process by interfering with the cell’s regulation of the relative concentrations of nucleotide pools present during DNA synthesis. That’s the end of the cell line. Cell division and replication, wrecked by the presence of the plastic imposter, comes to a halt. Chemotherapeutic drugs such as AZT are described as DNA chain terminators accordingly (2). Their effect is wholesale cell death of every type, particularly the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system and those lining our guts. Horwitz found that the sick immune cells went, but with so many others that his poison was plainly useless as a medicine. It was akin to napalm-bombing a school to kill some roof-rats. AZT was abandoned. It wasn’t even patented. For two decades it collected dust, forgotten - until the advent of the AIDS era.
As soon as Dr Robert Gallo made his famous announcement at a press conference on 23 April 1984 that his virus was the probable cause of AIDS, the race was on to find a pharmaceutical weapon against it. The stratospheric profit potential (since borne out) of being the first past the post was on everybody’s mind. Obviously, if an already synthesised drug could be applied to the malady, it would short-cut most of the road-race there. AZT was fished off the shelf, along with numerous other abandoned brews, and put to some in vitro tests. It demonstrated a bright alchemical sparkle. On the basis of a reassuring but fallacious assertion that AZT was specifically antagonistic to HIV, and a thousand times more toxic to the latter than human cells generally, the drug went to clinical trials. The chaos into which the trials degenerated is a tale too long to tell here. It wouldn’t be extravagant to call them fraudulent (3). (Subsequent trials consistently turned in opposite results.) At best, they were so incompetently staged that the data gathered under them were useless, save to note that one in five of its subjects taking AZT needed repeated blood transfusions to keep going. Small surprise, since the label on bottles of AZT supplied to laboratories bears a skull and cross-bones and cautions, “Toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed. Target organ(s): Blood, bone marrow…Wear suitable protective clothing.”
Four months after the trials started, they were called off prematurely, on an interpretation of provisional results deemed positive for the drug by the trial overseer. Which is odd for a drug claimed to be on double-blind test, with neither doctor nor patient supposed to know who was on what, but there we are. Next, it went before the FDA, to be approved in record time under huge political pressure from the gay lobby. Strong reservations were expressed at the hearing about its dreadful toxicity. The chairman’s vote against it was defeated. As the most poisonous drug ever licensed by the FDA for indefinite use, and with the conviction apparently that the terrible new disease needed a terrible medicine, AZT was approved for use in extreme AIDS cases only - for which you might want to read, in cases of people very ill with their presenting AIDS indicator disease, fungal pneumonia or what have you. Scarcely a year later, in the orgy of stupidity that characterises the AIDS age, AZT was officially recommended for administration to entirely healthy people, whose misfortune it was to register positive to an HIV antibody test. Since the drug destroys the very immune cells allegedly attacked by HIV, the introduction of AZT as a treatment regimen for asymptomatic HIV-positive people saw the AIDS mortality rate among the previously well take off like a rocket. Five years and countless deaths later, and only after the disastrous results of the European Concorde and St Mary trials, was this murderous treatment recommendation reversed. AZT, it was found, did no good. Of course not. On any intelligent consideration of its pharmacological action, AZT could never be ‘antiviral’, any more so than arsenic could have cured the scurvy for which it was administered to sailors, and later, to troops in the trenches in the First World War.
In Europe and the US, HIV-positive ‘long term survivors’ quietly gather to form groups, having sloughed off the terror of the death sentences imposed on them by their doctors. Here’s the strangest thing. Without exception, what they find they all have in common is that they all eschewed (or quickly gave up) AZT, related nucleoside analogues like 3TC, and protease inhibitors. Some have pondered the unthinkable: that nearly all medically managed AIDS cases, always terminal, represent that balefully familiar phenomenon in the history of medicine, iatrogenocide - to be killed by the cure. Their reasoning becomes less obscure when one reads the AZT package insert. To do so might tempt one to wonder impertinently whether AZT isn’t AIDS by prescription. Indeed, such perverse conjecture is actually confirmed in capitals: AZT use “MAY BE ASSOCIATED WITH HEMATOLOGIC TOXICITY INCLUDING GRANULOCYTOPENIA AND SEVERE ANEMIA” (destruction of white and red blood cells respectively), and “PROLONGED USE OF RETROVIR HAS BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH SYMPTOMATIC MYOPATHY (gross atrophy of muscle tissue) SIMILAR TO THAT PRODUCED BY HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS”. As to the latter claim, history will judge whether the thousands of healthy HIV-positive people who embarked on their metabolic poison treatment and wasted away (just as the AZT insert predicted) would have died had they ignored doctor’s orders and thrown their pills away. Here the syphilis story is instructive.
Before the introduction of mercury and arsenic salts as a treatment for this clap, the organic brain damage and dementia that signalled ‘tertiary-’ or ‘neuro-syphilis’ was quite unknown to medicine. When penicillin replaced the older decoctions, it then disappeared. The moral is hard to miss.
One sane notion in that otherwise mad dance with death that chemotherapy for cancer involves is that you stop before you drop. Since healthy cells are always killed in the crossfire, the idea is to rescue the patient from going over the cliff along with the target bad cells, by taking him off the drug in the nick of time. That iron rule is broken in AIDS treatment. You’re going to die, you’re told, so better take the bitter medicine to the bitter end, to stave off the evil day. But as AZT heads like a heat-seeking missile for one’s immune and energy transporting cells (“target organs: blood, bone marrow”, remember?) dying of AIDS on AZT is a racing certainty. No one has ever been cured by AZT, but it sells like hot cakes all the same, still the most widely prescribed AIDS drug, and it reaps profits counted in billions.
Ever irrepressible as a medicine following one failure after another, in 1994 AZT was proposed as a treatment for pregnant women to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, or so it was touted. Until then, it had been staunchly contraindicated during pregnancy. Generously underwritten by the drug’s manufacturer, the study, ACTG 076, in which this startlingly novel use of AZT was tried, epitomises the junk-science that characterises so much AIDS research. Of 477 babies born to HIV-positive mothers in the trial, 13 in the AZT-treated group were born antibody-positive, against 40 in the placebo group. Apart from the lunacy of basing a decision to dose HIV-positive mothers with a cell-toxin as lethal as AZT on such feeble numbers, the underlying assumption that an HIV-positive test result predicts inevitable illness and death is a canard of modern medicine which, surprisingly, wants for evidence. Most babies ‘seroconvert’ to HIV-negative in any event, medicated or not. The other overarching myth is that the mere presence of antibodies in one’s bloodstream signifies an active infection. Isn’t it elementary that we carry antibodies to all sorts of pathogens that we have met and defeated? Isn’t this first-year stuff? Advocates of AZT confess to being completely in the dark to account for the vaunted HIV blocking effect they claim. The reason why administering vitamin A instead works precisely the same magic might be a pointer to something less interesting: stressed health, thanks to chronic poor nourishment and living conditions. As for the positive immune signals a ‘short course of AZT’ can generate, poison ingestion provokes an immune reaction as the body rises to the insult. This is old hat.
Thrown to the wind have been all the safeguards set up to ensure that the Diethylstilbestrol and Thalidomide tragedies would never happen again. Before the hysteria of the AIDS age, women were enjoined even to avoid drinking beer during pregnancy. A recently reconfirmed active carcinogen, and teratogen too - cells not killed outright are nastily maimed - AZT freely crosses the placental barrier, so the package insert tells us cheerfully. Has anyone here paused to question whether a growing foetus comprising rapidly dividing cells should be exposed to a random terminator of DNA chain synthesis? Apparently not. Certainly not the recipients of GlaxoWellcome’s largesse from its slush fund of millions for those who make AIDS their business in this country. Nor our doctors carrying out bold medical experiments on the foetuses of pregnant black women - whose unlucky dice gives them a positive registration to the irredeemably and hopelessly non-specific ‘HIV-antibody’ test. Of course anyone in the game crying foul, and drawing attention to the reams of literature in the medical journals about the harm caused by AZT, especially to the young, is going to find himself sent off and defunded, for keeps. Were it not for the amazing collapse of critical intelligence in the AIDS age, GlaxoWellcome’s heart-warming contributions to ‘the fight against AIDS’, with its research grants and cut-prices - described by the Mail and Guardian as a “bouquet of assistance” - might have been seen less as philanthropy than commerce, pure and simple. As it has achieved so successfully abroad, what better way to fix its local market than by buying off our medical establishment and ‘AIDS activist’ crowd with lolly aplenty to fund their dumb projects? And by enticing our government with current discounts for its rancid wares, in order to hook longer-term contractual commitments.
The AIDS Law Project at Wits currently busies itself with plans to sue the minister in the High Court for an order compelling her to respect ‘pregnant women’s rights to AZT’, and dole it out on the house. Then again, its ‘AIDS activist’ lawyers gratefully take junkets to AIDS conferences in holiday cities overseas at GlaxoWellcome’s expense. The ‘human rights’ they pursue might be better served were these legal crusaders to call off their foolish case and think of ways best to bite the hand that feeds them. Several actions for loss of support have been launched against GlaxoWellcome in England and the USA, arising out of the deaths of family members killed by their doctors’ prescriptions of AZT (5).
Although she has justified her perplexing decision on AZT on the basis of financial considerations exclusively, saying she would rather spend her money on ‘AIDS education’, one day Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma will be praised for her great prescient wisdom in keeping AZT away from pregnant women and their foetuses. A bit like much-lauded Dr Francis Kelsey, whom Kennedy honoured for her wise perspicacity in sparing the USA the European Thalidomide calamity, when in truth her only notable trait was her fortuitously inefficient foot-dragging in obstructing the start of the FDA approval process.
It’s high time that everyone involved in this nightmarish mess went off to do some basic homework in the subject in which they have so much to say for themselves.
(1) Horwitz, J.P., Chua, J. and Noel, M: Nucleosides. V. The monomesylates of 1-(2’-Deoxy-beta-D-lyxofuranosyl)thymine, Journal of Organic Chemistry 29: 2076-2078 (1964). However, an American biochemistry professor with whom I have corresponded privately makes a documented prior claim to the first synthesis of AZT in the autumn of 1961. He prefers both to remain anonymous and not to upset the settled history - based on the first to publish. He mentioned to me that he employed AZT as an experimental cell-poison against leukaemic blood cells, and against the bacteria Salmonella Potsdam and E. coli. (Studies in the ‘90’s have confirmed AZT’s activity against all three.) He pointed out that after publishing his paper, Horwitz investigated the activity of AZT against Jensen tumour cells, and not against leukaemic blood cells as I reported originally in line with the conventional history. He also criticised my repetition of the claim that Horwitz abandoned AZT because of its toxicity (see for example the excerpt from Radford’s article immediately below). He said the reason was its inactivity against target cancer cells, while the acute toxicity of AZT emerged only later. Actually, Horwitz has made contradictory statements about this. Reviewing this essay, he remarked, “…you are justified in sounding a warning against the long-term therapeutic use of AZT, or its use in pregnant women, because of its demonstrated toxicity and side effects. Unfortunately, the devastating effects of AZT emerged only after the final level of experiments were well underway, that is, the experiments which consisted of giving AZT to large numbers of human patients over a long period of time. Your effort is a worthy one… I hope you succeed in convincing your government not to make AZT available...”
In an enthusiastic article about the pharmaceutical industry in the UK, Tim Radford wrote in the Guardian on 30 March 2000, “They settled on an anti-cancer drug which had proved too toxic to use against cancer: It was AZT… Since DNA is a ubiquitous part of life, compounds that act against it can potentially stop life forms like bacteria, like viruses, like humans. Of course, they can cause cancer as well, so balancing the risks is an essential part of the fascination.” The fascinating risks for the development of cancer posed by the administration of AZT are examined extensively in my reply to Dr Martin, AZT and Heavenly Remedies.
(2) DNA chain formation termination - described in this paragraph - is generally understood to be the basic pharmacological action of AZT. GlaxoWellcome asserts in its PRODUCT INFORMATION release about AZT, “In vitro, zidovudine triphosphate has been shown to be incorporated into growing chains of DNA by viral reverse transcriptase. When incorporation by the viral enzyme occurs, the DNA chain is terminated.” In a glitzy CD dished out at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, GlaxoWellcome claims similarly: “Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors – NRTIs – [like AZT are] phosphorylated by cellular enzymes… competitively inhibit viral DNA synthesis [and are incorporated] into the DNA thus terminating DNA synthesis.”
This conventional model of AZT pharmaco-kinetics is accepted by a vociferous critic of the drug, Dr Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley. His criticisms go principally to the unacceptable toxicology profile of AZT, and do not take issue with its manufacturer’s claims about its mode of action. Accordingly, in Inventing the AIDS Virus he writes, “While on AZT, Bergalis once told a reporter she hoped to also get dideoxyinosine (ddI), another experimental AIDS drug. This drug and ddC, two products of cancer chemotherapy research, work in precisely the same way as AZT. Chemically altered building blocks of DNA, they enter the growing chain of DNA while a cell is preparing to divide and abort the process by preventing new DNA building blocks from adding on… So, like AZT, ddI and ddC kill dividing cells and have similar toxic effects. They destroy white blood cells and therefore can cause AIDS.” Jay Levy, professor of medicine and director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at UCSF (and unlike Duesberg, a vocal protagonist of the orthodox HIV-AIDS model) said in Newsday on 12 June 1990, “AZT can only hasten the demise of the individual. It’s an immune disease and AZT only further harms an already decimated immune system.” Duesberg’s most recent and most detailed critique of AZT, co-authored with pharmacology biochemist David Rasnick Phd, is contained in The AIDS Dilemma: Drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus, published in Genetica in mid-1998. It can be read on the internet.
As Mycek et al put it in their text Pharmacology (2nd ed), it is trite that before the drug can be incorporated into DNA, “AZT must be converted to the corresponding nucleoside triphosphate by mammalian thymidine kinase in order for it to exert its antiviral activity.” Recognising this, GlaxoWellcome claims, “Within cells, zidovudine is converted to the active metabolite, zidovudine 5’triphosphate (AztTP), by the sequential action of cellular enzymes.” But numerous investigations since AZT was approved by the FDA in the US have found that AZT is triphosphorylated in vivo very inefficiently, and at least one order of magnitude lower than necessary for its claimed anti-HIV effect. Consequently viral DNA chain termination by the incorporation of metabolically altered AZT into DNA in place of natural thymidine is insignificant in relation to other activities of the drug, inter alia as a potent oxidising agent. This subject will get a close look in my reply to Dr Martin, AZT and Heavenly Remedies. AZT also disrupts cell division by perturbing the relative levels of natural nucleotide pools, with the drug acting as a ‘sink’ and sponging up phosphate molecules essential to the process. Starved of these molecules and denied the energy they provide, dividing cells die.
This pivotal criticism of the conventional model of the pharmacology of AZT - namely that AZT is not in fact triphosphorylated as GlaxoWellcome claims it is - is made and elaborated extensively in a paper discussed in my reply to Dr Martin,A Critical Analysis of AZT and its Use in AIDS by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, published in mid-1999 as a special supplement to the academic medical journal Current Medical Research and Opinion. Like Duesberg and Rasnick’s paper mentioned above, it is archived on the website www.virusmyth.com. Librapharm also has it posted at: http://www.librapharm.co.uk/cmro/vol_15/supplement/main.htm
(3) The way in which AZT was approved and reached the market as an AIDS drug has been closely researched and reported by John Lauritsen (Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story, and The AIDS War), Celia Farber (Sins of Omission, The AZT Scandal), Bruce Nussbaum (Good Intentions), Elinor Burkett (The Gravest Show on Earth), Peter Duesberg (‘With therapies like these who needs disease’ in Inventing the AIDS Virus) Martin Walker (Dirty Medicine and HIV, AZT, Big Science & Clinical Failure) and Steven Epstein (Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge). It’s an amazing story, and is certain to haunt GlaxoWellcome in litigation sooner or later. Some of this writing can be read on the website mentioned above.
(4) In his address to the National Council of Ministers on 28 October 1999, during which he ordered an investigation into the safety of AZT, President Mbeki mentioned these lawsuits. GlaxoWellcome’s representatives in South Africa immediately denied them. A few days later, the President’s office asked me for details. I referred to the English cases of Threakall and others, and the American Nagel and McDonnell cases, all of which had been reported in the press. A month later however, in a telephone call from Susan Threakall’s English solicitor Graham Ross, I was informed that her action, his lead case, had been withdrawn a couple of months earlier. In March 2000, Paul Headlund, the American attorney who had handled the Nagel and McDonnel cases, told me that the claims had not been pursued. GlaxoWellcome was therefore technically correct in disputing Mbeki’s statement that there were cases concerning AZT pending against it at that time. What GlaxoWellcome omitted to mention was that a month earlier a court in Maine in the US had dismissed a bid by health authorities to compel Valerie Emerson to administer AZT to her son after her daughter had died on the drug, and held, “She feels that she has willingly and in good faith surrendered up the life of one child to the best treatment medicine has to offer and does not want to do the same with the next. Nikolas has made significant strides recently in gaining weight and overcoming developmental deficits, and appears happy and healthy. She does not want to see this child take on the pallor and pain of a sick and dying child.”
I am currently briefed in a claim against GlaxoWellcome for the widow and minor son of an attorney killed by a single month’s course of AZT and 3TC treatment. The action will be the first world-wide in which the integrity of GlaxoWellcome’s claims about the molecular pharmacology of AZT and the adequacy of the information provided about its hazards will be examined by a trial court in the light of the Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al review paper and others canvassed in my reply to Dr Martin. It will be the plaintiffs’ case that AZT is an unreasonably dangerous drug with no therapeutic or palliative value as an ‘antiretroviral’ whatsoever. This action is my lead case. I have since been instructed to represent two other plaintiffs, one who suffered permanent leg muscle damage and another liver damage after treatment with the drug. For another action I am handling involving AZT poisoning, but brought on a different basis, see An AIDS Case in the appendices to this debate.
Appendix I
When we consider upon what ludicrous evidence the most preposterous beliefs have been easily, and by millions, entertained, we may well hesitate before pronouncing anything incredible.
-- The Last Days of Hitler
Hugh Trevor-Roper
In the preamble to his response to my article AZT: A Medicine from Hell, top HIV honcho Des Martin floats some scary statistics about HIV infection rates - all terrific fund-raising stuff. It will come as an awkward disappointment, no doubt, to those whose careers thrive on such numbers, to be confronted with The World Health Report 1998. It records that “using the latest data gathered and validated by WHO”, in 1996 South Africa had a magnificent 729 AIDS cases - of a population of 40 odd million. A few years ago our experts predicted 200 000 AIDS orphans by 1997 in KwaZulu-Natal, my province. Guess how many children were reported orphaned here in total over the period 1996/7 (car-crashes, whatever) according to our national Department of Welfare’s current Annual Statistical Report: - a whopping 971. Some epidemic! One could go on trotting out similar spectacular flops, but suffice it to say that nowhere on the planet has a single prediction of AIDS exploding into and decimating the general population ever come to pass. No demographic data anywhere speak to an “AIDS epidemic.” Scrutinised, AIDS statistics always turn to mush, and it’s when you home in on the “African AIDS” figures that the show really turns to farce. It’s all computer modeling, premised on the creed that an HIV-positive test result predicts sickness and death after 8 years or so. Could it be that there is something wrong with the theory? The public rightly yawns in reaction to Martin’s silly doomsday histrionics. We’ve noticed that the ‘experts’ are always postponing their plague with which they menace us for money and attention. And since the overwhelming majority of HIV-positive people are healthy, what is this Alice in Wonderland talk of his - this “HIV disease” in the absence of any AIDS defining illness?
Dr Martin states, “[HIV] disease is a major global health problem and is associated with a significant morbidity and mortality.” The Harvard School of Public Health doesn’t think so. In its encyclopaedicGlobal Burden of Disease Study, published in 1996 for the World Health Organization and the World Bank, it reports that “HIV currently [rates] twenty-eighth in the rankings…[in the] global pattern of disease burden.” That’s not even close to accidental falls (14th) or suicide (17th) as causes of disability, illness and death “for all regions of the world.” What this means for the ‘everyone is at risk of catching AIDS’ propaganda with which we’re relentlessly bombarded by scare-mongering AIDS careerists is that in truth you’re actually twice as likely to succumb in an accidental fall - about as remote a likelihood as you one day putting a gun to your head.
Consider Uganda, once the shining sore in African AIDS mythmaking, until Southern Africa was discovered to be a more lucrative market. Sold to the world as the epicentre of the ‘AIDS epidemic in Africa’, Uganda was said by the WHO to have a million HIV positives in 1987, about one in twenty. The same number in 1997, according to several articles in the Lancet in 1997 and 1998. Aren’t contagious epidemics supposed to follow an exponential bell-curve increase in case incidence? Because this is what any textbook on epidemiology will tell you. In December 1998, in its Weekly Epidemiological Record, the WHO stated the total number of Ugandan AIDS cases (not deaths) cumulatively since 1993 to be 55 201. (Bear in mind that in Africa, under the Bangui AIDS case definition, any number of common maladies can be recast as AIDS cases presumptively; you don’t even need an HIV-positive test result.) On the popular premise that AIDS takes you on average about 10 years after HIV infection, one might reasonably enquire where are the expected 500 000 dead? UNAIDS tells us - as a boasted triumph of health educational programmes advocating condom use - that the HIV-positive incidence rate among urban Ugandan women has dropped from about 40% to about 15%. So where are the mass graves of the lost 25%? Or are these women still around, hale and hearty, as the absence of any empirical evidence that Uganda has lost a quarter of its city-women to AIDS diseases would suggest? The exterminated villages of AIDS-lore, my Ugandan friend Denis Rugege explains simply, are deserted homesteads besieged by that timeless enemy, malaria, resurgent when general disease resistance is weakened in times of civil strife, infrastructural collapse and widespread hunger. And no one should need reminding what trauma Uganda has been through in recent decades.
Some contrary guys unimpressed by ‘the overwhelming evidence’ think that AIDS in our time is best construed as an epidemic of mass hysteria, rather than any conventional disease phenomenon. And that it is destined to pass rather like neurasthenia, the wandering womb, and hysteria among others in the olden days, to oblivion, as inevitably as that other dumb contemporary craze, ‘attention deficit disorder.’ After all, Professor Luc Montagnier himself notes that “AIDS has no typical symptoms.” Odd that. A disease as elastic as medical vogues and funding contingencies require.
For instance, if you’ve got tuberculosis and you’re HIV-negative you’ve just got tuberculosis, and really, who gives a damn? Who pays a mortgage and makes a career attending lushly sponsored overseas conferences to jabber excitedly about something as politically unsexy as TB? We have a hundred and twenty five TB cases here for every ‘AIDS’ case according to the WHO’s best data, but did you ever hear our AIDS activist crowd say a word about TB and the miserable social conditions that always hover about it? If you’ve got TB, and your blood contains arbitrary levels of certain proteins claimed to be produced by your immune system as antibodies specifically(#) to defeat a virus called HIV, voila, suddenly its not TB anymore, it’s !AIDS! Even if according to every marker, apart from the test result, the former and latter conditions are identical on clinical presentation. And even if the presence of antibodies without more has never before in medicine been deemed sufficient evidence of an active infection by any pathogen. In South Africa, with your TB rechristened AIDS, two possibilities arise. If black, you’ll probably be sent away from the hospital untreated as a lost case on injury time. If white you’ll go on ‘antiretrovirals’ for AIDS - provided you can afford to buy your expensive, certain and inexorable slide to the mortuary on today’s deadly AIDS drugs.
To illustrate the absurd fluidity of the HIV-AIDS construct, if the AIDS epidemic predicted by the US Surgeon General fails to explode into the general population and instead smoulders dismayingly within its original risk groups, thereby threatening the US Centers for Disease Control’s glorious funding, just change the definition of AIDS to double its case incidence by the stroke of a pen. Chuck in invasive cervical cancer in the presence of HIV antibodies to keep feminist lobbyists happy by including their occasional malady as an AIDS indicator disease to enable them to pull Federal health benefits. No matter that it’s hard to imagine what cancer has to do with immune suppression, the claimed hallmark of AIDS.
Martin’s appalling, ignorant, death-wish contention that most HIV-positive children will die is not supported by a single controlled study anywhere. Local AIDS boff Clive Evian repeats the WHO accepted wisdom that these babies can acquire their mothers’ “HIV antibodies… without being truly HIV-infected”, and over time they disappear. Around the town in which I live, Pietermaritzburg, some black children born HIV-positive are sent to die in specially established hospices. Some born sick in abject poverty fail to thrive and die, however good the care. But most don’t. Years later they languish there without hope, having missed their appointments with death set for them by the weird missionary types who run these joints. Medicine has branded these bright-eyed children carriers of a vile, filthy, deadly contagion, and they are raised to expect death. The mark they bear is like the hidden mole in the armpit detected by the inquisition - meaningless in a sane world, but during an hysterical storm, super-charged with evil. Perfectly healthy, they are raised as though leprous. Imagine growing up like that. It’s beyond pitiful.
Just where this notion comes from that HIV-positive children tend to die is hard to fathom. In 1995, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Davis et al reported that “Approximately 14,920 HIV-infected infants were born in the United States between 1978 and 1993. Of these, an estimated 12,240 children were living at the beginning of 1994; 26% were younger than 2 years, 35% were aged 2 to 4 years, and 39% were aged 5 years or older.” Which means that over 80% of children diagnosed HIV-positive at birth are still alive. No prizes for guessing what drug probably killed the others. On 18 May 1999, Dr. Warren Naamara, the Kenya adviser for the UNAIDS programme said, “Many HIV-positive children were now living beyond the usual five years and into their teens, bringing new challenges in the fight against the HIV/AIDS [and] more children born with the virus that causes AIDS now survive beyond the age of ten.” To the chagrin of the ‘AIDS experts’, these children just won’t die on time. How’s this for another stunning death wish: “The UNAIDS official said the new trend posed a threat to the management of disease in the five to 14 years age bracket, which was previously perceived as the hope for the next millennium, since it was largely free of the disease. Naamara…said HIV-positive children in sub-Sahara Africa were likely to contribute to the spread of the disease as most were orphans with no education or skills to derive a livelihood from.” (per PANA report, 20 May 1999.)
# Specific? In 1990, in the journal Cancer Research, Strandstrom et al reported that the blood of 72 of 144 healthy dogs tested for HIV antibodies with the Western blot test (the most ‘specific’, many ‘AIDS experts’ say) reacted positively with one or more bands. Dogs don’t get AIDS. Not even chimps whose DNA is more than 99% homologous with human DNA, and which are susceptible to all other pathogens causing real infectious diseases in humans.
Notes:
Concerning the biochemical phenomena said to evidence ‘HIV’, see An interview with Eleni Papadopulos, by Christine Johnson, 1997: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/cjinterviewep.htm
About ‘HIV antibody testing’, see Do antibody tests prove HIV infection? An interview with Valendar Turner, by Huw Christie, 1997: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/hcinterviewvt.htm
For a popular introduction to the erection of the HIV-AIDS construct and its root problems, see A Great Future Behind It; The Yin and Yang of HIV, by Valendar Turner & Andrew McIntyre, 1999: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/vtyinyang.htm
Appendix II
A reply to my invitation to Dr Desmond Martin to respond to AZT and Heavenly Remedies
31 March 2000
Dear Mr Brink,
I am a colleague of Des Martin and got to read the recent E-mail you sent to him.
There really is not much to say (please do not for one second misinterpret this again as debate) but I feel that there may be one or two issues of importance to your personal development. It was very strongly suggestive at the time of the Citizen article (especially your emotional and personalized attack in the windy rebuttal to Dr Martin’s reply) that you have suffered a loss or exposure to a bereavement or life event of some sort in the recent past. If that is the case, then I am sorry. But whilst anger may be a part of the recognized reaction sequence, it is not useful to displace and translate it into a word salad and slime innocent bystanders. The Citizen is really to blame, but the option to surf on a wave of sensationalism and misinformation and peddle some copy would have overcome any editorial misgivings - it would not be the first time. A more productive route would have been to seek some professional counseling (or are you hostile towards the entire medical and allied professions?) and perhaps it is still not too late.
Unfortunately it is easy to formulate and vocalize views without adequate background - in fact it is especially easy when not constrained by the burden of insight and perspective in synthesizing and reviewing the value of publications and the role they play in the evolution of paradigms. Debating AZT - questions of safety and utility - remember that it is the source of the answers (or perhaps your questions) that must be judged critically. Your list of reviewers gives the game away.
If you believe that you were responsible for evoking the wave of quackery that has influenced the State President, then perhaps you have a delusional component - there is a readily available and continual barrage of media trash which will provide bona fide evidence of anything from alien abductions to stealth viruses. If, however, it is true, then I am sure that you would also wish to share culpability for the hundreds of children recently infected with HIV-1 who do not have access to your “debate” and your resources but are the real victims of yet another huge governmental AIDS blunder. You will no doubt be aware that the minister of health has intervened more than once in recent months in thwarting the long-awaited recommendation by our Medicines Regulatory Authority (a detoothed MCC) to use AZT in mother to child transmission. How would the legal profession react to ministerial intervention in Supreme Court action or opinion?
I think that your debate is still to come - windmills, flat earth and a plethora of other useful antiretrovirals must be beckoning. And more’s the pity because one senses from your writing considerable ability and I think compassion.
Yours sincerely,
John Sim
Why the ‘AIDS Test’ is Useless, and Pathologists Agree
By Anthony Brink
15 March 2000
To the pathologist:
The Professional Provident Society requires me to take an HIV test for the purpose of increasing my life insurance. An ‘Informed Consent’ document supplied by the Life Offices Association invites me to ask you to explain its contents if I have any problems understanding it. I do have problems understanding it and I have several questions.
According to the face of the document, the test to be administered is an ELISA 3, which I understand to be a third-generation enzyme immunoassay for HIV antibodies. I wish to be informed of the name of the test kit employed and its manufacturer, and I require a copy of the operating/information booklet in order to inform myself fully about the test which I am obliged by my insurer to take.
Under the heading “Is the test always accurate? Can there be mistakes?” I am told that “the tests used are very accurate.” Even more categorical is the explanation under the heading “What does it mean if the test is positive?”: “this means that you have been infected with the AIDS virus.”
Does the mere presence of HIV antibodies in the absence of any clinical symptoms of illness signify an active infection with HIV? Are significant levels of such antibodies not consistent with a successful immune response? Are any other diseases diagnosed purely on the basis of antibody detection in the absence of clinical presentation?
I have looked up the specificity of four different third-generation ELISA HIV antibody test kits, and all claim specificity of about 99.8%.
Two senior medical technologists with the Natal Blood Transfusion Service tell me that the HIV seroprevalence among white people is this province is negligible and less than one in a thousand. I was told that the seroprevalence among Indian and Coloured people was likewise very small.
With a sensitivity of 100%, as all the test kits claim, the true positive in a thousand test subjects will be detected (allowing for present purposes one in a thousand ‘true positives’). With a specificity of 99.8%, two in a thousand non-infected test subjects will also register positive.
It follows that for every thousand people like me tested, there will be three reactive results, one true positive and two false positives. In other words, for people from my low- risk category in Natal-KwaZulu, HIV-positive test results will be wrong twice as often as they will be right. Am I right? If not, in what respect is my arithmetic unsound?
When I look at the specificity data for the antibody tests of the kind under discussion, I find no indication that any have been validated for specificity by comparing reactive results with confirmed viral infection in test subjects. In a pregnancy test for instance, the incidence of reactive urine tests would have been compared with actual confirmed pregnancies to determine sensitivity, and non-pregnant cases to establish specificity, that is the false-positivity rate. But looking at the scientific literature cited by the test kit manufacturers and other research papers, I find that this elementary control has never been performed for any HIV antibody test kit. Is there any reason why the specificity of HIV antibodies can’t be determined by comparing the incidence of reactive antibody test results with actual cases of confirmed HIV infection, ascertained by viral isolation in the suspected case?
I assume that we are agreed that viral infections can be directly confirmed by harvesting and dismantling putatively infected cells, by purifying and isolating the suspected virus by zonal ultracentrifugation into isopynic density gradients, electron photomicrography to confirm expected particle morphology, analysis of the proteins and nucleic acids of the purified particles to establish their exogenous origin, and confirmation of their infectivity by inoculation of virgin cell lines and then repetition of this procedure.
Can you refer me to any literature reporting that this has ever been done for HIV? Or am I correct in understanding from Abbott Laboratories’s statement, “there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood”, that HIV has never actually been isolated, and that no gold standard for the specificity of HIV antibody tests exists?
How does the claim in the informed consent form that “a positive test result means infection with the AIDS virus” square with Abbott’s warning, “All enzyme immunoassays…may yield non-specific reactions due to other causes” and therefore such results are required by Abbott to be “investigated further in supplemental tests”?
One of the test kit manuals that I have read states that the proteins employed as antigens by the test kit for the detection of HIV-1 antibodies are p24 and gp160. I assume that other HIV ELISA tests employ these same antigens, and/or p41 and its polymers, p80 and p120.
Have you any idea why p24 is described as an HIV-1 protein when Professor Luc Montagnier himself points out that p24 is not unique to HIV, and that it is also a constituent of HTLV-1 and HTLV-2 viruses as well as of endogenous retroviral sequences that form up to 2% of the human genome?
Since the glycoprotein with the molecular weight of 160 daltons is a polymer of p41, and Gallo has pointed out that Professor Luc Montagnier’s favoured ‘HIV-protein’ p41 is a ubiquitous cellular protein (which he now admits), can you explain why gp160 is described as an HIV protein? If the ‘co-discoverers of HIV’ are right, HIV antibody test kit reactivity to p24, p41, p80, p120 and p160 would represent no more than the detection of antibodies to cellular and other viral proteins from any number of sources, whether endogenous or exogenous.
What prevents HIV antibody test kits from lighting up to one or more of these non-HIV proteins?
I have difficulty understanding why ELISA HIV antibody test kit results need interpretation, and why reactivity or non-reactivity is determined not by reference to absolute on/off values but to a cut-off value on a continuum. In plain terms, if I am slightly reactive I am not infected, but if I am moderately strongly reactive I am. How can this be? If the proteins employed in the test as antigens are uniquely constituent of HIV-1, and HIV-1 antibodies are specific and monoclonal - the fundamental assumptions underlying HIV antibody testing - how can the test be reactive at all if I am not infected? How was this cut-off value fixed?
Under the heading “What is HIV?” I am told, “HIV is the virus that causes AIDS…” I have copies of and have studied Luc Montagnier’s 1983, and Gallo’s 1984 Science papers on LAV and HTLV-3 (now called HIV), and referred to as authority for this proposition by the test kit manufacturers, and I think you’ll concede that none come even close to establishing (a) that any virus was isolated under the well settled protocol for the purification and isolation of viruses, discussed at a symposium on this procedure at the Pasteur Institute in 1973, and (b) HIV-AIDS aetiology, except by weak reliance perhaps on thepost hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy that has so often has fooled medical researchers. Could you please refer me to any other literature that establishes HIV isolation by the Pasteur method, and the HIV-AIDS causality claimed in the ‘Informed Consent’ document. I believe his quest for such literature has occasioned some difficulty to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis Phd, inventor of the PCR technology adapted to your ‘HIV viral load’ tests. He complains that not even Luc Montagnier could refer him to any such literature, and that medical experts just ‘know’ HIV causes AIDS, just like they ‘knew’ bad air caused malaria. Because they ‘see’ it.
Under the heading “Is there a cure for HIV and AIDS?” I am informed that “there is no known cure” but that with careful management “you can greatly enhance the quality of your life before AIDS sets in.” Am I to understand from this that a person who is HIV-positive will invariably die a premature death from an AIDS indicator disease, and that his life will deteriorate even before such disease develops? If so, what research reports establish this?
What research reports establish that any of the licensed AIDS drugs improve quality of life? Isn’t it trite that they are all so poisonous and their ill-effects so severe that a very high proportion of patients are unable to comply with their treatment regimens and suffer dangerous toxicity injuries?
The ‘Informed Consent’ document restates a basic legal principle that persons urged to undergo any medical procedure are entitled to the fullest information about it, and that medical practitioners are required to supply it. Please consider this request for clarification and deal with my queries in the light of this. I reiterate my request for a copy of the information or operating manual supplied by the test kit manufacturer as I wish to study it closely myself.
Yours faithfully
ANTHONY
BRINK
Postea:
Pietermaritzburg pathologist, Dr Michael King, agreed unreservedly with my points made in paragraphs 1 and 3, and told me that pathologists have been conducting “a running battle with the Life Offices Association for years” regarding the sufficiency of the test as a basis for an HIV-positive diagnosis. At least five people preceded me for my ELISA test as I waited my turn including young black middle class folk who presumably lead not dissimilar lives and enjoy a similar healthy standard of living as their professional and business counterparts among the other ‘low risk’ races. None were alerted to the misinformation contained in the “Informed Consent” form that all were required to sign. Orthodox ‘AIDS expert’ Professor Gerald Stine of the University of North Florida made the same criticisms contained in paragraphs 1 and 3 above in AIDS UPDATE 1999 An Annual Overview of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in his article The Performance Rate for the Combined Elisa and Western Blot HIV Test – Is 99% accuracy good enough? The Answer Is No. As the title tells, and we’ll discuss below, a follow up Western blot test doesn’t plug the holes.
Imagine my surprise then to see King asserting in the Natal Witness newspaper on 28 June 2000, Diagnosis of HIV highly specific: “A number of conditions have been described that can give positive HIV Elisa results... Fortunately, these false positives are uncommon and are excluded by the highly specific confirmatory tests… Occasional samples give indeterminate results on Western Blotting and further patient follow-up or testing with highly sensitive and specific nucleic amplification techniques (PCR) may be required. Despite the admission by mainstream medicine that occasional difficulties with diagnoses can occur, the serological diagnosis of HIV infection using the combination of enzyme immunoassays and Western Blotting is highly sensitive and specific (99%). Ref: Mandell: Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, 5th ed, 2000, Churchill Livingstone.” Roma locuta, ergo finita est!
Before we look at these “highly specific confirmatory tests”, you might be interested to learn that Lynn Morris of the National Institute for Virology told us at the second meeting of President Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel in July 2000 that two reactive ELISA’s suffice for an HIV-positive diagnosis. You might wonder, “How can one unvalidated test possibly confirm another? To which another expert might offer the riposte, “We follow up with a different kind of test, the Western blot; it’s more specific.” Actually, the manufacturers of HIV Western blot tests do not make claims for better specificity than contemporary HIV ELISA kits. And in England and Wales, positive HIV ELISA test results are not confirmed or disconfirmed with an HIV Western blot test precisely because such tests are regarded by the ‘AIDS experts’ there as being too non-specific. The manual for one such HIV Western blot test (Epitope/Organon - Teknika Corporation) warns, “Do not use this kit as the sole basis of diagnosis of HIV-1 infection.” That’s how much confidence the manufacturer has in the specificity of its test. But don’t King’s “highly sensitive”, “highly specific” and “occasional” just roll off the tongue so nicely? No good upsetting the customers. Can’t have them thinking for themselves. Trust us. We know. Anyway Western blot is no different in principle from ELISA; it’s just that with Western blot antibody testing, you get to see which supposed ‘HIV proteins’ on the test strip react with the antibodies in your blood, whereas with ELISA the proteins are served mixed. Both kinds of tests presuppose that the test proteins have been shown to be uniquely constituent of a virus called HIV. But that’s not true. Quite the opposite in fact. It gets worse. Western blot test results for ‘HIV antibodies’ are interpreted differently in different places, kit to kit, lab to lab, country to country. By these different diagnostic criteria, you will be ‘infected with the AIDS virus’ and doomed to die in this country but not that. According to one pathologist but not another. What an incredible mess.
Some really clever guys like Dr William Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council, puff the sophisticated technology of modern ELISA HIV antibody tests by treating you to a little lesson on the purity of the proteins used in them as antigens to fish for the presence of ‘HIV antibodies’. “They don’t use purified proteins anymore”, he lectured us at the AIDS Panel’s second meeting. “They use recombinant proteins now.” That big drop-dead word is sure to impress, until your thoughts stray and you wonder, “What is the point of producing magnificently pure proteins, all with precisely the same molecular weight by means of bio-engineering techniques before ascertaining whether such proteins are unique to HIV?”
King’s statement that one can confirm or disconfirm HIV infection with “highly sensitive and specific nucleic amplification techniques (PCR)” will be a shocker to anybody who has read the contrary admonitions by the manufacturers of such tests. Makgoba spoke the same way in an interview in Focus in June 2000: “I have every confidence that the antibody test is so specific now that we don’t get many false positives. And if you take that with the identification of the virus by DNA techniques, there will be an abundance of correlative results.”
The only HIV PCR test licensed by the FDA for clinical (as opposed to experimental) use by pathologists is Roche Diagnostics Corporation’s AMPLICOR HIV-1 MONITOR Test, version 1.5. The manual says: “The AMPLICOR HIV-1 MONITOR Test, version 1.5 is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV-1 or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV-1 infection.” That’s because the manufacturer recognises that it is not specific enough. No, no, the ‘AIDS expert’ points out. That’s the wrong kind of PCR test. We don’t use quantitative monitoring tests for diagnosing HIV infection; we use a qualitative test. Like Roche Diagnostics Corporation’s other PCR test, their AMPLICOR HIV-1 Test. Well, it would help if the ‘AIDS experts’ read the manual: “For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.” As for “an abundance of correlative results” between HIV PCR and HIV antibody tests, in the only comparative study of its type yet performed - reported in AIDS in 1992 by theMulticenter Quality Control of PCR Detection of HIV DNA - the concordance of reactive results when the same blood was tested with both kinds of tests ranged unpredictably, hit and miss, between 40% and 100%. Odd isn’t it?
Dr King relies on a textbook for his statement that “the serological diagnosis of HIV infection using the combination of enzyme immunoassays and Western Blotting is highly sensitive and specific (99%).” All I can think is that by the time he wrote that, he had forgotten our little chat - specifically our discussion of the Grand Canyon of a difference between specificity and reliability in a low sero-prevalence cohort.
Let’s have a closer look at the significance or otherwise of King’s “99%” specificity figure. I learned that the specificity of the test used on me - an Abbott HIV gO EIA - was claimed to be 99.8%. Just how little such a specificity figure really means is well set out by Christine Maggiore in Los Angeles in a letter she wrote at the end of May 2000 to the webmaster of an AIDS information website: “The fact is that the specificity and the accuracy of HIV tests were determined by assuming that 100% of people with AIDS-defining illnesses who tested positive had actual current infection with HIV. The specificity was established by assuming that 100% of symptomless blood donors who tested HIV-negative did not have a current infection with HIV.”
Abbott Laboratories’s HIVABtm HIV-1 EIA test manual tells how the ‘specificity’ of the test was established: “Sensitivity and Specificity: At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence and absence of HIV-1 antibody in human blood. Therefore sensitivity was computed based on the clinical diagnosis of AIDS and specificity based on random donors. The ABBOT studies show that:
Sensitivity based on an assumed 100% prevalence of HIV-1 antibody in AIDS patients is estimated to be 100% (144 patients tested).
Specificity based on an assumed zero prevalence of HIV-1 antibody in random donors is estimated to be 99.9% (4777 random donors tested).”
The stunning implications of this are highlighted when we recall our pregnancy test illustration. The test gets tried out on 1000 women chosen because they are plump around the middle. They are presumed pregnant because they are tubby. Nobody thinks to establish by means of a scan whether they are actually pregnant. Then the test is tried out on 1000 slender women. They are presumed not to be pregnant because they have flat tummies. Nobody ascertains whether any are in their first terms of pregnancy. The test reacts for all the big-bellied women, and on this basis is declared 100% sensitive for pregnancy. It reacts for only two of the slim women and so gets declared 99.8% specific. Were such junk to be marketed for pregnancy testing, think how women’s groups would freak out. Can you just imagine?
Suppose that after well over a decade of use of this test it just coincidentally entered the heads of two independent teams of researchers on separate continents each to do a scan on one of these plump women who light up the test, and to publish their photographs in their leading trade rag. Imagine if the photograph showed nothing that looked like a foetus, in size and shape, bearing in mind how foetuses look through these scanning devices. The analogy is not as wild as one might think. Australian medical physicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her colleagues at the Royal Perth Hospital tells what happened when two separate teams of researchers went looking for HIV in the preparations of what they thought would be masses of concentrated, purified retroviral particles (Virology, March 1997)(*). And the astonishing concession made in the same year by the ‘discoverer of HIV’, Dr Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, concerning why he never published any electron photomicrograph of purified virus when making his claim to having isolated HIV (then called LAV) in 1983(#). Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s collated papers – all published in fine journals – are archived on the www.virusmyth.com/aids/perthgroup/ website.
When we leave our pregnancy test analogy and return to ‘HIV antibody tests’, the tale curdles even more. What if ‘AIDS defining illnesses’ in the absence of ‘HIV infection’ frequently cause the ‘HIV antibody test’ to react as well? Like the state of being plump setting off a pregnancy test. Such as the state of being thin lighting up an HIV antibody test. It does, actually – simple malnutrition is a reported cause of ‘false-positives’. As is tuberculosis. About seventy other conditions too, amply documented in the medical literature from ‘flu through to malaria. That’s the problem: ‘HIV antibody tests’ have never been validated against confirmed infection, and what’s more, just about anything can set them off. It’s something the ‘AIDS experts’ never get into. The manual for the test kit used on me rightly concedes, “False positive test results can be expected with a test of this nature” - contradicting the ‘Informed Consent’ form on the meaning of a reactive result: “What does it mean if the test is positive?”: “this means that you have been infected with the AIDS virus.”
Dr Desmond Martin wrote an article on the subject of ‘HIV diagnosis’ for the January 2000 issue of the South African Medical Journal. Reading it, you’d think you were in good hands going for an ‘HIV test’. That these guys know what they are doing. That their expert pronouncements on the state of your health can be confidently relied on. That they are cleverer than mediaeval doctors who wrote up an elaborate body of arcane learning on the exquisite variety of diagnostic meanings that could be pegged, for a fee, upon the qualities of your urine - its taste, colour, scent, density, viscosity and so on.
King was unable to answer or ducked the rest of my questions (in fact I had researched and knew the answers already) and referred me to the National Institute for Virology, university virology departments, and to an outfit called TOGA Laboratories, where Dr Desmond Martin currently makes his living. As far as the first two went, I’m afraid it was a case of ‘been there, done that’. Without any luck. None at all. The quality of my exchanges with ‘the experts’ at these places would bring tears to your eyes. University of Durban Virology Professor Alan Smith’s article on ‘HIV testing’ published alongside Dr King’s in the Natal Witness on 28 June 2000 is a good example of the brown-outs you encounter when ‘AIDS experts’ get asked simple questions at the root of this business. I didn’t bother Dr Martin or Dr Sim at TOGA Laboratories. Can you blame me? Nor did I go to the Life Offices Association again. I had approached their Medical Underwriters Committee before. They didn’t know what I was talking about. It all went right over their heads. Meant nothing to the Natal Blood Transfusion Service’s chief medical technologist, Dr Ravi Reddy, either, so I thought it would be pointless asking him: Why should race rather than class and environmental factors predispose one to contracting an infectious disease? (Are blacks really hornier than whites?) How can you determine the seroprevalence (infection rate) in a given community with an indirect (antibody) test before you have established the specificity of the test - by comparing how closely its performance (reactive, non-reactive) matches the incidence of infection (pathogen directly isolated in the patient)? Because until you do this, you’re just chasing your tail.
Think of an antibody test as detecting the fire fighting service out on a call. Usually to put out fires. But also to rescue kittens from trees. Or coax suicide jumpers away from high ledges. Or free drivers pinned inside their crashed cars. Apart from all this, there is an additional problem with relying on antibody tests as the sole basis for a diagnosis of infection: antibodies are often more partial to antigens other than those that stimulated their production. The assumption is that antibodies are specific, like faithful spouses. But as we all know, some husbands prefer their girlfriends to their wives. In short, antibodies are generally poly- not monoclonal. They are faithless partners. So you can’t just assume that a reactive antibody test indicates infection with a particular bug. You have to establish the specificity of the test first. Properly. Not in the asinine manner in which the HIV antibody test kit manufacturers have done. Imagine just assuming that a person lying in a hospital bed is ‘infected with HIV’ and has AIDS, just because he has one of the age-old diseases arbitrarily pulled under the CDC’s ever expanding bureaucratic umbrella as an AIDS indicator disease, and because he is an inner-city queer, black, or junkie – so in a ‘risk group’. Maybe just socially unpopular, marginalised and poor. Just the kind of person to feed AZT.
Why the blood of the impoverished black Africans (as opposed to the black middle classes and elites) makes HIV antibody tests light up like Christmas trees is a matter elucidated for the scientifically intrepid in papers that can be read on the internet: AIDS in Africa: distinguishing fact and fiction (World Journal of Microbiology & Biotechnology (1995) Vol. 11), Is a positive Western blot proof of HIV infection?(Bio/Technology June 1993, Vol. 11), HIV antibodies: further questions and a plea for clarification (Current Medical Research and Opinion Vol. 13: 1997), and HIV Antibody Tests and Viral Load - More Unanswered Questions and a Further Plea for Clarification (Current Medical Research and Opinion Vol. 14: 1998) all by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al and archived at the website mentioned above. Frankly, after these papers, anybody who tells you that a positive result to an ‘HIV antibody’ test means that you are infected with a deadly virus is, to quote John Lauritsen, “either ignorant, lazy or stupid.”
The ‘three or four million South Africans infected’ figure, which drives the hysteria in this country and elicits funds galore for AIDS careerists, is based on the extrapolation of anonymous HIV antibody test results of mostly poor black pregnant women at antenatal clinics. Unfortunately ‘AIDS experts’ haven’t thought to figure into their thrilling sums the fact that past pregnancy itself is a documented cause of ‘false positives’, reported in five separate research papers. And warned against by Abbott. Or, messing up the sums even more, that HIV infectivity is eight times lower for men than women according to top ‘AIDS experts’ (Padian et al 1997) - a curious notion for an allegedly sexually transmitted disease, but then HIV-AIDS is a curious affair. Whose mounting anomalies need interminable excuses, like that other rotting paradigm in its death throes, Ptolemy’s geocentric model of planetary motion, adjusted ad hoc to answer every Copernican challenge, until it all became just too ridiculous, and the whole thing finally collapsed, vehemently defended by the experts to the end.
If you are beginning to suspect that ‘HIV antibody’ testing is nothing more than a vicious form of high tech mumbo jumbo, bone throwing, divination, and death spell casting, with modern witchdoctors keeping suckers like us terrified and in their power - and their pockets full - I should emphasise that this little essay only scratches the surface. In her papers to which I have referred above, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her colleagues take ‘HIV antibody testing’ comprehensively to task. And blow it to smithereens.
This much is certain: HIV antibody test results are no more significant an indication of health or disease than a phrenologist’s skull-chart. They’re worth a bowl of cold spit. But while they shatter countless lives they sure rake in the cash. And the Life Offices Association’s ‘Informed Consent’ form for HIV tests creates litigation possibilities for psychic trauma claims enough to keep lawyers in business for years.
(*) www.deltav.apana.org.au/~vturner/aids
(#) http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/dtinterviewlm.htm
The AIDS Apostates
By Anthony Brink
To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.
Ruth Hubbard Phd
Emeritus professor of molecular biology, Harvard University.
Considering how AIDS saturates our public discourse, galvanises our politicians, thrills our gee-whiz journalists, inspires our musicians, worries our clergy, agitates our AIDS-activist lawyers, perturbs the judges of even our highest courts, engages the South African Law Commission’s energies in cooking up imaginative new bills, dominates our medical research effort, infuses exciting new relevance into tired careers in virology departments, and siphons off our tax rands into the pockets of condom missionaries proselytising to a stubborn public and ‘AIDS counsellors’ programming their victims for death, your regular guy might be excused for believing that our country and the world were in the throes of a dire public health crisis, a new Black Death, and for thinking that the fact of it was as certain as any in science about which there obtains a universal consensus.
In fact, hundreds of scientists of the highest rank disagree with the HIV-AIDS causation hypothesis. They think ‘AIDS’ as a diagnostic construct is a passing fad, a fashionable new name for age-old ills, and that ‘AIDS’ boils down to money-spinning political kitsch. In their most assiduous dissents they emphasise that ‘HIV’ has never been isolated under the well-settled rules for viral isolation, assert that ‘HIV’ has never been shown to exist as an infectious entity of exogenous origin, and demonstrate that every protein employed in the ‘HIV antibody’ test kits as antigens, and claimed to be uniquely constituent of ‘HIV’, is actually cellular, not viral - in other words, that all HIV-positive test results are false positives. In short, they consider the HIV-AIDS paradigm to be a scientific blunder of biblical proportions, and its experts foolish quacks. These AIDS dissidents include professors emeriti at the pinnacle of their specialities in cell-biology, virology and related fields. They also include eminent mathematicians, actuaries, philosophers, ethicists and law and history professors. Among them are two exceptionally distinguished Nobel laureates in our time, Walter Gilbert (Chemistry 1980), and Kary Mullis (Chemistry 1993).
Dr Peter Duesberg, professor of cell-biology, University of California at Berkeley, member of The National Academy of Sciences: Before Duesberg’s wrecking-ball challenge to Gallo’s HIV-AIDS theory was published as an invited paper in the prestigious journal Cancer Research in 1988, Gallo had remarked, “No one knows more about retroviruses than Peter Duesberg.” Once acclaimed as a widely published and extensively cited Nobel candidate for his discovery of onco-genes and genetic mapping of retroviruses, but now ‘delegitimated’ as a scientist, Duesberg was the recipient of the largest annual research grant in biology for years - awarded for the pursuit of whatever avenue of scientific enquiry took his fancy. Stripped of his grant and his post-graduate classes, evicted from his laboratory, practically barred from researching and publishing, and reduced to chairmanship of his faculty’s annual picnic committee, he continues to point out the fundamental anomalies, deficiencies and paradoxes of the 15 year old theory that the 29 old diseases renamed AIDS in the presence of HIV antibodies could have any causal link to a retrovirus. However, Duesberg finds himself increasingly alone in the AIDS dissident camp too, eclipsed by Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al (below) whose more fundamental tack in impeaching the HIV-AIDS theory is winning over its best heterodox scientists - most recently, Kary Mullis (below), pathology and epidemiology specialist Gordon Stewart (below), and Etienne de Haarven, pathology professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, renowned for his pioneering published work in the electron photomicrography of viruses.
Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, bio-physicist, department of medical physics, Royal Perth Hospital, Australia: Collaborating with, among others, John Papadimitriou, a practising pathologist and professor at University of Western Australia’s medical school, David Causer, senior physicist, head of the department of medical physics and professor at Royal Perth Hospital, and Valendar Turner, consultant emergency physician at the Royal Perth Hospital, Papadopulos-Eleopulos has raised the most radical and dramatic challenges to the HIV-AIDS theory, by highlighting the lack of a proper gold standard for the HIV antibody tests, in that unlike other known viruses, HIV has never been isolated according to the classical procedure for the isolation of viruses, commonly referred to as the Pasteur Rules.
Dr Walter Gilbert, formerly molecular biology professor at Harvard University: One of contemporary science’s most outstanding and accomplished scientists, Gilbert won his Nobel for inventing the now foundational modern technique for DNA sequencing. He considers Duesberg to be “absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by [HIV]. There is no animal model for AIDS, and without an animal model, you cannot establish Koch’s postulates [to prove the role of the suspected pathogen].” He observes, “The community as a whole doesn’t listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints, that if you have simply a consensus view it severely stultifies; it fails to see the problems of that consensus and it depends on the existence of critics to break up that iceberg and permit knowledge to develop. This is in fact one of the underpinnings of democratic theory. It’s one of the basic reasons that we believe in notions of free speech. And it’s one of the great forces in intellectual development…The general public accepts what the media tells them. And the media has blown up the virus as being the cause of AIDS, and the scientific community - parts of it - have blown up the virus as the cause of AIDS because it is more convenient to have a neat explanation than to be in that situation in which we often are in science at which the problems, the questions, still face us, and our knowledge proceeds gradually to overcome those difficulties.”
Dr Kary Mullis, molecular biologist: Nobel winner Mullis’s watershed invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction technology for amplifying minute DNA fragments for identification has so revolutionised biology that one might fairly speak of two epochs, the dark ages before and the enlightenment after it. He deplores the misapplication of his invention to measure ‘HIV viral load.’ He points out, “It is not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. …there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents.” He predicts, “Years from now, people will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find those who excommunicated Galileo.” Endorsing Duesberg’s rejection of the orthodox model of infectious AIDS, he says, “As applied, the HIV theory is unfalsifiable, and useless as a medical hypothesis… I can’t find a single virologist who will give me references which show HIV is the probable cause of AIDS. [Not even Luc Montagnier could help.] If you ask...you don’t get an answer, you get fury.” The HIV-AIDS hypothesis, he thinks, is “one hell of a mistake.”
Dr Beverly Griffin, director and professor of virology, Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London: “I do not believe HIV, in and of itself, can cause AIDS.”
Dr Harry Rubin, retrovirologist, professor of molecular biology, University of California at Berkeley, member of National Academy of Sciences: “I don’t think the cause of AIDS has been found. I think [that in] a disease as complex as AIDS…there are likely to be multiple causes. In fact, to call it a single disease when there are so many multiple manifestations seems to me to be an over-simplification…The causal role of HIV in AIDS is certainly not proven.”
Dr Albert Sabin, discoverer of live-virus polio vaccine, National Institutes of Health: “The basis of present action and education is that everybody who tests positive for the virus must be regarded as a transmitter and there is no evidence for that.”
Dr Luc Montagnier, virologist, ‘co-discover of HIV’, Pasteur Institute, Paris: “There are too many shortcomings in the theory that HIV causes all signs of AIDS…We are seeing people HIV infected for 9,10 years or more, 12 years, and they are still in good shape; their immune system is still good, and it is unlikely that those people will come down with AIDS later.”
Sir John Maddox, former editor, Nature: “[Luc] Montagnier said clearly what he meant. HIV [alone] is…not…a sufficient cause of AIDS.”
Dr Simon Wain-Hobson, immunologist, Pasteur Institute, Paris: “…an intrinsic cytopathic effect of the virus [HIV] is no longer credible...”
Dr Richard Strohman, emeritus professor of cell-biology, University of California at Berkeley: The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is “bankrupt.”
Dr Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of public health at the University of Glasgow, former AIDS advisor to the World Health Organisation: “AIDS is a behavioural disease. It is multifactorial, brought on by several simultaneous strains on the immune system - drugs, pharmaceutical and recreational, sexually transmitted diseases, multiple viral infections… there is no specific etiologic agent of AIDS... the disease arises as a result of a cumulative process following a period of exposure to multiple environmental factors… Nobody wants to look at the facts about this disease. It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve sent countless letters to medical journals pointing out the epidemiological discrepancies and they simply ignore them. The fact is, this whole heterosexual AIDS thing is a hoax.”
Dr Bernard Forscher, former managing editor of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “The HIV hypothesis ranks with the ‘bad air’ theory for malaria and the ‘bacterial infection’ theory of beriberi and pellagra [caused by nutritional deficiencies]. It is a hoax that became a scam.”
Dr Alfred Hassig, immunologist, former emeritus professor of immunology, University of Bern, and former director of the Swiss blood transfusion service(recently late): “The sentences of death accompanying the medical diagnosis of AIDS should be abolished.”
Dr Charles Thomas, former professor of molecular biology at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities: “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.” He himself has no doubts. He rejects the HIV-AIDS hypothesis as a “fraud”.
Dr Phillip Johnson, senior professor of law, University of California at Berkeley: “One does not need to be a scientific specialist to recognise a botched research job and a scientific establishment that is distorting the facts to promote an ideology and maximise its funding. The establishment continues to doctor statistics and misrepresent the situation to keep the public convinced that a major viral pandemic is under way when the facts are otherwise.”
Dr Serge Lang, professor of mathematics, Yale University and member of the National Academy of Sciences: “There does not even exist a single proper definition of AIDS on which discourse or statistics can reliably be based... the CDC calls these diseases AIDS only when antibodies against HIV are confirmed or presumed to be present. If a person tests HIV negative, then the diseases are given another name… I do not regard the causal relationship between HIV and any disease as settled. I have seen considerable evidence that highly improper statistics concerning HIV and AIDS have been passed off as science, and that top members of the scientific establishment have carelessly, if not irresponsibly, joined the media in spreading misinformation about the nature of AIDS.”
Dr Joseph Sonnabend, South African born New York physician: “...there is no specific etiologic agent of AIDS... the disease arises as a result of a cumulative process following a period of exposure to multiple environmental factors... The marketing of HIV, through press-releases and statements, as a killer virus causing AIDS without the need for any other factors, has so distorted research and treatment that it may have caused thousands of people to suffer and die.”
Dr Harvey Bialy, scholar in residence, Institute for Biotechnology, University of Mexico; founding Scientific Editor: Bio/Technology (now Nature Biotechnology): “From both my literature review and my personal experience over most of the AIDS - so called AIDS centres in Africa, I can find absolutely no believable persuasive evidence that Africa is in the midst of a new epidemic of infectious immunodeficiency.”
Dr Charles L. Geshekter, professor of African History, California State University: From “Cameroon to California, sex education must no longer be distorted by terrifying, dubious misinformation that equates sex with death… African poverty, not some extraordinary sexual behavior, is the best predictor of AIDS-defining diseases… A 1994 report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases concluded that HIV tests were useless in central Africa, where the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, malaria, and leprosy were so prevalent that they registered over 70% false positive results...in people whose immune systems are compromised for a wide variety of reasons other than HIV...”
Dr Hiram Caton, ethicist, head of the School of Applied Ethics at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia: “The AIDS epidemic was a mirage manufactured by scientists who believed that integrity could be maintained amidst the diverting influences of big money, prestige and politics.”
Dr Ralph Moss: author of The Cancer Industry: “The paradigm that was laid down for how to milk the cancer problem is basically the same paradigm which is being followed in milking the AIDS problem.”
Dr Frank Buianouckas: professor of mathematics, Bronx, New York: “I suspect everything involved in this AIDS epidemic. If HIV causes anything, it certainly causes fund-raisers. It sells stocks. It supports dances. It sells condoms. And it keeps the AIDS establishment going.”
The Pope of AIDS
By Anthony Brink
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.
He has nerve and he has knowledge.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), English author.
Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
"The Speckled Band" (1892), of Dr. Grimesby Roylott.
For any number of obvious reasons, it would probably be disquieting to most folk at large to discover that Mother Theresa - to employ a fanciful illustration - had kept a Swiss bank account. One would imagine that the honesty of men working at the frontiers of science in that hazy twilight terrain between the known and the unknown, the certain and the speculative, would count for quite a bit as well. Particularly where their pontifications, advices and theories have the potential both to reap magnificent honours and riches, and very directly affect us dumb fucks out in the laity, who sit at the feet of these guys and crave as much of their wisdom as we can get. And especially in a time of a perceived medical emergency, or during the rise of an hysterical epidemic, fuelled by a medieval fear of tainted blood and poisoned semen - and now evil mothers’ milk - in which we look up with frightened eyes to these secular sages for deliverance from tiny invisible enemies which we are told beset us. Mostly when enjoying our favourite evening recreation.
Science at its outer limits is populated by no end of ambitious cowboys of modest acumen hungry for fame, glory and the Ferraris in which some of their lucky chums in bio-tech cruise out of their labs’ parking lots in the direction of their Cessna hangars. They live so to speak in remote Wild West towns with lamentably few marshals to keep an eye on things. Many are the left-overs too mediocre to cut it in university environments who wind up in homes for scientific dullards like the politically powerful health bureaucracies of the National Institutes of Health and The Centres for Disease Control in the USA. As we’ve all seen, when these oracles mumble, press trumpets blare and the entire world eagerly gobbles up every word, without demur. Notwithstanding how many fake health crises they have delivered still-born into the popular consciousness, like the idle herpes scare in the 70’s, the great swine flu fiasco in the same decade, the phantom syphilis epidemic in the first half of the 20th century, and that shining emblem of medical idiocy, the pellagra plague in the US South over the same period, treated inter alia with arsenic, electrocution and ruthless quarantine, which turned out to be plain malnutrition among the politically awkward droves of poor white crackers in deep south industrial towns.
We need contagious epidemics to fight. Even imagined ones. They’re tremendously psychologically useful. Germ theory so dominates contemporary medicine that it seeks germs everywhere, the more virulent the better, and especially if they can be linked to our culture’s great taboos, sex and death. Anything to avoid facing up to unappealing political realities like widespread chronic undernourishment among a shameful number of our countrymen as the time-honoured and common sense cause of broken health. Or, at the other pole, for those of us felicitously occupying the higher orders, factors inextricably tied to the excesses of our culture of affluence.
Of course, the loftier the degree of scientific specialisation, the sharper the point of the pyramid, the smaller and remoter the frontier town, and the fewer the guys with badges. As in a funny little corner of theoretical (some say virtual) virology called retrovirology - served at the commencement of the AIDS era by only a handful of labs run by the same guys who’d lost the ‘war on cancer’ declared by Nixon in 1971, by putting all their money, and 40 billion of their country’s, on the perfectly ridiculous theory that cancer was an infectious condition caused by viruses.
Folk inclined to the view that a reasonable degree of personal integrity is essential to serve as a brake on the perennial temptation tickling largely unpoliced scientists at the frontiers of their specialisations to make extravagant claims with fabulous commercial potential beyond those which their data really support might be put out to learn that the pope of AIDS is a complete scum-bag.
We speak of Robert Gallo, who told the worried world at a press conference convened by the US Health Department on 23 April 1984, before the publication of any paper for his fellows to assess, that he’d discovered the cause, a virus he said, of the poor health that a narrow subset of gay men with ruinous lifestyles were experiencing - later christened, in a flourish of conceptual surplusage, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Having sneaked through a patent application on the blood test he’d devised for his claimed viral culprit ahead of the previously lodged French one, thus guaranteeing him a fortune in royalties, Gallo went on to publish four papers in Science two weeks later. Then the trouble started, an exuberant international disputation over who stole the fake diamonds. For Gallo this was the Paula trouble that led to Monica.
Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in France complained that the samples containing what he believed to be his newly spotted virus and which he’d trustingly sent Gallo had been flagrantly ripped off. He sued across the sea. Gallo brazenly counter-charged his accuser. It was embarrassing for the US administration to have its premier AIDS scientist accused of theft and fraud, but with the help of a gang of lawyers hired to fudge the facts and conceal boxes of crucial discoverable documents, Gallo got off - by dint of a neat political compromise agreeing a history, cosigned by no less than the presidents of the respective republics, Reagan and Chirac, in terms of which these two giants of modern biology were henceforth to be deemed co-discoverers of the ‘AIDS virus’.
The sham began unravelling almost immediately. A trouble-making investigative journalist on the Chicago Tribune, John Crewdson, began sticking his nose in. He went to print with a comprehensively researched expose spilling the beans on Gallo’s theft of Luc Montagnier’s samples, even his photographs of them. Hardly able to do otherwise, Gallo’s bosses in the National Institutes of Health instigated an enquiry with Yale biochemist Frederic Richards as overseer. Reviewing the four seminal research papers upon which the entire HIV-AIDS causation paradigm is founded - if feebly - the inquiry found fraud, a discrepancy between what had been reported and what had been done. The NIH watered it down, finding Gallo guilty merely of “creating and fostering conditions that gave rise to falsified/fabricated data and falsified reports.” This loyal whitewash was promptly criticised by Richards and by Senator John Dingle, who had got wind of the misfeasance in Gallo’s laboratory, and had begun his own investigation under the aegis of his Sub-Committee on Oversights and Investigations of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Department of Health’s Office of Research Integrity reviewed the NIH report and disagreed with the cop-out. It had no trouble finding Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct, the gravest possible verdict, and a capital offence in career terms. So did the Dingle Committee in its draft report. Facing criminal prosecution for the perjury adorning his patent application, Gallo was forced to leave the National Institutes of Health in disgrace. On the scandal festered, until 1993, when happily for Gallo, it all went away. The government dropped the patent charges, and those of fraudulently making a misstatement in a scientific journal and failing to credit the work of other researchers in claiming it as his own. Why? Because, a review board, comprising lawyers naturally, not scientists, had raised the bar in asserting a brand-new revised definition of scientific misconduct, which Gallo’s prosecutors in the Office of Research Integrity doubted they could clear. Unlike Sol Kerzner who kept his head down when the bribery case against him was dropped, Gallo boasted complete vindication.
Before making becoming famous for HIV, Gallo’s laboratory had been found by an investigative panel of university scientists appointed in 1974 to be one of the worst offenders in the scandalous abuse of federal funds dished out during Nixon’s ‘War on Cancer’. Two co-researchers later went down for embezzlement and taking secret gratuities.
From this scientific cesspool was spewed the constitution for The Terror, the founding papers of the most powerful, all-pervasive and terrifying medical model of our time, the HIV-AIDS-causation hypothesis. No wonder the Nobel committee has set its face against the whole stinking shambles. Yet its integrity as a premise is assumed in the almost one hundred thousand papers in the subject that have been published since. Those critics making a living in the scientific establishment who point a finger at the emperor’s pink arse do so at immense professional and personal risk, and for some, at terrible cost. But there’s another story.
Curiously, the Office of Research Integrity found that the fraud tainting Gallo’s claim-to-fame papers did not affect the validity of the papers’ main conclusions, even though some of the key research work was described as “of dubious scientific merit”, and “really crazy.” Suffice it to say that others who have meticulously scrutinised Gallo’s original HIV research claims - allowing for the purpose of reviewing them that the dubious research data is sound - have found them to be, well, shall we say troubling. The adventurous leap between the papers’ contents and their headings, for starters. But that’s another yarn still.
Gallo’s disgraceful behaviour in relation to his AIDS research was no first. Had he not ascended to such power and influence within the federal health bureaucracy, it is likely that his claim to have found a single infectious cause for the disparate diseases grouped together as AIDS in the early 1980’s would have been laughed out of court. After all, this was the bright spark who, with almost as much fanfare as that at his flash-bulb popping HIV press announcement, had loudly touted his discovery of what he claimed to be the first identified human retrovirus, HL23V, in the mid 70’s. After another look, this exciting find turned out to be nothing of the kind, just an accidental laboratory artefact. His laboratory hadn’t done the most basic controls. The virus had never existed. To his great embarrassment, Gallo had to retract his fancy claims, and HL23V then completely disappeared from the scientific lexicon.
As the last misfired shots were going off in the failed cancer war - staged largely around the retroviral-cancer hypothesis - and it had become irresistibly plain to everyone that cancer had nothing to do with germs, and the whole thing had been a monumental waste of money, Gallo and his mates (known in-house as the Bob Club) sought new funding opportunities for their imminently redundant laboratories. Ever eager to position himself where the action was, he began punting another retrovirus which he claimed to have discovered, HTLV1, as the possible cause of the odd diseases like Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystitis carinii pneumonia suddenly appearing to ail urban fast-track life-style gay men in San Francisco and New York. The virus had in fact been identified by biologists in Gallo’s lab, principally Poiesz and Ruscetti, not Gallo, but true to form he appropriated the discovery and took the accolades. Wanting the virus to be all things, the theory that HTLV1 could be responsible for AIDS was ludicrous. He had previously claimed this virus, again on absurd grounds, to be the cause of a rare form of leukaemia, which amounts to disorderly immune cell replication, not premature cell death. “One of the most exciting stories of twentieth century biology”, he gushed. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis thinks it “a joke.” The virus had first been posited to be a cell division stimulant, not a killer. Obviously, Gallo’s new converse role for HTLV1 went up like a lead balloon, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t long afterwards that Montagnier sent Gallo his samples, and we know the rest. In cravenly seeking the imprimatur of Big American Science, by seeking the endorsement for his work of an abject rogue, Montagnier naively left his keys in the ignition, and the next thing it was gone. Gallo resprayed Montagnier’s LAV as HTLVIII. It was later renamed HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, on the basis of Gallo’s claims, without proof to warrant its fearsome title. (Unless one thinks that correlations disclose proofs of causation. As if sparrows sometimes seen on telephone cables cause crossed lines.)
Whether HIV (or rather the minute biological traces said to evidence its presence) actually lives up to its frightening billing, is something Gallo can’t seem to make up his mind about. This ought to come as some comfort to those who live in wait for the clatter of the hangman’s key. Once insisting that HIV “kills like a truck”, and “would kill Clark Kent”, he now concedes, “We don’t know that…100 percent of people infected with HIV will die with AIDS. We don’t know that. We shouldn’t be predicting that, and it could even precipitate suicide. They shouldn’t have put that on the front page (of the Washington Post), even if it were true. But the fact is that we just don’t know.” In 1995, The Pasteur Institute’s Simon Wain-Hobson confessed, “An intrinsic cytopathic effect of the virus is no longer feasible.” The biggest medical research effort in history has found HIV to be biologically inactive. Gallo has tried weaselling out of the difficulty created by this humbling observation by suggesting that ‘cofactors’ might be involved in AIDS, since HIV can’t do any mischief on its own. (Time magazine’s 1996 Man of the Year, David Ho’s opposite assertions in 1996 have imploded on his childish mathematical errors.) Gallo had lots to say about a virus called HHV8 for a while, implicated as a ‘co-factor’ in the development of that signal AIDS condition Kaposi’s Sarcoma, but like all other exciting breakthroughs in AIDS research, it too has proved to be just another flash in the pan. Worse still, it is now generally accepted, and since 1994 by Gallo too, that those horrible skin blotches have nothing to do with HIV at all.
At last count, Gallo was on SABC TV a couple of years ago, singing his own praises for his alleged breakthrough anti-HIV protein HAF, distilled from the urine of women with child. About which we have heard nothing since. Naturally, since it was just another rodeo stunt. Gallo’s new laboratory in Baltimore had produced nothing to show for the millions he had duped state and municipal authorities into giving him, and was about to have its plug pulled by the Maryland legislature accordingly. A neatly timed “very important discovery” defeated the danger.
Since the case for Gallo’s HIV-AIDS hypothesis is invariably pressed with calls to the authority of its famous protagonist, in the absence of scientific proof in the sense that most curious folk understand, it’s as well that we know what kind of bloke we’re relying on.
With such scintillating credentials as Gallo’s, no wonder that astute German virologist Stefan Lanka - referring to HIV-AIDS, Luc Montagnier, and Gallo - talks of “a medical theory concocted by a French mediocrity who right from the start doubted the validity of a virus-only theory of AIDS causation, and only last week unleashed a new wave of doubt; and an American scientific gangster who had committed so many crass, self-aggrandising blunders in the previous decade, that he could not really be reliedupon to tell the time correctly.” The Einstein of modern biology, Kary Mullis, doesn’t mince words either; he considers Gallo and his acolytes “so stupid they’re to be pitied.”
How Could They All Be Wrong? Doctors and AIDS
By Anthony Brink
I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any other human experience.Alice James
A response sometimes heard to the expression of doubt about the integrity of the HIV-AIDS paradigm as a medical model for understanding disease incidence is, “How could all the doctors in the world be wrong?” There are many possible answers to this question.
One might point out that unanimity has never guaranteed the soundness of medical constructs, and examples of this abound. The history of medicine both ancient and modern is a wrecking-yard full of broken and abandoned ideas. In this century alone innumerable medical theses have collapsed to which nearly all doctors once subscribed, such as bacterial theories of scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra, and more recently, the immuno-surveillance and retroviral theories of cancer aetiology - for which billions of dollars funded thousands of convincing research papers during the “War on Cancer” declared by Nixon in 1971. Then there was swine flu: 1976 saw President Gerald Ford on television, at the behest of the American medical establishment, solemnly urging all Americans to get vaccinated against an imminent deadly influenza epidemic. About 50 million Americans were panicked into being immunised with useless or harmful vaccines rushed onto the market. Adverse reactions resulted in damages claims of $2.7 billion. Not a single case of swine flu appeared subsequent to the death of a sick recruit undergoing basic training in a boot camp in New Jersey (hardly an unusual event) that had ignited all the hysteria. Before HIV-AIDS, and alongside the mad cow craze in Britain and the avian flu folly in Hong Kong, the great swine flu fiasco was perhaps the most telling instance in recent times of how medicine can lose its head.
Another answer to the question goes to the fact that most doctors have scarcely more than a layman’s grasp of the concepts that populate biology at its molecular horizon. For instance, most would gape dully if asked to define the peculiar characteristics of a retrovirus (like HIV, we’re told) as distinct from other viruses, or distinguish endogenous and exogenous retroviruses, or articulate the rival contentions advanced by molecular biologists about whether the whole of retrovirology might be a mistake, a wrong turn at a scientific road-fork, a bad inference drawn from the evidence of certain metabolic biochemical phenomena which look odd when seen against old-fashioned rules of molecular genetics, and the possibility that retroviruses might not exist as infectious agents at all - that it is rather the classical dogma that needs an overhaul. Taxed about the HIV theory of AIDS, most doctors can do little more than quote the claims of their authorities, like priests citing papal bulls and encyclicals, making obeisance to their cardinals.
A third answer would make the impudent point that it is fallacious to imagine that doctors generally have a superior capacity for reasoning than their patients. The notes given medical students speak to the scant education that doctors receive in this art. To read them is to see how flimsy medical and biological theories are dished up as fact for rote learning, making the kind of call-and-answer instruction one sees in farm schools in this country look like an adventure in lateral-thinking training. Doctors do so well at school because they’re the kind of guys who are the most easily schooled. In myths and legends to outdo the Hare Krishna people. Especially virologists, who occupy the haughtiest medical echelons, but who seem to have the dimmest bulbs in the upper storey. As revealed by what they swallow without a hiccup. And regurgitate to their students. Like the timeless French fancy (“Le Rage”) that a bite from a dog acting wild and crazy can make you go mad too - and die. (But not the dog; man is the ‘end-host’ they say.) You can go the same way from eating steak. Although nobody can plausibly say why. Or some cancers are caused by viruses and are infectious. Or the most hilarious notion of them all: having sex can be deadly. Mothers’ milk too. But not spit. All of a sudden. After millions of years. Thanks to a mutated virus from monkeys. Or maybe the moon. And all of this without any evidence. Not a shred. And there’s a funny part to it. You might be feeling fine. But you’re sure to go in six months time from any one of a couple of dozen diseases or malignancies. No, make that two years, well actually five; shall we say eight, or ten, or twelve, maybe fifteen; OK perhaps your life is just shortened a bit. Definitely? Yes, most certainly; no, not necessarily. Look, we don’t know. How, why? We don’t have the faintest idea. Theories zigzag like a drunk at the wheel. (“We are still confused…, but at least now we are confused at a higher level of understanding” - Harvard Medical School professor of immunology Paul Johnson) Excuse me. Is this the circus?
Nor do doctors necessarily proceed from a more rational mindset than Joe Public does. The opposite may be the case. That HIV-AIDS as a medical construct could have taken root so richly among doctors, despite its absurd fundamental tenets (which fly in the face of everything known to virology), illustrates the point. As Harvey Bialy, scholar in residence at the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Mexico and editor at large of the prestigious science journal Nature Biotechnology puts it, the HIV theory of AIDS “turns immunology upside down and inside out.” To begin with, never before was the presence of antibodies taken to be prognostic of future disease. They used to be thought of as good things – evidence, where the patient appears healthy, of a successful immune response to a pathogen defeated. Former molecular biology professor at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities, Charles Thomas predicts that after the balloon pops, historians will be studying the flight of common sense in the lunacy of the AIDS age, “for a 100 years, ...how America gave AIDS to the world.” But since HIV-AIDS as a diagnostic construct is still hegemonically regnant in our time, the point about the way doctors as a group tend to think needs illustrating with a different example. What better than the turn medicine took during the Third Reich.
The Nazis’ virulently irrational and barbarous doctrines of racial hygiene found huge appeal for German and Austrian doctors in that era. No other profession was as well represented on Nazi party membership lists. From an ostensibly sober, rational profession functioning as an elite caste in a culture that seemed itself to be the fruit of the Enlightenment, just under half of them were card-carrying Nazis. Of course not all engaged in the sadistic butchery of untermenschen for which the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials were conducted, but it would be a mistake to imagine that such criminals were aberrant quacks from the fringes, flourishing like vermin on the opportunities created within the Nazi eugenics paradigm. In fact many medical practitioners and academics tried or named in testimony at the trials had enjoyed international eminence in their professional fields. Dr Edwin Katzenellenbogen, for instance, who got life imprisonment, had served on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School.
Scholars of religious thinking have long known that the more horrible and improbable the founding superstitions of a new faith, the greater its capacity to mobilise the popular imagination and the stronger the force of its revolutionary engine. In medicine, religion’s first cousin, the same sometimes applies. Like an infant upstart religion with imperial designs, the HIV-AIDS paradigm calls for a vigorous rebellion against long-established models of understanding. Woe betide any conservative scientists reluctant to become conversos to the rude new creed, who point out that the new theory is absurd on its face, that the link between AIDS and sex is no stronger than its link with sleeping; they become marginalised like Jews defying the demands of medieval Christendom, not racked and burned, but ostracised - scientifically defrocked, blacklisted and delegitimated, stripped of research funding, banned from lecturing podia, kicked out of their laboratories, rendered unemployable in academia or industry, menaced with confinement in psychiatric wards, isolated from graduate students in whom they might instill similar heretic doubts, and barred from publishing in the journals that once craved their papers. But naturally; radical political dissident Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US has pointed out that “if you serve power, power rewards you with respectability. If you work to undermine power…you are reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert.” The AIDS phenomenon at root is a vast pumping aggregation of interests with enormous political and economic power. Doctors and scientists who challenge its sacred tenets risk attracting the wrath of the revolution’s red guards. They won’t be thrown from windows. But their careers will be over. For their reactionary intransigence these critics will be marked always with pejorative epithets, as persistent as tattoos, like ‘discredited’, ‘loony’, ‘maverick’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible and pernicious’. Just to make sure we correctly tell the wits from the dunces. And to discourage us from asking, “Well, what are these guys actually saying?”
A fourth explanation lies in the fact that for all their social status and prestige, in truth doctors generally function close to the bottom of the food-chain in the medical-industrial complex, and serve as little more than a thoughtless delivery system for the pharmaceutical corporations – whose wares they peddle makes the medical drug industry one of the most profitable legal enterprises on the planet. Just how little room doctors are allowed for independent judgment founded on their own observations is revealed in the fact that in some places a doctor who declines to follow an approved treatment regimen such as chemotherapy for cancerous tumours, in view of his empirical assessment of its utter uselessness and lethal toxicity, risks sanctions from his controlling guild. Imagine the trouble a doctor would be in were he brazenly to announce his conclusion that having investigated the business, reactive HIV antibody test results are virtually meaningless - pointers to no more than heightened non-specific immunologic activity. And were he to refuse to diagnose negative or positive, selecting for life or death, like a Nazi doctor calling links or rechts. Or marking ‘+’ on the medical files of slow or crippled German children, to mark them for murder during the euthanasia programme.
In sum, one doesn’t have to cast about too far for answers to the question, “How could all the doctors in the world be wrong about AIDS?” Medicine’s penchant for screwing up magnificently, its characteristic intellectual sluggishness, and the appeal of “magical thinking” for its practitioners is plain to anyone who turns back a few pages.
By Anthony Brink
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Sourced
FOREWORD BY MARTIN WELZ
DEDICATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
AZT: A MEDICINE FROM HELL
AZT: A MEDICINE FROM HEAVEN (Dr D J Martin)
AZT AND HEAVENLY REMEDIES
[1] Dr Martin scolds the editor of the Citizen from a high horse.
[3] AZT and muscles.
[10] AZT and bone marrow.
[14] What does AZT do for opportunistic infections?
[15] Does AZT have “long lasting beneficial effects”?
[16] What did the Concorde trial in Europe reveal about AZT?
[17] The invention of HAART cocktails.
[18] Does AZT prolong life – or shorten it?
[19] The grim findings of the Claude Bernard Hospital study in France.
[21] Pressure from the manufacturer to sweeten the Concorde findings.
[22] Does AZT “improve quality of life”?
[26] AZT and the liver.
[30] AZT, foetal toxicity and birth defects.
[37] Is AZT safe for neonates and children?
[39] Are the ‘side effects’ of AZT different from AIDS?
[40] How well do untreated HIV-positive people do?
[41] How are children exposed to AZT in the womb affected?
[43] What did the introduction of AZT do for the AIDS death rate in the US?
[44] What cancer risks are posed to babies of mothers treated with AZT?
[49] Does AZT reduce HIV transmission from mother to child?
[50] AZT and the ‘AIDS experts’ at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital.
[51] A precedent for AZT: Diethylstilbestrol.
[52] Cancer again.
[56] AZT, nerve damage and dementia.
[58] AZT and hearts.
[59] AZT and eyes.
[60] A lesson from Japan.
[61] More cancer.
[66] AZT and needlesticks.
[67] Why AZT can never in principle prevent HIV infection.
[70] AZT and rape victims.
[72] MRC president Dr William Makgoba and the South African experts.
[73] Big-shots overseas.
[74] The National Minister of Health on AZT.
[75] Charlene Smith cheerleading AZT.
[84] The puzzling GlaxoWellcome HIV-AIDS Helpline.
[86] Mbeki and D P leader Tony Leon debate AZT for rape victims.
[88] The New York Times on ‘African AIDS’.
[89] Mbeki replies to Leon in his Oliver Tambo Memorial Lecture.
[90] South African journalists slap down the government’s concerns.
[93] Don’t take HAART - the latest research reports.
[111] A Pellagra parable.
[112] ACT UP founder Larry Kramer speaks about HAART.
[113] A withering indictment of AZT by the Perth group.
[114] AZT, Jewish weddings and soccer riots.
[115] GlaxoWellcome’s feeble response to the Perth group critique.
[116] Mbeki chides the ignorant MRC president and Nature correspondent.
[118] The lazy pharmacology professor who let the President down.
[124] The AZT campaign peters out, and Nevirapine moves in.
[125] AZT and its coy advocates.
[126] Justice Edwin Cameron and medical miracles.
[130] AIDS Law Project director Mark Heywood sounds off.
[134] Dr Neil McKerrow’s caring cures.
[135] Mbeki answers an appeal by a judge, church leaders and an AIDS expert to provide AZT to pregnant women.
[136] Mbeki explains his reservations about AZT.
[138] Journalists react to Mbeki’s grasp of the triphosphorylation problem.
[139] Mandela on Mbeki.
[140] The calomel calamity.
[141] Conclusions
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
WHY THE ‘AIDS TEST’ IS USELESS AND PATHOLOGISTS AGREE
THE AIDS APOSTATES
THE POPE OF AIDS
HOW COULD THEY ALL BE WRONG? DOCTORS AND AIDS
AN AIDS CASE
The upside of democracy is that every citizen has the right of access to information, the right to express, exchange and debate different points of view and, finally, to a vote. The downside, of course, is that each citizen is burdened with the responsibility of having to think for himself. That, in a nutshell, is what the investigative magazine noseweek is about, and why, prompted by the author of this book nearly two years ago, noseweek published a series of articles titled Rethinking AIDS.
For the first time South Africans were exposed to a critical re-evaluation of HIV and AZT undertaken by a number of very eminent scientists.
Clearly, many South Africans, reared in a society where for half a century they were forbidden to think for themselves, now find it too onerous a responsibility. They long for the quick fix. If AIDS is a problem, there must be a pill for it - which the government must pay for. Anyone, be it politician or pharmaceutical company, who is prepared to offer them that assurance, no matter how recklessly, is eagerly assumed to be right - because that lets us off the hook and instantly makes us feel good. The fact that it may not make the AIDS sufferers feel any better is, apparently, of no consequence.
Conversely, anyone who raises questions about AIDS exposes our vulnerability, and clearly makes many people, including the president of the South African Medical Research Council and the editor of the Mail and Guardian, very, very angry. Some abandon any attempt at thought - such as Sunday Times writer Laurice Taitz, who, in reporting the AZT controversy, gaily took it upon herself to declare to her readers: “the truth is the drug is not toxic.” Read this book and you will know why I say the Sunday Times clearly does not take AIDS seriously when it assigns a writer of Ms Taitz’s intellectual ability to the subject. And that when Dr William Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council, declares he has read nothing critical about the effects of AZT on infants, this is a reflection not of the state of science on the matter, but of his own arrogant indolence.
Anthony Brink is a citizen who takes his rights and his responsibilities seriously. He has written a book for every intelligent citizen to read. If you are not a member of those professions, do not be intimidated by the medical and pharmacological terminology. Simply stick with the argument. It is devastatingly clear.
Reading this debate about AZT between Brink, a Pietermaritzburg advocate, and Dr Des Martin, president of the Southern African HIV-AIDS Clinicians Society, leads one to reflect on the question: “What is an expert?” Dr Martin may have the credentials of expertise, but Brink has the intelligence, investigative zeal and adherence to the principles of scientific enquiry that make for authority on this subject. He has tracked and digested every important reference to AZT in contemporary medical literature. The result is a comprehensive and alarming review of the findings of medical researchers on the clinical use of the drug.
AZT was originally prescribed in high doses on its own as a therapy for people who tested HIV-positive. Other journalists have reported the fraudulent nature of the clinical trials on which this usage was based. When independent, much larger trials eventually showed that when HIV-positive individuals who showed no sign of illness used AZT, it significantly increased, rather than decreased, their chances of developing AIDS - and of dying - this regimen was quietly dropped. That this has not yet become a major medical scandal is testament to the power and resources of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoWellcome, and, by extension, the industry as a whole.
Now there are new, even more dangerous claims made for AZT, supported by well-funded lobbies. Anthony Brink demonstrates the sort of ability and dedication needed to properly scrutinise those claims. If you have any better information and arguments, let me know.
Martin Welz
Editor, noseweek
Cape Town.
Having interested South Africa’s leading investigative journalist Martin Welz in AZT and other problems with the HIV-AIDS paradigm, I was commissioned in October 1998 to write an article for his whistleblowing journal noseweek. After I had done so, Welz decided to publish a general introductory article featuring AIDS sceptic Nobel laureate Kary Mullis first, and to go to press about AZT in a later issue (see January 2000 edition). At this time an intense public controversy was raging about the economics and morality of the South African government’s decision not to provide AZT to rape victims and HIV-positive pregnant women. The angry condemnation that the government drew for this decision from AIDS activists, journalists, opposition politicians, doctors, health workers and others was premised on the conviction that AZT was a life-rescuing miracle drug. The look of it was that desperate supplicants were being denied the sacrament. As the ensuing debate did not concern the drug’s safety or efficacy, I thought publication of my critique shouldn’t be delayed so I sent it to several South African newspapers. Martin Williams at the helm of the Citizen took the lead and published AZT: A Medicine from Hell on 17 March 1999.
South Africa’s leading AIDS treatment authority, Dr Desmond Martin, rose to the piece and mounted a rebuttal two weeks later, entitled AZT: A Medicine from Heaven.
My rejoinder AZT and Heavenly Remedies was printed the following day. I thereafter revised and extended it substantially to incorporate discussion of important papers in the medical press excluded by the newspaper’s space constraints, as well as a torrent of research papers published subsequent to our newspaper debate. Dr Martin’s contentions about the ‘AIDS epidemic’ are treated separately in Appendix I to my reply.
After reading this debate, South African President Thabo Mbeki caused a local and international furore when on 28 October 1999 he ordered an enquiry into the safety of AZT. The following month, Dr Helen Rees and Dr Precious Matsoso, respectively the president and director general of the South African Medicines Control Council, received copies of both this debate and of the seminally important examination of the molecular pharmacology of AZT by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, published in a special supplement to the journal Current Medical Research and Opinion in mid-1999. This paper is discussed at the end of my reply to Dr Martin in my literature review AZT and Heavenly Remedies. Neither the toxicity data discussed in this debate nor the Perth group’s explosive review seemed to have made any impression on these ladies. On 11 May 2000, Dr Rees responded to a warning issued by the European Medicines Evaluation Authority concerning “life-threatening skin and liver reactions” and other “potentially lethal side effects” of Nevirapine (Viramune), currently being marketed aggressively in South Africa. After the deaths of several black women on antiretroviral trials (including Nevirapine), she remarked nonchalantly that “many AIDS medications could cause liver and other problems. ‘But the combination therapy can make a huge difference to people’s lives’.” One wonders how the Medicines Control Council would have reacted had the victims been white. To her great credit, when she learned of the deaths, South African Minister of Health Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang intervened directly and terminated the trials. Incredibly, “an uproar in South African medical circles” was reported in response to her move to prevent the deaths of more women. (On Sunday 13 August 2000 she announced that she had declined to make Nevirapine available to HIV-positive pregnant women, and directed that it should not be used outside approved research environments.)
Dr Tshabalala-Msimang has rejected two reports on AZT by the MCC on the grounds that they deal inadequately with the drug’s toxicity. On 15 March 2000, in the course of a radio interview, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the failure of a third report to address the issue of AZT’s long term risks, and said that she had commissioned further investigation. But from the minister’s forthright negative public statements on AZT and the even stronger sentiments emanating from Mbeki’s office, it would seem to be ‘game over’ for those calling on the government to buy and supply it to pregnant women and rape victims.In preparing the manuscript I decided to retain its original case-answer-reply debate format for two reasons. First, AZT: A Medicine from Hell serves as an easy introduction to the subject and a handy summary of the case against the drug, which I elaborate in my detailed reply to Dr Martin under the title AZT and Heavenly Remedies. Second, AZT: A Medicine from Heaven stands as an authoritative statement of the case for AZT by South Africa’s leading AIDS doctor and academic AIDS expert. This lends balance to my treatment of the subject, and better equips readers to form their own conclusions. The research papers discussed in AZT and Heavenly Remedies are cited in an informal manner for the lay readership I had in mind, but they are sufficiently identified to enable any interested reader to locate them. Excerpts from the literature are precisely quoted however, and I have retained American spelling and journal house-styles regarding the use of upper and lower case in the titles of papers.
Concerning my polemical style and sardonic tone, I should explain that I wrote with politicking in mind. (It’s a trick I picked up from Galileo. Unable to sell his discovery of the moons of Jupiter to his peers, he took to pamphleteering to the lay public instead.) This is because, after some dismal early encounters, I realised the futility of engaging with ‘the experts’, and decided to bring this appallingly dangerous drug to the attention of our political leaders and investigative journalists instead. My apprehensions were confirmed by the responses of ‘the experts’ to Mbeki’s extraordinary initiative in directing an enquiry into the safety of AZT. On their own showing they hadn’t examined the important recent medical literature on AZT with which the President was au fait and which founded his concerns, and they condemned him ignorant of it. Among them are Dr William Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council, and South Africa’s most eminent pharmacologist, Professor Peter Folb of the University of Cape Town. Consulted by Nature correspondent Michael Cherry to comment on the Perth group paper after Mbeki sent it to Cherry and asked him whether he’d read it, Folb contributed a disgracefully glib, uninformed, unreferenced, and tendentious opinion. Mbeki fittingly rejected it.
How South Africa’s leading medical experts failed to meet their responsibilities to President Mbeki and to the South African public in the AZT controversy is a tale told in the latter part of AZT and Heavenly Remedies. We’ll also have a look at the performance of some prominent journalists, AIDS activists, church leaders, the leader of the official opposition in parliament, and a constitutional court justice. And finally, Mbeki’s remarkable knowledge of AZT’s pharmacology and his insights into the inarticulate dynamics of the controversy are revealed in his own words, in letters and interviews quoted in full. He also gives the world an exemplary lesson in democracy in practice – the importance of independent enquiry, and the dangers posed by unthinking deference to ‘the experts’ in any institution or profession, especially the buffoons who run the medical show here.
No thanks from me to South Africa’s AIDS activists and Human Rights lawyers, all of whom have looked away - one of whom said that she could not afford to examine the issues raised by me or she would be out of a job, and another who opined that I was a public menace and should be killed.
I’m frequently asked why this subject seized my interest. At heart I’m a science geek. I had a provisional patent when I was ten, and was keenly interested in chemistry and microscopy as a boy. From impressive experiments with high-explosives to triple-stained microscopic slides and photomicrographs of blood, assorted microbes and cross-sections of my grandmother’s appendix, I drifted into audio electronics and equipped a recording studio and concert sound rig with most of the gear home-made. On my father’s ill advice, I took Latin at school but biology has long been my fascination. Part of it has been that the more I read and the more I reflect on it, the more textbook biology drifts from fact and begins to resemble the holy doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, supporting aggressively defended commercial and professional empires. I’m also one of those annoying inquisitive types with little respect for ‘authority.’ Being interested in cancer, the immune system and all that, I closely followed the drama of HIV-AIDS from the very beginning. Having accepted everything I read about it hook, line and sinker for years, I was inspired to examine the scientific foundations of the infectious AIDS paradigm afresh when I discovered in late 1996 that two of the most accomplished biologists in our time, Nobel laureates Walter Gilbert and Kary Mullis (discussed in my piece The AIDS Apostates) did not subscribe to it. That led me on to AZT. An irresistible imperative then possessed me. I couldn’t just carry on with my picnic while a child was drowning, so I jumped in. Or to mix metaphors, it was like finding a grave in my garden, and then more the deeper I dug. Or watching good neighbours carted off by secret police, never to be seen again. Not the kind of thing one can walk away from. Not me anyway.
After the conclusion of my brief newspaper debate with Dr Martin, I was moved to amplify my reply to him by the publication of a sudden flood of papers during the rest of 1999 and in 2000 - all with serious implications for the continued medical use of AZT, but none of which were surfacing in the public discourse about the drug. The death of a legal colleague after a single month’s course of AZT in combination with a similar drug 3TC was an added impetus. That’s how this book grew, its thread ripped undone and a new patch sewn in every time another paper on AZT came out in the medical press. And with every development in the controversy on the home front. It’s updated to September 2000.
Because I amplified AZT and Heavenly Remedies considerably after it was printed in its original form, I thought it proper to afford Dr Martin an opportunity to respond. I wondered what he would make of the Olivero papers on the transplacental carcinogenicity of AZT, the Ha, Blanche and De Martino papers on AZT’s foetal toxicity (and many more have since come in), and the vast survey of the literature on AZT and analysis of its pharmacology by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, which decisively debunks its manufacturer’s claims. Dr Martin’s colleague, fellow virologist Dr John Sim, intercepted the invitation, declined it, and proffered a sympathetic psychiatric diagnosis that I suffer mental perturbation. For an amusing exercise in Foucaultian deconstruction, Dr Sim’s response is a priceless little treasure, and I have put it up as Appendix II.
On 28 June 2000, Cape Town architect Richard Hepner, the editor of the Health Independent, asked Dr Martin again whether he would like to refute or comment on my extended reply, AZT and Heavenly Remedies - specifically the kernel of it, an excerpt I had prepared entitled Is AZT safe for babies? He declined the offer and said he stood by his piece AZT: A Medicine from Heaven, and suggested that Hepner simply publish it again. Offered the same opportunity, fellow AZT advocate Professor Gary Maartens at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town asked Hepner, “What’s in it for me?” and likewise declined it.
The value of this work, I hope, has been to systematise a large body of clinical and research data on AZT, render it in prose transparent to non-experts and to launch it into the popular domain. I daresay the ‘AIDS experts’ could learn a thing or two from it too, but for reasons you’ll see, I’m not optimistic. For locating the papers I’ve cited, all credit to David Crowe, Peter Duesberg, Bryan Ellison, Celia Farber, Billi Goldberg, Neville Hodgkinson, Matt Irwin, James Jerome, Heinrich Kremer, John Lauritsen, Todd Miller, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, David Rasnick, Val Turner, and Penn Xarwalyczha.
ANTHONY BRINK
Pietermaritzburg,
South Africa
arbrink@iafrica.com
September 2000
The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is,
the higher his reputation soars, even amongst powerful princes.
Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536), Dutch humanist.
National Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma has been condemned by just about everyone recently for her heartless decision not to make a drug called AZT available at State expense to HIV-positive pregnant women. It reduces the risk, so it’s said, of the transmission of HIV from mother to child. Politicians and journalists from left to right have joined moist-eyed, hand-wringing doctors in pleading for the free provision of AZT to these women, their babies cruelly deprived and doomed to die, they say.
In all the fuss about the minister’s decision on AZT, no one, it seems, has stopped to ask, “So what the hell is this stuff anyway?”
In 1964, a chemist called Jerome Horwitz synthesised a sophisticated experimental cell poison for the treatment of cancerous tumour cells (1). It was called Suramin, or Compound S. Its formal title is 3’-azido-3’-deoxythymidine - zidovudine for short - but everyone knows it by its nickname, AZT.
It works like this. Thymidine is one of the four nucleotides (building blocks) of DNA, the basic molecule of life. AZT is an artificial fake, a dead ringer for thymidine. As a cell synthesises new DNA while preparing to divide in order to spawn another, AZT either steals in to take the place of the real thing, or else disrupts the delicate process by interfering with the cell’s regulation of the relative concentrations of nucleotide pools present during DNA synthesis. That’s the end of the cell line. Cell division and replication, wrecked by the presence of the plastic imposter, comes to a halt. Chemotherapeutic drugs such as AZT are described as DNA chain terminators accordingly (2). Their effect is wholesale cell death of every type, particularly the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system and those lining our guts. Horwitz found that the sick immune cells went, but with so many others that his poison was plainly useless as a medicine. It was akin to napalm-bombing a school to kill some roof-rats. AZT was abandoned. It wasn’t even patented. For two decades it collected dust, forgotten - until the advent of the AIDS era.
As soon as Dr Robert Gallo made his famous announcement at a press conference on 23 April 1984 that his virus was the probable cause of AIDS, the race was on to find a pharmaceutical weapon against it. The stratospheric profit potential (since borne out) of being the first past the post was on everybody’s mind. Obviously, if an already synthesised drug could be applied to the malady, it would short-cut most of the road-race there. AZT was fished off the shelf, along with numerous other abandoned brews, and put to some in vitro tests. It demonstrated a bright alchemical sparkle. On the basis of a reassuring but fallacious assertion that AZT was specifically antagonistic to HIV, and a thousand times more toxic to the latter than human cells generally, the drug went to clinical trials. The chaos into which the trials degenerated is a tale too long to tell here. It wouldn’t be extravagant to call them fraudulent (3). (Subsequent trials consistently turned in opposite results.) At best, they were so incompetently staged that the data gathered under them were useless, save to note that one in five of its subjects taking AZT needed repeated blood transfusions to keep going. Small surprise, since the label on bottles of AZT supplied to laboratories bears a skull and cross-bones and cautions, “Toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed. Target organ(s): Blood, bone marrow…Wear suitable protective clothing.”
Four months after the trials started, they were called off prematurely, on an interpretation of provisional results deemed positive for the drug by the trial overseer. Which is odd for a drug claimed to be on double-blind test, with neither doctor nor patient supposed to know who was on what, but there we are. Next, it went before the FDA, to be approved in record time under huge political pressure from the gay lobby. Strong reservations were expressed at the hearing about its dreadful toxicity. The chairman’s vote against it was defeated. As the most poisonous drug ever licensed by the FDA for indefinite use, and with the conviction apparently that the terrible new disease needed a terrible medicine, AZT was approved for use in extreme AIDS cases only - for which you might want to read, in cases of people very ill with their presenting AIDS indicator disease, fungal pneumonia or what have you. Scarcely a year later, in the orgy of stupidity that characterises the AIDS age, AZT was officially recommended for administration to entirely healthy people, whose misfortune it was to register positive to an HIV antibody test. Since the drug destroys the very immune cells allegedly attacked by HIV, the introduction of AZT as a treatment regimen for asymptomatic HIV-positive people saw the AIDS mortality rate among the previously well take off like a rocket. Five years and countless deaths later, and only after the disastrous results of the European Concorde and St Mary trials, was this murderous treatment recommendation reversed. AZT, it was found, did no good. Of course not. On any intelligent consideration of its pharmacological action, AZT could never be ‘antiviral’, any more so than arsenic could have cured the scurvy for which it was administered to sailors, and later, to troops in the trenches in the First World War.
In Europe and the US, HIV-positive ‘long term survivors’ quietly gather to form groups, having sloughed off the terror of the death sentences imposed on them by their doctors. Here’s the strangest thing. Without exception, what they find they all have in common is that they all eschewed (or quickly gave up) AZT, related nucleoside analogues like 3TC, and protease inhibitors. Some have pondered the unthinkable: that nearly all medically managed AIDS cases, always terminal, represent that balefully familiar phenomenon in the history of medicine, iatrogenocide - to be killed by the cure. Their reasoning becomes less obscure when one reads the AZT package insert. To do so might tempt one to wonder impertinently whether AZT isn’t AIDS by prescription. Indeed, such perverse conjecture is actually confirmed in capitals: AZT use “MAY BE ASSOCIATED WITH HEMATOLOGIC TOXICITY INCLUDING GRANULOCYTOPENIA AND SEVERE ANEMIA” (destruction of white and red blood cells respectively), and “PROLONGED USE OF RETROVIR HAS BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH SYMPTOMATIC MYOPATHY (gross atrophy of muscle tissue) SIMILAR TO THAT PRODUCED BY HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS”. As to the latter claim, history will judge whether the thousands of healthy HIV-positive people who embarked on their metabolic poison treatment and wasted away (just as the AZT insert predicted) would have died had they ignored doctor’s orders and thrown their pills away. Here the syphilis story is instructive.
Before the introduction of mercury and arsenic salts as a treatment for this clap, the organic brain damage and dementia that signalled ‘tertiary-’ or ‘neuro-syphilis’ was quite unknown to medicine. When penicillin replaced the older decoctions, it then disappeared. The moral is hard to miss.
One sane notion in that otherwise mad dance with death that chemotherapy for cancer involves is that you stop before you drop. Since healthy cells are always killed in the crossfire, the idea is to rescue the patient from going over the cliff along with the target bad cells, by taking him off the drug in the nick of time. That iron rule is broken in AIDS treatment. You’re going to die, you’re told, so better take the bitter medicine to the bitter end, to stave off the evil day. But as AZT heads like a heat-seeking missile for one’s immune and energy transporting cells (“target organs: blood, bone marrow”, remember?) dying of AIDS on AZT is a racing certainty. No one has ever been cured by AZT, but it sells like hot cakes all the same, still the most widely prescribed AIDS drug, and it reaps profits counted in billions.
Ever irrepressible as a medicine following one failure after another, in 1994 AZT was proposed as a treatment for pregnant women to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, or so it was touted. Until then, it had been staunchly contraindicated during pregnancy. Generously underwritten by the drug’s manufacturer, the study, ACTG 076, in which this startlingly novel use of AZT was tried, epitomises the junk-science that characterises so much AIDS research. Of 477 babies born to HIV-positive mothers in the trial, 13 in the AZT-treated group were born antibody-positive, against 40 in the placebo group. Apart from the lunacy of basing a decision to dose HIV-positive mothers with a cell-toxin as lethal as AZT on such feeble numbers, the underlying assumption that an HIV-positive test result predicts inevitable illness and death is a canard of modern medicine which, surprisingly, wants for evidence. Most babies ‘seroconvert’ to HIV-negative in any event, medicated or not. The other overarching myth is that the mere presence of antibodies in one’s bloodstream signifies an active infection. Isn’t it elementary that we carry antibodies to all sorts of pathogens that we have met and defeated? Isn’t this first-year stuff? Advocates of AZT confess to being completely in the dark to account for the vaunted HIV blocking effect they claim. The reason why administering vitamin A instead works precisely the same magic might be a pointer to something less interesting: stressed health, thanks to chronic poor nourishment and living conditions. As for the positive immune signals a ‘short course of AZT’ can generate, poison ingestion provokes an immune reaction as the body rises to the insult. This is old hat.
Thrown to the wind have been all the safeguards set up to ensure that the Diethylstilbestrol and Thalidomide tragedies would never happen again. Before the hysteria of the AIDS age, women were enjoined even to avoid drinking beer during pregnancy. A recently reconfirmed active carcinogen, and teratogen too - cells not killed outright are nastily maimed - AZT freely crosses the placental barrier, so the package insert tells us cheerfully. Has anyone here paused to question whether a growing foetus comprising rapidly dividing cells should be exposed to a random terminator of DNA chain synthesis? Apparently not. Certainly not the recipients of GlaxoWellcome’s largesse from its slush fund of millions for those who make AIDS their business in this country. Nor our doctors carrying out bold medical experiments on the foetuses of pregnant black women - whose unlucky dice gives them a positive registration to the irredeemably and hopelessly non-specific ‘HIV-antibody’ test. Of course anyone in the game crying foul, and drawing attention to the reams of literature in the medical journals about the harm caused by AZT, especially to the young, is going to find himself sent off and defunded, for keeps. Were it not for the amazing collapse of critical intelligence in the AIDS age, GlaxoWellcome’s heart-warming contributions to ‘the fight against AIDS’, with its research grants and cut-prices - described by the Mail and Guardian as a “bouquet of assistance” - might have been seen less as philanthropy than commerce, pure and simple. As it has achieved so successfully abroad, what better way to fix its local market than by buying off our medical establishment and ‘AIDS activist’ crowd with lolly aplenty to fund their dumb projects? And by enticing our government with current discounts for its rancid wares, in order to hook longer-term contractual commitments.
The AIDS Law Project at Wits currently busies itself with plans to sue the minister in the High Court for an order compelling her to respect ‘pregnant women’s rights to AZT’, and dole it out on the house. Then again, its ‘AIDS activist’ lawyers gratefully take junkets to AIDS conferences in holiday cities overseas at GlaxoWellcome’s expense. The ‘human rights’ they pursue might be better served were these legal crusaders to call off their foolish case and think of ways best to bite the hand that feeds them. Several actions for loss of support have been launched against GlaxoWellcome in England and the USA, arising out of the deaths of family members killed by their doctors’ prescriptions of AZT (5).
Although she has justified her perplexing decision on AZT on the basis of financial considerations exclusively, saying she would rather spend her money on ‘AIDS education’, one day Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma will be praised for her great prescient wisdom in keeping AZT away from pregnant women and their foetuses. A bit like much-lauded Dr Francis Kelsey, whom Kennedy honoured for her wise perspicacity in sparing the USA the European Thalidomide calamity, when in truth her only notable trait was her fortuitously inefficient foot-dragging in obstructing the start of the FDA approval process.
It’s high time that everyone involved in this nightmarish mess went off to do some basic homework in the subject in which they have so much to say for themselves.
(1) Horwitz, J.P., Chua, J. and Noel, M: Nucleosides. V. The monomesylates of 1-(2’-Deoxy-beta-D-lyxofuranosyl)thymine, Journal of Organic Chemistry 29: 2076-2078 (1964). However, an American biochemistry professor with whom I have corresponded privately makes a documented prior claim to the first synthesis of AZT in the autumn of 1961. He prefers both to remain anonymous and not to upset the settled history - based on the first to publish. He mentioned to me that he employed AZT as an experimental cell-poison against leukaemic blood cells, and against the bacteria Salmonella Potsdam and E. coli. (Studies in the ‘90’s have confirmed AZT’s activity against all three.) He pointed out that after publishing his paper, Horwitz investigated the activity of AZT against Jensen tumour cells, and not against leukaemic blood cells as I reported originally in line with the conventional history. He also criticised my repetition of the claim that Horwitz abandoned AZT because of its toxicity (see for example the excerpt from Radford’s article immediately below). He said the reason was its inactivity against target cancer cells, while the acute toxicity of AZT emerged only later. Actually, Horwitz has made contradictory statements about this. Reviewing this essay, he remarked, “…you are justified in sounding a warning against the long-term therapeutic use of AZT, or its use in pregnant women, because of its demonstrated toxicity and side effects. Unfortunately, the devastating effects of AZT emerged only after the final level of experiments were well underway, that is, the experiments which consisted of giving AZT to large numbers of human patients over a long period of time. Your effort is a worthy one… I hope you succeed in convincing your government not to make AZT available...”
In an enthusiastic article about the pharmaceutical industry in the UK, Tim Radford wrote in the Guardian on 30 March 2000, “They settled on an anti-cancer drug which had proved too toxic to use against cancer: It was AZT… Since DNA is a ubiquitous part of life, compounds that act against it can potentially stop life forms like bacteria, like viruses, like humans. Of course, they can cause cancer as well, so balancing the risks is an essential part of the fascination.” The fascinating risks for the development of cancer posed by the administration of AZT are examined extensively in my reply to Dr Martin, AZT and Heavenly Remedies.
(2) DNA chain formation termination - described in this paragraph - is generally understood to be the basic pharmacological action of AZT. GlaxoWellcome asserts in its PRODUCT INFORMATION release about AZT, “In vitro, zidovudine triphosphate has been shown to be incorporated into growing chains of DNA by viral reverse transcriptase. When incorporation by the viral enzyme occurs, the DNA chain is terminated.” In a glitzy CD dished out at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, GlaxoWellcome claims similarly: “Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors – NRTIs – [like AZT are] phosphorylated by cellular enzymes… competitively inhibit viral DNA synthesis [and are incorporated] into the DNA thus terminating DNA synthesis.”
This conventional model of AZT pharmaco-kinetics is accepted by a vociferous critic of the drug, Dr Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley. His criticisms go principally to the unacceptable toxicology profile of AZT, and do not take issue with its manufacturer’s claims about its mode of action. Accordingly, in Inventing the AIDS Virus he writes, “While on AZT, Bergalis once told a reporter she hoped to also get dideoxyinosine (ddI), another experimental AIDS drug. This drug and ddC, two products of cancer chemotherapy research, work in precisely the same way as AZT. Chemically altered building blocks of DNA, they enter the growing chain of DNA while a cell is preparing to divide and abort the process by preventing new DNA building blocks from adding on… So, like AZT, ddI and ddC kill dividing cells and have similar toxic effects. They destroy white blood cells and therefore can cause AIDS.” Jay Levy, professor of medicine and director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at UCSF (and unlike Duesberg, a vocal protagonist of the orthodox HIV-AIDS model) said in Newsday on 12 June 1990, “AZT can only hasten the demise of the individual. It’s an immune disease and AZT only further harms an already decimated immune system.” Duesberg’s most recent and most detailed critique of AZT, co-authored with pharmacology biochemist David Rasnick Phd, is contained in The AIDS Dilemma: Drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus, published in Genetica in mid-1998. It can be read on the internet.
As Mycek et al put it in their text Pharmacology (2nd ed), it is trite that before the drug can be incorporated into DNA, “AZT must be converted to the corresponding nucleoside triphosphate by mammalian thymidine kinase in order for it to exert its antiviral activity.” Recognising this, GlaxoWellcome claims, “Within cells, zidovudine is converted to the active metabolite, zidovudine 5’triphosphate (AztTP), by the sequential action of cellular enzymes.” But numerous investigations since AZT was approved by the FDA in the US have found that AZT is triphosphorylated in vivo very inefficiently, and at least one order of magnitude lower than necessary for its claimed anti-HIV effect. Consequently viral DNA chain termination by the incorporation of metabolically altered AZT into DNA in place of natural thymidine is insignificant in relation to other activities of the drug, inter alia as a potent oxidising agent. This subject will get a close look in my reply to Dr Martin, AZT and Heavenly Remedies. AZT also disrupts cell division by perturbing the relative levels of natural nucleotide pools, with the drug acting as a ‘sink’ and sponging up phosphate molecules essential to the process. Starved of these molecules and denied the energy they provide, dividing cells die.
This pivotal criticism of the conventional model of the pharmacology of AZT - namely that AZT is not in fact triphosphorylated as GlaxoWellcome claims it is - is made and elaborated extensively in a paper discussed in my reply to Dr Martin,A Critical Analysis of AZT and its Use in AIDS by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, published in mid-1999 as a special supplement to the academic medical journal Current Medical Research and Opinion. Like Duesberg and Rasnick’s paper mentioned above, it is archived on the website www.virusmyth.com. Librapharm also has it posted at: http://www.librapharm.co.uk/cmro/vol_15/supplement/main.htm
(3) The way in which AZT was approved and reached the market as an AIDS drug has been closely researched and reported by John Lauritsen (Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story, and The AIDS War), Celia Farber (Sins of Omission, The AZT Scandal), Bruce Nussbaum (Good Intentions), Elinor Burkett (The Gravest Show on Earth), Peter Duesberg (‘With therapies like these who needs disease’ in Inventing the AIDS Virus) Martin Walker (Dirty Medicine and HIV, AZT, Big Science & Clinical Failure) and Steven Epstein (Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge). It’s an amazing story, and is certain to haunt GlaxoWellcome in litigation sooner or later. Some of this writing can be read on the website mentioned above.
(4) In his address to the National Council of Ministers on 28 October 1999, during which he ordered an investigation into the safety of AZT, President Mbeki mentioned these lawsuits. GlaxoWellcome’s representatives in South Africa immediately denied them. A few days later, the President’s office asked me for details. I referred to the English cases of Threakall and others, and the American Nagel and McDonnell cases, all of which had been reported in the press. A month later however, in a telephone call from Susan Threakall’s English solicitor Graham Ross, I was informed that her action, his lead case, had been withdrawn a couple of months earlier. In March 2000, Paul Headlund, the American attorney who had handled the Nagel and McDonnel cases, told me that the claims had not been pursued. GlaxoWellcome was therefore technically correct in disputing Mbeki’s statement that there were cases concerning AZT pending against it at that time. What GlaxoWellcome omitted to mention was that a month earlier a court in Maine in the US had dismissed a bid by health authorities to compel Valerie Emerson to administer AZT to her son after her daughter had died on the drug, and held, “She feels that she has willingly and in good faith surrendered up the life of one child to the best treatment medicine has to offer and does not want to do the same with the next. Nikolas has made significant strides recently in gaining weight and overcoming developmental deficits, and appears happy and healthy. She does not want to see this child take on the pallor and pain of a sick and dying child.”
I am currently briefed in a claim against GlaxoWellcome for the widow and minor son of an attorney killed by a single month’s course of AZT and 3TC treatment. The action will be the first world-wide in which the integrity of GlaxoWellcome’s claims about the molecular pharmacology of AZT and the adequacy of the information provided about its hazards will be examined by a trial court in the light of the Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al review paper and others canvassed in my reply to Dr Martin. It will be the plaintiffs’ case that AZT is an unreasonably dangerous drug with no therapeutic or palliative value as an ‘antiretroviral’ whatsoever. This action is my lead case. I have since been instructed to represent two other plaintiffs, one who suffered permanent leg muscle damage and another liver damage after treatment with the drug. For another action I am handling involving AZT poisoning, but brought on a different basis, see An AIDS Case in the appendices to this debate.
AZT: A Medicine from Heaven
By Desmond Martin
The Citizen 31 March 1999
The Southern African HIV/AIDS Clinicians Society responds to an article AZT: A Medicine from Hell, by Anthony Brink, published in The Citizen on March 17.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) disease is a major global health problem and is associated with a significant morbidity and mortality.
The number of people infected with HIV is rapidly increasing; recent estimates indicate more than 30 million adults and 1,1 million children are infected worldwide. In South Africa it is estimated that in excess of three million people are infected. It has been predicted that 40 million persons, including four to five million children, will have acquired the infection by the year 2000. Mother-to-child transmission, the major cause of HIV infection in infants, has led to a 30 percent increase in the mortality rate of infants and children in recent years.
The introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) has been good news. In the US the age-adjusted death rate among people with HIV in 1997 was less than 40 percent of what it was in 1995. This experienced was mirrored in other Western nations where dramatic declines in morbidity and mortality as a result of the increasing use of combination anti-retroviral therapy has occurred; many of these regimens contain AZT.
When AZT and other nucleoside analogues were first introduced they were used as monotherapy (a single drug was used). Clinical experience quickly showed that the effect of a single drug was short-lived, as resistance to the drug developed. It was then shown that by using a combination of drugs, a more lasting effect was obtained.
Beneficial
An added advantage of combination therapy was that the drugs acted at different stages of the replication cycle of the virus. This option therefore made sense; the risk of drug resistance was drastically reduced and long-lasting beneficial effects have been recorded. AZT together with 3TC and a protease inhibitor is a combination that has been found to be highly effective.
Impaired quality of life associated with the progression of HIV disease has a profound effect on the patient and leads to an increase in the direct medical and non-medical costs of illness. Published studies have shown that patients on combination therapy with AZT and 3TC have been able to maintain or more importantly improve their quality of life.
So effective are combination anti-retroviral regimens in reducing the complications of the disease that there are anecdotal reports emanating from the US that AIDS wards are being emptied of their patients and in some instances wards have been closed. Clinicians are now treating patients in out-patient settings and the status of the disease has changed to that of a chronic manageable disease.
It is however, in the arena of prevention of HIV infection that AZT has produced dramatic results.
Worldwide, approximately 500 000 infants become infected each year as a result of mother-to-child transmission. In some African countries 25 percent of pregnant women are infected with HIV. Without preventative therapy up to a third of their babies may become infected; many of these children will die in their early years.
In 1994 a clinical trial conducted in the US and France (ACTG 076) demonstrated that AZT given to mothers during their pregnancies, intravenously during labour and orally to their babies for six weeks reduced the risk of mother-to-child transmission by 67 percent. This regimen has been adopted as the "standard of care" in the US.
However, it is unsuitable for developing countries because of its complexity and cost.
To address the problem the Ministry of Health in Thailand introduced a trial of simpler and less expensive regimens of AZT to prevent mother-to-child transmission. This trial showed that a simpler regimen of AZT given orally to mothers in the last weeks of pregnancy reduced the risk of transmission by 50 percent. This short course AZT regimen (so-called Thailand regimen) is much more suitable for developing countries than the US-protocol because it is much easier to administer and less costly ($50 v $800).
Preliminary data from United Nation AIDS Programme (UNAIDS)- sponsored studies have also demonstrated that even more abbreviated, affordable, AZT-containing regimens may be equally effective.
Another instance where preventative AZT therapy is commonly used is in the event of a health-care worker (HCW) sustaining an occupational exposure to blood or body fluids from an HIV infected person (eg. needle-stick injury).
These occurrences are usually charged with much emotion and HCW’s are, quite justifiably, entitled to appropriate post-exposure prophylaxis to be commenced as soon as possible after the injury. A multinational study conducted among occupationally exposed HCW’s demonstrated a 79 percent reduction in the risk of acquiring HIV infection when AZT was used as post-exposure prophylaxis.
Toxicity
The toxicity of AZT is a very real issue however, the toxicity (particularly bone marrow toxicity) is usually noted in patients with advanced HIV disease whose bone marrow function may already be impaired by HIV disease. Toxicity does not appear to be a problem during short-term use (post exposure prophylaxis or mother-to-child transmission prevention).
Nevertheless vigilance and monitoring on the part of the clinician is necessary. If toxicity occurs the drug should be stopped and other drugs substituted and any appropriate management should occur. Toxicity in most cases is reversible. In addition, careful monitoring of babies whose mothers took AZT during pregnancy has failed to show any significant abnormal findings.
Thus AZT in combination with other drugs has proved to be invaluable for the treatment of those already infected with HIV and has also proved to be a potent preventative agent in the mother-to-child setting and for occupational exposures. For these very reasons the drug AZT deserves the accolade: AZT: a medicine from heaven.
Desmond J Martin is president of the Southern African HIV/AIDS Clinicians Society.
Note: Dr Martin has no conflict of interest and has not received financial sponsorship from GlaxoWellcome.
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[11] In their 1988 paper in the British Journal of Haematology, entitled, 3’-Azido-3’-deoxythymidine inhibits proliferation in vitro of human haematopoietic progenitor cells, Dainiak et alreported their investigation of “the mechanism by which cytopenias develop [i.e. cell depletion, which is]…a serious, dose limiting toxicity of AZT therapy…” Observing that “Anaemia [during AZT therapy] appears to be due to bone marrow suppression [and] nearly one half of patients treated with AZT for [HIV]-associated disease develop transfusion-dependent anaemia due to bone marrow depression”, they concluded from their study that “AZT is a potent inhibitor of haematopoiesis in vitro, and that erythroid progenitors are particularly sensitive to its action. These results may explain the marrow hypoplasia that occurs during AZT administration in vivo.” |
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Dr Martin states, “[HIV] disease is a major global health problem and is associated with a significant morbidity and mortality.” The Harvard School of Public Health doesn’t think so. In its encyclopaedicGlobal Burden of Disease Study, published in 1996 for the World Health Organization and the World Bank, it reports that “HIV currently [rates] twenty-eighth in the rankings…[in the] global pattern of disease burden.” That’s not even close to accidental falls (14th) or suicide (17th) as causes of disability, illness and death “for all regions of the world.” What this means for the ‘everyone is at risk of catching AIDS’ propaganda with which we’re relentlessly bombarded by scare-mongering AIDS careerists is that in truth you’re actually twice as likely to succumb in an accidental fall - about as remote a likelihood as you one day putting a gun to your head.
Consider Uganda, once the shining sore in African AIDS mythmaking, until Southern Africa was discovered to be a more lucrative market. Sold to the world as the epicentre of the ‘AIDS epidemic in Africa’, Uganda was said by the WHO to have a million HIV positives in 1987, about one in twenty. The same number in 1997, according to several articles in the Lancet in 1997 and 1998. Aren’t contagious epidemics supposed to follow an exponential bell-curve increase in case incidence? Because this is what any textbook on epidemiology will tell you. In December 1998, in its Weekly Epidemiological Record, the WHO stated the total number of Ugandan AIDS cases (not deaths) cumulatively since 1993 to be 55 201. (Bear in mind that in Africa, under the Bangui AIDS case definition, any number of common maladies can be recast as AIDS cases presumptively; you don’t even need an HIV-positive test result.) On the popular premise that AIDS takes you on average about 10 years after HIV infection, one might reasonably enquire where are the expected 500 000 dead? UNAIDS tells us - as a boasted triumph of health educational programmes advocating condom use - that the HIV-positive incidence rate among urban Ugandan women has dropped from about 40% to about 15%. So where are the mass graves of the lost 25%? Or are these women still around, hale and hearty, as the absence of any empirical evidence that Uganda has lost a quarter of its city-women to AIDS diseases would suggest? The exterminated villages of AIDS-lore, my Ugandan friend Denis Rugege explains simply, are deserted homesteads besieged by that timeless enemy, malaria, resurgent when general disease resistance is weakened in times of civil strife, infrastructural collapse and widespread hunger. And no one should need reminding what trauma Uganda has been through in recent decades.
Some contrary guys unimpressed by ‘the overwhelming evidence’ think that AIDS in our time is best construed as an epidemic of mass hysteria, rather than any conventional disease phenomenon. And that it is destined to pass rather like neurasthenia, the wandering womb, and hysteria among others in the olden days, to oblivion, as inevitably as that other dumb contemporary craze, ‘attention deficit disorder.’ After all, Professor Luc Montagnier himself notes that “AIDS has no typical symptoms.” Odd that. A disease as elastic as medical vogues and funding contingencies require.
For instance, if you’ve got tuberculosis and you’re HIV-negative you’ve just got tuberculosis, and really, who gives a damn? Who pays a mortgage and makes a career attending lushly sponsored overseas conferences to jabber excitedly about something as politically unsexy as TB? We have a hundred and twenty five TB cases here for every ‘AIDS’ case according to the WHO’s best data, but did you ever hear our AIDS activist crowd say a word about TB and the miserable social conditions that always hover about it? If you’ve got TB, and your blood contains arbitrary levels of certain proteins claimed to be produced by your immune system as antibodies specifically(#) to defeat a virus called HIV, voila, suddenly its not TB anymore, it’s !AIDS! Even if according to every marker, apart from the test result, the former and latter conditions are identical on clinical presentation. And even if the presence of antibodies without more has never before in medicine been deemed sufficient evidence of an active infection by any pathogen. In South Africa, with your TB rechristened AIDS, two possibilities arise. If black, you’ll probably be sent away from the hospital untreated as a lost case on injury time. If white you’ll go on ‘antiretrovirals’ for AIDS - provided you can afford to buy your expensive, certain and inexorable slide to the mortuary on today’s deadly AIDS drugs.
To illustrate the absurd fluidity of the HIV-AIDS construct, if the AIDS epidemic predicted by the US Surgeon General fails to explode into the general population and instead smoulders dismayingly within its original risk groups, thereby threatening the US Centers for Disease Control’s glorious funding, just change the definition of AIDS to double its case incidence by the stroke of a pen. Chuck in invasive cervical cancer in the presence of HIV antibodies to keep feminist lobbyists happy by including their occasional malady as an AIDS indicator disease to enable them to pull Federal health benefits. No matter that it’s hard to imagine what cancer has to do with immune suppression, the claimed hallmark of AIDS.
Martin’s appalling, ignorant, death-wish contention that most HIV-positive children will die is not supported by a single controlled study anywhere. Local AIDS boff Clive Evian repeats the WHO accepted wisdom that these babies can acquire their mothers’ “HIV antibodies… without being truly HIV-infected”, and over time they disappear. Around the town in which I live, Pietermaritzburg, some black children born HIV-positive are sent to die in specially established hospices. Some born sick in abject poverty fail to thrive and die, however good the care. But most don’t. Years later they languish there without hope, having missed their appointments with death set for them by the weird missionary types who run these joints. Medicine has branded these bright-eyed children carriers of a vile, filthy, deadly contagion, and they are raised to expect death. The mark they bear is like the hidden mole in the armpit detected by the inquisition - meaningless in a sane world, but during an hysterical storm, super-charged with evil. Perfectly healthy, they are raised as though leprous. Imagine growing up like that. It’s beyond pitiful.
Just where this notion comes from that HIV-positive children tend to die is hard to fathom. In 1995, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Davis et al reported that “Approximately 14,920 HIV-infected infants were born in the United States between 1978 and 1993. Of these, an estimated 12,240 children were living at the beginning of 1994; 26% were younger than 2 years, 35% were aged 2 to 4 years, and 39% were aged 5 years or older.” Which means that over 80% of children diagnosed HIV-positive at birth are still alive. No prizes for guessing what drug probably killed the others. On 18 May 1999, Dr. Warren Naamara, the Kenya adviser for the UNAIDS programme said, “Many HIV-positive children were now living beyond the usual five years and into their teens, bringing new challenges in the fight against the HIV/AIDS [and] more children born with the virus that causes AIDS now survive beyond the age of ten.” To the chagrin of the ‘AIDS experts’, these children just won’t die on time. How’s this for another stunning death wish: “The UNAIDS official said the new trend posed a threat to the management of disease in the five to 14 years age bracket, which was previously perceived as the hope for the next millennium, since it was largely free of the disease. Naamara…said HIV-positive children in sub-Sahara Africa were likely to contribute to the spread of the disease as most were orphans with no education or skills to derive a livelihood from.” (per PANA report, 20 May 1999.)
# Specific? In 1990, in the journal Cancer Research, Strandstrom et al reported that the blood of 72 of 144 healthy dogs tested for HIV antibodies with the Western blot test (the most ‘specific’, many ‘AIDS experts’ say) reacted positively with one or more bands. Dogs don’t get AIDS. Not even chimps whose DNA is more than 99% homologous with human DNA, and which are susceptible to all other pathogens causing real infectious diseases in humans.
Notes:
Concerning the biochemical phenomena said to evidence ‘HIV’, see An interview with Eleni Papadopulos, by Christine Johnson, 1997: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/cjinterviewep.htm
About ‘HIV antibody testing’, see Do antibody tests prove HIV infection? An interview with Valendar Turner, by Huw Christie, 1997: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/hcinterviewvt.htm
For a popular introduction to the erection of the HIV-AIDS construct and its root problems, see A Great Future Behind It; The Yin and Yang of HIV, by Valendar Turner & Andrew McIntyre, 1999: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/vtyinyang.htm
31 March 2000
Dear Mr Brink,
I am a colleague of Des Martin and got to read the recent E-mail you sent to him.
There really is not much to say (please do not for one second misinterpret this again as debate) but I feel that there may be one or two issues of importance to your personal development. It was very strongly suggestive at the time of the Citizen article (especially your emotional and personalized attack in the windy rebuttal to Dr Martin’s reply) that you have suffered a loss or exposure to a bereavement or life event of some sort in the recent past. If that is the case, then I am sorry. But whilst anger may be a part of the recognized reaction sequence, it is not useful to displace and translate it into a word salad and slime innocent bystanders. The Citizen is really to blame, but the option to surf on a wave of sensationalism and misinformation and peddle some copy would have overcome any editorial misgivings - it would not be the first time. A more productive route would have been to seek some professional counseling (or are you hostile towards the entire medical and allied professions?) and perhaps it is still not too late.
Unfortunately it is easy to formulate and vocalize views without adequate background - in fact it is especially easy when not constrained by the burden of insight and perspective in synthesizing and reviewing the value of publications and the role they play in the evolution of paradigms. Debating AZT - questions of safety and utility - remember that it is the source of the answers (or perhaps your questions) that must be judged critically. Your list of reviewers gives the game away.
If you believe that you were responsible for evoking the wave of quackery that has influenced the State President, then perhaps you have a delusional component - there is a readily available and continual barrage of media trash which will provide bona fide evidence of anything from alien abductions to stealth viruses. If, however, it is true, then I am sure that you would also wish to share culpability for the hundreds of children recently infected with HIV-1 who do not have access to your “debate” and your resources but are the real victims of yet another huge governmental AIDS blunder. You will no doubt be aware that the minister of health has intervened more than once in recent months in thwarting the long-awaited recommendation by our Medicines Regulatory Authority (a detoothed MCC) to use AZT in mother to child transmission. How would the legal profession react to ministerial intervention in Supreme Court action or opinion?
I think that your debate is still to come - windmills, flat earth and a plethora of other useful antiretrovirals must be beckoning. And more’s the pity because one senses from your writing considerable ability and I think compassion.
Yours sincerely,
John Sim
15 March 2000
To the pathologist:
The Professional Provident Society requires me to take an HIV test for the purpose of increasing my life insurance. An ‘Informed Consent’ document supplied by the Life Offices Association invites me to ask you to explain its contents if I have any problems understanding it. I do have problems understanding it and I have several questions.
According to the face of the document, the test to be administered is an ELISA 3, which I understand to be a third-generation enzyme immunoassay for HIV antibodies. I wish to be informed of the name of the test kit employed and its manufacturer, and I require a copy of the operating/information booklet in order to inform myself fully about the test which I am obliged by my insurer to take.
Under the heading “Is the test always accurate? Can there be mistakes?” I am told that “the tests used are very accurate.” Even more categorical is the explanation under the heading “What does it mean if the test is positive?”: “this means that you have been infected with the AIDS virus.”
Does the mere presence of HIV antibodies in the absence of any clinical symptoms of illness signify an active infection with HIV? Are significant levels of such antibodies not consistent with a successful immune response? Are any other diseases diagnosed purely on the basis of antibody detection in the absence of clinical presentation?
I have looked up the specificity of four different third-generation ELISA HIV antibody test kits, and all claim specificity of about 99.8%.
Two senior medical technologists with the Natal Blood Transfusion Service tell me that the HIV seroprevalence among white people is this province is negligible and less than one in a thousand. I was told that the seroprevalence among Indian and Coloured people was likewise very small.
With a sensitivity of 100%, as all the test kits claim, the true positive in a thousand test subjects will be detected (allowing for present purposes one in a thousand ‘true positives’). With a specificity of 99.8%, two in a thousand non-infected test subjects will also register positive.
It follows that for every thousand people like me tested, there will be three reactive results, one true positive and two false positives. In other words, for people from my low- risk category in Natal-KwaZulu, HIV-positive test results will be wrong twice as often as they will be right. Am I right? If not, in what respect is my arithmetic unsound?
When I look at the specificity data for the antibody tests of the kind under discussion, I find no indication that any have been validated for specificity by comparing reactive results with confirmed viral infection in test subjects. In a pregnancy test for instance, the incidence of reactive urine tests would have been compared with actual confirmed pregnancies to determine sensitivity, and non-pregnant cases to establish specificity, that is the false-positivity rate. But looking at the scientific literature cited by the test kit manufacturers and other research papers, I find that this elementary control has never been performed for any HIV antibody test kit. Is there any reason why the specificity of HIV antibodies can’t be determined by comparing the incidence of reactive antibody test results with actual cases of confirmed HIV infection, ascertained by viral isolation in the suspected case?
I assume that we are agreed that viral infections can be directly confirmed by harvesting and dismantling putatively infected cells, by purifying and isolating the suspected virus by zonal ultracentrifugation into isopynic density gradients, electron photomicrography to confirm expected particle morphology, analysis of the proteins and nucleic acids of the purified particles to establish their exogenous origin, and confirmation of their infectivity by inoculation of virgin cell lines and then repetition of this procedure.
Can you refer me to any literature reporting that this has ever been done for HIV? Or am I correct in understanding from Abbott Laboratories’s statement, “there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood”, that HIV has never actually been isolated, and that no gold standard for the specificity of HIV antibody tests exists?
How does the claim in the informed consent form that “a positive test result means infection with the AIDS virus” square with Abbott’s warning, “All enzyme immunoassays…may yield non-specific reactions due to other causes” and therefore such results are required by Abbott to be “investigated further in supplemental tests”?
One of the test kit manuals that I have read states that the proteins employed as antigens by the test kit for the detection of HIV-1 antibodies are p24 and gp160. I assume that other HIV ELISA tests employ these same antigens, and/or p41 and its polymers, p80 and p120.
Have you any idea why p24 is described as an HIV-1 protein when Professor Luc Montagnier himself points out that p24 is not unique to HIV, and that it is also a constituent of HTLV-1 and HTLV-2 viruses as well as of endogenous retroviral sequences that form up to 2% of the human genome?
Since the glycoprotein with the molecular weight of 160 daltons is a polymer of p41, and Gallo has pointed out that Professor Luc Montagnier’s favoured ‘HIV-protein’ p41 is a ubiquitous cellular protein (which he now admits), can you explain why gp160 is described as an HIV protein? If the ‘co-discoverers of HIV’ are right, HIV antibody test kit reactivity to p24, p41, p80, p120 and p160 would represent no more than the detection of antibodies to cellular and other viral proteins from any number of sources, whether endogenous or exogenous.
What prevents HIV antibody test kits from lighting up to one or more of these non-HIV proteins?
I have difficulty understanding why ELISA HIV antibody test kit results need interpretation, and why reactivity or non-reactivity is determined not by reference to absolute on/off values but to a cut-off value on a continuum. In plain terms, if I am slightly reactive I am not infected, but if I am moderately strongly reactive I am. How can this be? If the proteins employed in the test as antigens are uniquely constituent of HIV-1, and HIV-1 antibodies are specific and monoclonal - the fundamental assumptions underlying HIV antibody testing - how can the test be reactive at all if I am not infected? How was this cut-off value fixed?
Under the heading “What is HIV?” I am told, “HIV is the virus that causes AIDS…” I have copies of and have studied Luc Montagnier’s 1983, and Gallo’s 1984 Science papers on LAV and HTLV-3 (now called HIV), and referred to as authority for this proposition by the test kit manufacturers, and I think you’ll concede that none come even close to establishing (a) that any virus was isolated under the well settled protocol for the purification and isolation of viruses, discussed at a symposium on this procedure at the Pasteur Institute in 1973, and (b) HIV-AIDS aetiology, except by weak reliance perhaps on thepost hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy that has so often has fooled medical researchers. Could you please refer me to any other literature that establishes HIV isolation by the Pasteur method, and the HIV-AIDS causality claimed in the ‘Informed Consent’ document. I believe his quest for such literature has occasioned some difficulty to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis Phd, inventor of the PCR technology adapted to your ‘HIV viral load’ tests. He complains that not even Luc Montagnier could refer him to any such literature, and that medical experts just ‘know’ HIV causes AIDS, just like they ‘knew’ bad air caused malaria. Because they ‘see’ it.
Under the heading “Is there a cure for HIV and AIDS?” I am informed that “there is no known cure” but that with careful management “you can greatly enhance the quality of your life before AIDS sets in.” Am I to understand from this that a person who is HIV-positive will invariably die a premature death from an AIDS indicator disease, and that his life will deteriorate even before such disease develops? If so, what research reports establish this?
What research reports establish that any of the licensed AIDS drugs improve quality of life? Isn’t it trite that they are all so poisonous and their ill-effects so severe that a very high proportion of patients are unable to comply with their treatment regimens and suffer dangerous toxicity injuries?
The ‘Informed Consent’ document restates a basic legal principle that persons urged to undergo any medical procedure are entitled to the fullest information about it, and that medical practitioners are required to supply it. Please consider this request for clarification and deal with my queries in the light of this. I reiterate my request for a copy of the information or operating manual supplied by the test kit manufacturer as I wish to study it closely myself.
Yours faithfully
ANTHONY
BRINK
Postea:
Pietermaritzburg pathologist, Dr Michael King, agreed unreservedly with my points made in paragraphs 1 and 3, and told me that pathologists have been conducting “a running battle with the Life Offices Association for years” regarding the sufficiency of the test as a basis for an HIV-positive diagnosis. At least five people preceded me for my ELISA test as I waited my turn including young black middle class folk who presumably lead not dissimilar lives and enjoy a similar healthy standard of living as their professional and business counterparts among the other ‘low risk’ races. None were alerted to the misinformation contained in the “Informed Consent” form that all were required to sign. Orthodox ‘AIDS expert’ Professor Gerald Stine of the University of North Florida made the same criticisms contained in paragraphs 1 and 3 above in AIDS UPDATE 1999 An Annual Overview of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in his article The Performance Rate for the Combined Elisa and Western Blot HIV Test – Is 99% accuracy good enough? The Answer Is No. As the title tells, and we’ll discuss below, a follow up Western blot test doesn’t plug the holes.
Imagine my surprise then to see King asserting in the Natal Witness newspaper on 28 June 2000, Diagnosis of HIV highly specific: “A number of conditions have been described that can give positive HIV Elisa results... Fortunately, these false positives are uncommon and are excluded by the highly specific confirmatory tests… Occasional samples give indeterminate results on Western Blotting and further patient follow-up or testing with highly sensitive and specific nucleic amplification techniques (PCR) may be required. Despite the admission by mainstream medicine that occasional difficulties with diagnoses can occur, the serological diagnosis of HIV infection using the combination of enzyme immunoassays and Western Blotting is highly sensitive and specific (99%). Ref: Mandell: Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, 5th ed, 2000, Churchill Livingstone.” Roma locuta, ergo finita est!
Before we look at these “highly specific confirmatory tests”, you might be interested to learn that Lynn Morris of the National Institute for Virology told us at the second meeting of President Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel in July 2000 that two reactive ELISA’s suffice for an HIV-positive diagnosis. You might wonder, “How can one unvalidated test possibly confirm another? To which another expert might offer the riposte, “We follow up with a different kind of test, the Western blot; it’s more specific.” Actually, the manufacturers of HIV Western blot tests do not make claims for better specificity than contemporary HIV ELISA kits. And in England and Wales, positive HIV ELISA test results are not confirmed or disconfirmed with an HIV Western blot test precisely because such tests are regarded by the ‘AIDS experts’ there as being too non-specific. The manual for one such HIV Western blot test (Epitope/Organon - Teknika Corporation) warns, “Do not use this kit as the sole basis of diagnosis of HIV-1 infection.” That’s how much confidence the manufacturer has in the specificity of its test. But don’t King’s “highly sensitive”, “highly specific” and “occasional” just roll off the tongue so nicely? No good upsetting the customers. Can’t have them thinking for themselves. Trust us. We know. Anyway Western blot is no different in principle from ELISA; it’s just that with Western blot antibody testing, you get to see which supposed ‘HIV proteins’ on the test strip react with the antibodies in your blood, whereas with ELISA the proteins are served mixed. Both kinds of tests presuppose that the test proteins have been shown to be uniquely constituent of a virus called HIV. But that’s not true. Quite the opposite in fact. It gets worse. Western blot test results for ‘HIV antibodies’ are interpreted differently in different places, kit to kit, lab to lab, country to country. By these different diagnostic criteria, you will be ‘infected with the AIDS virus’ and doomed to die in this country but not that. According to one pathologist but not another. What an incredible mess.
Some really clever guys like Dr William Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council, puff the sophisticated technology of modern ELISA HIV antibody tests by treating you to a little lesson on the purity of the proteins used in them as antigens to fish for the presence of ‘HIV antibodies’. “They don’t use purified proteins anymore”, he lectured us at the AIDS Panel’s second meeting. “They use recombinant proteins now.” That big drop-dead word is sure to impress, until your thoughts stray and you wonder, “What is the point of producing magnificently pure proteins, all with precisely the same molecular weight by means of bio-engineering techniques before ascertaining whether such proteins are unique to HIV?”
King’s statement that one can confirm or disconfirm HIV infection with “highly sensitive and specific nucleic amplification techniques (PCR)” will be a shocker to anybody who has read the contrary admonitions by the manufacturers of such tests. Makgoba spoke the same way in an interview in Focus in June 2000: “I have every confidence that the antibody test is so specific now that we don’t get many false positives. And if you take that with the identification of the virus by DNA techniques, there will be an abundance of correlative results.”
The only HIV PCR test licensed by the FDA for clinical (as opposed to experimental) use by pathologists is Roche Diagnostics Corporation’s AMPLICOR HIV-1 MONITOR Test, version 1.5. The manual says: “The AMPLICOR HIV-1 MONITOR Test, version 1.5 is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV-1 or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV-1 infection.” That’s because the manufacturer recognises that it is not specific enough. No, no, the ‘AIDS expert’ points out. That’s the wrong kind of PCR test. We don’t use quantitative monitoring tests for diagnosing HIV infection; we use a qualitative test. Like Roche Diagnostics Corporation’s other PCR test, their AMPLICOR HIV-1 Test. Well, it would help if the ‘AIDS experts’ read the manual: “For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.” As for “an abundance of correlative results” between HIV PCR and HIV antibody tests, in the only comparative study of its type yet performed - reported in AIDS in 1992 by theMulticenter Quality Control of PCR Detection of HIV DNA - the concordance of reactive results when the same blood was tested with both kinds of tests ranged unpredictably, hit and miss, between 40% and 100%. Odd isn’t it?
Dr King relies on a textbook for his statement that “the serological diagnosis of HIV infection using the combination of enzyme immunoassays and Western Blotting is highly sensitive and specific (99%).” All I can think is that by the time he wrote that, he had forgotten our little chat - specifically our discussion of the Grand Canyon of a difference between specificity and reliability in a low sero-prevalence cohort.
Let’s have a closer look at the significance or otherwise of King’s “99%” specificity figure. I learned that the specificity of the test used on me - an Abbott HIV gO EIA - was claimed to be 99.8%. Just how little such a specificity figure really means is well set out by Christine Maggiore in Los Angeles in a letter she wrote at the end of May 2000 to the webmaster of an AIDS information website: “The fact is that the specificity and the accuracy of HIV tests were determined by assuming that 100% of people with AIDS-defining illnesses who tested positive had actual current infection with HIV. The specificity was established by assuming that 100% of symptomless blood donors who tested HIV-negative did not have a current infection with HIV.”
Abbott Laboratories’s HIVABtm HIV-1 EIA test manual tells how the ‘specificity’ of the test was established: “Sensitivity and Specificity: At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence and absence of HIV-1 antibody in human blood. Therefore sensitivity was computed based on the clinical diagnosis of AIDS and specificity based on random donors. The ABBOT studies show that:
Sensitivity based on an assumed 100% prevalence of HIV-1 antibody in AIDS patients is estimated to be 100% (144 patients tested).
Specificity based on an assumed zero prevalence of HIV-1 antibody in random donors is estimated to be 99.9% (4777 random donors tested).”
The stunning implications of this are highlighted when we recall our pregnancy test illustration. The test gets tried out on 1000 women chosen because they are plump around the middle. They are presumed pregnant because they are tubby. Nobody thinks to establish by means of a scan whether they are actually pregnant. Then the test is tried out on 1000 slender women. They are presumed not to be pregnant because they have flat tummies. Nobody ascertains whether any are in their first terms of pregnancy. The test reacts for all the big-bellied women, and on this basis is declared 100% sensitive for pregnancy. It reacts for only two of the slim women and so gets declared 99.8% specific. Were such junk to be marketed for pregnancy testing, think how women’s groups would freak out. Can you just imagine?
Suppose that after well over a decade of use of this test it just coincidentally entered the heads of two independent teams of researchers on separate continents each to do a scan on one of these plump women who light up the test, and to publish their photographs in their leading trade rag. Imagine if the photograph showed nothing that looked like a foetus, in size and shape, bearing in mind how foetuses look through these scanning devices. The analogy is not as wild as one might think. Australian medical physicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her colleagues at the Royal Perth Hospital tells what happened when two separate teams of researchers went looking for HIV in the preparations of what they thought would be masses of concentrated, purified retroviral particles (Virology, March 1997)(*). And the astonishing concession made in the same year by the ‘discoverer of HIV’, Dr Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, concerning why he never published any electron photomicrograph of purified virus when making his claim to having isolated HIV (then called LAV) in 1983(#). Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s collated papers – all published in fine journals – are archived on the www.virusmyth.com/aids/perthgroup/ website.
When we leave our pregnancy test analogy and return to ‘HIV antibody tests’, the tale curdles even more. What if ‘AIDS defining illnesses’ in the absence of ‘HIV infection’ frequently cause the ‘HIV antibody test’ to react as well? Like the state of being plump setting off a pregnancy test. Such as the state of being thin lighting up an HIV antibody test. It does, actually – simple malnutrition is a reported cause of ‘false-positives’. As is tuberculosis. About seventy other conditions too, amply documented in the medical literature from ‘flu through to malaria. That’s the problem: ‘HIV antibody tests’ have never been validated against confirmed infection, and what’s more, just about anything can set them off. It’s something the ‘AIDS experts’ never get into. The manual for the test kit used on me rightly concedes, “False positive test results can be expected with a test of this nature” - contradicting the ‘Informed Consent’ form on the meaning of a reactive result: “What does it mean if the test is positive?”: “this means that you have been infected with the AIDS virus.”
Dr Desmond Martin wrote an article on the subject of ‘HIV diagnosis’ for the January 2000 issue of the South African Medical Journal. Reading it, you’d think you were in good hands going for an ‘HIV test’. That these guys know what they are doing. That their expert pronouncements on the state of your health can be confidently relied on. That they are cleverer than mediaeval doctors who wrote up an elaborate body of arcane learning on the exquisite variety of diagnostic meanings that could be pegged, for a fee, upon the qualities of your urine - its taste, colour, scent, density, viscosity and so on.
King was unable to answer or ducked the rest of my questions (in fact I had researched and knew the answers already) and referred me to the National Institute for Virology, university virology departments, and to an outfit called TOGA Laboratories, where Dr Desmond Martin currently makes his living. As far as the first two went, I’m afraid it was a case of ‘been there, done that’. Without any luck. None at all. The quality of my exchanges with ‘the experts’ at these places would bring tears to your eyes. University of Durban Virology Professor Alan Smith’s article on ‘HIV testing’ published alongside Dr King’s in the Natal Witness on 28 June 2000 is a good example of the brown-outs you encounter when ‘AIDS experts’ get asked simple questions at the root of this business. I didn’t bother Dr Martin or Dr Sim at TOGA Laboratories. Can you blame me? Nor did I go to the Life Offices Association again. I had approached their Medical Underwriters Committee before. They didn’t know what I was talking about. It all went right over their heads. Meant nothing to the Natal Blood Transfusion Service’s chief medical technologist, Dr Ravi Reddy, either, so I thought it would be pointless asking him: Why should race rather than class and environmental factors predispose one to contracting an infectious disease? (Are blacks really hornier than whites?) How can you determine the seroprevalence (infection rate) in a given community with an indirect (antibody) test before you have established the specificity of the test - by comparing how closely its performance (reactive, non-reactive) matches the incidence of infection (pathogen directly isolated in the patient)? Because until you do this, you’re just chasing your tail.
Think of an antibody test as detecting the fire fighting service out on a call. Usually to put out fires. But also to rescue kittens from trees. Or coax suicide jumpers away from high ledges. Or free drivers pinned inside their crashed cars. Apart from all this, there is an additional problem with relying on antibody tests as the sole basis for a diagnosis of infection: antibodies are often more partial to antigens other than those that stimulated their production. The assumption is that antibodies are specific, like faithful spouses. But as we all know, some husbands prefer their girlfriends to their wives. In short, antibodies are generally poly- not monoclonal. They are faithless partners. So you can’t just assume that a reactive antibody test indicates infection with a particular bug. You have to establish the specificity of the test first. Properly. Not in the asinine manner in which the HIV antibody test kit manufacturers have done. Imagine just assuming that a person lying in a hospital bed is ‘infected with HIV’ and has AIDS, just because he has one of the age-old diseases arbitrarily pulled under the CDC’s ever expanding bureaucratic umbrella as an AIDS indicator disease, and because he is an inner-city queer, black, or junkie – so in a ‘risk group’. Maybe just socially unpopular, marginalised and poor. Just the kind of person to feed AZT.
Why the blood of the impoverished black Africans (as opposed to the black middle classes and elites) makes HIV antibody tests light up like Christmas trees is a matter elucidated for the scientifically intrepid in papers that can be read on the internet: AIDS in Africa: distinguishing fact and fiction (World Journal of Microbiology & Biotechnology (1995) Vol. 11), Is a positive Western blot proof of HIV infection?(Bio/Technology June 1993, Vol. 11), HIV antibodies: further questions and a plea for clarification (Current Medical Research and Opinion Vol. 13: 1997), and HIV Antibody Tests and Viral Load - More Unanswered Questions and a Further Plea for Clarification (Current Medical Research and Opinion Vol. 14: 1998) all by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al and archived at the website mentioned above. Frankly, after these papers, anybody who tells you that a positive result to an ‘HIV antibody’ test means that you are infected with a deadly virus is, to quote John Lauritsen, “either ignorant, lazy or stupid.”
The ‘three or four million South Africans infected’ figure, which drives the hysteria in this country and elicits funds galore for AIDS careerists, is based on the extrapolation of anonymous HIV antibody test results of mostly poor black pregnant women at antenatal clinics. Unfortunately ‘AIDS experts’ haven’t thought to figure into their thrilling sums the fact that past pregnancy itself is a documented cause of ‘false positives’, reported in five separate research papers. And warned against by Abbott. Or, messing up the sums even more, that HIV infectivity is eight times lower for men than women according to top ‘AIDS experts’ (Padian et al 1997) - a curious notion for an allegedly sexually transmitted disease, but then HIV-AIDS is a curious affair. Whose mounting anomalies need interminable excuses, like that other rotting paradigm in its death throes, Ptolemy’s geocentric model of planetary motion, adjusted ad hoc to answer every Copernican challenge, until it all became just too ridiculous, and the whole thing finally collapsed, vehemently defended by the experts to the end.
If you are beginning to suspect that ‘HIV antibody’ testing is nothing more than a vicious form of high tech mumbo jumbo, bone throwing, divination, and death spell casting, with modern witchdoctors keeping suckers like us terrified and in their power - and their pockets full - I should emphasise that this little essay only scratches the surface. In her papers to which I have referred above, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her colleagues take ‘HIV antibody testing’ comprehensively to task. And blow it to smithereens.
This much is certain: HIV antibody test results are no more significant an indication of health or disease than a phrenologist’s skull-chart. They’re worth a bowl of cold spit. But while they shatter countless lives they sure rake in the cash. And the Life Offices Association’s ‘Informed Consent’ form for HIV tests creates litigation possibilities for psychic trauma claims enough to keep lawyers in business for years.
(*) www.deltav.apana.org.au/~vturner/aids
(#) http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/dtinterviewlm.htm
To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.
Emeritus professor of molecular biology, Harvard University.
Considering how AIDS saturates our public discourse, galvanises our politicians, thrills our gee-whiz journalists, inspires our musicians, worries our clergy, agitates our AIDS-activist lawyers, perturbs the judges of even our highest courts, engages the South African Law Commission’s energies in cooking up imaginative new bills, dominates our medical research effort, infuses exciting new relevance into tired careers in virology departments, and siphons off our tax rands into the pockets of condom missionaries proselytising to a stubborn public and ‘AIDS counsellors’ programming their victims for death, your regular guy might be excused for believing that our country and the world were in the throes of a dire public health crisis, a new Black Death, and for thinking that the fact of it was as certain as any in science about which there obtains a universal consensus.
In fact, hundreds of scientists of the highest rank disagree with the HIV-AIDS causation hypothesis. They think ‘AIDS’ as a diagnostic construct is a passing fad, a fashionable new name for age-old ills, and that ‘AIDS’ boils down to money-spinning political kitsch. In their most assiduous dissents they emphasise that ‘HIV’ has never been isolated under the well-settled rules for viral isolation, assert that ‘HIV’ has never been shown to exist as an infectious entity of exogenous origin, and demonstrate that every protein employed in the ‘HIV antibody’ test kits as antigens, and claimed to be uniquely constituent of ‘HIV’, is actually cellular, not viral - in other words, that all HIV-positive test results are false positives. In short, they consider the HIV-AIDS paradigm to be a scientific blunder of biblical proportions, and its experts foolish quacks. These AIDS dissidents include professors emeriti at the pinnacle of their specialities in cell-biology, virology and related fields. They also include eminent mathematicians, actuaries, philosophers, ethicists and law and history professors. Among them are two exceptionally distinguished Nobel laureates in our time, Walter Gilbert (Chemistry 1980), and Kary Mullis (Chemistry 1993).
Dr Peter Duesberg, professor of cell-biology, University of California at Berkeley, member of The National Academy of Sciences: Before Duesberg’s wrecking-ball challenge to Gallo’s HIV-AIDS theory was published as an invited paper in the prestigious journal Cancer Research in 1988, Gallo had remarked, “No one knows more about retroviruses than Peter Duesberg.” Once acclaimed as a widely published and extensively cited Nobel candidate for his discovery of onco-genes and genetic mapping of retroviruses, but now ‘delegitimated’ as a scientist, Duesberg was the recipient of the largest annual research grant in biology for years - awarded for the pursuit of whatever avenue of scientific enquiry took his fancy. Stripped of his grant and his post-graduate classes, evicted from his laboratory, practically barred from researching and publishing, and reduced to chairmanship of his faculty’s annual picnic committee, he continues to point out the fundamental anomalies, deficiencies and paradoxes of the 15 year old theory that the 29 old diseases renamed AIDS in the presence of HIV antibodies could have any causal link to a retrovirus. However, Duesberg finds himself increasingly alone in the AIDS dissident camp too, eclipsed by Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al (below) whose more fundamental tack in impeaching the HIV-AIDS theory is winning over its best heterodox scientists - most recently, Kary Mullis (below), pathology and epidemiology specialist Gordon Stewart (below), and Etienne de Haarven, pathology professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, renowned for his pioneering published work in the electron photomicrography of viruses.
Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, bio-physicist, department of medical physics, Royal Perth Hospital, Australia: Collaborating with, among others, John Papadimitriou, a practising pathologist and professor at University of Western Australia’s medical school, David Causer, senior physicist, head of the department of medical physics and professor at Royal Perth Hospital, and Valendar Turner, consultant emergency physician at the Royal Perth Hospital, Papadopulos-Eleopulos has raised the most radical and dramatic challenges to the HIV-AIDS theory, by highlighting the lack of a proper gold standard for the HIV antibody tests, in that unlike other known viruses, HIV has never been isolated according to the classical procedure for the isolation of viruses, commonly referred to as the Pasteur Rules.
Dr Walter Gilbert, formerly molecular biology professor at Harvard University: One of contemporary science’s most outstanding and accomplished scientists, Gilbert won his Nobel for inventing the now foundational modern technique for DNA sequencing. He considers Duesberg to be “absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by [HIV]. There is no animal model for AIDS, and without an animal model, you cannot establish Koch’s postulates [to prove the role of the suspected pathogen].” He observes, “The community as a whole doesn’t listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints, that if you have simply a consensus view it severely stultifies; it fails to see the problems of that consensus and it depends on the existence of critics to break up that iceberg and permit knowledge to develop. This is in fact one of the underpinnings of democratic theory. It’s one of the basic reasons that we believe in notions of free speech. And it’s one of the great forces in intellectual development…The general public accepts what the media tells them. And the media has blown up the virus as being the cause of AIDS, and the scientific community - parts of it - have blown up the virus as the cause of AIDS because it is more convenient to have a neat explanation than to be in that situation in which we often are in science at which the problems, the questions, still face us, and our knowledge proceeds gradually to overcome those difficulties.”
Dr Kary Mullis, molecular biologist: Nobel winner Mullis’s watershed invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction technology for amplifying minute DNA fragments for identification has so revolutionised biology that one might fairly speak of two epochs, the dark ages before and the enlightenment after it. He deplores the misapplication of his invention to measure ‘HIV viral load.’ He points out, “It is not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. …there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents.” He predicts, “Years from now, people will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find those who excommunicated Galileo.” Endorsing Duesberg’s rejection of the orthodox model of infectious AIDS, he says, “As applied, the HIV theory is unfalsifiable, and useless as a medical hypothesis… I can’t find a single virologist who will give me references which show HIV is the probable cause of AIDS. [Not even Luc Montagnier could help.] If you ask...you don’t get an answer, you get fury.” The HIV-AIDS hypothesis, he thinks, is “one hell of a mistake.”
Dr Beverly Griffin, director and professor of virology, Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London: “I do not believe HIV, in and of itself, can cause AIDS.”
Dr Harry Rubin, retrovirologist, professor of molecular biology, University of California at Berkeley, member of National Academy of Sciences: “I don’t think the cause of AIDS has been found. I think [that in] a disease as complex as AIDS…there are likely to be multiple causes. In fact, to call it a single disease when there are so many multiple manifestations seems to me to be an over-simplification…The causal role of HIV in AIDS is certainly not proven.”
Dr Albert Sabin, discoverer of live-virus polio vaccine, National Institutes of Health: “The basis of present action and education is that everybody who tests positive for the virus must be regarded as a transmitter and there is no evidence for that.”
Dr Luc Montagnier, virologist, ‘co-discover of HIV’, Pasteur Institute, Paris: “There are too many shortcomings in the theory that HIV causes all signs of AIDS…We are seeing people HIV infected for 9,10 years or more, 12 years, and they are still in good shape; their immune system is still good, and it is unlikely that those people will come down with AIDS later.”
Sir John Maddox, former editor, Nature: “[Luc] Montagnier said clearly what he meant. HIV [alone] is…not…a sufficient cause of AIDS.”
Dr Simon Wain-Hobson, immunologist, Pasteur Institute, Paris: “…an intrinsic cytopathic effect of the virus [HIV] is no longer credible...”
Dr Richard Strohman, emeritus professor of cell-biology, University of California at Berkeley: The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is “bankrupt.”
Dr Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of public health at the University of Glasgow, former AIDS advisor to the World Health Organisation: “AIDS is a behavioural disease. It is multifactorial, brought on by several simultaneous strains on the immune system - drugs, pharmaceutical and recreational, sexually transmitted diseases, multiple viral infections… there is no specific etiologic agent of AIDS... the disease arises as a result of a cumulative process following a period of exposure to multiple environmental factors… Nobody wants to look at the facts about this disease. It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve sent countless letters to medical journals pointing out the epidemiological discrepancies and they simply ignore them. The fact is, this whole heterosexual AIDS thing is a hoax.”
Dr Bernard Forscher, former managing editor of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “The HIV hypothesis ranks with the ‘bad air’ theory for malaria and the ‘bacterial infection’ theory of beriberi and pellagra [caused by nutritional deficiencies]. It is a hoax that became a scam.”
Dr Alfred Hassig, immunologist, former emeritus professor of immunology, University of Bern, and former director of the Swiss blood transfusion service(recently late): “The sentences of death accompanying the medical diagnosis of AIDS should be abolished.”
Dr Charles Thomas, former professor of molecular biology at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities: “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.” He himself has no doubts. He rejects the HIV-AIDS hypothesis as a “fraud”.
Dr Phillip Johnson, senior professor of law, University of California at Berkeley: “One does not need to be a scientific specialist to recognise a botched research job and a scientific establishment that is distorting the facts to promote an ideology and maximise its funding. The establishment continues to doctor statistics and misrepresent the situation to keep the public convinced that a major viral pandemic is under way when the facts are otherwise.”
Dr Serge Lang, professor of mathematics, Yale University and member of the National Academy of Sciences: “There does not even exist a single proper definition of AIDS on which discourse or statistics can reliably be based... the CDC calls these diseases AIDS only when antibodies against HIV are confirmed or presumed to be present. If a person tests HIV negative, then the diseases are given another name… I do not regard the causal relationship between HIV and any disease as settled. I have seen considerable evidence that highly improper statistics concerning HIV and AIDS have been passed off as science, and that top members of the scientific establishment have carelessly, if not irresponsibly, joined the media in spreading misinformation about the nature of AIDS.”
Dr Joseph Sonnabend, South African born New York physician: “...there is no specific etiologic agent of AIDS... the disease arises as a result of a cumulative process following a period of exposure to multiple environmental factors... The marketing of HIV, through press-releases and statements, as a killer virus causing AIDS without the need for any other factors, has so distorted research and treatment that it may have caused thousands of people to suffer and die.”
Dr Harvey Bialy, scholar in residence, Institute for Biotechnology, University of Mexico; founding Scientific Editor: Bio/Technology (now Nature Biotechnology): “From both my literature review and my personal experience over most of the AIDS - so called AIDS centres in Africa, I can find absolutely no believable persuasive evidence that Africa is in the midst of a new epidemic of infectious immunodeficiency.”
Dr Charles L. Geshekter, professor of African History, California State University: From “Cameroon to California, sex education must no longer be distorted by terrifying, dubious misinformation that equates sex with death… African poverty, not some extraordinary sexual behavior, is the best predictor of AIDS-defining diseases… A 1994 report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases concluded that HIV tests were useless in central Africa, where the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, malaria, and leprosy were so prevalent that they registered over 70% false positive results...in people whose immune systems are compromised for a wide variety of reasons other than HIV...”
Dr Hiram Caton, ethicist, head of the School of Applied Ethics at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia: “The AIDS epidemic was a mirage manufactured by scientists who believed that integrity could be maintained amidst the diverting influences of big money, prestige and politics.”
Dr Ralph Moss: author of The Cancer Industry: “The paradigm that was laid down for how to milk the cancer problem is basically the same paradigm which is being followed in milking the AIDS problem.”
Dr Frank Buianouckas: professor of mathematics, Bronx, New York: “I suspect everything involved in this AIDS epidemic. If HIV causes anything, it certainly causes fund-raisers. It sells stocks. It supports dances. It sells condoms. And it keeps the AIDS establishment going.”
He has nerve and he has knowledge.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), English author.
Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
"The Speckled Band" (1892), of Dr. Grimesby Roylott.
For any number of obvious reasons, it would probably be disquieting to most folk at large to discover that Mother Theresa - to employ a fanciful illustration - had kept a Swiss bank account. One would imagine that the honesty of men working at the frontiers of science in that hazy twilight terrain between the known and the unknown, the certain and the speculative, would count for quite a bit as well. Particularly where their pontifications, advices and theories have the potential both to reap magnificent honours and riches, and very directly affect us dumb fucks out in the laity, who sit at the feet of these guys and crave as much of their wisdom as we can get. And especially in a time of a perceived medical emergency, or during the rise of an hysterical epidemic, fuelled by a medieval fear of tainted blood and poisoned semen - and now evil mothers’ milk - in which we look up with frightened eyes to these secular sages for deliverance from tiny invisible enemies which we are told beset us. Mostly when enjoying our favourite evening recreation.
Science at its outer limits is populated by no end of ambitious cowboys of modest acumen hungry for fame, glory and the Ferraris in which some of their lucky chums in bio-tech cruise out of their labs’ parking lots in the direction of their Cessna hangars. They live so to speak in remote Wild West towns with lamentably few marshals to keep an eye on things. Many are the left-overs too mediocre to cut it in university environments who wind up in homes for scientific dullards like the politically powerful health bureaucracies of the National Institutes of Health and The Centres for Disease Control in the USA. As we’ve all seen, when these oracles mumble, press trumpets blare and the entire world eagerly gobbles up every word, without demur. Notwithstanding how many fake health crises they have delivered still-born into the popular consciousness, like the idle herpes scare in the 70’s, the great swine flu fiasco in the same decade, the phantom syphilis epidemic in the first half of the 20th century, and that shining emblem of medical idiocy, the pellagra plague in the US South over the same period, treated inter alia with arsenic, electrocution and ruthless quarantine, which turned out to be plain malnutrition among the politically awkward droves of poor white crackers in deep south industrial towns.
We need contagious epidemics to fight. Even imagined ones. They’re tremendously psychologically useful. Germ theory so dominates contemporary medicine that it seeks germs everywhere, the more virulent the better, and especially if they can be linked to our culture’s great taboos, sex and death. Anything to avoid facing up to unappealing political realities like widespread chronic undernourishment among a shameful number of our countrymen as the time-honoured and common sense cause of broken health. Or, at the other pole, for those of us felicitously occupying the higher orders, factors inextricably tied to the excesses of our culture of affluence.
Of course, the loftier the degree of scientific specialisation, the sharper the point of the pyramid, the smaller and remoter the frontier town, and the fewer the guys with badges. As in a funny little corner of theoretical (some say virtual) virology called retrovirology - served at the commencement of the AIDS era by only a handful of labs run by the same guys who’d lost the ‘war on cancer’ declared by Nixon in 1971, by putting all their money, and 40 billion of their country’s, on the perfectly ridiculous theory that cancer was an infectious condition caused by viruses.
Folk inclined to the view that a reasonable degree of personal integrity is essential to serve as a brake on the perennial temptation tickling largely unpoliced scientists at the frontiers of their specialisations to make extravagant claims with fabulous commercial potential beyond those which their data really support might be put out to learn that the pope of AIDS is a complete scum-bag.
We speak of Robert Gallo, who told the worried world at a press conference convened by the US Health Department on 23 April 1984, before the publication of any paper for his fellows to assess, that he’d discovered the cause, a virus he said, of the poor health that a narrow subset of gay men with ruinous lifestyles were experiencing - later christened, in a flourish of conceptual surplusage, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Having sneaked through a patent application on the blood test he’d devised for his claimed viral culprit ahead of the previously lodged French one, thus guaranteeing him a fortune in royalties, Gallo went on to publish four papers in Science two weeks later. Then the trouble started, an exuberant international disputation over who stole the fake diamonds. For Gallo this was the Paula trouble that led to Monica.
Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in France complained that the samples containing what he believed to be his newly spotted virus and which he’d trustingly sent Gallo had been flagrantly ripped off. He sued across the sea. Gallo brazenly counter-charged his accuser. It was embarrassing for the US administration to have its premier AIDS scientist accused of theft and fraud, but with the help of a gang of lawyers hired to fudge the facts and conceal boxes of crucial discoverable documents, Gallo got off - by dint of a neat political compromise agreeing a history, cosigned by no less than the presidents of the respective republics, Reagan and Chirac, in terms of which these two giants of modern biology were henceforth to be deemed co-discoverers of the ‘AIDS virus’.
The sham began unravelling almost immediately. A trouble-making investigative journalist on the Chicago Tribune, John Crewdson, began sticking his nose in. He went to print with a comprehensively researched expose spilling the beans on Gallo’s theft of Luc Montagnier’s samples, even his photographs of them. Hardly able to do otherwise, Gallo’s bosses in the National Institutes of Health instigated an enquiry with Yale biochemist Frederic Richards as overseer. Reviewing the four seminal research papers upon which the entire HIV-AIDS causation paradigm is founded - if feebly - the inquiry found fraud, a discrepancy between what had been reported and what had been done. The NIH watered it down, finding Gallo guilty merely of “creating and fostering conditions that gave rise to falsified/fabricated data and falsified reports.” This loyal whitewash was promptly criticised by Richards and by Senator John Dingle, who had got wind of the misfeasance in Gallo’s laboratory, and had begun his own investigation under the aegis of his Sub-Committee on Oversights and Investigations of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Department of Health’s Office of Research Integrity reviewed the NIH report and disagreed with the cop-out. It had no trouble finding Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct, the gravest possible verdict, and a capital offence in career terms. So did the Dingle Committee in its draft report. Facing criminal prosecution for the perjury adorning his patent application, Gallo was forced to leave the National Institutes of Health in disgrace. On the scandal festered, until 1993, when happily for Gallo, it all went away. The government dropped the patent charges, and those of fraudulently making a misstatement in a scientific journal and failing to credit the work of other researchers in claiming it as his own. Why? Because, a review board, comprising lawyers naturally, not scientists, had raised the bar in asserting a brand-new revised definition of scientific misconduct, which Gallo’s prosecutors in the Office of Research Integrity doubted they could clear. Unlike Sol Kerzner who kept his head down when the bribery case against him was dropped, Gallo boasted complete vindication.
Before making becoming famous for HIV, Gallo’s laboratory had been found by an investigative panel of university scientists appointed in 1974 to be one of the worst offenders in the scandalous abuse of federal funds dished out during Nixon’s ‘War on Cancer’. Two co-researchers later went down for embezzlement and taking secret gratuities.
From this scientific cesspool was spewed the constitution for The Terror, the founding papers of the most powerful, all-pervasive and terrifying medical model of our time, the HIV-AIDS-causation hypothesis. No wonder the Nobel committee has set its face against the whole stinking shambles. Yet its integrity as a premise is assumed in the almost one hundred thousand papers in the subject that have been published since. Those critics making a living in the scientific establishment who point a finger at the emperor’s pink arse do so at immense professional and personal risk, and for some, at terrible cost. But there’s another story.
Curiously, the Office of Research Integrity found that the fraud tainting Gallo’s claim-to-fame papers did not affect the validity of the papers’ main conclusions, even though some of the key research work was described as “of dubious scientific merit”, and “really crazy.” Suffice it to say that others who have meticulously scrutinised Gallo’s original HIV research claims - allowing for the purpose of reviewing them that the dubious research data is sound - have found them to be, well, shall we say troubling. The adventurous leap between the papers’ contents and their headings, for starters. But that’s another yarn still.
Gallo’s disgraceful behaviour in relation to his AIDS research was no first. Had he not ascended to such power and influence within the federal health bureaucracy, it is likely that his claim to have found a single infectious cause for the disparate diseases grouped together as AIDS in the early 1980’s would have been laughed out of court. After all, this was the bright spark who, with almost as much fanfare as that at his flash-bulb popping HIV press announcement, had loudly touted his discovery of what he claimed to be the first identified human retrovirus, HL23V, in the mid 70’s. After another look, this exciting find turned out to be nothing of the kind, just an accidental laboratory artefact. His laboratory hadn’t done the most basic controls. The virus had never existed. To his great embarrassment, Gallo had to retract his fancy claims, and HL23V then completely disappeared from the scientific lexicon.
As the last misfired shots were going off in the failed cancer war - staged largely around the retroviral-cancer hypothesis - and it had become irresistibly plain to everyone that cancer had nothing to do with germs, and the whole thing had been a monumental waste of money, Gallo and his mates (known in-house as the Bob Club) sought new funding opportunities for their imminently redundant laboratories. Ever eager to position himself where the action was, he began punting another retrovirus which he claimed to have discovered, HTLV1, as the possible cause of the odd diseases like Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystitis carinii pneumonia suddenly appearing to ail urban fast-track life-style gay men in San Francisco and New York. The virus had in fact been identified by biologists in Gallo’s lab, principally Poiesz and Ruscetti, not Gallo, but true to form he appropriated the discovery and took the accolades. Wanting the virus to be all things, the theory that HTLV1 could be responsible for AIDS was ludicrous. He had previously claimed this virus, again on absurd grounds, to be the cause of a rare form of leukaemia, which amounts to disorderly immune cell replication, not premature cell death. “One of the most exciting stories of twentieth century biology”, he gushed. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis thinks it “a joke.” The virus had first been posited to be a cell division stimulant, not a killer. Obviously, Gallo’s new converse role for HTLV1 went up like a lead balloon, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t long afterwards that Montagnier sent Gallo his samples, and we know the rest. In cravenly seeking the imprimatur of Big American Science, by seeking the endorsement for his work of an abject rogue, Montagnier naively left his keys in the ignition, and the next thing it was gone. Gallo resprayed Montagnier’s LAV as HTLVIII. It was later renamed HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, on the basis of Gallo’s claims, without proof to warrant its fearsome title. (Unless one thinks that correlations disclose proofs of causation. As if sparrows sometimes seen on telephone cables cause crossed lines.)
Whether HIV (or rather the minute biological traces said to evidence its presence) actually lives up to its frightening billing, is something Gallo can’t seem to make up his mind about. This ought to come as some comfort to those who live in wait for the clatter of the hangman’s key. Once insisting that HIV “kills like a truck”, and “would kill Clark Kent”, he now concedes, “We don’t know that…100 percent of people infected with HIV will die with AIDS. We don’t know that. We shouldn’t be predicting that, and it could even precipitate suicide. They shouldn’t have put that on the front page (of the Washington Post), even if it were true. But the fact is that we just don’t know.” In 1995, The Pasteur Institute’s Simon Wain-Hobson confessed, “An intrinsic cytopathic effect of the virus is no longer feasible.” The biggest medical research effort in history has found HIV to be biologically inactive. Gallo has tried weaselling out of the difficulty created by this humbling observation by suggesting that ‘cofactors’ might be involved in AIDS, since HIV can’t do any mischief on its own. (Time magazine’s 1996 Man of the Year, David Ho’s opposite assertions in 1996 have imploded on his childish mathematical errors.) Gallo had lots to say about a virus called HHV8 for a while, implicated as a ‘co-factor’ in the development of that signal AIDS condition Kaposi’s Sarcoma, but like all other exciting breakthroughs in AIDS research, it too has proved to be just another flash in the pan. Worse still, it is now generally accepted, and since 1994 by Gallo too, that those horrible skin blotches have nothing to do with HIV at all.
At last count, Gallo was on SABC TV a couple of years ago, singing his own praises for his alleged breakthrough anti-HIV protein HAF, distilled from the urine of women with child. About which we have heard nothing since. Naturally, since it was just another rodeo stunt. Gallo’s new laboratory in Baltimore had produced nothing to show for the millions he had duped state and municipal authorities into giving him, and was about to have its plug pulled by the Maryland legislature accordingly. A neatly timed “very important discovery” defeated the danger.
Since the case for Gallo’s HIV-AIDS hypothesis is invariably pressed with calls to the authority of its famous protagonist, in the absence of scientific proof in the sense that most curious folk understand, it’s as well that we know what kind of bloke we’re relying on.
With such scintillating credentials as Gallo’s, no wonder that astute German virologist Stefan Lanka - referring to HIV-AIDS, Luc Montagnier, and Gallo - talks of “a medical theory concocted by a French mediocrity who right from the start doubted the validity of a virus-only theory of AIDS causation, and only last week unleashed a new wave of doubt; and an American scientific gangster who had committed so many crass, self-aggrandising blunders in the previous decade, that he could not really be reliedupon to tell the time correctly.” The Einstein of modern biology, Kary Mullis, doesn’t mince words either; he considers Gallo and his acolytes “so stupid they’re to be pitied.”
One might point out that unanimity has never guaranteed the soundness of medical constructs, and examples of this abound. The history of medicine both ancient and modern is a wrecking-yard full of broken and abandoned ideas. In this century alone innumerable medical theses have collapsed to which nearly all doctors once subscribed, such as bacterial theories of scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra, and more recently, the immuno-surveillance and retroviral theories of cancer aetiology - for which billions of dollars funded thousands of convincing research papers during the “War on Cancer” declared by Nixon in 1971. Then there was swine flu: 1976 saw President Gerald Ford on television, at the behest of the American medical establishment, solemnly urging all Americans to get vaccinated against an imminent deadly influenza epidemic. About 50 million Americans were panicked into being immunised with useless or harmful vaccines rushed onto the market. Adverse reactions resulted in damages claims of $2.7 billion. Not a single case of swine flu appeared subsequent to the death of a sick recruit undergoing basic training in a boot camp in New Jersey (hardly an unusual event) that had ignited all the hysteria. Before HIV-AIDS, and alongside the mad cow craze in Britain and the avian flu folly in Hong Kong, the great swine flu fiasco was perhaps the most telling instance in recent times of how medicine can lose its head.
Another answer to the question goes to the fact that most doctors have scarcely more than a layman’s grasp of the concepts that populate biology at its molecular horizon. For instance, most would gape dully if asked to define the peculiar characteristics of a retrovirus (like HIV, we’re told) as distinct from other viruses, or distinguish endogenous and exogenous retroviruses, or articulate the rival contentions advanced by molecular biologists about whether the whole of retrovirology might be a mistake, a wrong turn at a scientific road-fork, a bad inference drawn from the evidence of certain metabolic biochemical phenomena which look odd when seen against old-fashioned rules of molecular genetics, and the possibility that retroviruses might not exist as infectious agents at all - that it is rather the classical dogma that needs an overhaul. Taxed about the HIV theory of AIDS, most doctors can do little more than quote the claims of their authorities, like priests citing papal bulls and encyclicals, making obeisance to their cardinals.
A third answer would make the impudent point that it is fallacious to imagine that doctors generally have a superior capacity for reasoning than their patients. The notes given medical students speak to the scant education that doctors receive in this art. To read them is to see how flimsy medical and biological theories are dished up as fact for rote learning, making the kind of call-and-answer instruction one sees in farm schools in this country look like an adventure in lateral-thinking training. Doctors do so well at school because they’re the kind of guys who are the most easily schooled. In myths and legends to outdo the Hare Krishna people. Especially virologists, who occupy the haughtiest medical echelons, but who seem to have the dimmest bulbs in the upper storey. As revealed by what they swallow without a hiccup. And regurgitate to their students. Like the timeless French fancy (“Le Rage”) that a bite from a dog acting wild and crazy can make you go mad too - and die. (But not the dog; man is the ‘end-host’ they say.) You can go the same way from eating steak. Although nobody can plausibly say why. Or some cancers are caused by viruses and are infectious. Or the most hilarious notion of them all: having sex can be deadly. Mothers’ milk too. But not spit. All of a sudden. After millions of years. Thanks to a mutated virus from monkeys. Or maybe the moon. And all of this without any evidence. Not a shred. And there’s a funny part to it. You might be feeling fine. But you’re sure to go in six months time from any one of a couple of dozen diseases or malignancies. No, make that two years, well actually five; shall we say eight, or ten, or twelve, maybe fifteen; OK perhaps your life is just shortened a bit. Definitely? Yes, most certainly; no, not necessarily. Look, we don’t know. How, why? We don’t have the faintest idea. Theories zigzag like a drunk at the wheel. (“We are still confused…, but at least now we are confused at a higher level of understanding” - Harvard Medical School professor of immunology Paul Johnson) Excuse me. Is this the circus?
Nor do doctors necessarily proceed from a more rational mindset than Joe Public does. The opposite may be the case. That HIV-AIDS as a medical construct could have taken root so richly among doctors, despite its absurd fundamental tenets (which fly in the face of everything known to virology), illustrates the point. As Harvey Bialy, scholar in residence at the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Mexico and editor at large of the prestigious science journal Nature Biotechnology puts it, the HIV theory of AIDS “turns immunology upside down and inside out.” To begin with, never before was the presence of antibodies taken to be prognostic of future disease. They used to be thought of as good things – evidence, where the patient appears healthy, of a successful immune response to a pathogen defeated. Former molecular biology professor at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities, Charles Thomas predicts that after the balloon pops, historians will be studying the flight of common sense in the lunacy of the AIDS age, “for a 100 years, ...how America gave AIDS to the world.” But since HIV-AIDS as a diagnostic construct is still hegemonically regnant in our time, the point about the way doctors as a group tend to think needs illustrating with a different example. What better than the turn medicine took during the Third Reich.
The Nazis’ virulently irrational and barbarous doctrines of racial hygiene found huge appeal for German and Austrian doctors in that era. No other profession was as well represented on Nazi party membership lists. From an ostensibly sober, rational profession functioning as an elite caste in a culture that seemed itself to be the fruit of the Enlightenment, just under half of them were card-carrying Nazis. Of course not all engaged in the sadistic butchery of untermenschen for which the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials were conducted, but it would be a mistake to imagine that such criminals were aberrant quacks from the fringes, flourishing like vermin on the opportunities created within the Nazi eugenics paradigm. In fact many medical practitioners and academics tried or named in testimony at the trials had enjoyed international eminence in their professional fields. Dr Edwin Katzenellenbogen, for instance, who got life imprisonment, had served on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School.
Scholars of religious thinking have long known that the more horrible and improbable the founding superstitions of a new faith, the greater its capacity to mobilise the popular imagination and the stronger the force of its revolutionary engine. In medicine, religion’s first cousin, the same sometimes applies. Like an infant upstart religion with imperial designs, the HIV-AIDS paradigm calls for a vigorous rebellion against long-established models of understanding. Woe betide any conservative scientists reluctant to become conversos to the rude new creed, who point out that the new theory is absurd on its face, that the link between AIDS and sex is no stronger than its link with sleeping; they become marginalised like Jews defying the demands of medieval Christendom, not racked and burned, but ostracised - scientifically defrocked, blacklisted and delegitimated, stripped of research funding, banned from lecturing podia, kicked out of their laboratories, rendered unemployable in academia or industry, menaced with confinement in psychiatric wards, isolated from graduate students in whom they might instill similar heretic doubts, and barred from publishing in the journals that once craved their papers. But naturally; radical political dissident Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US has pointed out that “if you serve power, power rewards you with respectability. If you work to undermine power…you are reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert.” The AIDS phenomenon at root is a vast pumping aggregation of interests with enormous political and economic power. Doctors and scientists who challenge its sacred tenets risk attracting the wrath of the revolution’s red guards. They won’t be thrown from windows. But their careers will be over. For their reactionary intransigence these critics will be marked always with pejorative epithets, as persistent as tattoos, like ‘discredited’, ‘loony’, ‘maverick’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible and pernicious’. Just to make sure we correctly tell the wits from the dunces. And to discourage us from asking, “Well, what are these guys actually saying?”
A fourth explanation lies in the fact that for all their social status and prestige, in truth doctors generally function close to the bottom of the food-chain in the medical-industrial complex, and serve as little more than a thoughtless delivery system for the pharmaceutical corporations – whose wares they peddle makes the medical drug industry one of the most profitable legal enterprises on the planet. Just how little room doctors are allowed for independent judgment founded on their own observations is revealed in the fact that in some places a doctor who declines to follow an approved treatment regimen such as chemotherapy for cancerous tumours, in view of his empirical assessment of its utter uselessness and lethal toxicity, risks sanctions from his controlling guild. Imagine the trouble a doctor would be in were he brazenly to announce his conclusion that having investigated the business, reactive HIV antibody test results are virtually meaningless - pointers to no more than heightened non-specific immunologic activity. And were he to refuse to diagnose negative or positive, selecting for life or death, like a Nazi doctor calling links or rechts. Or marking ‘+’ on the medical files of slow or crippled German children, to mark them for murder during the euthanasia programme.
In sum, one doesn’t have to cast about too far for answers to the question, “How could all the doctors in the world be wrong about AIDS?” Medicine’s penchant for screwing up magnificently, its characteristic intellectual sluggishness, and the appeal of “magical thinking” for its practitioners is plain to anyone who turns back a few pages.
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