From The Mailbag: Explaining the BS Theory
Dean
I've been exchanging email for some time with Chuck Ortleb. He was the publisher of what was once one of the most popular gay publications in country, the New York Native. It started up in 1981 and went out of business in 1996.
Chuck watched a lot of friends die in those days. He recently sent me some questions and, after some back-and-forth, he agreed that I could publish the following (lightly edited) correspondence:
Dean,
I'm very grateful to see your continued good sense and courage on the HIV issue. If possible, I'd like to know more about your take on AIDS. Here are four questions.
Is there an AIDS epidemic?
If so, what is your definition of AIDS?
If you think there is an AIDS epidemic, what do you think the cause is?
If there is an AIDS epidemic, how big is it?
Thanks,
Chuck
Is there an AIDS epidemic?
An epidemic is defined as the rapid spread of an infection, and by that definition the AIDS epidemic seems to have ended in the US long ago. The disease itself may still be around but if so it's hard to tell who exactly has it.
Clearly, something horrible was killing people in the 1980s. Also clearly, some were misdiagnosed and medicated inappropriately — and ever since then, any chance we had of knowing what really went on, and what's really going on now, has been almost completely obliterated.
We were lied to about the bogus African variety, as well as the massive breakout in the heterosexual population that was going to kill tens of millions of people by the early 1990s. All this leads me to naturally wonder how much else we were lied to about.
If so, what is your definition of AIDS?
Today, it's no longer even clear what the hell AIDS is. The medical definitions are so broad and vague as to be meaningless.
Basically, it's a specific type of catastrophic immune system failure that hit a few select groups in the 1980s in the U.S. for which the cause is currently unknown. Many people were misdiagnosed with it. Many others may be suffering from the same exact condition and be undiagnosed. It's simply no longer clear what we're looking at. The only thing I am certain of is that HIV does not work as advertised.
If you think there is an AIDS epidemic, what do you think the cause is?
To all appearances, the epidemic in the US subsided long ago. I understand that some people believe that the virus HHV-6 is somehow related to, or might even be the real cause of, AIDS. I have no opinion on that. The only thing I'm certain of is that we've been horribly led astray on HIV.
If there is an AIDS epidemic, how big is it?
There's almost certainly no African AIDS epidemic--those people are dying of malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, and all the same things they've always died of. In the U.S. we simply have no way of knowing anymore. The truth has been obscured for going on two decades now.
More from Chuck:
Dean,
I'm curious about this statement in the answers to the questions I posed: "Thus: it's clear we were lied to..."
Lies? Did you really mean that? It doesn't reflect the general drift of what you've been saying on your blog. Lying generally implies that the liar knows what is really going on.
Ironically, just before I sent you those questions, I was putting together an e-mail that tries to understand the benefits of holding fast to the "silliness" or "bullshit" (your words) of HIV. Why do people continue to believe this stuff?
Here it is:
Question: What is the social benefit in continuing to believe that HIV is the cause of AIDS when enough evidence has undermined it?
Answer: One needs to know the political and sociological history of HIV to appreciate how much is invested in keeping this falsehood alive. Hannah Arendt has pointed out that the thing about lies is that they often are what the listener WANTS to hear and believe. In "Truth and Politics," she wrote "Since the liar is free to fashion his 'facts' to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truth teller. Indeed, he will usually have plausibility on his side; his exposition will sound more logical, as it were, since the element of unexpectedness — one of the outstanding characteristics of all events--has mercifully disappeared. . . . reality quite frequently offends the common sense reasoning no less than it offends profit and pleasure."
In her book "Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy," Sylvia Noble Tesh nailed it when she wrote "Concentrating on a causal microorganism helps guard against assigning responsibility for disease to a sick person's personal characteristics. . . . The homophobic response to AIDS demonstrates the limits of that reasoning, for large sectors of the American public persist in believing that AIDS is caused by promiscuity, but the response surely would be far worse had no virus been isolated."
The very chilling line that "the response surely would be far worse had no virus been isolated" captures a moment in time (that I clearly can recall) when terror was suddenly brought under control by the vision of a very peculiar virus which acted more like a lobbyist for the Right Wing than a traditional virus (essentially what Duesberg pointed out about the illogical nature HIV's propensities).
HIV keeps everyone calm. Take away HIV and we return to the crisis and panic of 1981-1983. That's the political and sociological problem. I think you are right about HIV being silly, but it is in essence a finger in the dike that must be removed--but at great social, political and economic expense. What will follow will not be pretty. The medical establishment won't like it. The gay community won't like it. Politicians won't like it. Nobody will be happy.
If HIV falls questions that follow for most commonsensical folks will be: Then what is AIDS? You mean we don't know WHAT AIDS is? Is the definition wrong? Then who really has AIDS? Could we get this? Is the blood supply safe if HIV is not the cause? Can we trust anything the leading scientists say about this? Etc., etc.
Even if there technically are no "liars," but rather only people clinging to falsehoods (and keeping them in place with all kinds of threats and sanctions) we can at least try to understand why the falsehoods are so appealing. That might help us figure a way to get out of this mess.
Chuck
P.S. Are people who seem to work overtime to keep a falsehood alive at least honorary liars?
Chuck:
Anyone who knows me knows that I cringe at the word "lie." I almost never level it unless it can be shown that someone deliberately and knowingly promulgates falsehoods. Willfully and knowingly. It's a terrible thing.
But yes, we have been lied to, repeatedly, about AIDS. By the late 1990s, we learned that there was no massive AIDS outbreak in heterosexual America, wasn't going to be one, and it wasn't safe-sex programs that prevented it. In Africa, unless Stanley Fishbein and his compatriots are lying, we now know we've been lied to there too.
Even beyond Fishbein and co., we have every reason to believe much of what we're told in Africa is lies because most African AIDS patients aren't even tested for "HIV" or HIV antibodies--most are diagnosed as having AIDS simply by a symptom list that's so broad it could apply to many diseases common to that continenent. Worse, international aide money is doled out for AIDS patients in much greater amounts than for malnutrition or malaria, which means we've given African hospitals and governments direct financial incentive to inflate their numbers as much as possible.
But I go back to Fishbein and NIH's Department of AIDS, and the fact that Fishbein isn't the only one making his allegations of widespread fraud. These people at NIH, people at the highest levels according to eyewitnesses, have been completely fabricating data, and hiding other data they don't like. It leads one to wonder what else they've lied about, since these are the exact same people who've been in charge of the Federal government's AIDS work ever since the 1980s.
As for why this ridiculous HIV=AIDS theory continues to be embraced by most people, I think your explanations are pretty on target. Although politically I don't see things quite the same way you do. I see nothing right-wing in any of this. It was the conservatives who told us we were all at risk and not just the gays and the drug users. And as I've said many times in other forums, you don't need AIDS in order to convince people that sexual promiscuity is unhealthy.
Mind you, there are people on the right who have behaved abominably, calling AIDS a sign of God's wrath upon gays and such. But look at how the left has behaved too; ACT-UP has been the worst, but you see it in lots of other outlets: anyone who questions the HIV theory is said to hate gays, or to be akin to a sociopath or a Nazi who wants millions of people to die.
I see this whole thing as a swirling confluence of different political and bureaucratic forces all forming together to create an ugly mess.
Still, this I think is the biggest hurdle: If you look at surveys of attitudes of trusted professions (I linked one from Gallup on my blog not long ago), doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are the most trusted professionals in America. I've noticed many times how people think of doctors as authority figures and even saintly somehow. The same is true for public school teachers. Thus any inkling that any of these people have been doing destructive things, even if it's unintentional, both offends and scares the crap out of people.
Indeed, I think that's what fuels half the rage at Peter Duesberg: people are grievously offended by any insinuation that doctors have gotten something this big wrong. Their instant response is to level vicious charges at those who question the reigning dogma.
When you get right down to it, the vast majority of people who believe the HIV=AIDS theory believe it sincerely. They want to help people--and Republican administrations and congresses have put as much money into AIDS research and treatment as Democratic administrations and congresses have.
There are in my view a very few people in this whole mess who've been genuinely evil and/or sociopathic. Very few. Mostly it's a matter of good intentions--but as has been said, the road to Hell is paved with those.
Dean,
I don't have any problem with you publishing [our emails], but you missed one of my little points. I referred to the virus acting like a "Right Wing lobbyist" as a bit of sarcasm in support of Duesberg's original point that HIV doesn't act like viruses normally act--in terms of who is supposedly infected. I was not analyzing the politics of AIDS. There is plenty of blame to be passed around the entire political spectrum.
Fair enough, Chuck.
By the way, for anyone who's interested, Chuck is also the writer and director of "The Last Lovers On Earth," a film about this very subject. You can hear a preview and read a synopsis by clicking here.
All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:
- The New Tuskegee Experiments
- From The Mailbag: Explaining the BS Theory
- Conflicts of Interest...
- A Conversation
- HIV Skepticism
- Scientific Dissenters
None of my friends, either gay or straight, has died of AIDS. Am I just lucky?
But the number of lies piled up about HIV is staggering. The heterosexual AIDS plague never materialized, and try as they might the advocates of the HIV theory have never been able to show with even remote credibility that it was sex education or needle exchange programs that did it. It was total nonsense. There was never any breakout of AIDS to anyone beyond the gay population--excuse me, gay MALE population strictly--and IV drug users in the US. A few cases here and there but it never materialized.
They now admit it's extraordinarily difficult to pass through everyday heterosexual intercourse.... yet the government's education materials still promulgate the lie that everyone is equally at risk (and yes, once again, it qualifies as a government lie, a known falsehoood knowingly spread). Yet these same people would have us believe that there is a completely separate strain in Africa that acts differently and spreads almost entirely through heterosexual contact... and when you ask them how this supposedly happens the best they can come up with is racist explanations which boil down to the belief that everyday sexual intercourse for most black African women is little more than rape and that the average black African has anonymous sexual, rape-like encounters with multiple anonymous partners on a weekly basis.
Just this week I saw a (well-meaning) blogger telling us that if the figures on Africa are correct, within another ten years, something like a hundred million black Africans will die of this voodoo HIV virus... little did the poor guy realize that they first told us that almost 20 years ago and it still has yet to happen. Indeed, despite these tens of millions of people supposedly dying every year of this devastating "African strain" AIDS, if you look at the actual mortality figures for that continent, you cannot find these hundreds of millions of dead people in them.
It's a crock. A crock of shit piled on two crocks of shit piled on four crocks of shit piled on eight.
Yeah, but by pointing out how absurd this all is, we're the crackpots. Christ. What's it take for some people to finally realize they've bought a pig in a poke? And how much lipstick will they keep putting on this pig before they admit it's just never going to look any better?
Even before I knew that the subject was even under debate, I frequently pondered the stories I was hearing from the media about the African epidemic. From those reports, it seemed to be behaving so differently from the American version. I was thinking to myself: are the African people caught up in this really that promiscuous? Can it really be just a smaller percentage of people using safe sex? It didn't seem to add up, but I wrote that off as a simple lack of information on my part.
Once I learned that there was a debate about all this, one fact in particular really stood out: an African AIDS diagnosis does not require an HIV test.
That sent up a huge red flag for me, and once I learned how poor the accuracy of a single HIV test is, that just sent up another one.
It seems to me that even if the current HIV=AIDS theory is 100% correct, that still doesn't explain the African epidemic. Add to that the fact that the current theory has a number of very blurry patches and the whole thing gets even more fishy.
In my view, AIDS, freed of the ruse of HIV causality, screams the warning cry that may wake us from our normative blindness. Millions are "corroding" from the inside out because their foundational biochemistry is beset with the insidious chronic burden of cryptopathic inflammation and pernicious malnutrition silently operating at the molecular level. AIDS is a syndrome.. a SYNDROME. We are trying to make it "a disease" that fits the allopathic model we operate as a nation. Well, we can't make it fit. And neither do the causalities of Type II Diabetes, MS, RA, and other systemic inflammatory diseases of our era.
AIDS is the scandal of cholesterol "causing" heart disease repeated with a highly focused horror. How many of you know cholesterol cannot calcify unless its been oxidized, and that oxidized cholesterol is the problem? The "scandal" typology is itself a syndrome in allopathic medical practice.
AIDS is a blood-stained window that allows us to look into the society-wide epidemic made possible by the modern diet, and the food processing and packaging that makes modern food distribution possible. This only sounds far fetched because it seems so utterly alien, but, this, along with our genetics, is as elemental as it gets. We need chemicals to live, certain chemicals in certain forms at certain times in certain ways. Our modern biochemically monolithic diet has no precedent in our evolutionary biology. Add drugs and other chemical burdens that have never been before, and, well, welcome to the greatest undiscussed self-inflicted experiment in the history of human kind. There is not evil in this. We cannot go back the caves, but must begin to do the heavy lifting of our ancestors that got us all this far. We have not "arrived" in our modern era, we are just passing through and on to the next. Hubris still kills more than the mind of those it infects. We will prove that again and again.
The gay lifestyle may well contain unique stresses that trigger the manifested syndromic systems of illness called AIDS, but the underlying problem is cryptopathic inflammation and pernicious malnutrition triggering systemic oxidative disease and associated metabolic deranging and collapse. Ironically, the underlying epidemic is killing obese Baptists at a faster rate than AIDS is killing Gays, and they're too blind to see it. It is my prayer these tragic AIDS deaths will lead to an epiphany that will trigger a massive overhaul in the way disease is "administrated" and "funded" by the allopathic monopoly that controls the Insurance-University-Governmental complex. We need to return to the basics of patient-focused medicine, metabolic individuality and what we are doing to ourselve from the perspective of our evolutional biology. This goes way beyond memorizing human anatomy and paging through the latest PDR.
I've often wondered of the outcome of such a simple unthinkable experiment: What if we gave 100 AIDS patients to a team of 10 allopathic physicians, and then, gave 100 AIDS patients to a team of 10 veternarians. My hunch is the vets would save more patients than the allopaths.
Nobel prize winning biochemist Kary Mullis has said that those of us who doubt what we've been told about HIV don't have to agree on what DOES cause AIDS in order to agree on what DOES NOT. What's scandalous is how researchers, not to mention individual patients, who dissent have been treated.
Willem: Not sure how much of that I quite buy into. A lot of what we think of as chemical assaults on the system are really harmless in my view, and furthermore, a lot of the diseases we're suffering now we get because we live long enough to get them whereas a century ago or earlier the average lifespan was so short that relatively few people lived long enough to contract cancer or heart disease.
Still, the more time goes on the more I tend to see it your way: I'm inclined to trust physicians who are involved in trauma care (what E.R. docs and surgeons can do is simply amazing), and in the treatment of bacteriological treatments, as well as the management of chronic pain. Beyond that, it gets increasingly dicey.
If you doubt that, simply go back 100 years and look at the figures for deaths in childbirth and stillbirths.
One small thing about Africa, too. The population is pushing upwards to 1 billion (about the same as Europe) on this poor continent, which has battled colonialism, tribal warfare, poverty, famine, disease and everything under the sun.
Prior to 1988 or so, they died in the tens of thousands of malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria, diarhhea and dysentary.
Now, they die of the exact same things, but some well-intentioned international health bureaucrat calls it "AIDS" -- and that's supposed to mean something different.
It really is silly.
Barnes, Hank
Our bodies are remarkably effective at maintaining homeostasis, even under the burdens of additive chemical insults. Chronic deficits in diet and metabolic reserves are capricious and can be disproportionate in their ability to trigger disease. Pernicious malnutrition is a function of metabolic deficits which arise from monolithic diet, stress and genetic predisposition. It is more about toxicology and biochemistry than about nutrition in the 'diatetics' sense. This is about the individuality of one's nutritional biochemistry, metabolism and the dance of nutrients and anti-nutrients at the metabolic level.
It took centuries to recognize and develope RDAs for nutrients in reference to acute disease. In scientific terms, that was a very long time ago. We need to revisit the underlying scientific thinking that led us to RDAs, but in the context of modern diet and the chronic non-infectious disease we see today.
In our evolutionary biology, our history is one of diverse, biochemically complex foods and whole foods of feral origin. In the last 70 years this diet has radically changed. So has the structure and dose of the chemistries which surround us, and enter us... with and without our knowledge.
People dying of AIDS are crashing from a pernicious combination of metabolic derangement, oxidative distress and toxemia. That premise is central to Duesberg's revolutionary thesis. I further see it as emblematic of the emerging crisis in medicine concerning failed abatement of non-infectious chronic disease and cascading morbidity, and the human suffering and skyrocketing costs associated with it. We cannot see the forest for the trees. Yet, the allopaths keep looking for a disease and a drug to kill it.
I have long been convinced that HIV is a harmless passenger virus. But AIDS, however, is tip of an epidemiological iceburg... of cryptopathic inflammation and systemic oxidative disease which includes CAD, Diabetes II, MS, RA and other chronic systemic inflammatory disease. I was not joking about obese Baptists dying in greater numbers. G_d help us all. AIDS was never about sex. We are looking a new epidemic in the face, and we need to transform our thinking about the scope of what has befallen our brothers and sisters who are growing morbid and dying too young because of it.
Thanks a lot for having this blog and for expressing your views so eloquently, Dean.
I've been reading most of the comments on the HIV/AIDS issue, and even though this debate wasn't new for me when I found your blog, here I've learned many, many valuable information that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise. In my country, Costa Rica, I have never heard of any individual supporting any idea outside of the dogma or at least acknowledging the existence of any of such ideas. In my country, this debate lies in the darkest corner, voiceless and imperceptible, no one knows it's there. So, if it wasn't for the Internet, for me, people like Christine Maggiore and her outstanding book (What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?) woulnd't exist and right now I'd be very scared, wondering if I had HIV yet.
It is very sad to see how one can so easily be driven astray by one's authorities and how foolish one can be by taking as facts things that "everyone knows are true". When the doctor who did my last Elisa test about 8 months ago told me that the test was 99% secure, I believed her because science, I though, is very advanced nowadays...
May I sue her for spreading this false datum? :-)
I feel pity for those who have died for no real reason and for those who cry because they know they are going to die soon. I feel a little sick for those who defend the statu quo and chose to attack anyone who disagrees.
How fool or mean do you have to be to assume such a poor attitude in a medical field?
I wonder how long this is going to last and how this is going to end.
Andrés Quesada
This assumes that the government is intelligent enough to know that it is a falsehood. I doubt that is the case.
Once that bombshell dropped, we could no longer call them anything but liars so far as I can see.
They know they've been lying and they're still lying now.
Here is a quote from the article that confirms the culture of coverup at NIH: "Only within the past year have whistleblowers within the NIH stepped forward with information suggesting a widespread cover-up of the HIVNET 012 clinical trial. Yet, instead of acknowledging their errors, the NIH bureaucracy has tried to silence its critics through intimidation, false accusations, character assassination and job termination."
Interesting you should mention life span. My family MD recently made the comment that every single man would contract prostate cancer, if only he lived long enough. True, some get it sooner than others, but his point was that it is inevitable, given a long enough life span.
I also believe we are cleaning ourselves into illness. If we develop immunity to illness and disease by being exposed to the illness in order to develop antibodies to it, then it's not in our best interests to keep our entire lives 100% bacteria- and virus-free. We are slowling evolving into beings dependent on cleaning products rather than a built-in immune system.
Compelling comparison? Pleassseee.
The black men who were part of the Tuskegee experiment were not informed of their illness and were deliberately left untreated. Neither of those applies to the participants in NIH funded PMTCT experiment in Africa.
Tuskegee was all about deliberately not treating patients who should have had access to treatment. This is about finding the safest, most effective treatments that are also affordable. The HIVNET012 study was apparently flawed, so fix THAT. But don't blow it up into more than it is.
dale