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Out of
Print
Part 1
This is the third
in a series of reprints of articles
from earlier issues of the print
version of G&LH.
This article
created a firestorm of controversy
when it was first published in 2003,
including personal attacks from
several prominent humanist members
of the AIDS establishment who were
outraged that we dared even to
question the HIV/AIDS hypothesis.
As
John Lauritsen reveals,
this irrational, illogical and
unscientific response is entirely
typical of the AIDS establishment
with its diverse vested interests
ranging from the huge profits of
pharmaceutical corporations to the
jobs of employees of the plethora of
HIV/AIDS groups and organisations
around the world.
Dogma, whether of
the religious or 'scientific' kind,
is very hard to shift, as
Peter Tatchell explains in his
article
elsewhere in this issue about the
continuing ban on blood donations
from gay men in the UK.
Bad science is
now (very) big business and the
HIV/AIDS hypothesis is just one of
several examples of it in the world
around us today. |
AIDS: A Death
Cult
This article has been
hard to write. I’ve taken a break from “AIDS”
for several years, and, returning to the
topic now, I’ve been in shock over what has
been done to us. My opinions have not
changed: I still regard “AIDS”
as the greatest blunder and the greatest
hoax in medical history – an epidemic of
incompetence and an epidemic of lies.
 |
John
Lauritsen |
As long as there has been
“AIDS” there have been
critics of the orthodox AIDS
model: “AIDS dissidents”.
For the most part our voices were silenced.
As AIDS became a
religion, a death cult – with sacred
commodities, dogmas, rituals and sacrifices
– any expression of scepticism was
tantamount to blasphemy.
For this article I don’t
intend to cover the waterfront, or go into
the usual technobabble. Instead, I’ll go
back to the very earliest AIDS
assumptions, and show the kind of scepticism
that ought to have been applied to them.
I’ll try to analyse the basic “AIDS”
concept in plain English, its contradictions
and absurdities.
In 1981 five young men,
all “active homosexuals” who were
“previously healthy”, were diagnosed as
having pneumocystis
carinii pneumonia (PCP),
which was then believed to be a rare disease
caused by a protozoan. Shortly after this, a
couple of dozen men, also active
homosexuals, were diagnosed as having
Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS),
which was then believed to be a rare form of
cancer. Public-health workers and physicians
assumed that there must be a connection, and
strained mightily to find one. One term
bandied about was “gay-related immune
deficiency”, or
GRID.
Deficiency of
scepticism
After gay leaders
objected to GRID, it was
changed to “auto-immune deficiency syndrome”
(AIDS); some people
believed that the body might somehow be
destroying its own immune system. When the
folks at the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
realised that the “auto-immune” bit was
untenable, but the acronym had caught on,
they changed it to “acquired immune
deficiency syndrome”, even though nobody was
sure what was meant by “acquired”.
Even at this early stage
there was a deficiency of scepticism. The
PCP organism is now
thought to be a fungus, rather than a
protozoan, and it is ubiquitous – present in
the lungs of every human being in the world.
Normally it coexists peacefully with human
hosts, causing illness only in those in
desperately poor health. How, therefore,
could PCP be rare, since
poor health has always been part of the
human condition? The alleged rareness of
PCP is merely an artefact
of the difficulty in diagnosing it. If
someone in the past stopped breathing – an
old man at the end of his life or a heroin
addict starving in a cold room – the
diagnosis would simply be “pneumonia”,
without reference to a micro-organism that
had yet to be identified.
|
Poppers:
Killed in the rush? |
 |
Kaposi’s sarcoma was then
considered to be a cancer. Most of the gay
men with KS received
cancer chemotherapy, and they quickly died.
It is now known, and has been publicly
admitted by top public-health officials,
that KS is not a cancer,
but a rather benign affliction of the blood
vessels; KS is not caused
by HIV, and is not in any
way related to “immune deficiency”. The
deaths of tens of thousands of gay men with
KS were caused by toxic
anti-cancer and anti-HIV
drugs, not by KS itself.
(See my
poppers articles on the VirusMyth
website for the case that nitrite inhalants
are causing KS in gay
men.)
 |
AZT:*
Eat poison, it's
good for you |
The basic AIDS-concept,
prior to 1984, was that something caused a
condition of “immune deficiency”, which in
turn caused PCP,
KS and various other “AIDS-indicator
diseases”. But here “immune deficiency” was
defined in a way that was new and
unprecedented: by counting CD4+
T lymphocytes, by computing T4/T8 ratios. By
a miraculous coincidence, the technology for
counting T-cells had been perfected just
before the emergence of “AIDS”,
which the world had allegedly never seen
before. Later on, CD4 counts, rather than
the health of the patient, would be the
basis for evaluating the efficacy of
AIDS drugs. It has been
known since at least 1993 (when the results
of the Concorde
AZT study were published), and
has been publicly admitted by public-health
officials, that the CD4 test is worthless;
nevertheless, this worthless test is still
being used to evaluate the alleged efficacy
of toxic and worthless AIDS
drugs.
Multiple
fallacies
The very earliest
attempts by the CDC to
formulate a surveillance definition for “AIDS”
involved a process of elimination. If a
“previously healthy” patient developed an
AIDS-defining illness, as
well as low CD4 counts, and there was no
known cause of the “immune deficiency”, then
he had AIDS. There are
multiple fallacies involved here. For one
thing, the early AIDS
cases were by no means “previously healthy”
– they had, in fact, been quite sick for a
long time. Secondly, all of the early cases
had multiple and severe health risks in
their lives. Thirdly, there are innumerable
ways to become seriously sick (or
“immune-deficient”), and it is impossible to
eliminate all of these.
In the early years,
various hypotheses were advanced as to the
nature and causes of AIDS.
All this changed in 1984, when the
US secretary of health announced
at a press conference that the “probable
cause of AIDS” had been
found: HTLV-III (“human
T-cell lymphotropic virus type III”, later
renamed as “human immunodeficiency virus” or
HIV). Though there was no
evidence for the AIDS-virus
hypothesis then, and there is none now, it
became instant dogma. From 1984 on,
AIDS could be discussed only in an
“AIDS virus” context.
I witnessed this shift
first-hand as a member of the New York Safer
Sex Committee, which met in 1983–4 to
formulate the first comprehensive set of
risk-reduction guidelines. I fought hard to
get, and succeeded in getting, the
guidelines to address drug abuse. Our
brochure, with cartoons by Harold Cruse,
came right out and said, “Avoid drugs.
Shooting up kills . . . Poppers are also
dangerous.” In 1984,
Gay Men’s
Health Crisis [GMHC], the first and
largest AIDS
organisation, ordered our brochure
suppressed and supplanted by its own, which
treated risk reduction entirely in terms of
avoiding a putative virus.
|
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If HIV
were the cause of “AIDS”,
or any other form of illness, then there
would be HIV infection in
every case of the disease. This is the logic
of Koch’s First Postulate, a standard test
of whether an infectious agent causes a
disease. Not only does HIV
flunk Koch’s First Postulate, it has never
been properly isolated. Although we all have
seen pictures of HIV,
these are merely artists’ renditions of what
HIV is assumed to look
like. In reality, it has never been seen
through the electron microscope, and may not
even exist in a cell-free, infectious form.
Amazingly, no one has
ever demonstrated HIV
infection, even in a single case, using
“infection” in the ordinary sense of the
word. “Infection” implies a large amount of
virus or microbe, and a high level of
biochemical activity; there would be what’s
known as “viremia”: the blood would be
teeming with whole, cell-free, infectious
viruses, hundreds of thousands to millions
of them in every millilitre of blood. In
fact, viremia has never been demonstrated.
Many people believe that
the so-called “viral load” tests actually
count whole viruses in the blood. This is
not true, and the tests have been denounced
by Kary
Mullis, who ought to know, as he
received the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing
the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)
technology on which they are based.
According to Mullis, “Quantitative
PCR is an oxymoron.”
|
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|
Kary Mullis |
Neither of the “HIV-antibody”
tests – the Elisa and the Western Blot – has
ever been properly validated, which means
that no one knows what their results mean.
The tests are chemical reactions to
antigens, which are substances that provoke
an immune response. Many dozens of
conditions can produce a positive result on
these tests, including drug abuse, flu
vaccinations, past infection with malaria,
pregnancy and liver disease. Nevertheless,
physicians still use these worthless tests,
assume that positive results mean
HIV infection and give their
patients doom-diagnoses of “HIV-positive”
or “AIDS”.
Different
people, different ways
“AIDS”
is not a coherent disease entity, which has
ever been rationally defined, but rather a
dubious and contradictory construct, which
has changed radically several times.
Originally, those with an “AIDS”
diagnosis were close to death; now one can
obtain the diagnosis without even being
sick. When “AIDS” is
deconstructed, one is left with 29 (at last
count) extremely heterogeneous “AIDS-indicator
diseases”, and can only say that different
people are getting sick in different ways
and for different reasons. For gay men,
those reasons involve drugs (both
“recreational” and pharmaceutical),
alcoholism, venereal diseases and powerful
psychological factors.
The various AIDS
drugs are, without exception, toxic and
worthless. It is not true that the protease
inhibitor “cocktails” have caused
AIDS deaths to drop: on the
contrary, they are causing death and
deformity in people who would otherwise be
healthy. These drugs were approved on the
basis of invalid and even fraudulent
research; their alleged benefits are
concocted by behind-the-scenes public
relations firms, who feed their stories into
popular media and medical journals.
I’m afraid that I have
barely scratched the surface of the
AIDS-dissident arguments, but this
is not intended to be a long article.
For those of you who
would like to learn more, a good place to
begin is the Internet. The
largest AIDS-dissident website is based
in Amsterdam. The
HEAL
Toronto website is especially valuable
for its emphasis on the psychosocial aspects
of the AIDS cult.
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|
Peter Duesberg |
The book I co-edited with
Ian Young, The AIDS
Cult: Essays on the Gay Health Crisis,
explores the irrationalism and psychological
horror of the epidemic – medical voodoo –
sadistic death threats met with masochistic
death wishes. My earlier book, The
AIDS
War, contains my “dispatches from the
front”, 1985 to 1993. Books by
Peter
Duesberg, Joan Shenton, Ian Young and
Neville Hodgkinson are also recommended (see
descriptions on the
VirusMyth website).
It’s time for gay men to
wake up, look at “AIDS”
rationally and put an end to the sacrificial
ritual. We didn’t deserve this, and we
should no longer go along with it.
|
As mentioned at
the beginning, this article created
enormous controversy and criticism
of us for having the freemindedness
to question the highly dubious
HIV/AIDS hypothesis. In a subsequent
issue of G&LH, we published
some of this criticism and responses
to it. We have also reproduced this
material here in this issue in the
article
AIDS Debate. |
___________
* Editor's
Note:
AZT was
originally developed as a cancer drug but
was deemed too toxic to be actually used,
even for cancer! Stuffing it down the
throats of gay men seems to have raised few
such objections, even within the gay
“community”. MF
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