My preoccupation with HIV/AIDS began as a purely intellectual pursuit, trying to make sense of contradictory accounts, and becoming hooked as I gathered HIV-test data that seemed to point inescapably toward the conclusion that “HIV” didn’t cause an epidemic and was not the cause of AIDS. But after my book was published, and increasingly since I began this blog, I’ve glimpsed the many human tragedies for which this monstrous mistake has been responsible. Careers of people who testified to the mistake have been wrecked; an unknown number of parents have been forced to feed their babies poisonous substances that hurt and harmed them; an unknown number of relationships have been broken needlessly; on and on. Recently my Google Alert brought in a single day several stories that illustrate the range of damage that the wrong theory of HIV/AIDS has wrought.

Circumcision:

It’s become a shibboleth among HIV/AIDS “activists” and journalists that circumcision reduces the risk of contracting “HIV” by something like 60%. That’s in the face of many studies to the contrary, including from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [Rwanda: circumcise all men—even if it means more HIV infection, 3 February 2008]: “Unhygienic Circumcision ‘Increases Risk of Hiv’” (SciDev.Net, London, 28 February 2007); “PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni has trashed claims that circumcised men are less prone to HIV/Aids infection. . . . “Why are Muslims and Bagisu dying? Who beats the Bagisu when it comes to circumcising men?” . . . Among the Bagisu, a tribe in eastern Uganda, every male, between adolescence and manhood, must be circumcised”; “Circumcised male and female virgins were substantially more likely to be HIV infected than uncircumcised virgins”; “Circumcision does not affect HIV in US men”.

And still the shibboleth is promulgated: “Adopt male circumcision as anti-HIV strategy” (by Sam Anguria, 6 January 2009, on The New Vision — Uganda’s Leading Website; “The writer an

HIV/AIDS specialist”) : “male circumcision should be fully rolled out in Uganda . . . . Leaders should themselves embrace male circumcision and circumcise their male children.”

It’s not as though circumcision of adults were a trivial matter; let alone in much of Africa, which is where the HIV/AIDS dogmatists advocate it

Stigma:

A rather astonishingly stark self-contradiction in HIV/AIDS matters is the plaintive appeal not to stigmatize HIV-positive people — at the same time as it’s insisted that “HIV” is contracted by careless, unsafe sexual behavior, the risk of “infection” being small unless there is a high level of promiscuity, adultery, and anal intercourse — all of them practices that most societies have stigmatized long before AIDS.

“KENYA: Unease over new HIV transmission law . . .

NAIROBI, 12 December 2008 (PlusNews) — In June 2006, a young woman in western Kenya died of HIV-related complications and left a list of about 100 people that she said she had infected with HIV. A new law, approved by the Kenyan president but yet to be implemented, is hoping to prevent willful transmission. The HIV and AIDS Prevention and Control Act 2006 has drawn mixed and very sharp reactions. Inviolata Mbwavi, an AIDS activist who went public about her status in 1994, warned that the legislation in its current form appeared to label HIV-infected people as dangerous human beings with whom people should not associate. ‘When you criminalise HIV then we are going back to square [one] of trying to stigmatise the virus even more, yet we have not effectively dealt with the stigma associated with HIV. Why do we want to further burden those who are already burdened by coming up with HIV-specific legislation?’ . . . . ‘We know that the majority of those who know their status are women. What we are doing by passing such a law is therefore to condemn people we are claiming to protect to jail.’ The new legislation has also brought into question the responsibility of HIV-negative people. ‘What we are proposing in the law only touches those already [HIV]-positive. We should also look at the responsibility of those who do not have the virus’ . . . .”

And so on and so forth. When a wrong theory gains acceptance, conundrums and contradictions and mutually impossible things also have to be swallowed whole.

Well-intentioned do-gooder harm:

Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report [6 January 2009]

Global Challenges

“IRIN/PlusNews on Friday profiled a commune operated by HIV advocate Paul Ari designed for HIV-positive people who have experienced stigma and discrimination near Mount Hagen, the capital of Papua . . . . people are able to stay at the commune for as long as they need, and relatives are encouraged to visit to help fight stigma related to the virus”.

Clearly, the way to combat stigma directed at HIV-positive people is to have separate places for them, just as long ago we fought the stigma against lepers by providing them with separate accommodations.

Homosexuality:

Gay men — together with hemophiliacs and people of African ancestry and pregnant women and babies — are among those most harmed by the invention and application of the fallacious “HIV” test. For whatever reason, gay men tend to test “HIV-positive” with a rather high probability even when they are perfectly healthy and remain so (as of the present date, for upwards of two decades). So gay men are among those most threatened by the urging that “HIV-positive” people accept antiretroviral treatment, and “HIV” has delivered yet another arrow for the quiver of the confirmed homophobes and homophobic groups:

“HIV being spread mainly through homosexual relations in Spain” (Catholic News Agency, Madrid, 6 January 2009)

“The Anti-AIDS Independent Committee in Spain has called for behavioral changes among homosexuals in order to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS, as 2007 data confirms that the disease is more prevalent in the homosexual population. . . . The organization criticized government campaigns that promote condom use, ‘with a message aimed indiscriminately at the population in general and young people in particular, as if everyone were equally at risk, regardless of their habits.’ . . . the ‘disproportionately high rate of infections can only be explained by much higher promiscuity and a higher risk of homosexual contact.’”

African ancestry:

When panic erupted in a St. Louis school over possible “HIV” infections, I wrote, “What we know from the demographics of ‘HIV-positive’ in the United States is that an individual may test positive after being vaccinated against flu, or taking an anti-tetanus shot, or having TB, or for a large number of other reasons having nothing to do with a life-threatening sexually transmitted virus . . . . We also know that the probability of testing positive for any of those reasons is far greater for people of African ancestry than others; black females in particular are typically 20 times as likely to test positive under one of those numerous conditions. We also know that in the lower teenage years, females are more likely to test positive than males . . . . Those facts cause me to dread the further ‘news’ and rumors that will be leaking out from those ignorant, panicked, ‘everything is normal’, school administrators and health officials in St. Louis.” And, sure enough, it turned out that 99% of the students in that school are black.

Men of African ancestry have been charged with or convicted of having sex while “HIV-positive” in Australia, in Canada, in the United States. In the United States, the average “prevalence of ‘HIV’” is about 0.6%. African Americans are between 7 and 21 times as likely to test “HIV-positive” compared to others, so the average prevalence among African Americans is about 8%. Another demographic fact is that the likelihood of testing positive is greatest at ages in the late thirties to mid-forties. So African Americans in middle age have a chance ≥ 10% of testing “HIV-positive” under such circumstances as having recently been vaccinated or being exposed to some minor health challenge. It struck me as particularly sad that “HIV” should be mentioned in the case of an African American pastor charged with sexual abuse:

“Police: Pastor Charged With Sexual Abuse Has HIV — James Bell Faces Sexual Abuse, Sodomy Charges” (by Stephanie Segretto, WLKY Louisville, 5 January 2009)

“SHELBYVILLE, Ky. — More information about the arrest of a Shelbyville pastor charged with sexual abuse has become public, including his HIV status. . . .

For those who knew Bell, they said it’s hard to imagine he would be facing charges for anything, especially this. . . . neighbors said they will have several people on their minds — Bell’s wife and his three children [emphasis added]”

That “HIV status” will make it seem to most people ever so much worse than the far-from-uncommon sexual lapses of ministers and priests, or the actions of the many men who have sex with young teenagers.

Of course, Bell really behaved irresponsibly in having sex with a 15-year-old. On the other hand, he himself was the one who first reported the fact. And he would be far from the only African American clergyman to be confounded by the news that he is “HIV-positive”, knowing that he was never at risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease:

“An increasing number of Africans who find themselves HIV-positive are taken aback, knowing that they have never behaved in a pertinently risky fashion, like the Rev. Gibson Mwadime, 53, an Anglican vicar in southern Kenya (Sanders 2006a): ‘I thought AIDS was for prostitutes and truck drivers,’ [he] said … learning about his diagnosis in 2001 was like a slap from God, spurring feelings of betrayal and anger. ‘I lived a faithful life and my wife lived a faithful life,’ he recalled praying. ‘And then you bring this sinful disease upon us?’ Like most of the clergymen, Mwadime said he doesn’t know how or when he contracted the virus. He believes his wife was infected through a blood transfusion during childbirth in 1985. A year later, doctors told the couple their baby girl had tested positive for HIV. But when they were told it was a sexually transmitted disease, they dismissed his advice to get tested themselves” (p. 172 in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

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That one day’s set of stories is a mere glimpse of the many human tragedies that the HIV/AIDS business has brought. But is everyone at risk, as the mainstream propaganda would have it?

YES; EVERYONE IS AT RISK

If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have their way, “HIV” testing will become routine if not universal. Then an increasing number of babies, pregnant women, recently vaccinated individuals, and people exposed to a whole range of health challenges will test positive. After all, the CDC keeps asserting that something like a quarter of all “HIV-positive” Americans don’t know their “status”. That’s about a quarter of a million people.

Some proportion of the newly “diagnosed” will be advised, urged, or forced to consume antiretroviral drugs. Thereupon the numbers of “AIDS” patients dying from non-AIDS events caused by those drugs will increase noticeably. It’s already a majority of them, after all — “In the era of combination antiretroviral therapy, . . . the risk of several non-AIDS-defining conditions, including cardiovascular diseases, liver-related events, renal disease, and certain non-AIDS malignancies [97-102] is greater than the risk for AIDS in persons with CD4 T-cell counts >200 cells/mm3; the risk for these events increases progressively as the CD4 T-cell count decreases from 350 to 200 cells/mm3” (NIH Treatment Guidelines, 29 January 2008, p. 13).

Eventually, the increasing number of diagnosed people who know they could not have been “infected”, and the obviously increasing number of iatrogenic deaths, will bring wealth to a whole population of trial lawyers, and the HIV/AIDS house of cards will soon thereafter implode.

But it would be so very nice if that implosion could happen without so many unsuspecting people having to die first at the hands of misinformed doctors.