By Sheila Casey / RCFP



On April 23, 1984, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler and researcher Robert Gallo from the National Cancer Institute held a press conference and announced that Gallo had found the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the retrovirus HIV. Heckler estimated that a vaccine would be available in just two years. That same day in 1984, Gallo patented the blood test to detect the HIV antibodies.



As a retrovirus researcher, Gallo had previously tried to pin the blame for Alzheimer’s, leukemia and neurological disorders on a retrovirus, all without success. Now AIDS was in his sights.



But Gallo had skipped an important step in the scientific process: his HIV research had never been subjected to peer review, and was not published until after the press conference with Heckler had already conferred legitimacy on it.



Billions of dollars poured into research programs and millions of people lined up to have their blood checked; by 2006, 72 million Americans had been tested, with a third of that number tested every year. As its creator, Gallo received a percentage of the cost of each test.



To receive a positive HIV test result was considered a death sentence: you would get AIDS and die a miserable death, sooner or later.



As the years passed, it became apparent that this was not true. Only five percent of the people who tested HIV positive went on to develop AIDS. A vaccine has never been found. And there is now a growing group of scientists who dispute that HIV causes AIDS.



Peter Duesberg is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg earned renown as one of the scientists to discover a cancer gene in 1970, and earned tenure at UC Berkeley at the age of 36. At 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1986 he received a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health.



He was on the fast-track to receive the Nobel until he published an article in 1987 in Cancer Research challenging the consensus that HIV is the cause of AIDS. After that his funding dried up and he was dismissed as a misguided contrarian by those with careers and billions in funding riding on the view that HIV is the cause of AIDS.



The views of Dr. Duesberg, David Crowe, Dr. Charles Geshekter, and other disidents who dispute the infectious model for AIDS are summarized below.



1) All viruses are harmless after antibody immunity. Disease is caused before the antibodies are created, because it is the antibodies that neutralize the pathogen and enable the host to recover. When people test positive for the antibodies, that means they have developed resistance, ‘immunity’ to the virus. No microbe causes disease only after antibodies have appeared, as HIV is claimed to do. Why develop a vaccine for people who already have the antibodies to the disease? Duesberg: “there is no virus in AIDS patients, only antibodies.”



2) Retroviruses, which are one type of virus, do not kill T-cells. They do not kill the cell they infect—ever. (AIDS is diagnosed partly by a deficiency of T-cells.)



3) HIV does not infect enough T-cells to cause disease.



4) No retrovirus causes disease and there is no logical reason why they should.



5) Viruses replicate quickly; there is no such thing as a slow virus. If a host cannot mount an immune defense quickly enough, the virus will overwhelm and kill the host in a matter of days or weeks. Yet we are told that HIV can cause up to 30 different diseases ten years after initial infection. None of these diseases are specific to AIDS; all existed prior to the “discovery” of AIDS.



6) HIV is not a new virus. When a virus is new in a population that has never been exposed to it, it explodes exponentially. But this is not what we see with AIDS. The number of AIDS cases hasn’t changed since 1985.



7) It fails Koch’s Postulates, which require four steps to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease.

1. the agent must be found in all cases of the disease;



2. it must be isolated from the host;



3. it must cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host; and



4. it must then be found growing again in the newly infected host.

HIV fails all of these tests. Although theoretically it can be found and isolated from a host, this is in practice very difficult to do, since the HIV virus is not found in humans; only antibodies to HIV are found.



The history of medicine has many examples of diseases which were assumed to be infectious but later proved not to be. Scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, Beriberi is caused by a thiamine deficiency, and pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency. All failed Koch’s postulates and all ultimately proved to be non-infectious dietary deficiencies.



8) AIDS has remained in its original risk groups and has not broken out into the general population. Outside of Africa, 97% of AIDS patients are homosexuals, IV drug users, hemophiliacs and transfusion patients.



9) The US Army tests recruits for HIV and finds the virus evenly divided between men and woman, yet AIDS is 90% a male disease.



10) With other infectious diseases, cases are always seen among the doctors and nurses who work with infected patients—but this has not happened with AIDS. Medical workers are actually less likely to become sick with AIDS than the general population.



11) AIDS behaves differently depending on geography. African AIDS appears to be a completely different disease. In part, this is because in Africa, no HIV test is necessary for diagnosis. A patient is considered to have AIDS if he exhibits three of the 4 symptoms: persistent cough, persistent fever, persistent diarrhea and weight loss. These also happen to be the symptoms of malaria, malnutrition and tuberculosis, but there are no large funding programs for those diseases. If something is called AIDS, money pours in.



12) According to David Crowe, president of Rethinking AIDS, and founder and president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, HIV is not transmitted sexually. He quotes a study done in the 90s on seroconversion in couples where one partner was HIV positive and the other HIV negative. Not a single case was found where the HIV negative partner became positive, even after years of unprotected sex.



13) Different risk groups manifest AIDS in a different way. IV drug users get tuberculosis and wasting syndrome, gays get Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Yet these specific diseases also occur in high numbers among members of these risk groups who do not have HIV infection. If an IV drug user has tuberculosis and no HIV antibodies, he is simply diagnosed with tuberculosis. If he has tuberculosis and does have HIV antibodies, he is diagnosed with AIDS. It is this method of defining AIDS that assures a high correlation between HIV infection and the constellation of diseases defined as AIDS.



14) HIV supposedly causes 30 different diseases. All other viruses cause only one disease. Duesberg: “There is no HIV specific disease anywhere.”



15) AIDS occurs without HIV infection, and 95% of those with HIV infection never get AIDS. Despite all this, it is clear that people are sick and dying. If not HIV, what are they dying from? AIDS is a condition of suppressed immunity, and there are many things that can suppress immunity. One of the worst is the HIV drug AZT, which destroys the bone marrow and which Duesberg describes as “the most toxic drug ever licensed for long term consumption in the free world.” Many people who test positive for HIV antibodies are told they must go on these dangerous drugs—even though they are completely healthy.



In a tragic case described by Celia Farber in the March 2006 Harpers magazine, Joyce Ann Hafford, a healthy 33 year old single mother, four months pregnant, was enrolled in an HIV drug trial, put on three anti-HIV drugs in June, and was dead by August 1. Although Hafford felt completely well prior to the drug trial and the drugs immediately made her violently ill, she stayed on them in the belief that she must, at all costs, prevent passing the HIV virus on to her unborn child. Hafford had only one HIV test prior to enrolling in the study, and was never told that pregnancy can cause a false positive HIV test.



According to Duesberg, recreational drug use also suppresses immunity and the gay community has, to some degree, brought their woes upon themselves. He points out that it is common knowledge that toxic foreign substances cause disease: alcohol causes cirrhosis of the liver and smoking causes emphysema. But gay activists typically dismiss it as homophobia to point out that drug use and sexual promiscuity can result in lowered immunity.



Crowe says that gay community leaders essentially had a choice between facing up to promiscuity in the gay population, or to the rampant use of recreational drugs such as inhalant nitrate poppers. They were willing to face up to the promiscuity, but not the drug use.



Because recreational drugs such as heroin, cocaine, speed and poppers suppress immunity, many gay men use large amounts of antibiotics to combat infections. Repeated antibiotic use eventually wears down the immune system.



If a gay man with a depressed immune system develops pneumonia and is found to be HIV positive, he will be diagnosed with AIDS and put on toxic HIV drugs, which will further destroy his immune system and virtually guarantee his eventual death.



According to AIDS dissidents such as Crowe and Duesberg, gay community leaders have unwittingly contributed to prolonging the fiction of a viral cause of AIDS, due to their unwillingness to confront and change the behaviors that are destroying the immune systems of gay men. Instead, they have successfully clamored for more research dollars focusing on the infectious model, drawing a disproportionate amount of funding away from other, more prevalent diseases such as cancer and heart disease.



But what about Africa? Surely there are not large numbers of Africans inhaling poppers and overloading their immune systems with antibiotics? Yet we are told that AIDS is decimating Africa, and that Africa is teeming with AIDS orphans who have lost both parents to the disease.



Yes, say the AIDS dissidents, Africans are much sicker now than they were 25 years ago. Colonialism has destroyed traditional societies, and there is rampant malnutrition, malaria, war, poverty and a lack of clean drinking water.



According to Charles Geshekter, Ph.D., a three-time Fulbright scholar who teaches African history at California State University in Chico, the current explanation for the AIDS epidemic in Africa is based on racist beliefs about African promiscuity. In fact, says Geshekter, the European communities in South Africa are far more promiscuous than the Africans, yet AIDS is practically unknown among the Europeans, who are much richer, well-fed, and have access to clean drinking water.



Also, virtually all HIV testing in Africa is done at pre-natal clinics. Although pregnancy causes high numbers of false positives, statisticians extrapolate from the tiny numbers at the clinics to the continent at large, giving the impression of a vast epidemic. In addition to pregnancy, there are 70 different conditions—including use of cosmetics and skin lighteners—that can cause false positives for the HIV antibody.



“After 25 years of a so-called epidemic, with unlimited amounts of money being spent, there is absolutely nothing to show for it,” says Geshekter. He posits that there is not supposed to be an end to the AIDS epidemic in Africa – it is just supposed to keep going. “To ask hard questions threatens the livelihood of the thousands of AIDS researchers, as well as the journalists who have won Pulitzer Prizes for conforming to the received wisdom about AIDS in Africa,” says Geshekter.



Geshekter says that humanitarian groups have a strong incentive to hide the truth about AIDS in Africa. “All the people with money in Africa are those in AIDS programs.” He goes on to explain that there is little money for organizations helping Africans build wells and improve their nutrition and sanitation—but billions upon billions poured into programs to fight AIDS. As for journalists, Geshekter states baldly that those who report the truth about AIDS lose their jobs, while massive research organizations would shrivel up and die if it became known that HIV does not cause AIDS.



The pharmaceutical companies would be wiped out by lawsuits from the survivors of the millions of people who have died after taking toxic HIV drugs, if the truth were to come out. It seems that everyone is making money from the AIDS epidemic – all at the expense of those who suffer and die from the constellation of diseases, many of them pharmaceutically induced, we call AIDS.



In 1990, Neville Hodgkinson, then medical and science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, wrote: “If HIV does not cause AIDS, then we will have witnessed the biggest medical and scientific blunder of this century.”



Eighteen years later, it seems all but certain that Hodgkinson was right.



Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams and the Rock Creek Free Press. She blogs at sheilacasey.com