The Drug Business

The Drug Business

   The disgrace of medicine has been that colossal system of self-deception, in obedience to which mines have been emptied of their cankering minerals, the entrails of animals taken for their impurities, the poison bag of reptiles drained for their venom, and all the inconceivable absurdities thus obtained thrust down the throats of human beings suffering simply of some want of organization, nourishment or vital stimulation.

   If all the drugs were cast into the sea, it would be so much better for man, and so much the worse for the fishes.

   Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94)

   When people think about the appalling effects of drugs in the world there comes to mind pictures of heavily armed drug barons in jungle hideaways, drug pick-ups from darkened boats offshore and from secret airstrips, of evil mafia characters, drug pushers and emaciated addicts. We think of young people lying dead in untidy rooms or in back alleys.

   That alcohol and cigarettes, albeit in a slower way, wreck more lives and physically destroy far more people than illegal drugs does not arouse all that much concern because they have long been an established part of our culture, considered by many to be quite an essential part. The people who control the liquor and tobacco industries and who push their products in lavish advertising sprees would have to be as morally corrupt as any jungle drug baron, but instead of being hounded by the law they are looked upon, often in admiration, as dynamic and successful businessmen.

   Be that as it may, that's what we've got, and everybody knows it. But what everybody does not know is that there is a more insidious and widespread drug danger to humanity than all the others put together, and that is the ever-increasing consumption of pharmaceutical products which, in terms of money, corruption and danger, makes the operation of jungle drug barons look like chickenfeed. The pharmaceutical companies don't just target impressionable teenagers for their next crop of addicts; they target everybody, young and old.

   Almost everyone at some time or another takes medicine either bought over the counter or prescribed by their doctor, without for one second querying whether it may be anything other than good for them. They are entitled to feel that way because they trust their doctor and respect his vast knowledge. If only they knew just how little he really knew!

   Regardless of whatever effect is conveyed by medicine, it is a fact that any chemical substance-other than those in natural nutrients--that enters the bloodstream is sensed by the body as a poison to be neutralized and eliminated as quickly as possible, and it is the job of the liver, kidneys, immune system and other vital organs to achieve this. Because most medicines are not virulent poisons, they can be neutralized and eliminated without too much difficulty, and if adverse effects are experienced they are defined medically to be only 'side effects'--a term that sounds better than poisoning. However, with or without side effects the body's systems--no doubt already overburdened with other toxins to start with--has been put under even greater strain, and it is no wonder that after many years of drug-treated chronic illness, one or another of the vital organs breaks down and death of the patient ensues. The patient's death is reported in the local news as having occurred after a long illness--which is true--but it would be more accurate to say that the death was consequential to a long process of poisoning the patient could no longer endure.

   Iatrogenic disease* has always been known to be a major cause of death, and if allowance is made for the undetected and unrecorded cases it would be reasonable, in the light of current knowledge, to assume iatrogenic disease to be one of the very main causes of death. The reason why a doctor can unknowingly poison a patient to death is that even if he knows there will be side effects, he has no option if he is to please his patient other than to prescribe the 'approved' medicine, and he is equipped with little knowledge as to the effects of long-term usage.

*Iatrogenic means caused by medical treatment. According to a report from the World Health Organization, one in every four hospital deaths is the result of medical drugs--from The Healing Mind by Dr Irving Oyle, 1975.

   To illustrate the fact that vast numbers of sick people are killed by what is called 'complications' arising from medical treatment are the occasions in fairly recent years when death rates have fallen dramatically following situations when doctors have gone on strike. In 1973 doctors in Israel went on strike and reduced their daily patient services from 65,000 to only 7000. The strike lasted a month, and during that time the death rate, according to the Jerusalem Burial Society, dropped fifty per cent. In 1976 in Bogota, Columbia, doctors refused to treat all except emergency cases for a period of fifty-two days, and in that time the death rate fell thirty-five per cent. Also in 1976, a slowdown by doctors in Los Angeles resulted in a fall of eighteen per cent in deaths. Too bad for some that it was only a slowdown!

   The medical industry of today has become the subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry, now the wealthiest industry in the world. Doctors of all ranks are today puppets controlled by financial strings. The pharmaceutical companies make such astronomical profits from their position of monopoly that all they have to do to maintain that position is to devote as much money as necessary in influencing the right people--which is all of US. The pharmaceutical companies provide or control most of the money for medical research (providing the research meets their approval); they provide large sums to the various medical journals in which they advertise lavishly; they fund lavish holidays for doctors disguised as medical conferences; and they hand out to doctors all sorts of lavish gifts.

   A Sydney newspaper recently disclosed some of the methods by which doctors are encouraged by drug companies to prescribe their products. The companies make gifts of computers, briefcases, golf balls, calculators, hotel dinners, conferences at exotic resorts, calenders, beepers, and other give-aways. The companies devoted fifteen per cent of their total sales income to promoting their products, and this amounted to an average of $10,000 for every general medical practitioner in the country.

   The drug companies. don't have to influence doctors to prescribe drugs--they are already trained to do this; the companies' main concern is that the doctor prescribes the right ones, ie, the ones which are most profitable. So to influence a doctor's decision in this regard the companies have what they call 'detail men' (salesmen) who call in on doctors regularly and bring them up-to-date with the new lines available, and it is upon this sort of 'know-how' that you, the patient, must depend for relief from your next twinge of arthritis or whatever.

   This is the modern practice of medicine, and when organs within the body pack up and fail, scientific medicine steps in and conducts a transplant for you--if you have the money. Such is the system proudly called 'health care' by politicians, 'scientific medicine' by the chemists and surgeons, and 'sound business' by the pharmaceutical companies.

   To complete their stranglehold on the medical profession the drug companies maintain a powerful influence within the upper echelons of health and drug administration agencies, which influence is reflected in the agencies' uncompromising opposition of natural health practitioners and anyone else who disagrees with the official allopathic* line. It cannot be coincidental that upon retirement, many of the former heads of government agencies find themselves in highly paid jobs in the hierarchies of the drug companies.

*Allopathy is the practise of medicine in which drugs are used to alleviate pain and other symptoms.

   Thus is explained the banning of laetrile, the herbal extract demonstrated in the US Food and Drug Administration's own tests to be helpful in the treatment of cancer, and the outlawing of any cancer therapy that does not conform to official medical guidelines, such as therapies based on herbs, vitamins, diet and so on. The thalidomide scandal of the 1960s is a good example of the ethics of the drug trade, and to read the book Thalidomide and the Power of the Drug Companies would chill even Jack the Ripper to the bone. Even when thalidomide was publicly exposed as the cause of the dreadful infant deformities happening at the time, the Distillers Company of Germany continued to market the drug in countries where it had not been banned. In the USA the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was prepared to okay the drug in the face of warnings from one of its own doctors, a lady, and it was only because of this lady's stubborn insistence that thalidomide was not unleashed on the pregnant women of America. How many adult Americans today can thank this courageous woman for their intact bodies will always be unknown, but they certainly don't owe any thanks to the top brass of the FDA.

   Today we are witnessing yet another scandal, this time involving the marketing of a dangerous drug by the Burroughs Wellcome Company. This is the drug AZT, which until recently was the only drug approved for the treatment of AIDS, thus giving Burroughs Wellcome a multibillion dollar monopoly in the AIDS industry. The drug was FDA approved without the proper clinical trials, just as on pure supposition HIV was designated the approved cause of AIDS. To make the deal a real pushover for Burroughs Wellcome, they had to make no promises or guarantees. All that is claimed for AZT is that it inhibits the spread of HIV in the body, and that--despite the admitted fact that it is poisonous and highly immunosuppressive--it extends the life expectancy of people with AIDS. This claim is still being made despite the fact AZT has been shown to be distinctly of no advantage at all, the claim being sustained by the fact that deaths among HIV-positive people have not been as numerous as predicted. The true position is that HIV-positive people have not perished as predicted because HIV is not the cause of AIDS at all, whereas the prediction was made on the assumption that it was. The tragedy now being enacted is that many reasonably healthy people, merely on the basis of them having HIV antibodies in their blood, are being transformed into sick people by AZT and the tortured thinking that accompanies the belief in HIV. And when AZT destroys their immune system HIV will, of course, get the official blame. As time elapses the fearful consequences of AZT become more apparent; in August 1991 the US National Institute of Health (NIH) revealed that nearly half of AZT patients eventually develop aggressive cancer.

   For Burroughs Wellcome to continue with their AZT financial bonanza, it is vitally important for the HIV illusion to be sustained, and they are doing everything they can to sustain it. In 1983 Dr Joseph Sonnabend of New York (see previous chapter) started a journal called AIDS Research to act as a forum for basic research and general information on AIDS. When the HIV theory was announced in 1984 the journal maintained its impartial stance, including in its contents discussion both for and against the theory. AIDS Research was still an independent journal in 1986, with twenty-one people on the editorial board. Then the Burroughs Wellcome company began to fund the journal and shortly afterwards took over control. It is more than significant that Burroughs Wellcome changed the name of the journal to AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, and in its first edition for 1987 the journal contained nine articles, seven of them about HIV and two about other retro-viruses. The editorial board now numbered fifty, of which only two were original members, Dr Sonnabend not being one of them.

   AIDS Research was a good name for Dr Sonnabend's journal; why encumber the name by adding 'and Retroviruses' to it? Why is it now common in medical literature to refer to AIDS as 'HIV disease'? Is it meant to somehow reinforce the belief in HIV and to sustain a theory too weak to stand inspection?

   By their control of research funds, upon which the careers of many influential research doctors depend, the drug companies can control what is discovered and what is not, and they are not interested in discoveries that don't lead to selling drugs. Researchers whose work shows no 'promise' in this regard soon find themselves short of research funds, and this is why so little progress has been achieved in the 'war against cancer' and why no progress at all has been achieved in the 'war against AIDS'.

   The key to winning the war against AIDS is the same key that is needed to win the war against cancer. What has to be overcome is not a germ or a virus, but vested interests and mental blocks which keep research pointing in the wrong direction. The etiology of cancer was obvious to many doctors one hundred years ago but never saw much light of day until clearly explained by four of the world's greatest cancer researchers about forty years ago (see Chapter 12). One of them, Dr Otto Warburg, was a double Nobel Prize winner, but his findings did not interest the world of medicine which needs disease to exist and whose interest is only in finding 'cures' which can be sold for money. However, the war against AIDS will not be so prolonged because the factors involved are not as obscure as with cancer, and when the HIV pantomine is over and the already known factors are properly assessed, the true etiology of AIDS will be obvious to everybody but only after a lot of people have been killed by AZT and a lot of money made by Burroughs Wellcome.

AZT: The AIDS Drug

   AZT, it is admitted by its manufacturers, Burroughs Wellcome, is toxic and suppressive to the immune system. It sounds absurd that something of a toxic and immunosuppressive nature could help someone who is already terribly immuno-compromised, but the theory is that by the drug's effect of inhibiting the action of HIV there is achieved a net gain, so enabling the AIDS patient--supposedly already doomed--to live a little longer.

   Now, if HIV was indeed the cause of AIDS, and if indeed AZT worked in the way intended, there would indeed be a case for its use, but leaving the HIV argument right out of it, tests have shown AZT to be at best useless and at worst harmful. On 13-14 February 1991, in Washington DC, a special meeting was held of the Anti-viral Drugs Committee of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to discuss the validity of AZT use. The first thing that was agreed upon was that the P24 antigen test, upon which AZT effectiveness was assessed, was useless and meaningless, which of course meant that the grounds upon which AZT was approved in the first place were spurious. The main focus of the meeting was the Veterans Administration Co-operative Study 298, the preliminary findings of which were presented by Dr John Hamilton MD. The study was of 338 HIV-positive individuals with AIDS, divided into two groups, both groups given AZT but in different dosage. Dr Hamilton reported that no benefit for either treatment group was detected for survival or the combined chemical end points of AIDS and death. He said that early AZT resulted in transitory benefits in whites, and neutral or harmful effects in black and Hispanic patients. No mention was made of the high risk of cancer for those taking the drug.

   The very next day the shares of the Burroughs Wellcome parent company fell* by ten per cent, but Burroughs Wellcome responded quickly the same day with a letter to physicians which they drafted in such a way to indicate the Washington meeting had re-affirmed the previous support for AZT, which was not the case at all. But not to incriminate themselves, they put the onus on the FDA by including a copy of the FDA Talk Paper on the subject. Reporter John Lauritsen described the FDA paper thus:

   'The FDA Talk Paper dated 14 Feb, 1991, reads as though it had been drafted by Burroughs Wellcome. A more false and distorted version of the meeting could hardly be imagined. The first sentence claims that the committee 're-affirmed the drug's usefulness in treating individuals who are at less advanced stages of infection with the AIDS Virus.' Then the Talk Paper goes on to summarize the VA study in such a way as to obliterate the most important finding: that AZT conferred no benefit in terms of survival.'

*The author wonders how much further the shares would have fallen if the 50:50 chance of cancer had been mentioned.

   This is how the FDA Talk Paper was worded:

   'One study presented to the committee was conducted by the Veterans' Administration. Preliminary results from this study, in general, confirmed that earlier use of zidovudine was beneficial in delaying the onset of AIDS. However, the study when analyzed by various demographic factors also indicated that zidovudine's effects might vary significantly among different patient groups. For unknown reasons, among the African-American and Hispanic patients in the study, those who received zidovudine at a later stage of their infection may have fared better than those who received earlier treatment with the drug. The results regarding the outcome of African-American and Hispanic patients were not conclusive however, and thus no definite changes in practise were deemed appropriate by the Committee.'

   Reporter Lauritsen concluded: 'It should be clear that Burroughs Wellcome is a thoroughly unscrupulous company, and the collusion between the FDA and Burroughs Wellcome is as strong as ever.' The text of John Lauritsen's address to the FDA Committee meeting on 14 February 1991 was as follows:

   'I'm John Lauritsen. I'm here as a working journalist, and also as an AIDS Dissident, so my comments will be against the grain. In the United States, AIDS dissidents are not sent to Siberia, the way that dissidents were in the Soviet Union when they disagreed with the tenets of Lysenkoism. However, we are punished. Two physicians who questioned the HIV-AIDS hypothesis had their practices destroyed, and were driven to the edge of bankruptcy. Molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, an outstanding scientist, had a grant cancelled. And I've taken my share of abuse. All this was for questioning what is probably a false hypothesis.

   For two decades, I've made my living analyzing statistical data. Before analyzing data, there are two things one needs to know. Number one, are the data good? And number two, are the premises correct-is the study design good? I maintain with regard to AZT that much of the data are bad, and in some cases manifestly fraudulent. And secondly, that most of the AZT research is based on a false hypothesis--the hypothesis that a retrovirus, tendentiously named the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the cause of AIDS.

   I am the author of a book, which has become an underground best seller. It is called Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story. It gives quite a different viewpoint from what you have heard here. In this book I come to three main conclusions. Number one: AZT is highly toxic. Number two: AZT was approved for marketing on the basis of research which was not just bad and sloppy and so on, but was overtly, manifestly fraudulent. And three, there is really no scientifically credible evidence that AZT has any benefits.

   With regard to toxicity, I would point out that the issue of cancer has been swept under the rug. I didn't hear cancer mentioned once at this meeting. And yet four different lines of proof, of reasoning, indicate that AZT will cause cancer in the long run. First, there are the biochemical properties of the drug itself. Peter Duesberg has pointed out that when a nucleoside analogue is incorporated into a cell, there are only two possible outcomes. Either the cell dies, or, if the cell is lucky, it mutates and the patient gets cancer. Second, there is the Cell Transformation Assay, which was performed several years ago. The results of this test indicated that AZT was highly positive, and therefore should be presumed to be a potential carcinogen. Third, there are the rodent carcinogenicity studies, which found that AZT causes cancer in animals, and therefore probably will in humans as well. And fourth is the correlation, which is becoming ever more clear, between AZT therapy and cancer of the lymph system. The issue of cancer must be taken into consideration when recommending a drug for long term use.

   With regard to the charge of fraud, which I realize is quite serious, I would point out that the Phase II AZT trials occurred when Frank Young was FDA Commissioner. Consumer advocates, such as Sidney Wolfe, charged that Young's reign was one of lawlessness, in terms of collusion between industry and government. Young had to resign, under the shadow of the generic drugs scandal. Illegal collusion between the FDA and drug companies is nothing new. There have been a number of exposs on this topic--by Morton Mintz, by a Ralph Nader study group, and others. Collusion is really business as usual.

   With regard to the conflict-of-interest issue, I notice that some of the speakers are identified on the program as Burroughs Wellcome scientists. That's fine, you know that's like truth in advertising or labelling. One is alerted that these people may be giving sales pitches rather than objective presentations of data. However, other people like Margaret Fischl, are not identified as being in the Burroughs Wellcome camp. And yet remuneration, in whatever form it takes, direct or indirect, including grants to institutions, should be taken into account and recognized.

   On the question of markers, which was the topic yesterday, I have been writing for some time that the P-24 antigen test is no good. Harvey Bialy, in a forceful editorial in BioTechnology several years ago, pointed out that the P-24 antigen test was no good, and that the results from it, which appeared in medical journals, were absurd. It is good to see it recognized now, finally, that the test is useless. However, one should realize that for several years the P-24 antigen test was used to claim benefits for AZT. One can't just forget that. Furthermore, it is more than likely that the P-24 antigen test doesn't mean much for the simple reason that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

   With regard to the CD4 test-it was clear from yesterday's talks that the CD4 test isn't really all that good. However, this is the test that is the basis for giving AZT to people who are objectively healthy. And you are the committee that made the recommendations- to give AZT routinely to people with HIV antibodies, whose CD4 counts fall below 500. I maintain that we are confronted with nothing less than pharmacogenic manslaughter at this point--125,000 people, more or less, are now undergoing AZT therapy. Many of these are objectively healthy people, who ought to live for another 20, 30, or 40 years. I don't think that they will. I think that they will die of AZT poisoning. And I think this committee must realize that it has responsibility. In fact, if I am correct, and we will know in a few years, this committee has blood on its hands. If some of you have consciences, and are not beholden to particular industrial interests, then you should do what you can, now, to stop this genocide.

   I know that some people refuse to believe in the possibility of genocide. But genocide has occurred at other times and in other places, and it is happening here and now.

   There have been many other drug scandals. Take thalidomide, when the head of the FDA did everything he could to prevent Frances Kelsey from doing her job. It was one single independent woman, a maverick, who prevented thalidomide from entering the United States. If Frances Kelsey had not stood up to her superiors, if the FDA had done business as usual, then thalidomide would have been marketed in the United States, with the consequences being thousands of monstrously deformed infants. And I submit to you that the thalidomide scandal was utterly trivial--it didn't amount to a hill of beans--compared to the AZT scandal that is happening now.

   I know some of these people on AZT. You know, it's not real to think of 125,000 people. But I know three, or four, or five of the nicest people I could . . . I could describe. Young, intelligent people, who ought to live for a long time. And they will not. They have been persuaded through lies to take a drug which will surely terminate their lives long before their time.

   Please do your job. Find out the real facts. Don't believe everything you hear at these meetings, or that you read in medical journals, about the alleged benefits of AZT. It is elementary that when researchers have committed fraud in the past, as was certainly the case in the Phase II trials, they can do so again.

   It is your duty to learn the truth and speak out-to stop the tragedy that is now taking place.'

   Excerpt from a letter by Dr Joan McKenna, Director of Research, TBM Associates, Berkeley California, which was published in the Policy Review, Fall, 1990: (see pages 94, 95).

   'Like Duesberg and Ellison, we see the use of AZT as a political and economic solution without real medical benefit to the patients. AZT is a known immune suppressant that essentially shuts down the immune system. By administering AZT to AIDS and ARC patients, few symptoms emerge that require medical care or hospitalization until the final stage of massive system failure form multiple infections. With AZT, the insurance companies avoid the $150,000-$250,000 expenses of earlier AIDS cases where 9 to 18 months of hospital and medical care were threatening to bankrupt the companies. Hospital and health care administrators, including Medicaid officials, who saw their ruin looming as Medicaid AIDS patients filled their wards, were relieved that their financial exposure could be limited to a few weeks or months by AZT administration to patients. Politicians who were reluctant to expend more money and public resources for the care of economically and politically disenfranchised minorities could assuage concerned families and friends and the media that everything was being done that could be done medically with AZT. They promised to make AZT easier to obtain and require that all physicians seeing AIDS patients urge them to go on the drug. AZT does not stop the progression of the disease. It does not stop patients from dying. But the dying is quiet, convenient, and cheap at $5,000 to $15,000 per patient.'

   A report in the New Scientist, 19 October 1991 read: 'Britain and France are to continue for at least another nine months a trial of the anti-AIDS drug Zidovudine (AZT) in which some participants receive only a placebo. The trial is designed to show whether the drug prolongs the lives of people infected with HIV but not showing symptoms of AIDS. But the US stopped a similar trial two years ago because the drug had already been shown to delay the progression of AIDS.'

   In February 1992 the trial, conducted by the Wellcome Pharmaceutical Company and the National Center for HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, was terminated for the same reasons given for the termination of the American trial, ie that it showed early AZT to benefit HIV-positive people, and so it would have been immoral to further withhold the drug from the placebo subjects.

   Again, this is an example of 'science by press release' (The Australian, 4 February 1992) because 'it would be some time before the trial was published and a full assessment made', while in the meanwhile, the author was informed by the Sydney AIDS Centre, the data was held by the Wellcome Company as classified information. What will the full assessment reveal, seeing that the entire trial was based on pure supposition from start to finish? When it is known that less than 3% of HIV-positive people proceed to AIDS anyway, it is ridiculous to base a 'scientific' trial on the basis that 100% will do so.

   Of course, if Wellcome succeed in convincing everyone that AZT can save people from something that wouldn't have happened anyway, look at the sales they will make. The chairman of the trials advisory committee said the Wellcome Company had a moral obligation to drop its price for the drug (currently $5000-$9000 per patient per annum) now that it is proposed to give it to all HIV-positive people (15,000 in Australia alone), but the company has stated there will be no price reduction.

   AZT is still the recommended treatment for AIDS, however, and now two new drugs are on the scene--Didanosine by Bristol-Myers, and Nevirapine by Boehringer-Ingelheim, both of which are designed to destroy the 'deadly' AIDS virus, HIV, against which in the eight years since it was accused, no evidence has been produced to show it does the slightest harm.

   That the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has for years been a powerful instrument manipulated by the pharmaceutical companies has been obvious to some people for a long time. Its legislation has always been to stamp out as quackery all forms of natural therapies while at the same time protecting the interests of the drug manufacturers. In the US the FDA faces a bitter opponent in the form of the National Health Federation, dedicated to freedom of choice and the breaking of the medical monopoly which has become more and more profit motivated and, at the same time, counterproductive to public health. The NHF's journal Health Freedom News, October 1991 issue featured an opening article by the Federation's president, Maureen Salaman, titled 'Watchdogs to Watch the FDA Watchdogs, Can the Food and Drug Administration Stand Close Scrutiny?' It commenced:

   'Supposedly a reformer, FDA Commissioner David A Kessler, MD, continues ever-enduring FDA policy of giving undivided attention to a pimple and ignoring a cancer, of overlooking major pharmaceutical companies' toxic, sometimes lethal, drugs and persecuting small manufacturers of harmless vitamin supplements. Pursuing the same FDA course of letting the Goliaths of the drug industry get away with--yes--murder . . .

   . . . Now what are Dr Kessler's ignored cancers? The antiquated, riddled-with-faults, rotten-with-politics approval system for harmful medicines and drugs, the FDA's hierarchy manned in many instances by former drug company executives-the revolving door system of executives flowing from the FDA into drug companies and vice-versa--and the FDA's Big Brother policy of arbitrarily raiding plants of legitimate nutritional supplement companies--intentionally or unintentionally keeping health-giving products off the market.

   First things first. Anyone who has even glanced casually at an ad for a drug product in a medical magazine and noted the frightening side effects will feel icicles racing up and down their spine.

   At best, any medicine or drug listed in the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR) can sicken, disable, or even kill a patient while alleviating his symptoms. So prescribing any of them is potentially like playing catch with vials of nitroglycerine.'

   And that's only the start of the article--and you can't say things like that in the USA unless you can back them up. And she does.

   In conclusion to this chapter I should again emphasize that, there are many medical drugs capable of destructive effects like those of AZT. Alpha interferon, the new drug recommended for the treatment of hepatitis C, has as previously mentioned the following side effects: depression, skin rashes and low white blood cell count. Great drug--it can pull you out of the minor league and make you eligible for AZT!

   Thank God for the Salvation Army and the National Health Federation! (N.H.F. address: 212 W. Foothill Blvd, Monrovia, California 91017, P.O. Box 688 Monrovia)

Postscript on AZT

Science by Press Release

   Within the space of one month several news reports about the AZT trials appeared in Australian newspapers, headlined as follows:

   'EARLY AZT DOSES HALVE AIDS CASES'
   (The Australian, 4 February 1992)

   'AZT NO SURVIVAL BENEFIT TO AIDS'
   (The Courier Mail, 14 February 1992)

   'AIDS WONDER DRUG* FAILS TO PROLONG LIFE OF SUFFERERS'
   (The Australian, 2 March 1992)

*The license to call drugs 'wonder drugs' is apparently a journalistic one, the product of a wild imagination.

    What Burroughs Wellcome and the FDA want everybody to believe from the first report is that even though AZT is destructive to the immune system, it is at the same time capable of slowing such destruction by its effect of arresting HIV activity if it is used early enough. In regard to the other reports, the AIDS establishment says that AZT treatment should have been started earlier, but nevertheless while lives were not prolonged, the patients were spared the worst symptoms before their final decline. So goes the old saying: 'The operation was a success, but unfortunately the patient died.' Cancer never gets a mention.

   The realistic viewpoint of these reports is completely different. The Duesberg/Roote-Bernstein viewpoint is that the toxic effects of AZT given to symptom-free HIV-positive subjects actually assists the development of AIDS in many of them, and that the 50% who reportedly escaped did so because their constitutions were strong enough to combat the AZT toxicity. In other words they escaped, not because of AZT, but in spite of it. In relation to the reports about no survival benefit, the same argument applies, which is that many of the patients that perished would not have done so at all had they not been brainwashed (along with their doctors) to expect death, and then assisted to die by AZT poisoning.

   Such discrepancies in the interpretation of observed phenomena need not imply conscious criminal intent by one party or another. More likely it demonstrates Dr William Roe's observations quoted in Chapter 6 which en&.

   'Indeed it seems the most destructive (and perhaps the most dangerous) characteristic of that species of the genus Homo we conceitedly label Sapiens is not his wisdom but his reluctance to admit ignorance.

   Rather than do so, he is prone to posit an hypothesis and, all too frequently in the absence of supporting evidence, comes to believe it. Thus are myths created.'

   Which is myth and which is fact in the argument on AIDS? If the reader is in doubt, perhaps the following chapter may assist in resolving it.