The Myth of the AIDS Virus

The Myth of the AIDS Virus 

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Anon. from old Latin

 

   In democratic law a suspect is held to be innocent until proven guilty. A suspect may be held for questioning by police, but unless there is sufficient evidence against him he cannot even be brought to trial; he must be presumed innocent and released. To have been at the scene of the crime, acting in a suspicious manner, only marks a person as a suspect. To gain a conviction the prosecutor must show that the suspect actually committed the crime; the prosecutor must prepare a case and at the trial present evidence to prove it. There have been trials when the jury has been swayed by the oratory of the prosecutor and have found the accused guilty on flimsy evidence, and there have been other cases when the accused has been 'framed' and found guilty on the strength of fabricated false evidence.

   Science, like civil law, demands the truth; it is concerned only with cold, hard fact. All claims of new knowledge, new discoveries, must be supported by clearcut, demonstrable data. Anecdotal evidence or speculation, no matter how convincing, is unacceptable until proven by exact scientific method. But even that is not enough. To gain full acceptance, a claim must not only pass scrutiny for publication in one or more scientific publications, it must then pass the scrutiny of all the scientific people who read the journals.

   To prove that a specific germ (or virus) is guilty of causing a certain disease, the first thing a researcher must do is to ensure Koch's postulates (see Chapter 6) are satisfied, the first and most obvious of which is that in every case of the disease the accused germ must be present in significant numbers. If in only one case the germ cannot be detected at all, it obviously cannot be the cause. But that is only the beginning--even if the germ is detected in all cases it still doesn't mean that it has caused the disease, because there may be other germs also present in all cases, as happens in beriberi (see Chapter 6). So to make sure, Koch's second, third and fourth postulates must be met.

   Koch's postulates have been discussed already, but whatever you may think of them one thing is certain: no germ or virus can infect a person's body from a distance; to do so it must necessarily be present in the body, it must be present in significant numbers, and it must be seen to be doing something.

   Ever since germs were found to play a part in disease there have been many different germs identified to be associated with different disease conditions. As previously mentioned, some of these germs (and viruses) were proven capable of transmitting a particular disease and some were proven to be only incidental, but even the ones found guilty could not pass Koch's third postulate until the postulate was changed to admit susceptibility was a prerequisite for the germ to have effect. Thus it is accepted that for any germ or virus to do harm to anybody, that person must first of all be susceptible, which means that the real cause of any infectious disease is whatever it is that lowers a person's resistance.

   AIDS is now considered to be a disease in its own right, characterized by the occurrence of multiple infections, none of them new. In the past when any one of these infections appeared on its own, which was rare, conventional drug treatment was employed and no mention made of immune deficiency. So AIDS has in fact done the world a service in that it has forced the medical profession to relax its vendetta against germs and viruses and focus instead on the real issue--susceptibility--or, in other words, immune deficiency.

   Whereas the doctors of the 19th Century can be excused for not identifying the mysterious causes of beriberi, pellagra, etc, the immune-depressing factors of AIDS stand out like neon signs on a dark night and there can be no excuse other than blindness for ignoring them. But medicine is not really an art or a science, it is a commercially oriented industry, based on germs and drugs and more lately on viruses. So when AIDS appeared, medical research was myopically directed in search of the ultimate virus, one which is not governed by the laws of Nature, one which does not wait for someone's resistance to lower, but instead goes out and lowers it all on its own.

   So urgent was the need for this discovery that a fair amount of invention had to be employed and a lot of conventional rules set aside. Formalities usually rigid and considered essential were dispensed with entirely, but this was no problem for Dr Robert Gallo because he worked for the US Government in the prestigious National Institute of Health. So in 1984 a new virus, unlike any other known, was announced, and became instantly famous as the AIDS virus. But so hurried was Dr Gallo to beat his French rivals, the announcement was the most premature in medical history. There were no medical trials, no double-blind studies, no epidemiological studies, no submissions to scientific journals, no scientific scrutiny or peer review. Not one of Koch's postulates were met and no proof has ever been produced.

   When the subject of scientific accuracy was raised with Dr Gallo in an interview by Charles Ortleib, publisher of The New York Native, Mr Ortlieb reported Dr Gallo's response thus: 'Dr Gallo told me that his early assertion that HIV is the cause of AIDS was not based purely on scientific grounds, but rather that he needed to bring the field to another extreme. Otherwise, he felt that people would be confused by multifactorial or crackpot theories. I told him that I thought it was dangerous to mix his public health concerns with his statements of scientific truths. But, he insisted that he had the medical authority to do so.'

   Dr Gallo, who has since admitted the virus was not his discovery as he first claimed, refuses any debate on the matter of proof, while at the same time the man who originally discovered the virus, Dr Luc Montagnier, has announced his disbelief that HIV causes AIDS.

   The case for HIV causing AIDS does not hold water, and in a court of law would be thrown out in very short time.

   When germs were discovered in the 19th Century they were suspected to be the cause of most human diseases. And when viruses were discovered later on they automatically became the suspects in all the diseases that could not be blamed on germs. Early in this century when cancer research was speeding up, it was demonstrated at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research that a type of cancer peculiar to chickens could be transmitted from one susceptible chicken to another, and this led many researchers to suspect viruses to be the cause of all cancers and that cancer was contagious. This was never shown to be the case, but when President Nixon in his 1971 State of the Union address officially declared war on cancer in the belief that the sort of technology that split the atom and put man on the moon must surely succeed, research was again directed at viruses.

   The war against cancer was directed by the US Government National Cancer Institute (NCI), a subsidiary of the US National Institute of Health. Totally committed to the belief in orthodox allopathic medicine and heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical companies, the research efforts of the National Cancer Institute achieved nothing despite the prodigious outlay in money, and it was eventually admitted that the war against cancer was lost. However, it was concluded once again that cancer was not caused by a virus.

   With the advent of the AIDS epidemic among homosexuals in the early 1980s, government health officials, having just lost the war on cancer, now found themselves with another war on their hands, one which they were determined to win. The research personnel were already there and lost no time switching from cancer research to research on AIDS. Dr Robert Gallo, head of the Laboratory of Human Cell Biology at the NCI, had been in charge of the NCI's war against cancer and was retained in charge for the war against AIDS. He even had a new virus that showed promise, a sort of left-over from the cancer research.

   In his previous research into cancer, Gallo had discovered a new virus his team had isolated from the T tells of leukemia patients which he called Human T cell Leukemia Virus I and which he believed to be the cause of their leukemia. When epidemiological evidence on 600,000 test subjects (Japanese) showed this virus, HTLVI, to have absolutely no bearing on leukemia at all, Gallo maintained his stance that it could, but that the virus probably had a very long 'latency period' of maybe forty years. As the latency period, ie the time between infection and symptoms, of viruses is usually measured in days, Gallo was either joking or trying out for the Guinness Book of Records.

   In the following year, 1982, Gallo and his team discovered a new retro-virus they called HTLVII which came from a young man with hairy cell leukemia,* but this virus proved to be blameless and the team turned their virus-hunting efforts on to resolving the AIDS problem.

*See The Health Revolution, Chapter 2, in which the case is described by a Perth engineer who by dietary means completely cleared himself of hairy cell leukemia in a few months.

   Convinced still that viruses were man's greatest enemy, Gallo set out to show that his HTLVI, if not the cause of leukemia, would prove to be the cause of AIDS. This was an odd change of opinion because having first said the virus caused an increase in white cells (leukemia), he was now saying it caused the decrease in white cells which is AIDS.

   Early in 1983, Professor Luc Montagnier and his team of virologists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris were also searching for a virus they suspected of causing AIDS, and they found one. Tests done on a thirty-three-year old male homosexual who was promiscuous and who had AIDS symptoms revealed a novel retro-virus isolated from a lymph node, which Montagnier named lymphodenopathy-associated virus (LAV). He did not at that time claim it to be the cause of AIDS.

   Montagnier's LAV, a sample of which was sent to Gallo in America, resembled Gallo's HTLVI but tests showed it to be distinctly different. Gallo continued in his assertions that HTLVI would prove to be the cause of AIDS, but at the same time he was cultivating in his laboratory the LAV from Montagnier's sample.

   In December 1983 Gallo received a laboratory report on thirty-three blood samples from AIDS patients which showed thirty-one to be negative for viruses, the other two showing positive for LAV, not HTLVI. Thus if any virus was involved with AIDS at all, it had to be Montagnier's LAV.

   But finding a virus was meaningless if, as in Gallo's two leukemia suppositions, the virus could not be shown to be doing something. But again this detail did not worry Gallo; he merely, as he had done before, assumed guilt by association. There was no time to spare, and Gallo was intent on beating his French rivals in the race to conquer AIDS, even if it meant ignoring the established research protocols.

   It is normal procedure in scientific research that when new discoveries are made and conclusions arrived at, the research data is formally submitted to one or more reputable scientific or medical journals for review, and if accepted and published the data is assessed by all the experts. Following this initial step, months of discussion and argument usually ensue before general consensus is reached as to whether the concept is practical, useful and safe. This is traditional scientific and medical procedure.

   In the case of Gallo's HIV hypothesis, all rules were set aside. Gallo was the big chief, full of confidence, and he was backed by the US Government. Protocol was ignored, and instead of the HIV hypothesis appearing tentatively in some respectable medical journal, it was announced, fully fledged as a fait accompli, in two national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. That these two newspapers cater to the centers of the country's financial and political power itself arouses suspicions in what was going on. Why were the New York Times and the San Francisco Examiner not in on it? Be that as it may, it was only several days later, on 19 April 1984, that Gallo's formal announcement appeared in the New Scientist.* The report made no mention of Montagnier's LAV; instead, Gallo claimed he had discovered another altogether new virus called HTLVIII which he stated without fear of contradiction to be the cause of AIDS. (It was only later that HTLVIII was shown to be none other than Professor Montagnier's LAV.)

*The New Scientist is not a medical journal. It is a popular weekly magazine on sale to the general public.

   The New Scientist report, which set off the most bizarre sequence of events in medical history, read as follows: 'Researchers at America's National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, believe they have finally tracked down the organism that causes Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It is a virus that affects particular cells of the immune system and is called Human T cell Leukemia Virus III (HTLVIII).'

   In his book The HIV Myth (Macmillan, 1989), English journalist Jad Adams described the events that immediately followed the New Scientist report:

   'There now occurred one of the strangest tableaux of the entire AIDS story. The Department of Health and Human Services held a press conference in Washington, DC, on April 23 to report on a new virus which had been found by Robert Gallo.

   The press conference was held in a small auditorium; too small to hold the reporters and TV crews who attended. Microphones hung round the lectern like fruit weighing down a tree, and scientists crowded onto the tiny stage. Secretary of Health and Human Resources, Margaret Heckler, even introduced a scientist who wasn't there.

   Gallo made a grand entrance, as described by David Black: 'He approached the podium like the only kid in the school assembly to have won a National Merit Scholarship. He was fastidiously dressed. None of Sonnabend's (Dr Sonnabend--see Chapters 8 and 10 ) ratty sweaters and baggy slacks for him. He wore aviator glasses--a Hollywood touch-and his hair was rumpled, but just enough to make it look as if he had recently emerged from handling a crisis. His manner seemed to me condescending, as though he were the Keeper of Secrets obliged to deal with a world of lesser mortals.' The moral seems to be to make sure David Black is your friend before you invite him to your press conference.

   Margaret Heckler acknowledged 'other discoveries in different laboratories-even in different parts of the world' but the accolade was reserved for the US: 'Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science.

   Heckler said the discovery of the virus would allow the development of a vaccine against AIDS which would be available by 1986. She resigned her post in 1985 and was sent to Ireland as ambassador.

   An honorable exception to the shabby behavior of the US media in general was the New York Times which, days before the press conference, featured a story in which credit for the isolation of the virus went to the Pasteur Institute. Later the New York Times commented on the fierce-and prematurefight for credit between scientists and bureaucratic sponsors of research.

      One other event occurred on April 23: a patent was filed in the US on a test kit developed by Gallo. The prestige of coming first in the race to grow the virus was now indistinguishable from the financial gain each institute would receive if they could prove they came first. The small matter of proving that the virus actually caused the disease remained.'

Conclusion

   The small matter of proving that the virus caused the disease still remains, and it remains for two very good reasons:

1. There is no valid evidence that the virus causes AIDS.
2. There is an enormous weight of evidence to show that it does not.

   So far the HIV theory of AIDS has been sustained in the absence of proof by the very fact it was sponsored and officially launched by the US Federal Government agency, the National Institute of Health. Such credibility was enough for people everywhere to accept the virus theory without question, particularly in view of the fact few doctors know much about viruses anyway, especially 'retro'-viruses. And since the official launching of the HIV theory it has been sustained by a constant stream of propaganda from the National Institute of Health's instrumentalities, the Center of Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, which contains information relating only to HIV infection rates and so on, completely excluding any of the valuable original research data which on its own invalidates the HIV theory.

   The HIV pantomime is nearly over, having had a surprisingly long run. It started in Washington DC, and that's where it will finish, although most of the action has been generated in California. The man who has done most to dispel the myth of HIV and to put some common sense back into medicine is the world's leading virologist, Professor Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkley. Selected in 1987 by the National Institute of Health as one of America's twenty-three most brilliant scientists, Duesberg was awarded the prestigious $500,000 Outstanding Investigator Grant. Great things were expected of him in the war against AIDS, and great things he has indeed achieved--but not (to the dismay of the establishment) quite along the lines they anticipated.

   As the world's leading retro-virologist, Professor Duesberg has always insisted emphatically that no retrovirus could possibly be the cause of AIDS. He has over and over again challenged Dr Robert Gallo, the initiator of the HIV hypothesis, or anybody else from the medical establishment, to debate the HIV argument: any time, any place, but there have been no takers. Instead he has had his Outstanding Investigator Grant terminated and his challenges to debate have been ignored or brushed aside as being trivial. But the challenges are not trivial, and sooner or later will have to be answered. In more and more news articles journalists are demanding these answers and coming out in support of Duesberg. Professor Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the very man who discovered HIV in 1983, has stated publicly he no longer believes the virus to be the cause of AIDS. Dr Robert Gallo, the man who dishonestly claimed to first discover HIV and then initiated the HIV hypothesis in 1984, is now back-pedalling on the HIV theory as his credibility dwindles and investigations of fraud threaten the reputation of his entire establishment.

   As this book goes to press, a news report from Paris (the Australian, 21 April 1992) reads as follows:

   From this report it would appear that a two-year investigation has found enough evidence of scientific misconduct to warrant charges against Gallo's closest collaborator Popovic, but at the same time not sufficient evidence to involve Popovic's closest collaborator, Gallo. Does this mean Dr Gallo does not know what is going on in his own inner sanctum? One way or the other he has blown it, because if he doesn't know what is going on under his nose in his own laboratory, what chance has he of knowing what goes on in the microscopic world of cells and viruses?

   With due respect to the French Office of Scientific Integrity, it is becoming more and more evident that the medical management of the AIDS problem has been nothing less than farcical ever since the HIV theory was swallowed, hook, line and sinker, by almost everybody in 1984, at the same time reeking in some circles of gross ineptitude, deceit and greed for money.

Addendum

A CONVERSATION WITH PETER DUESBERG,
Professor of Virology, University of California, Berkeley
(from the California Monthly, Journal of the University of California Alumni Association).

   'It does not exist on the front pages of newspapers, and can be found in the scientific literature only after a careful search, but there is a countermovement in AIDS thinking, long present and continuing to grow. The countermovement opposes the standard view that a retrovirus, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), is the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The accepted account of how people with AIDS become ill is that HIV kills T-cells, the very basis of the immune system; this allows the introduction of any of 25 diseases into the defenseless body, which then succumbs.

   'This explanation, however, incorporates a number of paradoxes. First, HIV never infects sufficient numbers of T-cells to destroy the immune system. Second, according to this view, disease results from the 'AIDS virus' only after anti-viral immunity has been achieved--that is, only after antibodies to the virus can be detected. Third, disease strikes only about ten years after infection (the 'latent period'). Fourth, people with AIDS succumb to different diseases depending on their risk group (Kaposi's sarcoma for homosexuals, pneumocystis pneumonia for IV drug users) or their country of origin (the pneumonia common in the United States and Europe is not seen among AIDS sufferers in Africa). Finally, if HIV acted like a conventional virus, it would by now have spread far beyond its original points of attack. The virus would be random in the population, as was predicted in 1983, when it was discovered; this, however, has not come to pass.

   'The response of the dominant medical groups, private and public, has not been to seek other explanations for AIDS. Instead, billions of dollars have been given to research aimed at resolving the maze of paradoxes surrounding the 'virus-AIDS' hypothesis.

   'But many scientists believe that other approaches must be used to explain and therefore deal with AIDS. One of the key figures in this countermovement is Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at Berkeley. A member of the National Academy of Science, one of the world's most respected retrovirologists, and a current beneficiary (one of only two on the Cal campus) of an Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Cancer Institute, the 53-year-old Duesberg has been at Berkeley since 1964.

   'Duesberg entered the AIDS debate in 1987, when he wrote 'Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality,' in Cancer Research, which closed with an attack on the virus-AIDS hypothesis. In 1988, he debated the issue in the pages of Science magazine (HIV does Not Cause AIDS). Last year, he wrote 'HIV Fails as the Cause of AIDS' in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

   'He has just completed an article for publication in Research in Immunology, 'AIDS: Non-infectious deficiencies acquired by drug consumption and other risk factors,' which continues his assault on the virus-AIDS hypothesis and introduces, for the first time, his own proposal, the 'risk-AIDS' hypothesis. With this new hypothesis, he claims to have resolved many of the paradoxes in the standard account. It is the difference between these two accounts which forms the basis for this Q&A.

 'Q: I want to explore the differences between the accepted AIDS explanation and the new one you are proposing. What is the standard, 'virus-AIDS', hypothesis?

 A: It basically says that AIDS is an infectious, contagious disease, caused by a virus. It holds that the 25 'indicator diseases' of AIDS are all the result of a primary effect of the virus, which is the depletion of T-cells, one of the major components of the immune system.

 

Q: What are the main diseases, and are any of them new?

 A: The major diseases are pneumocystis pneumonia, Kaposi's sarcoma, and dementia. Not one of the 25 is new, although the whole syndrome is often referred to as a 'new disease'--in Scientific American, as well as the popular press. But this is clearly not the case. AIDS is not a new disease or a disease at all. What is new is that some of these diseases now occur in a group of people in which they formerly were virtually absent, or at least not observed in the Western, affluent countries. Twenty years ago, we didn't see 20-, 30-, or 40-year-olds with Kaposi's sarcoma, pneumonia, or dementia in the numbers we see now.

 

Q: And the standard explanation is that we're seeing these diseases in these people now because of the spread of the HIV virus?

 A: It's a virus, but a special type of virus in that it's different from many other viruses we know that cause disease in man and animals. It's a retrovirus, and retroviruses in fact are the most benign of viruses: they want to become part of the cell; that's how they survive. Most viruses--the ones that cause polio, flu, measles, mumps, and so forth--kill cells. A retrovirus does not.

 

Q: But the HIV hypothesis is that it kills immune cells, specifically T-cells.

 A: That's one of the many paradoxes of the virus-AIDS hypothesis. Immune deficiency due to a depletion of T-cells is the hallmark of AIDS; yet not more than one in 10,000 T-cells is ever actively infected by HIV. And 'infection' at this rate cannot damage the body.

 

Q: You're saying that HIV is incapable of killing the cells it's supposed to kill. How do the virus-AIDS thinkers get around this point?

 A: The primary technique is to ignore the point. The other approach is to propose hypotheses about the hypothesis.

   The hypothesis is that the virus does it. And since the virus doesn't infect T-cells--and my critics agree that more than 99 percent of T-cells are uninfected--they come up with hypotheses about how the virus could possibly kills cells that are not infected. I could count probably a dozen hypotheses that have been put forward. And billions of dollars in research projects are being spent to find out if any of these hypotheses has a chance to succeed.

 

Q: The January 1990 issue of the Lancet carried reports that Kaposi's sarcoma appears in men who are HIV-negative. How does this square with the virus-AIDS hypothesis?

 A: It doesn't. You see, Kaposi's was one of the most characteristic AIDS diseases for homosexuals in the early 1980s. When you said Kaposi's, that meant AIDS. What I have asked for some time is 'If HIV is the cause of Kaposi's sarcoma, why are only homosexuals getting it?' They were getting it in the lungs, the face, and the chest--the routes along which amyl nitrite inhalants, or 'poppers', are used. Poppers have been directly correlated with the incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma--the only people in the United States to get Kaposi's were the homosexuals who were using poppers as an aphrodisiac. And as the use of poppers declined--when it was pointed out that this was a dangerous practice--the incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma declined.

   I had also wondered why there are Kaposi's sarcoma cases that are free of HIV. How can you get exactly the same disease in the same risk group without HIV? That's usually the kiss of death in an etiology study: if you can get the same disease without the agent, the agent can't be the cause.

   So, to answer your question, HIV has nothing to do with Kaposi's sarcoma, as the Lancet now agrees, even though this was the original hallmark disease of AIDS.

 

Q: Then what is the connection between HIV and AIDS?

 A: I think that HIV is totally irrelevant as an etiological agent in AIDS. HIV is, by definition, a part of AIDS because AIDS is defined as any of 25 diseases when they occur in the presence of antibody to the virus. But I see no evidence that it could play any role whatsoever in causing AIDS.

 

Q: But clearly people do have HIV, or antibodies to HIV, in their blood. What does this mean?

 A: You may call it, at least in this country, a surrogate marker for risk behavior. It is very difficult to pick up because the virus is mostly latent; therefore, to pick it up you have to have lots of contacts with other people. And that is essentially the same as saying you're practicing risk behavior.

 

Q: Sexual promiscuity?

 A: Sex is one way. But, as we know from the literature, sex is an extremely inefficient way. On the average, 500 sexual contacts are required to pick up the latent HIV from a partner. That's a lot of contacts.

   You could pick it up from a blood transfusion. And you clearly could receive it from your mother--that's how it is naturally transmitted in Africa, perinatally. That's how virtually all retroviruses in animals are transmitted, from mother to offspring. That's why it is found in both sexes and in very high percentages of the population in some countries, like Zaire.

 

Q: Which means what?

 A: Which simply means that in Africa it is an endemic retrovirus, harmless, of which there are many examples in the animal kingdom and even in some humans.

 

Q: If HIV is harmless, and endemic in parts of Africa, what is causing the deaths there that we are told are due to AIDS?

 A: Most of it, I think, is a matter of giving old diseases a new name. I think slim disease, fever, diarrhea--the main AIDS diseases in Africa--have existed there all along.

 

Q: Caused by what?

 A: Malnutrition and parasitic infection, which is far more common there than here. The water is unsterile, the food isn't as clean as it is here, and the nutrition is protein-deficient. A balanced diet would solve most of the health problems in Africa.

   Throughout the world, protein malnutrition is the most common cause of disease. The AIDS diseases in fact are the diseases of the poor we had in Europe and the United States a century ago.

   We're told that AIDS is a microbial disease, a microbial epidemic. The epidemic exists, but it is not a microbial epidemic. It is a drug epidemic associated with malnutrition.

 

Q: A drug epidemic?

A: Yes, we are seeing, in the United States, some of the results of the drug culture which has reached epidemic proportions. In particular, psychoactive drugs, which are used by exactly the groups that are said to be at risk for HIV infection.

 

Q: What are the risk groups?

 A: Essentially 90 percent of AIDS cases are in two major risk groups--intravenous drug users and male homosexuals--as they have been since 1981. And I think it should be pointed out that it is not 'male homosexuality' which is the risk-homosexuality is as old as life, and it hasn't become any more dangerous in 1980 than it was in Socrates' and Plato's day.

   We are looking at a very small segment of the homosexual population, namely those who are very active because they are aided by psychoactive drugs: cocaine, crack, amphetamines, poppers. And the conventional drugs that compensate for these: Valium, cigarettes, and alcohol. These individuals also get a lot of venereal infections, which require treatment by antibiotics. And with drug addiction often comes protein malnutrition. If you eat junk food and take drugs, you don't make T-cells and B-cells. And if that goes on for eight or ten years, it may become irreversible. And then you're talking about AIDS.

 

Q: What is your alternative to the virus-AIDS hypothesis?

 A: I call it the 'risk-AIDS' hypothesis. It proposed that non-infectious agents, such as psychoactive drugs, overmedication with antibiotics, and now, above all, AZT, are causing immune deficiencies and other deficiencies that are now called AIDS.

 

Q: Let's talk about AZT, the only federally approved treatment for AIDS. What is it?

 A: AZT is simply an analogue of one of the four building blocks of DNA. It's essentially chemotherapy--it was developed to treat leukemia--designed to kill fast-growing cells. In the case of AIDS, it's aimed particularly at lymphocytes, the immune system. It kills cells. That's the one thing we can say for sure about it.

 

Q: What is the rationale for killing cells as part of AIDS therapy?

 A: Those who sanction AZT say that they don't want to kill cells, they want to interfere with the replication of the virus. Retroviruses make DNA; AZT inhibits DNA synthesis. Everything that is in the process of making DNA will be killed by AZT.

 

Q: Won't it kill the person who takes it?

 A: It will kill the person. AZT proponents say, 'This is the price you pay for killing the virus.' And they think the benefits are worth that cost.

 

Q: But government reports have said that AZT prolongs AIDS patients' lives.

 A: I have never seen any such study. That was science by press release. No studies have ever been published to back up those claims. I have asked people in the field, I have written to the New York Times and other papers which repeated the government claims, and I have never gotten an answer. I don't know what to call this type of propaganda.

 

Q: What do you think of treating AIDS patients with AZT?

 A: I think there is no rational basis for treating any AIDS patient with AZT. The first reason is that we have no proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Second, even if we had such proof, the number of infected cells which would be the rational targets for AZT therapy--the sole justification for the therapy, to kill HIV-infected cells--is so incredibly low that the toxicity index will be irresponsibly high. The net result is an incredible attack on the immune system. Which is exactly why you have AIDS, according to the standard definition. So with AZT you'll take out the little bit of the immune system that is left.

   Thus, in my opinion, AZT treatment is totally irresponsible. I would be more forgiving if we were talking about a drug like aspirin, which we don't totally understand and which might have some miraculous side effect. But AZT is not one of those drugs. AZT is a drug whose mechanism is embarrassingly clear. There is no possible way you could see a beneficial side effect of a chain terminator of DNA synthesis. I don't see how this could be justified. At all.

 

Q: If what you say is true, how can people stand by and let this happen?

 A: I have asked myself this question many times. The only answer I can come up with is that they have made this look so confusing and complex that many people say, 'I don't know enough to judge this. In fact, I think that the majority of people who believe in the virus-AIDS hypothesis are totally unaware that the virus is completely latent at the time you get AIDS and infects very, very few cells. People don't check the details of popular dogma or consensus views. I know that many people in the field who have been asked to respond to my scientific papers on the subject say they haven't had the time to read them. Many have said straight out that they won't read them. 'Duesberg's off the wall.' Or: 'He's from Berkeley.'

   Another part of it is that most people, even scientists, take their information from the newspapers. Science is really now a popularity contest, made by newspapers. You hype something in the press, and people take it from there. They do not advertise the fact that HIV infects only one in 10,000 cells. If people are really pushed on this point, they come up with a dozen hypotheses that could-but so far don't-explain it.

   Finally, I think another reason is that many AIDS scientists have significant commercial interests in companies that are tied to the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. If you open up the AZT question, then the viral cause of AIDS must come up. And that would raise a lot of flack.

 

Q: Let's return to your alternative to the virus-AIDS hypothesis. How will the 'risk-AIDS' hypothesis help?

 A: My alternative, I believe, will explain in a rational way virtually everything that is paradoxical in the virus-AIDS hypothesis--25 diseases in the presence of antibodies to a retrovirus which I consider harmless because it is always idle.

   My hypothesis postulates that most of the AIDS diseases in the United States and Europe are a direct consequence of the consumption of psychoactive drugs. Thirty percent of AIDS cases in this country are confirmed IV-drug users. We don't need any further explanation for those. And the others we have briefly discussed: the homosexuals who are at risk for AIDS use batteries of drugs--as aphrodisiacs, to get high, or for medical purposes. The worst of them now, of course, is AZT.

   The risk-AIDS hypothesis would help explain why different groups get different diseases. As I said before, generally speaking the homosexuals in this country are the only ones to get Kaposi's sarcoma and they are the only ones who use poppers. Heroin and cocaine addicts get pneumonia. In Africa, they get slim disease and fever and diarrhea because of straight malnutrition and all the local infections there; they don't get pneumonia, even though they carry the same pneumocystis in their lungs that people in the rest of the world do. So, all of these groups are at risk, not because of HIV but because of the damage done to their bodies, directly or indirectly; by drugs and malnutrition.

   My alternative, then, would explain why AIDS remains exclusively restricted to the major risk groups and is not random in the population, as an infectious disease would be. It would explain why it takes, on the average, ten years after infection to develop symptoms--ten years is merely an expression of the long and unpredictable time it takes to reach a threshold for pathogenicity when you use toxic drugs or have a toxic lifestyle.

 

Q: What is the 'toxic lifestyle' of a hemophiliac?

 A: Being a hemophiliac puts one at risk for a number of diseases. One element is the immunosuppressive function of blood substances--whether it is Factor VIII for hemophiliacs or blood transfusions in general. Both of these are known, classical conditions that repress the immune system. Again, it's individually very different. Some people accept blood products better than others.

   And of course the additional risk is that, despite all current precautions, there are accidental infections that accompany blood products: hepatitis, cytomegalo infection, Epstein-Barr infection, and other infections through transfusions. That's unfortunately not uncommon.

 

Q: What about press reports of a year or two ago about the 55-year-old Marin woman who died of AIDS five years after receiving a blood transfusion?

 A: That is what is called an anecdotal study; it's worthless for science. You need a controlled study to identify the cause of a disease in a person who picked up a presumably causative virus--or antibody to a virus--five years earlier. You would need a hundred 55-year-old women from Marin County who got the same disease she did--what was it, pneumonia?--and are antibody positive. And you would need to compare them to a hundred similar 55-year-old women without antibody to the virus. If only the hundred antibody-positive women became sick, and the only variable were the virus, then you could say the virus could have done it.

   I want to emphasize that such a controlled study has never been done. Not a single one. I have asked for such studies. I have suggested them. A good one would be to match hemophiliacs with and without antibody to the virus, follow them for a year or more, and then ask: How are the ones with antibody doing compared to those without antibody? If you found pneumonia, hepatitis, cytomegalovirus, and all the other infections that are typical of hemophilia only in the ones with antibody to the virus, then you'd have some evidence.

 

Q: What do you expect would be found from such a controlled study?

 A: The incidence of AIDS diseases in HIV-positives and HIV-negatives would be exactly the same.

   If you think a virus is the cause of AIDS, do a control without it. To do a control is the first thing you teach undergraduates. But it hasn't been done. The epidemiology of AIDS is a pile of anecdotal stories, selected to fit the virus-AIDS hypothesis.

 

Q: You are saying that AIDS is not an infectious disease?

 A: Yes. It doesn't fit anything we know about infectious diseases. It stays in risk groups; it takes ten years from so-called infection to symptoms. Microbes are not that picky--to limit themselves to very special risk groups. There is no microbe that takes ten years to cause disease. Within a couple of weeks or months, either you reject the microbe or the microbe eats you up.

   I think you can ask one question after another that was not answered by the virus-AIDS hypothesis and answer it with the risk-AIDS hypothesis. It explains, for example, why a vaccine would never work. Because antibodies to the virus are said to be the precondition for AIDS under the standard definition. An absolute paradox. It would be the first and only virus in the universe that causes 25 different diseases only after anti-viral immunity! But this paradox could readily be reconciled with the hypothesis of risk- or drug-induced diseases. According to this hypothesis, the roughly ten years HIV is said to take to cause disease--the so-called latent period--would depend on how often you use drugs, what drugs you use, where you inject them, and how sensitive your body is to them. Thresholds would be largely different for different people, and the outcomes would therefore be largely differentas they are in AIDS cases.

 

Q: You think the war on AIDS should, instead, be the war on drugs?

 A: Yes, I think so. But that is not my field. I am just trying to find a consistent alternative, trying to find an explanation. And I think the only thing new in the past 15 years in the Western world is the increased use of drugs.

 

Q: What about AIDS in babies in this country?

A: An AIDS baby is one who is (a) sick and (b) has antibody to the virus. Now, 95 percent of AIDS babies are born to mothers who are drug-addicted or prostitutes. That's 95 percent of the cases. You don't hear of AIDS babies in Orinda or Lafayette. Never. You're talking about children who have picked up the virus from their mothers. And the babies are sick and die because the mother, say, was taking cocaine when she should have had a steak or a glass of milk, at the time the baby's lung was being formed or the brain was being developed--this is an extremely sensitive time for the baby, the early stages of development. If it doesn't get proteins at this time, it will be retarded or defective; it can't catch up.

 

Q: What difference does it make which hypothesis you use--virus-AIDS or risk-AIDS? People are still dying.

 A: Well, it makes a difference if you want to develop a public-health policy that is successful. The one we have now, based on the virus-AIDS hypothesis, is a total failure. Its predictions are wrong: AIDS hasn't spread into the heterosexual population. Current policy hasn't cured anyone, despite the billions of dollars spent. And it now is using AZT, which will kill more and more people. These are the accomplishments of the virus-AIDS hypothesis translated into public-health policy.

   So if you want to have a better showing in terms of public-health benefits, you first have to know what the cause is and then take appropriate action. But you'll never get a good public-health policy based on poor s cience. And that's what we have now.

   A public-health policy based on the risk-AIDS hypothesis would immediately break away from the central HIV definition of the syndrome and instead would classify the 25 diseases according to the risks that may generate them--poppers for Kaposi's, heroin for pneumonia--and would treat each one accordingly. You wouldn't give all of these people AZT regardless of whether they are suffering from diarrhea or dementia or Kaposi's sarcoma or pneumonia--which is what we're doing now.

 

Q: If a person is HIV-positive but does not take drugs, eats a balanced diet, and gets good exercise and rest, what is his prognosis?

 A: Exactly the same as for an HIV-negative person. Exactly the same. The fact that one or two million Americans are antibody positive, and no more than 20,000 a year, or 1.5 percent, develop one of these 25 diseases is already an indication that being antibody-positive can't be a big risk factor by itself. And these one or two million Americans include, of course, most of those who have used lots of drugs.

 

Q: Although you're not talking about sexual practices, the fact that you are talking about drug use recalls the earlier versions of 'lifestyle' as the cause of AIDS.

 A: Non-infectious agents seem to be called lifestyle, and that implies responsibility or blame. If the cause is a virus, no one can help it. I talked to an AIDS group recently, and they were sensitive to the 'risk-AIDS' hypothesis. They said, 'You're saying we are doing bad things, bringing this on ourselves.'

 

Q: What was your response?

 A: I said, 'I'm a scientist, not a politician or a priest. My only interest is to find a solution for AIDS. Or at least an explanation. Once you have an explanation that makes sense, then you can debate public health policies.'

 

Q: You have been both ignored and vilified since you came out against HIV as the cause of AIDS. What do you see as you look ahead?

 A: I'm a little more optimistic than I was a year or two ago. I think my best ally is the truth. The virus hypothesis simply doesn't make any sense. It is so poorly framed, and like all poorly framed hypotheses, it doesn't generate any benefits. It has yet to save the first patient. And we are about to kill off, intoxicate, 50,000 people with AZT. That's the number now taking AZT. And that's the same number of people we lost in Vietnam.

   This is now 1990, by which time AIDS was supposed to have killed off the Haitians and to have moved into the heterosexual population because it was a sexually transmitted disease. But we don't hear anything any more--in the press or in the scientific literature--about Haitians. And the primary risk groups, drug users and homosexuals, have remained the same as they were at the beginning. All of these paradoxes had to be incorporated into the virus-AIDS hypothesis: This virus is so special and so smart that it causes a disease in homosexuals it wouldn't cause in drug addicts, causes different diseases in Africa than in Europe, and it waits ten years to do so.

   I think people will soon wake up and ask, 'Why are we spending a billion dollars a year on a hypothesis that has yet to save a single life.''

 

Statement by Robert S. Roote-Bernstein,
Associate Professor of Physiology, Michigan State University,
East Lansing, MI (as appeared in Policy Review, Fall 1990).
Professor Roote-Bernstein is, like Professor Duesberg, a member of a select group of twenty-three chosen by the National Cancer Institute as the most brilliant scientists in America, and as such is the recipient of the prestigious Outstanding Investigator Grant.

   'Lest readers of Duesberg and Ellison's article claiming that HIV is not the cause of AIDS think that the authors are lone wolves crying in the wilderness, let me add my voice to the growing chorus. While I am not convinced that HIV is irrelevant to understanding AIDS-after all it is highly correlated with the syndrome--I am not convinced that it is any more important than other immunosuppressive agents associated with AIDS. On the contrary, I believe existing evidence demonstrates that HIV is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause AIDS.

   'First, data linking HIV to AIDS are nowhere near as good as the public are led to believe. Reference to the Centers for Disease Control's own data reveals that 5 percent of AIDS patients tested for HIV never display signs of infection, and that less than 50 percent of AIDS patients have been tested for HIV.

   'Recently, cases of homosexual men with AIDS and without HIV infections have been verified. In response, HIV proponents are lobbying for a change in the definition of AIDS to exclude HIV-free cases. These people do not, apparently, understand two things: 1) that defining AIDS by HIV and simultaneously demonstrating that HIV causes AIDS is tautological, and therefore bankrupt, reasoning; and 2) that altering the definition of AIDS does not alter the fact that HIV-free people can and do develop the same set of opportunistic infections as those who are HIV-infected. Whether these HIV-free cases are listed as AIDS patients or not, they are still medical patients whose syndrome is in need of explanation. Logically, HIV is not, therefore, necessary to cause the development of these symptoms, and other causes of what we now call AIDS must exist.

Other Agents

   'My own research, which was published this summer in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, suggests what these other causes of acquired immunosuppression may be. Briefly summarized, all of the following agents had been demonstrated to be immunosuppressive prior to the discovery of HIV, and all are highly associated with one or more AIDS risk groups: immunological response to semen following anal intercourse; the use of recreational drugs such as the nitrites ('poppers' and 'snappers'); chronic antibiotic use (often associated with promiscuity); opiate drugs; multiple transfusions; anesthetics; malnutrition (whether caused by 'gay bowel syndrome', drug use, poverty, or anorexia nervosa); multiple, concurrent infections by diverse microbes; and infection by specific viruses such as cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, and hepatitis-B virus (all of which are as highly associated with AIDS as is HIV).

   'Several of these agents, including cytomegalovirus, hepatitis-B virus, opiate drugs, and repeated blood transfusions, are known to cause the same sort of T-cell abnormalities that are found in AIDS, and which are usually attributed (perhaps inaccurately) to HIV infection. The other agents cause a wider spectrum of immunosuppressive responses, and probably explain why more than simply T-cells are non-functional in AIDS patients. Every AIDS patient has several of these immunosuppressive agents at work in his or her system in addition to, and sometimes in the absence of, HIV. We cannot, therefore, logically conclude that HIV is the sole or even the main cause of immunosuppression in AIDS.

19th-Century AIDS

   'Now, if the so-called life-style theory of AIDS is correct, one important implication is that AIDS should not be a new syndrome. It is not. I am one of only a handful of scientists who have bothered to search intensively through the back issues of medical journals for odd cases that match the CDC surveillance definition of AIDS. So far I have found hundreds of such cases, extending back to 1872 (the date when the first opportunistic disease associated with AIDS was identified). I have also scoured the medical literature for data relevant to changes in life-style risks associated with immunosuppression. What I have found is very provocative.

   'Whereas the Kinsey report of 1948 indicates that the average homosexual man had a sexual encounter no more frequently than once a month, by 1980, the advent of gay bars and bath houses had increased this average to dozens per month. Gay AIDS patients have often had thousands of sexual partners. Medical reports of complications arising from AIDS-associated high-risk activities such as anal intercourse and fisting are first mentioned in the medical literature only at the beginning of the 1970s, and become increasingly frequent thereafter. From 1960 to 1980, the rates of syphilis triple, gonorrhoea quadruple, and diseases related to 'gay bowel syndrome' quadruple. These increases were found only among gay men, but not among heterosexual men or women.

   'From 1960 to 1980, hepatitis-B cases rose 10-fold, in part due to sexual transmission in gay men, and in part to IV drug abuse. Arrests on opiate-related drug charges rose nearly 20-fold during the same period. There is, then, no doubt that AIDS was preceded by medically evident changes in life-style among those groups at highest risk for AIDS, and these changes are such that not only HIV, but the entire spectrum of immunosuppressive agents mentioned above became increasingly prevalent in these groups.

   'These data indicate to me that HIV is not sufficient to explain the manifestation of AIDS or its recent appearance. Many other factors are also at work. It is a tremendous mistake to base our policy decisions concerning AIDS on an exclusive HIV basis. Far from undermining current drug prevention and safe sex programs, the recognition of non-HIV immunosuppressive factors in AIDS suggests that these programs are failing because they are too narrow. AIDS will only be understood when we begin to explore the ways in which anal sex, infections, drugs, blood products, anesthetics, antibiotics, and malnutrition interact. At present, we know almost nothing about such interactions. Since increasing evidence from the laboratories of the discoverers of HIV indicates that HIV needs immunosuppressive co-factors to be active, such studies are clearly needed. In the meantime, those who wish to avoid contracting AIDS should avoid all potential causes of immunosuppression, not just HIV. And those who are HIV-positive but not ill may find that if they, too, avoid the lengthy list of immunosuppressive co-factors, they too will stay healthy.'