Answers to your questions Part 2 *updated*

I am updating this post to include an important comment from a reader. It’s in the answer to the question from PF Stevens. H/T Christoph.

I received a few questions that I replied to in the comments, and I won’t reply again here. In particular, if you want to speak with me directly, I am happy to do so, but you need to email me directly via replying to the post. I will reply if you do this. As always, I do not give medical advice. Thanks!

Also, there were a couple of comments that didn’t actually contain a question, so if one of those was you and you intended to pose a question, shoot me an email or leave a comment here with clarification. And if I accidentally missed your question, it’s me not you, and I don’t mind at all being reminded.

From Ray Vaughan:

Death panels in the USA.

I believe VA has several. One metric they use is QALY (Quality Adjust Life Year). Right now they are just ,it seems, on a multi-year process of blinding me.

U.K. has and Canada has and maybe a dozen other countries in the world.

Your thoughts please?

I don’t know about “death panels” per se, but as an expat Canadian I have been watching with alarm as Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD, has become so popular that in 2022, it accounted for a full 4.1% of all deaths in Canada. This represents over 13,000 people in a country with a population only slightly larger than that of the state of Texas. Check out the Canadian government report here, if you can stomach it.

The situation in Canada is wildly alarming. Bill C-14 was passed by parliament in June 2016, and it allows adult citizens to request voluntary euthanasia (signed off on by two physicians) for a variety of reasons. But don’t worry, per Wikipedia, Canada’s law is more restrictive than those of either Belgium or the Netherlands, which allow euthanasia for minors under certain circumstances. In March 2024, the law was amended to allow for MAiD to be available for those with mental illness and certain disabilities. (Also, the law technically requires that a physician be physically present during the administration of MAiD, but I know for a fact that people are being given MAiD and allowed to die alone at home, because I personally know someone that did exactly that.)

The criteria that must be met for MAiD are that the patient must meet the following five conditions: “1. be eligible for health services funded by the federal government, or a province or territory (or during the applicable minimum period of residence or waiting period for eligibility); 2. be at least 18 years old and mentally competent (capable of making health care decisions for yourself); 3. have a grievous and irremediable medical condition; 4. make a voluntary request for MAID that is not the result of outside pressure or influence; and 5. give informed consent to receive MAID.”

The problem is the criterion number 3, which is that the definition of a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” is far too broad, and this is raising alarm among several groups in Canada including disabled individuals. There was recently a horrifying story about a Canadian woman who was paralyzed following her Moderna Covid booster and was subsequently offered MAiD twice. Read it here if you can stand it.

I could go on and on about this, and I probably will in a separate post (wait until you hear the actual medication protocol for MAiD—it’s bonkers), but I think the meager information I have provided here ought to send a chill down anyone’s spine. We’re already on the slippery slope offering MAiD to disabled and mentally ill individuals; I’m sure you can imagine the disaster that might ensue if this continues.

From Steve Tate:

I imagine in your years of questioning hiv-aids and the validity of hiv drugs, you’ve been attacked. What and from whom was the most vicious and/or personally damaging attack? (although considering this area of study you’ve gone in to, and your going against the powerful Big Pharma narrative, I’m also imagining you probably have some strength and fortitude psychologically).

This is true. I don’t know about strength and fortitude (although, shameless self promotion, I can do more pull-ups than most people—RFK Jr, here’s a challenge), but I have plenty of stubbornness and curiosity, and that’s been enough to keep me going so far.

As to your question, the most damaging—and also the weirdest—attack was back in 2006/7 when some anonymous AIDS activists created fake accounts online pretending to be me, giving medical advice to AIDS patients. These claims were then sent to the president of the university that employed me at the time. Lovely.

As far as “personally damaging,” I wouldn’t say I’ve been damaged personally, although I will push back when one of my own commenters accuses me of cowardice, dishonesty and lack of principle. Free speech is great, but throwing around accusations like that is not cool. We can do better. And that’s all I’m going to say about that. I’ve probably already said too much.

From Bob, the Free Radical:

OK, on the subject of "ask anything"

WHY did the worlds greatest military power FAIL to defend even its own HQ?

I know what you’re referring to, but I’m going to open the comments for this one, because I am the wrong person to ask about geopolitics—it’s interesting and I follow it but I’m no expert. I will say your question/suspicion is quite reasonable. I’ve asked myself this question many times.

From El Terco:

Why do you think Fauci, Gallo, Gottlieb, Gardner et al. chose AIDS in the 1980s to build their huge scientific, political, and economic machinery on, and not CFS/ME, if both were equally available, for both some coincidental retrovirus could surely have been found and patented into a Western Blot (and thereby a cause determined and made it "real")? Was it simply that AIDS activists were screaming louder ("pick me, pick me!!!'")? Was the recent CD-4 cell count technology the reason, and the immune system irregularities were more consistent than with CFS/ME? I can see that they would have decided: we can't have both. It will water things down. CFS/ME would have been a distraction etc. But why AIDS and not CFS/ME?

I don’t know for sure why this happened; I can only speculate. My speculation is the following, and I’m going to be lazy and quote myself, from a post from January.

“I believe that the reason this [the fact that many people figured out the Covid psyop] did not happen with AIDS is that AIDS in the West was an experiment carried out on a small marginalized group, by design. Find a “risk group” that has been historically oppressed and quite often disenfranchised, and use them as Guinea pigs for the response to a so-called epidemic that you have identified as affecting that group almost exclusively. Cloak the response with a veneer of care and political correctness so that no one outside the group questions it. Recruit agents and call them “activists” so that it appears that the pressure for fast tracked drugs comes from them. If this scheme works on this small group, wait until many of the members of the original “risk group” have died and are therefore no longer able to contradict you, scale it up massively, and try again. And that’s how we got from AIDS to Covid. AIDS was literally the clinical trial for Covid.”

CFS/ME does not affect a marginalized “risk group.” That’s my short answer, although I imagine there is some nuance I’m not mentioning.

From PF Stevens:

Here’s my long-winded question:

More than a decade ago my uncle was the foster dad to a young gay guy ( I’ll call him Joe) who tested positive for hiv at a very young age (I believe 17 or 18). My uncle said the Joe said it was from the first guy he had sex with ( take that for what it’s worth). Joe would sometimes not be regular about taking his meds and would spike a fever and start showing signs of illness. After a few short years Joe met some ppl who were not buying the whole hiv story. Joe stopped taking the meds and had moved out on his own at that point and didn’t have the father figure encouraging him to take the meds. At a very young age Joe passed away I believe around 22 or so. My question is, is there any evidence that stopping the retro viral meds can cause an extreme detox reaction so severe it may cause death? I know we can only speculate and we have no idea what his lifestyle was but 22 is really so young to pass . We have no evidence that he was a drug user.

I’m sorry about what happened to Joe. That’s really tragic. First of all, I can’t say anything about what happened to him, because I don’t know any details, but I can say that progression to full blown AIDS and death in five years is pretty fast, even per the mainstream.

As to your questions about whether stopping the medications can cause an extreme detox reaction, the answer is it’s complicated. What IS a phenomenon of concern is that abruptly starting these medications can actually cause an extreme reaction referred to as Immune Reconstitution Syndrome or IRIS, which is a paradoxical reaction in which starting ARVs actually causes opportunistic infections.

*Update* I received the following comment from a reader and he kindly agreed to my including this in an update to the post. It’s very relevant to the question. Here it is:

“Regarding the PF Stevens question about stopping antiretrovirals. I think it's quite possible this could happen, theoretically. In fact recently it came to light that Paxlovid has as part of its makeup an HIV drug that specifically is there to slow down the liver's ability to clear the drugs from the system. These drugs at the same time are damaging the liver and making it 'leaky', bile is leaking into the bloodstream where it doesn't belong causing all kinds of havoc in the body. Type 2 diabetics for instance have much higher levels of serum bile acids than non-diabetics. There's a series of tests for this called Serum Bile Acids tests, it's not a theoretical thing that this happens. So you quit the drugs, and the liver 'wakes up', of sorts, and begins the process of trying to rid itself and the body of toxins at a faster pace, through the bile (that's how it gets rid of a lot of toxins), but they're backing up into the body now where they don't belong making you really really sick. This sickness is then blamed on 'HIV' rebounding. I think this is is one plausible mechanism in my mind.”

From X Man:

Rebecca have you seen people who are sick from HIV to the last stages of their live and be rescued by taking ARVs and come back fit and strong yes with side effects in some cases?

That’s actually a really interesting question. I won’t address clinical trial data, because they only use surrogate markers as endpoints rather than clinical health, so there isn’t really any. As to personal anecdotes, I have heard a few, although I’ve noticed that in the small number of cases I’ve seen, it was the treatment for the opportunistic infection and not the ARVs that “brought them back from death.” I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer.

Thank you all for your comments and questions (even the mean ones)!

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If you’re a new reader and would like some background as to my views on HIV AIDS, including the “existence” question, please refer to this post and the links contained therein.