Thought provoking Interview with Alex Berenson

Mr. Berenson, I’d love to talk to you about AIDS

I’ve been following former New York Times journalist and fiction writer Alex Berenson since the beginning of Covid, primarily because he was one of the first people decrying lockdowns from basically day one, and there weren’t a lot of us—at one point I felt like it was me and Ron Paul. I’ve since followed his content rather loosely, and one thing I have noticed about Mr. Berenson, despite having a clear ear for statistics, making him a rarity among modern journalists, is that he has made some statements that clearly indicate that he has completely swallowed the HIV AIDS story. He is the perfect example of a critic of the public health apparatus that somehow believes that HIV AIDS was somehow the one glaring exception in which they got it right. (Actually, there’s an asterisk on that. He certainly seems to be more aligned with mainstream medicine than someone like Bret Weinstein might be.) One thing that is interesting is that Mr. Berenson has been at the center of more than one censorship battle, including his being banned from Twitter before eventually being reinstated in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover and rebranding to X. He’s also suing the federal government over related issues. You can find all that information on his quite popular SubStack, Unreported Truths.

I have for some time wanted to write a sort of “open letter” to Alex Berenson about AIDS, and an unexpected new source sent me the following interview between Tucker Carlson (again—I’m sorry, but some of his guests are too good to ignore) and Alex Berenson about the sins of Covid. The parallels to the sins of AIDS are clear, and his discussion of clinical trials opens up a conversation about AIDS vaccine trials that he may not know about. I really think it would be interesting to actually have a conversation with him about this, or for someone from our perspective to do so. So I’m reacting to this interview here.

I’ll do this in the same way as I summarized the last interview. Time stamps are approximate to within 10 seconds. Rather than providing direct quotes, I will for the most part paraphrase. Pay special attention to 41:00.

Oh, one more thing—something I really like about this interview is the sparring between the two. Berenson pushes back on Tucker in some very amusing ways, and Tucker pushes back himself in his exaggerated way, which made the conversation quite entertaining.

Interview with Alex Berenson

2:00 There is a clip of Berenson and Tucker on Fox News in 2022 in which Berenson says that the mRNA vaccines should be taken off the market and that no one should take them. I’m pretty sure that isn’t giving medical advice; it’s giving regulatory advice. And here’s my hot take: I think people that aren’t medical doctors should be allowed to say “don’t take this drug/test” without censure. No one punishes private citizens for saying “don’t take heroin.”

4:30 We get directly into the Covid vaccines, and the discussion immediately turns to the fact that the clinical trials, though large, were massively foreshortened. I wonder if Mr. Berenson is aware that the precedent for massively shortening clinical trials (not to mention the abandonment of placebo controls) begins with AIDS and the first trial for AZT, which was cut off at 16 weeks because the results were so “overwhelmingly” in favor of AZT. We all know how that turned out, which is that a generation of gay men and hemophiliacs were put on high dose AZT and they all died, really quickly, and that AZT has fallen dramatically out of favor and has been replaced by only marginally less toxic drugs. In the wake of that, it was thanks to AIDS drug trials that the use of true placebo is now often considered “unethical” and that therefore a placebo is replaced by a different drug in many trials, not limited to AIDS. And we haven’t even addressed the Truvada disaster.

7:00 There is a discussion about the vaccine mandates of 2021 and why this might have happened. There was some speculation as to whether the mandates were a kind of sleight of hand to distract the public from the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan with a disaster at home.

8:20 There is a brief discussion of the Biden-ordered OSHA vaccine mandates in early 2021, which I won’t get into except to highlight a funny line from Berenson, who points out the absurdity of mandating vaccines for working Americans, who are by definition healthy enough that Covid wouldn’t be likely to affect him. He then said something to the effect that if they really wanted to reach the vulnerable, they’d say, “get vaccinated if you want your social security check.” This was said somewhat tongue-in-cheek because vaccine mandates are a total violation of our human rights.

Since the majority of this interview is about Covid, I’ll skip forward to the second half, although there are a couple of moments I’d like to point out.

At 19:00 there is a discussion about the unexpected adverse event of the vaccines on children, which was that some children began having seizures following vaccination. Berenson covered this on his site, and the only mainstream media coverage contained the predictable spin, which was to say that this is a normal response to fever. This legacy media spin is of course extremely familiar to us.

25:00 Berenson discusses proper clinical trial design and how it was not adhered to in some of these Covid studies. He explains the typical blind placebo controlled trial design; I wonder if he is aware that the first time that placebo controls were completely abandoned happened in AIDS drug trials after AZT because it was considered “unethical” to give a placebo. And let’s not talk about abandoning clinical endpoints of morbidity and mortality in favor of poorly defined “surrogate markers” that often have little or nothing to do with clinical health.

28:45 Berenson categorized the “original sin” of Covid as the lie that everyone was at risk. A similar phenomenon occurred in the beginning of AIDS wherein, in the mid 1980s, we were scared into believing that we were all at equal risk—remember Oprah Winfrey famously pronouncing that by 1990, one in five heterosexuals might be dead of AIDS? That narrative very quickly switched to a very narrow focus on “risk groups,” which I think was entirely intentional.

At 32:16 there is a discussion of the Four Villains of Covid. They are Fauci, Gottlieb, Slavitt and Bourla. This inspired me to make a list of the Four Villains of AIDS. The first two were easy, but there was stiff competition for the next two. We might also have honorable mentions. Here are my Four Villains of AIDS (let me know what you think!): Robert Gallo, Anthony Fauci, David Ho (because of his terrible mathematical model that at least partly justified hit hard, hit early drug therapy), and Larry Kramer (activists are a huge part of this story). Let me know yours in the comments.

39:00 Berenson mentions that his wife is Canadian and Tucker says, “oh you can get Canadians to do anything.” I feel compelled to defend my countrymen. Freedom Convoy, anyone? Canadians can be very complacent UNTIL we’re pushed to the brink (disclaimer: I am dual American/Canadian and fulfill all the stereotypes of both cultures—a very culturally Canadian libertarian Texan—although I never say “eh”—enough said). We’re not as innocent as we appear. I digress. I drove to Canada in fall 2021 and again in summer 2022 and the difference was drastic. It was almost impossible to get in in 2021 and there were strict testing and vaccine requirements with basically zero exceptions for non citizens. Just nine months later, Canada had completely opened up and all the draconian mandates had been dropped, no on site border testing, nothing. What happened between those two dates? The Freedom Convoy. Protests can work even, or especially, if they’re big enough for the dictator in charge, I mean the Prime Minister, to threaten to freeze participants’ bank accounts.

41:00 Here’s the part I really want to address. Berenson is saying that respiratory viruses are not best dealt with using vaccines, and that we should focus on antivirals. He even defends Paxlovid (one of whose two active ingredients is an HIV protease inhibitor, ritonavir—so much for these drugs being highly specific to HIV), though I’ve seen scant evidence for its effectiveness. He then says, “How did we get out of HIV? Not with a vaccine, but with effective antivirals.” I wonder if he knows that worldwide, far fewer than 2/3 of HIV positives are “retained in care” on antivirals? How is AIDS not a problem anymore? How did we “get out of HIV” because of the great drugs if a LARGE minority—very close to 40%—aren’t taking them? This is a totally unanswerable question for the AIDS mainstream. I wonder if he knows that the crisis in clinical trials is entirely due to precedents set during AIDS? I wonder if he’s aware that these drugs are both not specific and that they don’t work and are in fact so toxic that they are under a massive class action lawsuit? (Plus additional lawsuits.)

42:15 “In general there are a lot more people suspicious of the public health establishment […] Virology is toxic and dangerous, especially this part of it, the emerging infectious disease part.” He clarifies this statement by mentioning the insanity of trying to manipulate viruses to make them more dangerous, or to actually go and seek out dangerous pathogens. I don’t have a lot to add to that, except to remind everyone that “HIV” was at its beginning considered an “emerging infectious disease.” (Remember the crazy theories as to how it supposedly “jumped species”? And somehow, immediately following the “jump,” according to CDC data, “HIV” was already everywhere in the US at a prevalence of 0.3% of the population testing positive—the same as it is forty years later. That’s not the behavior of an infectious pathogen, and especially not a new one.)

47:00 They circle back to the discussion that had started earlier, which is that Pfizer manufactured something like 5 billion doses, only 3 billion of which were used, and the rest paid for. Were the rest dumped? Who pays for the unused doses? Where is the journalist covering that story? It seems like a pretty big one. It’s actually an interesting story, but I’m not the person to follow it.

48:00 The last part of the interview covers the declining birth rate in wealthy countries, referred to as the “baby bust,” which isn’t relevant to this post, so I will wrap it up now.

My final analysis is that Mr. Berenson has been swimming in the waters of mainstream journalism until very recently and that he is also an extremely intelligent individual that has a hard time grasping that sometimes, people can be really stupid. (At one point he even says he assumes people are smart and Tucker responds by saying that obviously doctors aren’t and that made me laugh.) I’d encourage him to look into early AIDS criticism and I’d especially recommend Dr. Henry Bauer’s 2007 book, The Origins, Persistence, and Failings of HIV AIDS Theory. It has very compelling demographic evidence that HIV positivity cannot be contagious. And I’d REALLY like him to consider how the Covid fiasco—in particular the vaccines—could never have happened without the precedent set by AIDS to massively foreshorten clinical trials and to abandon true placebo controls.

If he wants some background on this issue, I’d refer him to the following pieces I’ve written:

Why I Quit HIV (I will say that the Western Blot “confirmatory” test was abandoned from testing protocol in 2014 and PCR was added to test for “acute HIV infection,” although during “acute infection” you ought not to need PCR, and this actually ought to increase the incidence of false positives)

The Perth Group’s explanation of maternal antibodies

The drugs don’t work

Four decades of HIV (pay particular attention to the demographic data—they are incompatible with HIV as the cause of the AIDS crisis)

Anti-HIV drugs are not specific to HIV

More on the Truvada disaster—this includes links to most of the pieces I wrote about the Truvada lawsuits, 9 months before the New York Times broke the five year media blackout on the story with a piece in the business section

A summary of my views on HIV AIDS

How to kill a book about AIDS

In conclusion, reach out to me anytime, Mr. Berenson. I’d love to debate you on this issue.

To support my work on Substack, please purchase my book for yourself or for a friend, and leave a review on Amazon. You can learn about efforts to ban my book here. You can also buy my new book Almost Cancelled. 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.