Is there an HIV "reproducibility crisis"?

I was recently asked a very intriguing question. Those who are familiar with the history of the HIV debate are no doubt aware that there have been many attempts over the years on the part of dissident scientists to have a public debate with AIDS orthodoxists regarding the etiology of AIDS; in nearly every case, the debate has not occurred or, at best, occurred via internet proxy — see, for example, the Durban Declaration and its rebuttal.

The question I was asked was regarding these dissident rebuttals. These cogent arguments have rarely appeared in the mainstream peer-reviewed literature, with two notable early exceptions: Peter Duesberg’s 1987 Cancer Research paper, “Retroviruses as carcinogens and pathogens: Expectations and reality;” as well as his 1989 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper, “Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: Correlation but not causation.” Also, the Perth Group maintains a list of papers and letters rejected by mainstream scientific publications, which can be found here. The question was the following: If dissident rebuttals rarely appear in the mainstream literature, can we trust them? More specifically, what references do dissident scientists use in these so-called rebuttals?

Occasionally we see papers questioning the HIV/AIDS hypothesis in journals such as the Journal of Scientific Exploration, that are widely considered to be outside the mainstream. However, a little digging into these rebuttals reveal that they largely reference papers in the mainstream — using the mainstream’s own evidence against them, as it were. This tactic is not new and is essentially a parallel of the logical/mathematical strategy of proof by contradiction, and it involves assuming that a particular mainstream argument is true and then proving it to be impossible given real-world evidence. A simple example would be the statement that HIV causes massive destruction of CD4+ T cells, which is shown to be nearly impossible because HIV is rarely to be found in the CD4+ T cells of even patients with full blown, late stage AIDS.

With this in mind, there are a number of logical follow-up questions, and they are related. First, after forty years of mainstream refusal to debate, it seems reasonable to assume that this refusal will continue into the foreseeable future; in that case, what strategy do we employ in lieu of debates that will likely never happen? And secondly, as we recently discussed, given that many of these mainstream references are now “out of date,” how do we reconcile this with their continuing use as references by both mainstream and dissident scientists?

To answer these questions, we must first keep our eyes on the prize — there is no evidence that HIV causes AIDS. The refusal to debate is telling because it amounts to silencing any dissenting views and to effectively remove them from public access. If these arguments are so specious and easily debunked, mainstream scientists would likely be eager to debunk them. Moving forward, we must assume that this debate will never happen publicly. We need a new strategy to prove that the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is bankrupt.

Two very prominent examples come to mind. The first is the 1984 Science paper by Gallo et al., “Frequent detection and isolation of cytopathic retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and at risk for AIDS,” that did not employ proper isolation techniques, and even in this case, only found genetic material related to HIV (known as HTLV-III until 1985; a clever move really because the alleged virus’s alleged danger is cemented in the public mind as part of its name!) in fewer than half of the AIDS patients — hardly a smoking gun. It would be interesting indeed to attempt to replicate the results of this study, preferably but not necessarily using proper isolation techniques. Can these results be reproduced, or even better, improved upon?

The second two are the Ho paper published in Nature in 1995, “Rapid turnover of plasma virions and CD4 lymphocytes in HIV-1 infection,” and the Wei paper from 1995, also published in Nature, “Virus dynamics in human immunodeficiency type 1 infection.” These are the papers that ushered in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, which remains in use to this day. The problem is that the mathematical models used in these papers to justify aggressive early treatment do not come close to predicting what actually happens in AIDS. In fact, the models indicate the complete annihilation of every CD4+ T cell in the body within months of infection rather than years as had been previously assumed. This is clearly a contradiction of reality, yet these papers remain the basis of current treatment strategies.

For the purpose of this post, I will consider only these three papers, although there are literally hundreds if not thousands more that will not stand up to close scrutiny. (We will look much more carefully at the papers used to justify PrEP in a future post.)

The interested reader probably has a cursory knowledge of the replication crisis in science. Per Wikipedia, the replication crisis is “an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce.” We have certainly seen, in our lifetimes, theories that have long been accepted by the mainstream debunked and thrown out — consider for example the theory that ulcers are caused by stress, which has been replaced with the theory that ulcers are actually caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori.

The million dollar question here is simple: Are the papers of Gallo et al and Ho et al reproducible? One can argue until one is blue in the face as to whether these papers support a causal role for HIV in AIDS—certainly, their evidence and results are less than stunning, for reasons that have been addressed many times—but this may not be the question that needs to be addressed. The better and more promising question should instead be: Are the results of these papers reproducible, and if not, should the papers themselves be retracted? The implications of retraction are immense, because in the case of Gallo et al, a retraction of the 1984 Science paper ought logically to pull the rug out from under the HIV/AIDS hypothesis entirely; and in the case of the 1995 Nature papers, a retraction ought to lead to a reconsideration of current protocol for drug treatment of people who test HIV-antibody-positive.

Why is this important? I maintain that calling into question in a very serious way the results of these papers is not only a critically important scientific and medical issue, but it also has significance far outside the field of medicine and science. It is also an issue with far-reaching psychosocial implications. The distinction of “HIV positive” has long been used as a weapon of discrimination and ghettoization of members of “risk groups.”

Even further, though, this discussion is at its heart a discussion of the very nature of reality. AIDS and immune dysfunction in general are much more widespread than the neat category of “HIV positive” would indicate. By neatly categorizing “risk groups” to make it appear that AIDS is sexually transmitted, a nice optical illusion is created whereby the patients suffering immune dysfunction and in some cases, HIV-negative AIDS, are swept under the rug. But if we switch our focus from “zooming in” on HIV to “zooming out” on the epidemic of immune dysfunction in both the presence and the absence of an HIV-positive test result, the picture that emerges is far different.

The time has come to very seriously consider whether many of the seminal papers on AIDS should be retracted. The implications for humanity in general, and for both HIV-positive and HIV-negative AIDS patients, are too profound to ignore. Lives have been ruined by the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, a hypothesis that for forty years has spectacularly failed to either explain or to predict. Furthermore, in a more abstract sense, we must examine the philosophical underpinnings of a theory that has been propped up for years and that is likely almost entirely illusory, at least with respect to the popularly accepted mainstream hypothesis.

Words matter. Truth matters. The only way out of this hall of mirrors is to raise these serious questions about the pivotal scientific papers that continue to prop it up. The time for debate has passed. It is past time to dismantle the very foundations of the failed hypothesis, and raising the issue of retractions is an excellent starting point.

Pre-order my upcoming book, “The Real AIDS Epidemic,” here.