Peter Duesberg on Koch’s Postulates

Logic has been abandoned

This is going to be a short one, with quite a few quotes, but I want to draw your attention to the following 2019 interview with Dr. Duesberg:

Peter Duesberg on Why Robert Koch’s Postulates are Germane to Infectious Diseases

Of course, anyone who has been following the Covid fiasco is aware that Koch’s Postulates, which were once considered the gold standard in determining causation in infectious disease processes, have been criticized as being “outdated.” (Why? Because following them is inconvenient to the narrative.) Here is what Dr. Duesberg has to say about that (from near the end of the interview, emphasis mine—we’ll be going back, but this is important):

SC: Koch’s postulates have played a significant role in microbiology, yet many now believe that, with new discoveries, his criteria are out of date. How is it we can still use them to rule out the common belief that HIV does not cause AIDS?

PD: Koch’s postulates are pure logic. Logic will never be “out of date” in science.

It’s a short interview and I encourage you to check it out at the link above. There are a few other interesting moments. I’ve bolded the part that I want to draw particular attention to.

Peter Duesberg: Koch is the father of “the germ theory” of disease, which is perhaps the greatest ever success story in medicine and biology. Therefore, it is on the mind of every medical researcher and student as a model for new careers. The germ theory has been the background for the discovery of many microbial pathogens and beyond—meaning efforts to blame non-microbial diseases on microbes—as with AIDS now.

I am not of the opinion that the germ theory of disease is bankrupt, but I definitely do think that we are super quick to assume that disease states are the result of contagion when some of them are not, even though they might appear to be contagious. (Scurvy is a classic example, as well as other vitamin deficiencies such as pellagra and beri-beri.) The abandonment of Koch’s Postulates conveniently allows scientists to assign any infectious agent they want as the cause of the disease du jour, because the standards of “proof” are now subterranean. (We will leave the fact that the vast majority of viruses and bacteria are not harmful but beneficial and in fact necessary to our health in the form of the micro biome and the virome.)

In the case of AIDS, at the beginning of the epidemic, retroviruses had only just been abandoned as potential causes of cancer, and the amount of money and brainpower invested in retrovirology at that point could not go to waste. Hence, magically, this “new” epidemic of acquired immune deficiency that coincidentally just arrived at the time that retrovirologists were wringing their hands over the disappointment in their lack of oncogenic ability, was magically—surprise!—caused by a new retrovirus. How convenient.

Regarding Koch’s Postulates (emphasis mine):

SC: Can you tell us how HIV fails to meet Koch’s postulates? Where or how does it fail exactly?

PD: Since the discovery of HIV in 1984, it is described as a new (in the US and Europe) sexually transmitted retrovirus that causes AIDS by killing T-cells of the immune system. But although about five million babies are born in the United States every year, there has yet to be a new heterosexual AIDS epidemic in the US or in Europe since 1984. This indicates that sexual transmission of HIV is not causing AIDS. 

Also, the HIV-AIDS hypothesis predicts that HIV causes AIDS by multiplying in and killing T-cells—much like all other viruses cause disease. But all efforts to detect and possibly prevent HIV multiplication in AIDS patients have failed. Instead, AIDS patients contain not HIV, but only antibodies against HIV. These antibodies reduce HIV to undetectable levels in AIDS patients. Accordingly, these antibodies should cure AIDS, if HIV caused AIDS. Since HIV-neutralizing antibodies don’t cure or prevent AIDS, HIV is not likely to cause AIDS.

Duesberg himself worked on retroviruses, and in fact his first paper critical of HIV AIDS, and further, critical of any role for a retrovirus in cancer, was titled “Retroviruses as carcinogens and pathogens: Expectations and Reality.” Dr. Duesberg elaborates with a discussion of how HIV AIDS is so entrenched (emphasis mine):

PD: It is my experience as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley that in order to survive as a researcher in academia and in the pharma industry, and in order to publish your research in prestigious journals, you have to be “convinced” by the scientific mainstream. There are no funds for research by dissidents from the National Institutes of Health, no advancements in their academic career at universities, and no publications in prestigious journals. Survival and “professions” of researchers under these conditions automatically form a very tight “mainstream scientific community“ that “remains unconvinced” by dissidents.   

Ask AIDS mainstream leaders such NIH’s Anthony Fauci, Robert Gallo, Harold Varmus, and others, how many HIV-AIDS dissidents they have funded. 

The demographic distribution of HIV positivity, contrasted with the epidemiology of AIDS, in and of themself cast sufficient doubt as to whether one could possibly cause the other. The HIV theory of AIDS is actually so wild—they aren’t even well correlated. The seminal paper by Gallo et al in 1984 in Science, which was supposed to cement the HIV theory of AIDS, only found HIV related genetic material in fewer than half of the cohort of 72 AIDS patients. How did we get from there to causation?

I’ll conclude with the following, in which Duesberg addresses the fact that HIV AIDS is, indeed, “too big to fail.” He’s right about that. (Again, emphasis mine.)

SC: Throughout history, challenging the generally accepted consensus has proven to be a crucial part of scientific discovery, not just in microbiology but in all scientific fields. But with Dr. Robert Willner, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Kary Mullis, and others including yourself being denounced by the scientific community, we must ask why is there such a stigma behind asking if HIV and AIDS are truly linked?

PD: The HIV-AIDS hypothesis was and still is the biggest single biological project in history involving a large majority of highly prestigious scientists (See Confronting AIDS by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine), two Nobel prizes in Medicine, and billions of dollars in funding from the NIH, Bill Gates and others. Yet nothing came out of it! One would say in business or politics, this project was and is too big to be wrong. To paraphrase Max Planck, science has to wait for the present generation to die out, before it is open for an unbiased re-evaluation of HIV-AIDS.

He concludes with this delightful quote, when asked if his views had changed “in light of recent research”: “No. The “light of recent research” on AIDS has failed to illuminate the HIV-AIDS hypothesis.” I’m going to leave it right there, because I couldn’t put it any better.

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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.