Questioning HIV is the third rail for many. It shouldn’t be.

Over the past three years, many people have realized for the first time that science is not infallible, that scientists make mistakes, that public health officials do not always have as their primary goal the health of anything beyond their own careers and their wallets, and that fear of disease and fear of the fallout of noncompliance are powerful motivators when the goal is to control people.

This playbook wasn’t novel to Covid, though. Using the fear of infectious disease as a mechanism for encouraging behavior modification is hardly new, but it really exploded in a major way in the 1980s with the emergence of AIDS. At the beginning, people were afraid of hugging, kissing, and even using public restrooms. Once the alleged viral cause of AIDS was announced to the world via press conference in 1984, prior to any supporting evidence in the literature, the focus switched awfully quickly to “risk groups,” despite the fact that by that point, HIV-positivity was ubiquitous in every risk group at remarkably consistent levels, baffling behavior for an infectious, and especially a sexually transmitted, agent. The nearly immediate focus on risk groups is concerning.

But there were early signs that this narrow focus on risk groups, and on the CD4 + T cell depletion model of AIDS, were wrong. If you, like many people, saw Tom Hanks in the film Philadelphia, you recall his horror at discovering Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. This was a very effective visualization and, in the early days of AIDS, the condition of immune deficiency was almost synonymous in the public mind with KS lesions. In fact, according to this 1990 article, fully 95% of early AIDS patients, regardless of risk group, had internal Kaposi’s sarcoma.

You don’t hear much about Kaposi’s sarcoma, and you might be forgiven for imagining that this is because anti-HIV drugs are so marvelous but no. You don’t hear much about Kaposi’s sarcoma because now even the mainstream admits that it is not caused by HIV after all, but rather by a herpes virus, HHV8 or KSHV. Put plainly — the morbidity most commonly associated with AIDS in the early days is not caused by HIV. So, again, why is it so crazy to question HIV’s culpability in other conditions? It’s not because the evidence for its culpability is so copious. One could argue that the opposite is true.

AIDS research very quickly fell into a very narrow channel of investigation. When scientists and doctors discovered, using newly minted technology, that the subset of T cells known as “helper T cells,” or CD4+ T cells, were often depleted in AIDS patients, they very quickly turned their focus to an agent that was tropic for these T cells. They settled on a retrovirus called HTLV-III, quickly changed its name to “human immunodeficiency virus,” or HIV, thus cementing in the minds of the public what this virus was claimed to be capable of.

There are a few problems with this. First of all, CD4+ T cell depletion is common even among healthy people, and there is plenty of evidence that many persistently HIV-negative individuals also suffer immune deficiency and even HIV-negative AIDS. But further than that, the research and public health focus has quietly shifted over the years away from the use of CD4+ T cells as the primary surrogate marker for the progress of “HIV disease,” and toward the concept that “HIV is an inflammatory disease and causes chronic inflammation.” (The article I linked also mentions that antiretroviral medications also reduce inflammation, which might provide some hints as to why the medications appear to help some people, although the story behind that is not so simple as the mainstream would have you believe.)

What would have happened if, in 1983 or so, researchers had been looking for an agent or a disease process that caused massive inflammation, rather than an agent that is tropic for T cells? What would have happened if Kaposi’s sarcoma had been recognized as being caused by an entirely different virus, and had nothing to do with T cells as well?

Indeed, a look back at when AIDS began will raise more questions than it answers, especially when the causation issue is considered. Very few predictions made have panned out. A vaccine was promised by well before 1990, but so far, every single HIV vaccine trial has failed — and there have been something like ninety such trials. Why has every single HIV vaccine failed? After so much failure, perhaps it shouldn’t be behind the pale to ask if, just maybe, it’s because HIV and AIDS are not what we have been led to believe.

I wonder if part of the reason questioning HIV is the “ third rail” for so many people is because of the “ risk groups” designation. A facade of caring for minorities and disenfranchised groups such as gay men is produced to hide the ugly reality that the HIV theory necessarily ghettoizes and stigmatizes gay men and African Americans. Turn on your television any day of the week and watch the aggressive ads for HIV medication for both HIV-positive and HIV-negative people (the latter via PrEP). They very clearly target a very specific demographic. The psychosocial implications are tremendous in terms of how effectively and willingly we “other” people in this way.

Yes, there is a lot of money at stake, especially when it comes to AIDS drugs. AIDS activist organizations such as ACTUp are primarily funded by pharmaceutical companies, and their agenda appears to be to sell these drugs to, well, anyone who wants them — PrEP is even considered for people who are “concerned” about becoming HIV-positive. The financial implications are enormous, but they are not the only element to consider. These medications are not safe — a glance at the Truvada and Atripla lawsuits makes this very clear — so why are they being marketed so aggressively in a manner that is patently racist? Why do AIDS activist organizations seem to exist primarily to cover up the harm caused by AIDS drugs and the basic flaws in AIDS research?

It was about behavior modification in the beginning and it is about behavior modification now. “Compliance” and being “retained in care” are the goals with HIV treatment and monitoring. Public health officials the world over scored a major victory when they convinced billions of people to take an untested vaccine and let the consequences roll out in real-time. Of course, the safe and effective Covid vaccine narrative is crumbling, but Operation Warp Speed would never have happened were it not for the precedent set with AIDS to short cut clinical trials and even to discard clinical endpoints such as morbidity in favor of surrogate markers. I believe the reason the Covid narrative is falling is because it simply affects too many people. The neat perception that has been created that AIDS affects only poor and marginalized risk groups is the biggest hurdle to recognizing that the HIV theory of AIDS is even more scientifically vacuous than some of the theories and practices implemented around Covid. We stigmatize these “at risk” individuals while pretending to care, thus preventing any real progress from being made. Perhaps HIV is the third rail because to admit that it has nothing to do with AIDS opens up the possibility that the average person is far more at risk for immune deficiency than the HIV model would indicate, and that opens up a world of possibilities that some people may find far too frightening.

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