Remembering Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos

What I like to refer to as the alternative AIDS community has lost some giants recently and I would like to highlight the contributions of some of these intellectuals and activists.

The name Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos may not be familiar to some. She was an Australian biophysicist (c. 1930-2022), at the helm of the group of scientists known as the Perth Group. From the beginning of the AIDS era, the Perth Group were known as possibly even more radical than Peter Duesberg. While Duesberg, an expert in retrovirology, insisted that HIV had indeed been isolated but was merely a “harmless passenger virus”, the Perth Group went further by providing painstaking, critical analysis of the scientific literature to support the notion that HIV had not been isolated and had never been proven to exist. You can find a good summary of their work here. There is also an excellent interview from 1997 here.

Despite the controversy surrounding Eleni and the Perth Group, their work remains extremely important, especially today in light of the fact that questions about viral isolation are becoming more mainstream. Their critical analyses of the literature suggest, at the very least, that the methods used to prove the existence of HIV as an exogenous (from the outside) virus were at best sloppy and at worst fraudulent. Their work strongly suggests that much of the initial research on HIV and AIDS should be regarded with extreme suspicion and would likely be impossible to replicate. The fallout would be staggering given the government and pharmaceutical forces that are the only things keeping this failed paradigm in place and accepted without question by most people.