Where Do We Go From Here?

Last excerpt from The Real AIDS Epidemic

The following excerpt is the last chapter from Science Sold Out. This and much more are available when you purchase The Real AIDS Epidemic in Kindle or hardcover .

AIDS does not inevitably lead to death, especially if we suppress the co-factors that support the disease. It is very important to tell this to people who are infected. I think we should put the same weight now on the co-factors as we have on HIV. Psychological factors are critical in supporting immune function. If you suppress the psychological support by telling someone he’s condemned to die, your words alone will have condemned them. [emphasis mine]

—Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of HIV

Even the co-discoverer of HIV acknowledges the dangers of uncritically promoting the HIV=AIDS=DEATH hypothesis. In order to prevent more deaths caused by inappropriate medical treatment and the psychological terror that accompanies an HIV diagnosis, we must fairly and honestly assess all the evidence.

There are several practical considerations. HIV tests are unacceptably unspecific, given the ramifications of a reactive result. Using proper isolation (and not just culturing methods to detect viral markers), we must rigorously verify the accuracy of these tests. The isolation experiments as proposed by prominent scientists would cost about $100,000 but despite the fact that this would be a drop in the bucket by AIDS research standards, no funding is forthcoming.

There urgently needs to be a proper debate in the scientific literature between the foremost establishment scientists and the best-credentialed dissenting ones. But the scientific ruling majority (note the intentional use of an oxymoron) refuses to even consider the possibility that they might be wrong, despite every indication to the contrary, and the top HIV scientists in the country continually refuse to participate in a debate with any “dissident.”

The suppression of debate goes back to Peter Duesberg’s very first criticisms of the HIV hypothesis and Robert Gallo’s refusal to entertain such debate by literally rubbing away. It continues to this day with slanderous accusations by leading scientists and a refusal to “dignify” the dissenting arguments by responding to or even acknowledging them.

Harvey Bialy [recently] challenged Dr. John Moore of Cornell University to a debate in the AIDS Wiki regarding the etiology of AIDS. Dr. Bialy’s challenge was: “I will present one fully referenced (with PDF files that the moderator can hyperlink) challenge to your favorite and livelihood-sustaining hypothesis, and you can demolish my feeble arguments in the same fashion. We will continue this for one additional round, and then move on to the next challenge. I have maybe seven such challenges. At the end, we will have produced to first fully documented, real scientific debate on the cause of AIDS. Interesting that after twenty-five years none has ever been held before, Bob Gallo’s promise in the PNAS in 1989 notwithstanding.”

Rather than accepting this debate, Moore replied by stating: “Participating in any public forum with the likes of Bialy would give him a credibility that he does not merit. The science community does not ‘debate’ with the AIDS denialists, it treats them with the utter contempt that they deserve and exposes them for the charlatans that they are. Kindly do not send me any further communications on this or any related matter.”

Moore unwittingly exposes the true motivations of the AIDS “science community” in his reply to Bialy. It is clear that Moore and his ilk only desire to “expose charlatans” within self-defined constraints; namely, in situations in which they are protected from ever having to defend their own viewpoint and through channels that support their interests in their paradigm.

Furthermore, his choice of language is illuminating. He refers to the “scientific community” as though it were some sort of moral majority in-crowd, as though dissenters were not scientists at all—despite the fact that the signatories to the petition for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis number in the thousands and include two Nobel Prize winners and hundreds of PhDs and MDs. In Moore’s view, apparently, none of these people qualifies as being a member of the “scientific community.”

But HIV/AIDS research has always suffered from this sort of moral absolutism, outright discrimination, and suppression of argument. As Kary Mullis says in his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, “What people call science today is probably very similar to what we called science in 1634. Galileo was told to recant his beliefs or be excommunicated. People who refuse to accept the commandments of the AIDS establishment are basically told the same thing.”

The HIV theory has never been about science but rather about behavior modification primarily, and, to a lesser extent, about money, power, and prestige. Language surrounding HIV and AIDS is infected with a sort of pious moralism that is completely inappropriate in science, and this sort of language is not restricted to the cultural and sociological aspects of AIDS. We can see it in the use of terms like “denialist” by scientists like Moore, and in the words of Dr. Mark Wainberg, who said that HIV dissenters are “perpetrators of death” and that “Peter Duesberg is the closest thing we have on this planet to a scientific sociopath.”

This same sort of science-by-majority-rule attitude can be seen in the words of the unnamed Berkeley scientist, interviewed by Celia Farber for her recent book, Serious Adverse Events: An uncensored history of AIDS: “He did it to himself, you know. You see, he wouldn’t give up an idea. He went after it with a hammer. He may well be 3000 percent right, but he upset an awful lot of people… Nobody believed in him because what he was doing was overturning generally held views. They felt betrayed… You don’t just stand up and say everybody is wrong.”

That sentence alone should illuminate just how much is wrong in HIV/AIDS science. But a society that has been so largely secularized has to believe in something with total faith, and for so many of us who don’t have the time to look into the minutiae of every issue for ourselves, that something so often is science and scientific discoveries, broadcast to us in the reassuring tones of those who know better. We don’t question—we have faith. As Mullis says about the high priests of science: “Thank your lucky stars that they didn’t bother to change their clothes or their habits. They still wear priestly white robes and they don’t do heavy labor. It makes them easier to spot.”

In his 1993 book, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, Robert Root-Bernstein wrote: “We do not understand AIDS.” [Fifteen] years later, we still do not understand AIDS. And we will never understand AIDS until we acknowledge our own ignorance, but there are powerful forces at work preventing such acknowledgment.

First of all, there are tremendous financial and social interest involved. Billions of dollars in research funding, stock options, and activist budgets are predicated on the assumption that HIV causes AIDS. Entire industries of pharmaceutical drugs, diagnostic testing, and activist causes would have no reason to exist.

Second, the scientific and medical communities have a great deal of face to lose. It is not much of an exaggeration to state that when the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is finally recognized as wrong, the entire institution of science will lose the public’s trust, and science itself will experience fundamental, profound, and long-lasting changes. The “scientific community” has risked its credibility by standing by the HIV theory for so long. This is why doubting the HIV hypothesis is now tantamount to doubting science itself, and this is why dissidents face excommunication.

Third, doctors have become emotionally attached to the idea of an HIV/AIDS pandemic threatening to take over the world. The HIV/AIDS “predictions” are a projection of the medical profession’s self-identity, and taking away the HIV/AIDS paradigm threatens the medical profession’s self-identity.

Fourth, powerful psychological forces are at work. It is simply easier for most people to project our neglect of disenfranchised groups—gay men, drug users, Blacks, the poor, and so on—onto a virus and accept those “infected” as sacrificial victims, than to recognize that there is no bug*. [emphasis added] For society, the latter would require acceptance of these disenfranchised groups as equal participants in mainstream society and culture.

However, the most significant obstacle of all is apathy. In a world full of constant distraction, most people are content to live in the public reality created by the media and advertisers. They do not want to be disturbed or provoked. Our most important goal is to make people care. We must reach their hearts, as well as their minds, and appeal to their inherent sense of justice and of what is right and wrong.

At this point, it is up to each person to acknowledge their own ignorance, to do their own homework, and to decide for themselves. To make that decision, all the information must be available to everyone because, after all, as we have been told from the beginning by the AIDS mainstream, SILENCE=DEATH.

*More to come.