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and ridicule, delivered with a level of vehemence that is seldom seen within
professional circles. Instead of willingness to reconsider, he was met by
stratagems designed to conceal or deny that the predictions were failing. This
is the kind of reaction typical of politics, not science, usually referred to
euphemistically as "damage control."
For example, statistics for new AIDS cases were always quoted as cumulative
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figures that could only get bigger, contrasting with the normal practice with
other diseases of reporting annual figures, where any decline is clear at a
glance. And despite the media's ongoing stridency about an epidemic out of
control, the actual figures from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for
every category, were declining, and had been since a peak around 1988. This
was masked by repeated redefinitions to cover more diseases, so that what
wasn't AIDS one day became AIDS the next, causing more cases to be diagnosed.
This happened five times from 1982 to 1993, with the result that the first
nine months of
1993 showed as an overall rise of 5 percent what would otherwise i.e., by the
1992 definition have been a 33 percent drop.
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Currently (January 2003) the number of indicator diseases is twenty-nine. One
of the newer categories added in 1993 was cervical cancer. (Militant
femininists had been protesting that men received too much of the relief
appropriations for AIDS victims.) Nobody was catching anything new, but
suddenly in one group of the population what hadn't been AIDS one day became
AIDS the next, and we had the headlines loudly proclaiming that heterosexual
women were the fastest-growing AIDS
group.
A similar deception is practiced with percentages, as illustrated by figures
publicized in Canada, whose population is around 40 million. In 1995, a total
of 1,410 adult AIDS cases were reported, 1,295 (91.8%) males and 115 (8.2%)
females. The year 1996 showed a startling decrease in new cases to 792,
consisting of 707 males (89.2%) and 85 females (10.8%). So the number of adult
female AIDS
cases actually decreased by 26% from 1995 to 1996. Yet, even though the actual
number decreased, because the percentage of the total represented by women
increased from 8.2% in 1995 to 10.8% in
1996, the Quarterly Surveillance Report (August 1997) from the Bureau of
HIV/AIDS and STD at the
Canadian Laboratory Centre for Disease Control issued the ominous warning that
AIDS cases among
Canadian women had dramatically increased.
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Meanwhile, a concerted campaign across the schools and campuses was doing its
part to terrorize young people over the ravages of teenage AIDS. Again, actual
figures tell a different story. The number of cases in New York City reported
by the CDC for ages 13 19 from 1981 to the end of June 1992
were 872. When homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs are
eliminated, the number left not involving these risks (or not admitting to
them) reduces to a grand total of 16 in an eleven-year period. (Yes, 16. You
did read that right.)
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The correlation between HIV and AIDS that was repeatedly cited as proving
cause was maintained by denying the violations of it. Obviously if HIV is the
cause, the disease can't exist without it.
(You don't catch flu without having the flu virus.) At a conference in
Amsterdam in 1992, Duesberg, who had long been maintaining that dozens of
known instances of AIDS patients testing negative for
HIV had been suppressed, produced 4,621 cases that he had found in the
literature. The response was to define them as a new condition designated
Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia, or ICL, which is obscurese for "unexplained
AIDS symptoms." The figures subsequently disappeared from official
AIDS-counting statistics.
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Questioning the Infectious Theory
Viral diseases strike typically after an incubation period of days or weeks,
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which is the time in which the virus can replicate before the body develops an
immunity. When this didn't happen for AIDS, the notion of a "slow" virus was
introduced, which would delay the onset of symptoms for months. When a year
passed with no sign of an epidemic, the number was upped to five years; when
nothing happened then either, to ten. Now we're being told ten to fifteen.
Inventions to explain failed predictions are invariably a sign of a theory in
trouble. (Note: This is not the same as a virus going dormant, as can happen
with some types of herpes, and reactivating later, such as in times of stress.
In these cases, the most pronounced disease symptoms occur at the time of
primary infection, before immunity is established. Subsequent outbreaks are
less severe immunity is present, but reduced and when they do occur, the virus
is abundant and active. This does not describe AIDS. A long delay before any
appearance of sickness is characteristic of the cumulative buildup of a toxic
cause, like lung cancer from smoking or liver cirrhosis from alcohol excess.)
So against all this, on what grounds was AIDS said to be infectious in the
first place? Just about the only argument, when you strip it down, seems to be
the correlation that AIDS occurs in geographic and risk-related clusters. This
is not exactly compelling. Victims of airplane crashes and Montezuma's revenge
are found in clusters too, but nobody takes that as evidence that they catch
their condition from each other. It all becomes even more curious when you
examine the credentials of the postulated transmitting agent, HIV.
One of the major advances in medicine during the nineteenth century was the
formulation of scientific procedures to determine if a particular disease is
infectious carried by some microbe that's being passed around and if so, to
identify the microbe; or else a result of some factor in the environment, such
as a dietary deficiency, a local genetic trait, a toxin. The prime criteria
for making this distinction are known as Koch's Postulates, from a paper by
the German medical doctor Robert Koch published in 1884 following years of
investigation into such conditions as anthrax, wound infections, and
TB. It's ironic to note that one of problems Koch was trying to find answers
to was the tendency of medical professionals, excited by the recent
discoveries of bacteria, to rush into finding infectious causes for
everything, even where there were none, and their failure to distinguish
between harmless "passenger"
microbes and the pathogens actually responsible for illness.
There are four postulates, and when all are met, the case is considered proved
beyond reasonable doubt that the disease is infectious and caused by the
suspected agent. HIV as the cause of AIDS fails every one.
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(1) The microbe must be found in all cases of the disease.
By the CDC's own statistics, for 25 percent of the cases diagnosed in the U.S.
the presence of
HIV has been inferred presumptively, without actual testing. And anyway, by
1993, over four thousand cases of people dying of AIDS diseases were admitted
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