Capitol IdeaslHeretic
Bethell, Tom
Heretic by Tom Bethell 4 4 eH retic" is a much admired category in contemporary liberal thought—provided the heretic in question is safely dead. (Galileo comes to mind.) The other day I went...
...Army blood tests and blood bank surveillance show that, since 1985, the HIV-positive percentage of the tested population has remained constant at 0.03 percent, and equally distributed between the sexes...
...When you say use 'clean needles' that implies that it's okay to take drugs...
...It's there but it isn't doing anything...
...As a rule, only the antibody can be detected (which is why an antibody test is used...
...And that, when they do not have HIV, they do not have AIDS...
...This hypothesis explains the total failure—and I emphasize the total failure—of the virus-AIDS hypothesis in terms of public health benefits...
...For those who would like more detail, I recommend an article by Duesberg and Bryan Ellison in Policy Review, Summer 1990...
...that teenagers would get AIDS, and that hasn't occurred...
...We're only supposed not to use them because this is somehow too much fun, I assume...
...Chimpanzees infected with HIV haven't come down with AIDS...
...The prevalence of "opportunistic" diseases—caused by ubiquitous but normally harmless microbes—ensures that this must be so...
...Federal Science countered with correlations...
...He described AZT as a "DNA chain terminator" that will kill cells that incorporate it...
...The Centers for Disease Control defines AIDS as any one of twenty-five conventional diseases in the presence of HIV antibody...
...This group includes about 75 percent of the heterosexual AIDS cases, and 71 percent of the females with AIDS," Duesberg says...
...A virus is a much more popular, politically more attractive pathogen, because it is God-given and egalitarian, and no one can be blamed for it...
...The most serious consequence for her was that she was treated with AZT, and she died a year later," Dues-berg said...
...In as many as 50 percent of AIDS cases, Duesberg says, the HIV test was never reported, the "positive" diagnosis being presumptive...
...It was predicted by Margaret Heckler and by the National Institutes of Health that it would explode into the heterosexual population, which has yet to occur...
...omosexual activists seem hypnotized by drugs...
...Michael Fumento, author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, goes so far as to accuse Duesberg of bad faith...
...It was a sanction, clearly," Duesberg says...
...First virus to be co-discovered a year after its discovery...
...I can't do justice here to the many points that Duesberg makes against the virus hypothesis...
...The city of Berkeley is still a bastion of socialism, but the campus is now far from it...
...Same with the junkies...
...I think he has to know he's wrong," Fumento says...
...Since only one in 8,000 cells of the immune system is ever infected by HIV, and then harmlessly, Duesberg claims, using AZT to kill the virus is like poisoning the drinking water of an entire village in order to kill one lurking (but in fact harmless) terrorist...
...There were supposed to be 270,000 cases by the end of 1991...
...Charles A. Thomas, Jr, formerly professor of biochemistry at Harvard, recently organized the "Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis," supporting Duesberg...
...The latency period of HIV has been steadily increased (now said to be ten years or more) evidently to account for the failure of reported AIDS cases to match CDC projections...
...or years Duesberg was supported F by an "outstanding investigator" grant from the NIH, but this was recently not renewed...
...I came today," he started out, "to advance an hypothesis, which holds that Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...The other day I went to hear a live one, who was giving a lecture to students at the University of California in Berkeley...
...Of the homosexual AIDS cases (60 percent of the total), Duesberg said in his lecture: "It is a minority of homosexuals who are at risk," and he cited a recent NIH study of 3,916 homosexuals, 83 percent of whom reported they had used one drug with sex in the past six months, and sixty percent of whom reported that they had used two or more drugs with sex...
...Born in Germany in 1936, he is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the university, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences...
...He has been a pioneer in cancer-gene research, and was the first to map the genetic structure of retroviruses...
...AIDS is not infectious, but is in fact a consequence of drug consumption and AZT consumption, which is given as an antiviral drug to a lot of antibody-positive persons and AIDS patients...
...Dwinnelle Hall, on the Berkeley campus near Sproul Plaza, was packed with about 400 students, mostly pre-med...
...First virus to kill only after antiviral immunity...
...In the newsletter Full Context (Royal Oak, Michigan), he told Karen Reedstrom: "We never hear that drugs are bad for our health...
...His voice was in the alto range...
...But antibodies normally indicate that the body's Defense Department has done its job, neutralizing the invaders...
...Dues-berg agrees that something is depleting the immune system...
...He said that most people who take AZTwill die from it...
...But immune-system failure cannot be blamed for some AIDS diseases, notably dementia (the immune system doesn't reach the brain...
...His original grant encouraged him to "venture into new territory," but the letter of termination complained about "the dilution of his efforts with non-scientific issues...
...At one point, he concedes, he was naive enough to think he might receive a congratulatory phone call from Washington for pointing to the danger of drugs...
...These drugs included nitrites ("classical mutagens," Duesberg added), cocaine, amphetamines, methaqualone, lysergic acid (LSD), phenylcyclidine, and more...
...n the wall of his lab in Stanley 0 Hall, Duesberg has a glossy poster depicting the dreaded virus, on which he has written: "First virus to kill without biochemical activity...
...First virus to kill 50-100% of its carriers...
...A German film crew was rolling when Duesberg came to the podium—a slim, bespectacled figure with silvery hair and an open-neck shirt...
...Can't you see, the NIH-men said, that all these people who come down with AIDS show up positive when tested for HIV...
...Thus the American AIDS epidemic is a subset of the drug epidemic...
...He told me later that he had tried to get word to Magic Johnson not to take AZT, but didn't know whether he had been able to penetrate the shield of managers that surround these top athletes...
...Without alternative funds, it will be difficult for him to maintain his lab...
...Duesberg attacked at the level of virology (what is visibly happening in the microscope...
...NIH couldn't say, 'Here's one of our star scholars and he's saying we are wasting $3 billion on HIV research.' " Duesberg has been compared to a flatearther, and Robert Gallo, the NIH virologist whose alleged co-discovery of HIV (along with Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris) has been under investigation for fraud (it seems that Gallo's lab reproduced the sample sent from Paris and then claimed independent discovery of it), says he "cannot respond [to Duesberg] without shrieking...
...He said that Kimberly Bergalis, the young Florida woman supposedly infected by her dentist, tested positive for HIV and had a yeast infection, and was therefore diagnosed as an AIDS patient...
...It's a very strange message that the AIDS caretakers are sending out...
...Over 72 percent of American AIDS cases are 20 to 44 year-old males, although no AIDS disease is male-specific, because males of this age-group consume over 80 percent of all hard psychoactive drugs...
...Perhaps three-fourths of the audience were Oriental—very earnest and undecipherable...
...But HIV itself is a harmless "hitchhiker...
...II The American Spectator May 1992 19...
...AIDS patients admit to using intravenous drugs...
...About forty-five people, mostly scientists and doctors, and four of Duesberg's colleagues at Berkeley (a virologist and a cell biologist among them), have called 18 The American Spectator May 1992 for a "thorough reappraisal of the evidence for and against HIV...
...It also explains the failure to come up with a vaccine, and the failure to come up with a drug against the virus...
...with replies, Fall 1990...
...Duesberg is amazed by the profession's nonchalance here...
...Why is this, at a time of sexual promiscuity and rising venereal disease...
...Politically," he said, "it's not very correct to say drugs caused your disease...
...and it explains why, despite spending $3 billion a year, more than we have spent on all viruses in history combined, we have yet to save the first life...
...One-third of U.S...
...IV is supposed to be new, but it H is not spreading in the susceptible population as is to be expected of such a virus...
...make sure your injection equipment is clean...
...that women would get AIDS, which has yet to occur...
...But the figure is surely underreported because the drugs are illegal...
...In fact, there were 202,000...
...There have been enough HIV-negative cases of Kaposi's sarcoma in homosexuals to set the virologists looking for a completely different (non-HIV) cause...
...We're told to use 'clean needles' by the AIDS doctors, but we're never told not to use drugs...
...His name is Peter Duesberg...
...a fortunate percentage do not effectively absorb it, he said...
...The established view—since 1984—is that HIV attacks the immune system, specifically T-helper cells...
...This use declined when homosexuals themselves recognized their danger, and the incidence of Kaposi's has since declined likewise...
...Yet AIDS has remained overwhelmingly confined to two groups: intravenous drug-users and male homosexuals...
...Although HIV is supposedly deadly, scientists can barely find the elusive virus in AIDS patients...
...Or, as Duesberg told me: "The message is 'Drugs without bugs.' " Duesberg's drug message has been unpopular with an establishment that is supposedly waging a war on drugs...
...By CDC logic, Kaposi's should by now have been stricken from the AIDS list...
...In a recent (1992) article published in Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy, Duesberg summarizes a mass of data as follows: "It is concluded that all American AIDS exceeding the normal low incidence of indicator diseases in the general population is the result of recreational and anti-HIV drugs...
...His heresy—a whopper—is his claim that the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, is benign and does not cause AIDS...
...Duesberg says that drugs themselves suppress the immune system, and that many "bathhouse" homosexuals use drugs...
...Their four-sentence letter calling for this reappraisal has been rejected by the major medical and scientific journals...
...But this is an artifact of definition: AIDS is defined as known diseases in the presence of HIV...
...In fact, I will submit to you that we are doing just the opposite...
...Duesberg believes he knows what caused Kaposi's: the (formerly) widespread use of amyl-nitrite inhalants ("poppers") in the homosexual bathhouses...
...We are about to help 120,000 people die, by giving them AZT...
...But of course he hasn't In his lecture to the Berkeley students, he suggested why not...
...It's a big game with this guy, and I don't think this is very funny...
...In the course of their numerous encounters they pick up what's going around, including HIV and a lot of other viruses...
...AIDS is new because bathhouses and the drug epidemic are new...
...a "heroic hypothesis," says Duesberg, on the part of virologists "who have not been able to place any of their viruses as a human pathogen" and "would like nothing better than to be clinically relevant at some time in their career...
...It's an attempt to unify disparate phenomena under one heading and identify a single cause...
...When Duesberg tells them not to take AZT, they say: "What drugs should we take...
...This seems to be true with HIV...
...And of course the medical establishment lives by drugs...
...Because essentially you tell people you are to blame yourself, and you are responsible for your health...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
