Capitol Ideas/Rethinking HIV
Bethell, Tom
nowledge is never more askew K than when it has been silently politicized. This is true of a good deal of government-funded science, which can serve political interests in ways that the public,...
...fisting and...
...That suited the gay activists just fine...
...In AIDS patients, the vast majority of T-cells of the immune system are not infected by HIV, nor can it be found in the semen of about 95 percent of those who test positive for the virus...
...Better start up condom and needle-exchange programs and fully fund the Ryan White Act and social-security disability payments and fork over some cash for housing people with AIDS...
...Viral-cancer theorists thought that, in doing so, retroviruses may mess up the DNA in some way, transforming ordinary cells into cancer cells...
...anal intercourse and...
...Grain applications must be submitted, the National Institutes of Health must be kept happy...
...It looks very much as though the virus is swiftly neutralized by antibodies...
...The evidence that HIV causes AIDS is simply this: HIV is well correlated with AIDS...
...V irus, did someone say...
...And you'll notice that within two weeks they had a new definition of a new disease...
...promiscuity of...
...we are a democracy (mention "checks and balances...
...He took orders from Stalin...
...Root-Bernstein has a complex theory of co-factors, including the immunosuppressive effects of semen and other agents, perhaps including HIV, leading to a civil war within the immune system...
...A virus was the scientifically fashionable hypothesis because the triumph over polio was still uppermost in many researchers' minds...
...The field is broadly divided between collectivists and individualists, and the judges seemingly recognize that there is no agreement about truth...
...But by 1981 the cancer virus was proving elusive...
...A lucrative coalition had been forged...
...The virus "cloaks AIDS activists in nobility," said ACT-UP specialist Robert Rafsky, who "confronted" Bill Clinton in the New York primary last year...
...An infectious agent was assumed, as early as March 1981, because opportunistic diseases such as pneumocystis, hitherto rare, abruptly became more frequent among gay men and intravenous drug users...
...But peer-review imposes its own conformity, and the raised eyebrows of senior colleagues can whip a youthful free-thinker into shape...
...This may be untidy, but it is surely healthier than the bogus certitude and the appeals to consensus that stifle so much of modern science...
...Hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients also have immunosuppressive factors...
...I think in the history of medicine that has to be the fastest...
...oot-Bernstein also effectively R rebuts one of the key assumptions of the official science: that AIDS patients had pristine immune systems until this deadly virus came along and shredded the defending T-cells...
...Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg thinks that HIV plays no role in AIDS, that drugs alone sufficiently explain immune-system collapse, and that homosexuals take lots of them...
...And the new generation of virologists would become heroes of medicine, just like Salk and Sabin...
...Frustrated researchers were therefore happy to turn to this intriguing new syndrome, at first called GRID, gay-related immune deficiency...
...U.C...
...Hordes of new virologists were being turned out by the graduate departments...
...Larry Kramer, gay playwright, and Anthony Fauci, head government AIDS researcher, became friends...
...What relevance they have is another matter...
...Gay protests did wonders for the budget...
...But the story didn't have a happy ending...
...Synthesized as chemotherapy in 1964, AZT had not hitherto been approved because of its toxic effects...
...It is possible that AIDS is not infectious at all, but is the result of damage to the immune system caused by behavior...
...An earlier definition of AIDS did not require HIV positivity, but that was because the syndrome was first defined before the virus had even been discovered...
...giardiasis in...
...Everyone would understand that, and it would undermine everything that they have done in the last ten years...
...nitrites used by...
...It was this (elementary) discovery that led Montagnier to revise his opinion about HIV...
...I3ut as Root-Bernstein points out, there are other viruses that are at least as well correlated as HIV...
...sexually transmitted diseases in...
...The frequent redefinition was itself a reflection of the politics of AIDS...
...rectal injuries of...
...There's much, much more in the book, and in a newsletter of the same name, Rethinking AIDS, available from 2040 Polk St., #321, San Francisco, CA 94109...
...So they could not accept that...
...Anyone can pick up a virus...
...The many reasons for thinking that a great and shocking mistake has been made are set forth by Robert Root-Bernstein in a new book called Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus.' Root-Bernstein is a professor of physiology at Michigan State University...
...It's just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...malnutrition in...
...The suggestion that this might have something to do with the drugs themselves, and with the increasingly abandoned "gay lifestyle," seems to have been given remarkably short shrift...
...But as the definition was expanded, the caveat was added that the new cases must be HIV positive...
...To a remarkable extent AIDS has remained confined to homosexuals and drug addicts...
...That little critter will be replicating away inside you before you know it...
...It turns out that Gallo's virus had been isolated at the Pasteur Institute in Paris by Luc Montagnier, who now says that HIV alone is insufficient to destroy the immune system...
...cytomegalovirus in...
...You can find a lot of them if you bring in a suspicious detective to conduct a search...
...Spin magazine recently had some good reporting on the phony African AIDS story...
...The cure didn't work (may in fact have killed people—long-term chemotherapy isn't normally indicated for anyone...
...So listen up, straights...
...It now seems likely that the 12-year government research and publicity effort has been based on the wrong hypothesisthat the various diseases called AIDS are caused by a single infectious agent, the human immunodeficiency virus...
...By 1987, in at least half the so-called AIDS cases, no HIV test had been conducted...
...Openly politicized subjects, such as economics, involve a contest for the truth that is at least acknowledged to be unresolved...
...This is politics, not science...
...They put on their white coats and peer into their test tubes, scarcely recognizing the extent to which they may be following political guidelines or prudently considering the continued funding of their labs...
...Two symbiotic interest groups illuminate the politics of AIDS: homosexual activists and the NIH-funded medical-scientific complex...
...The polio virus had been isolated, a vaccine developed, and Salk and Sabin were heroes of science...
...patients were "presumed" to be positive...
...Viruses are like fingerprints in the living room...
...And, hey, while you're at it, how about spending a little more on finding a cure...
...semen antibodies in...
...But there's a more important point about the "correlation" between HIV and AIDS...
...Here are just a few points that are worth pondering: The discovery of the cause of AIDS was announced at a press conference in April 1984, by Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler, at a time when the Reagan administration was under attack for not doing enough...
...The epidemic was failing to match CDC predictions, and was rather conspicuously remaining confined to the two main risk groups: drug addicts and gay bathhouse habitués...
...That correlation is itself largely an artifact of the definition of AIDS...
...20 for 12 issues...
...This is true of a good deal of government-funded science, which can serve political interests in ways that the public, and even scientists themselves, do not suspect...
...hepatitis B virus in...
...At that point the CDC swallowed hard and said that this was an entirely new disease, which it dubbed idiopathic CD4 T-cell lymphocytopenia, or ICL, in case you were wondering...
...Then she introduced the man who was thought to have discovered the virus, NIH virologist Robert Gallo...
...Expanding the definition to include cervical cancer, pulmonary TB, and other diseases was therefore congenial to the main political interest groups...
...The CDC claims there have been seven cases of the latter in a 12-year epidemic...
...shigellosis in . . . " Somehow, the news media managed to overlook all this...
...drug abuse by...
...rimming and...
...They parasitically use the cell's DNA to crank out new copies of themselves...
...Ten years before AIDS, in 1971, the federal government launched an expensive "war on cancer...
...AIDS was first defined in 1982, and redefined, more and more expansively, in 1984, 1985, 1987, and 1993...
...We look at Soviet science and smugly feel superior: Lysenko was a "charlatan," but of course we have no such problem here...
...As to the gays, I'll skip the details, but let me quote selectively from the book's index, under Homosexuals: "amebiasis in...
...The CDC now says that there have been over 43,000 such presumptive diagnoses...
...To that extent, the correlation of the "disease" (which is not a unitary phenomenon at all) and the virus is tautological...
...The flow of funds from the World Health Organization and foreign agencies rise proportionately...
...Funding for NIH and CDC duly soared, until more money was being spent on HIV than on all previous viruses combined...
...Now they would apprehend the guilty virus and bring it into custody...
...The most striking instance of politicized science in recent years has been the phenomenon called AIDS, which is thought of as a disease but which more nearly resembles a federal program...
...an antibody test is used because the virus itself is so hard to find...
...Three years later, in 1987, the Food and Drug Administration, responding to political pressure from homosexual activists, approved the drug AZT for use against AIDS...
...Last year, however, there was quite a lot of publicity about cases in which no trace of HIV could be found, despite careful testing, in cases that otherwise looked very much like AIDS (emaciated gays with pneumocystis and ruined immune systems...
...The African AIDS epidemic now looks very fishy...
...Interestingly, a retrovirus—just like HIV—was the prime cancer suspect, because cancer is a growing mass of cells and retroviruses usually don't kill the cells they infect...
...The fact is, Root-Bernstein argues, "every AIDS patient has multiple causes of immune suppression other than HIV, many of which precede HIV infection and some of which occur in the total absence of HIV...
...A virus is exculpatory (nothing to do with behavior) and egalitarian (we are all at risk...
...Neither chimps infected with HIV, nor health-care workers who accidentally stick themselves with needles, get AIDS...
...Die in an auto accident in Kampala, it's said, and you may be counted as an AIDS statistic...
...But when the gays started protesting outside FDA's doors—well, something had to be done, because lives were at stake, and so the drug was hurriedly approved...
...antibiotics used by...
...gay bowel syndrome in...
...It is also a great scandal...
...It's possible that HIV plays no role at all, he admits...
...The CDC has now jiggered the definitions of AIDS and ICL in such a way that the correlation of HIV and AIDS is a tautology—true by virtue of the definition of AIDS...
...You're next for the AIDS wards...
...If HIV is added to cell-lines growing in vitro, they go on growing happily...
...blood transfusions for...
...Here was promise...
...Promising a vaccine within two years, she added: "Those who have said we weren't doing enough have not understood how sound, solid, significant medical research proceeds...
...A s those who saw ABC's "Day One" program will know, there is growing skepticism about the cause of AIDS...
...The white-coats out at NIH's Bethesda campus didn't mind that...
...If they had admitted that the ICL cases were really AIDS cases, then that would be the absolute proof that HIV is not a necessary cause of AIDS," Root-Bernstein told me...
...And it turns out that we are not all at risk...
...Nobel prizes are impartially awarded to the proponents of incompatible theories...
...The numbers are based on extrapolations from inaccurate reports at a handful of hospitals, in countries where officials have an incentive to increase the AIDS count...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
