VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE


IS THERE SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE DEMONSTRATING THAT HIV CAUSES AIDS?

By Dave Steele

25 February 2001


1. Introduction

The great Albert Einstein once said that in science, "the most important thing is to never stop questioning." In this debate over AIDS, I think a reasonable person would begin with the elemental questions; namely, (1) What is this disease? and (2) How many people are dying from it?

First, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is defined by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) since 1985 as person who, (1) is infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and (2) has 1 or more of 30 unrelated diseases, including pneumonia, tuberculosis, yeast infection, weight loss, dementia and diarrhea. The important dynamic is that each AIDS victim has some mechanism that suppresses his immune system, which supposedly renders it helpless to prevent contracting any of the AIDS-defining diseases. Of course, we've all heard of pneumonia and tuberculosis. The important point is that NONE of the AIDS-defining diseases are new, nor is immune deficiency new. Here's our friend, Dr. Robert Gallo, the scientist who discovered the "cause" of AIDS. "Of course, immune suppression has occurred in the past, and especially the recent past in association with some drugs, radiation, ... and pronounced malnutrition." (Gallo, autobiography, pg. 291.) We'll talk about Gallo's rather odd approach to scientific inquiry a little later, but, to reiterate, the important point, is that nothing involved with the clinical diagnosis of AIDS is new.

Second, since it was first reported in 1981 (by Dr. Michael Gottlieb of UCLA) the general discussion of AIDS has been fraught with hysteria, designed to frighten, rather than inform the public. "Without massive federal AIDS intervention, there may be no one left," shouts Donna Shalala, Clinton's former Secretary of Health and Human Services. (Wash. Times, 6/8/99.) "By 1991, 1 in 10 babies may be AIDS victims," reads a headline from USA Today in 1988. The head honcho of AIDS research, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Health, states, "By 1996, 3 to 5 million Americans will be HIV positive, and 1 million will be dead of AIDS." (NY Times, 1/14/86.)

Did these dire predictions come true? Well, let's look at the numbers. In 1998, 2.3 million Americans died. (CDC National Vital Statistics Reports, 7/24/00.) Here is a list of the top 5 killers:

1. Heart Disease -- 724,000
2. Cancer -- 541,000
3. Stroke -- 158,000
4. Pulmonary Disease112,000
5. Accidents -- 97,000

AIDS isn't even in the ballpark. A whopping total of 13,000 AIDS deaths (out of 270 million Americans) were reported in all of 1998. The Number 6 killer, pneumonia, caused 91,000 deaths in 1998. However, if you're HIV-positive and have pneumonia, they call it AIDS, and Alec Baldwin wears a red ribbon on your behalf on Oscar night. But if you're HIV-negative, and have the same pneumonia, you die at a rate 7 times higher, but no one gives a flying hoot.

These underwhelming numbers are not some aberrant trend, either. The TOTAL amount of American deaths attributed to AIDS from 1981 through 1998, is 410,000. For the same time frame, there were 800,000 auto fatalities, and 9 million cancer deaths. For you history buffs, the flu epidemic in 1918 killed 20 million people in 1 year. For the same reporting period of 410,000 AIDS deaths, there were 1.7 million deaths from adverse reactions to properly presrcibed and correctly taken pharmaceuticals. (Lazarou, Journal of American Medical Association, 1998.)Based on these figures, one could argue that the best advice is to ignore your doctor.

As for the fears of pediatric AIDS, hold on to your hats. In 1998, there were 4.1 million live births, and 28,000 infant deaths (age 1 and under). Of these, there were a mere 14 deaths due to AIDS! For you math wizards, that's 14 out of 4.1 million. Of course, 14 infant deaths are 14 too many, but as anyone can see, pediatric AIDS is not only NOT an epidemic, but it barely even registers as a blip on the medical radar screen. In contrast, there were 2,822 deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome that same year.

So the numbers paint an entirely different picture than what has been crammed down our throats since 1981. There is also another remarkable number -- unlike every other contagious disease known to mankind (chicken pox, polio, herpes, the flu, measles, etc.) somehow AIDS has found a way to discriminate against men -- 85% of all AIDS cases are men, while 15% are women. Although the great Oprah Winfrey predicted that by 1990, 1 in 5 heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS (Transcript from Oprah Winfrey show, 2/18/87), the CDC reports that only 10% of AIDS victims contracted the disease through heterosexual sex. But even this number is likely exaggerated, since the best epidemiological study on heterosexual transmission of AIDS, concluded that it takes 1000 encounters with an infected male to transmit it to a woman. (Padian, Journal of Epidemiology, 1997.)

So, following 20 years of intense AIDS study and billions of dollars in research, how do we respond to Einstein's initial elementary questions? Well, that AIDS, a supposedly new disease, comprised of 30 old diseases, has killed about 20,000 Americans per year since 1981 (cancer kills 500,000)and, that, 90 to 95% of the victims are gay males and drug users.

The table having been set, we now turn to the $64,000 question: What is causing this disease called AIDS?

2. The Prevailing Theory of the Cause of AIDS

Before I jump into specifics, I want to briefly discuss the general scientific principles of "cause and effect." Indeed, the entire body of science is dedicated to observing stuff in nature (the effect) and then trying to explain why and how stuff happens (the cause). If you see a man lying in the middle of Wilshire Blvd., legs broken in a pool of blood, with a Mack truck stopped in front of him, you don't need a doctorate in Kinetics to state that the man's injuries were probably caused by an impact with the truck.

But what about a less clear example, such as back pain? An honorable man, with impeccable integrity, swears to his employer that his back was injured lifting heavy boxes at work, whereas the employer (or his attorney) replies that an x-ray shows no herniated disc, and furthermore, the back pain was caused by 28 years of bad posture and a lumpy mattress. Who is right? How can we tell?

With disease, it's even more difficult to establish the underlying cause since there are thousands of viruses and other microbes living in your body, neither named nor catalogued, because they have not been shown to manifest in any symptom whatsoever. If a 14-year old boy breaks out with itchy, reddish bumps on his body, how do we determine the discrete offending microbe out of thousands?

Thank God for the field of epidemiology, the study of disease. This scientific discipline has developed time-honored methods for establishing the cause of disease -- in short, the controlled study of populations. Take smoking -- you measure the rate of lung cancer in the general population, and compare it to the rate in the smoking population. Guess what? Most of the studies have shown that smokers get lung cancer in far great numbers, than non-smokers. Of course, many people smoke and never get lung cancer and many lung-cancer victims never smoked a cigarette in their life. But the important point is that the controlled studies, show a pronounced increase in risk associated with smoking, so much so that scientists can authoritatively state that smoking causes cancer. And all sane people believe this.

Returning to AIDS, the prevailing theory is that AIDS is solely caused by a virus, HIV. The prevailing theory posits that HIV suppresses your immune system by killing T-Cells, the white blood cells created to fight off foreign microbes. By analogy, think of a gang of thugs in downtown L.A., that doesn't rob, rape, smoke crack, or chew gum in class, but rather kills policemen so efficiently, that other hoodlums can run wild throughout the city with impunity.

Now, if the prevailing theory of viral disease is correct, there obviously has to be detectable HIV. Surprisingly, there is not with AIDS patients. Only 1 out of 500 T-Cells are infected. (Schnitman, Fauci et al., Science, 1989.) But T-Cells regenerate at a rate of about 15 per 500. Do the math -- new healthy T-Cells are naturally created at a faster rate than HIV infection. So how is it possible for T-Cell depletion to lead to immune suppression to lead to pneumonia or diarrhea, with such a small army of thugs? With all viruses before HIV, the subject cells were infected at a rate of 30 to 40%, not 0.2%. If you have hepatitus, you've got virus-infected cells all over your liver. Same with strep throat. There is no trouble, whatsoever, finding an abundance of viral activity, immediately after infection, not 10 years down the road as with AIDS cases. The dirty little secret is that AIDS researchers can barely even find HIV in AIDS patients, let alone count the virus using conventional methods.

Now, here's another conundrum -- is it possible to have AIDS without HIV? The prevailing theory says, as do the time-honored Koch's postulates (discussion deferred), "NO". You can't have polio, without the polio virus, nor chicken pox without the Varicella Zoster Virus.

But at the 1992 8th Annual AIDS conference in Amsterdam, a score of HIV-free AIDS cases was added to the 4,621 AIDS cases identified in the medical literature that were determined to be entirely free of HIV. This confounded the AIDS establishment, who had banked so much on an infectious agent. Unable to explain this phenomenom, (clinically diagnosed AIDS cases without HIV), they renamed this disease, Idiopathic CD4-lymphocytopenia (ICL). I'll give anyone in this courtroom 10 bucks if they've ever heard of this "disease," let alone pronounce it correctly. In fact, the same yahoo, Dr. Fauci, who predicted 1 million American AIDS deaths by 1996, published a paper in 1993, which concluded that ICL could not possibly be caused by a virus, because the resulting diseases were too "heterogeneous." (Fauci, New England Journal of Medicine, 1993.)

Earth to Dr. Fauci --- comprised of 30 unrelated diseases ranging from diarrhea to cervical cancer, AIDS is fairly heterogeneous, too! Even though Dr. Fauci may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, the real travesty lies with his conscious disregard for genuine scientific inquiry. These 4,621 HIV-negative, AIDS cases should have served as a control group for a perfectly valid epidemiological study to settle the issue once and for all. You compare the numbers of HIV-positive, AIDS patients, with HIV-negative, AIDS patients (like the 4,621), to determine any statistical significance between the rate of disease in the two groups. Despite 50 billion dollars in tax-payer money spent on this so-called epidemic, no such study has ever been done.

One last point on cause: Besides the controlled epidemiological study, you can also do animal testing. Simply inject a rat or monkey with a virus or toxin and see if it develops the disease. Since 1984, at least 150 chimpanzees (which cost about $50,000 a pop) have been injected with HIV, and as of 1996, none have developed AIDS.

The bottom line is that at a government press conference in 1984, Gallo declared that he had found the "probable cause" of AIDS. His supporting data was later shown to be fraudulent, and no epidemiological study ever bore his assertion out. In 1985, the CDC linked AIDS with HIV by mere fiat -- they defined it that way without any solid scientific data to support it.

3. The Alternative Theory of Causation

We return to the elementary questions posed at the beginning, the next question would surely be, "If AIDS is not caused by a virus, then what causes it?" My truthful answer is, "I'm not sure." The 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Kary Mullis, says, "We have not been able to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus..There is no evidence that this is true and no one who can claim it by ways of science."

The 1980 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Dr. Walter Gilbert states that the leading opponent of the prevailing theory, Dr. Peter Duesberg, "is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS. (Omni, 1993)

The bottom line is that Gallo and the other government scientists/bureacrats predicted that AIDS would spread into the general population (like all infectious diseases) and they predicted they would develop a vaccine by 1986. Neither of these items came true --- neither of these items will ever come true.

The most logical explanation for the AIDS phenomenom is that prolific drug use (cocaine, heroin, amyl nitrates, amphetamines, etc.) wrecks your immune system. In fact, long before AIDS was claimed to be infectious, here's what our nation's foremost scientific journal had to say:

Perhaps, one or more of these recreational drugs is an immunosupressive agent. The leading candidate are the nitrites, which are commonly inhaled [by homosexuals] to intensify orgasm. (Durack, New England Journal of Medicine, 1981.)

Apparently, there is high drug use, including these amyl nitrites, among the gay population, who are contracting AIDS. This coupled with admitted drug users, who comprise 33% of the AIDS cases, suggests a strong association between drugs and AIDS.

Another culprit is AZT, the highly toxic, chemotherapeutic pill, prescribed for AIDS since 1987. AZT is the ultimate anti-biotic, since it is literally "against life" -- its sole purpose is to kill all T-Cells, healthy and infected. Few people can survive large doses of AZT, just as few people can survive large doses of chemotherapy. Recall that 1.7 million Americans (compared with 410,000 AIDS deaths) have died from the adverse side effects of drugs, properly prescribed and taken.

I've gone a little longer than anticipated, so I'll stop for now. There is however, much more to discuss, particularly on the last topic, as well as African AIDS, protease inhibitors, antibodies and other matters.


VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE