AIDS: MYTH AND REALITIES 15 YEARS ON

By Jad Adams

1996

In 1996, Kingston University invited Jad Adams to consider the enormous output on AIDS - in literature, medicine and popular culture.

I have viewed the AIDS epidemic from the dissident perspective, indeed I might well have been the first to use the term ‘AIDS dissident’ so it does fall to me to give something of a definition. There are three fundamental arguments which characterise AIDS dissidents, though not all of them have necessarily been held by those who called themselves dissident. One is that the predicted spread of the AIDS epidemic has been vastly exaggerated; secondly that the drug AZT at best brings no benefit and at worst poisons those who take it; and thirdly, that the cause of AIDS has been misidentified as a virus now known as HIV, and that we should be looking elsewhere for the cause.

It would be fair to say that the dissident position has been partially successful in persuading others of the truth of all of these, and has, at the very least, encouraged the challenge of ideas which were otherwise being passed on to the population at large without discussion under the guise of the Protection of Public Safety. Context is all, so as I have been specifically asked to present a personal perspective on my contribution to the AIDS debate, it is as well to remember what the prevailing forces were in mid-1986 when I started work on the subject.

The British Government had just announced its intention to send every household in the country a leaflet advising them not to die of ignorance, to avoid sharing their toothbrushes and their syringes, among other things. The Health Education Authority was advising that the only difference between HIV and AIDS was time. It was therefore a supposed fact that everyone who got HIV would develop AIDS and it was widely believed that AIDS had 100 percent fatality rate. The only treatment licensed for AIDS was AZT which was considered to be a drug so miraculous in its beneficial properties that it wasn’t even allowed to complete a double-blind controlled trial, and the control patients were taken off the placebo and given the AZT. This drug was so wonderful, was considered so great, it would be unjust to deny the control patients the benefits of it. The benefits disappeared when the blind came off the trial.

In mid 1986, doctors who had swept to an unaccustomed public prominence because of the AIDS epidemic were predicting that everyone who had HIV would infect six other people. The Government’s Communicable Diseases Surveillance Centre predicted between 20,000 and 40,000 deaths each year from AIDS by the turn of the century. A report in Hospital Doctor magazine suggested that ‘there would be145,000 AIDS cases by 1992’. Just to inject a note of reality into all of this, by the end of 1994 there have been 10,304 AIDS cases cumulatively in the UK in the whole of the epidemic.

In 1986 I was working as a television producer with Meditel Productions making a series of mainly current affairs programmes about controversies in medicine. This meant I was acquainted with expensive government-backed health education material, based on dubious science. In the mid-eighties I had made a programme which dealt with failures in cancer therapy and I was thus very aware of the failure of the theory that viruses cause cancer. It is an understanding of that theory which is essential to an appreciation of retro-virology. In making the kind of programmes I did, I was therefore accustomed to appreciating how ductile the facts can be when they are required to do service for one or another interest group.

If Meditel itself had a ‘company’ line which ran through its programmes it was that governments should not use public money to attempt to change the lifestyle of entire populations because of the health problems of a small proportion of those populations. In terms of the heart disease debate in which Meditel had been deeply involved in a number of programmes, and some very public controversy, the argument was that the advice to change lifestyle in order to reduce the risk of heart attack should be directed at those who were genetically or otherwise pre-disposed to coronary heart disease. Treating the whole population was wasteful of resources, inefficient and possibly even harmful. This ‘high risk’ strategy is translated in the case of AIDS into a view that we must, as a society, help people in clearly identifiable risk groups, rather than terrifying the entire population, the risk for most of whom is low.

I knew that AIDS had not uniquely sprung from nowhere to threaten all humanity, which was the most commonly presented view. I knew for example that the great pandemic of influenza at the end of the first World War had killed more people than the War did, and that it disproportionately affected young adults rather than the very young or the very old. An agent had been found so frequently in the lungs of people with influenza that it was declared the cause, and the agent was named after the condition Haemophilus influenzae. Many angry words were exchanged with those who refused to accept that this bacteria was the cause of flu. Was not their obstinacy hindering a path to a cure for this terrible disease which had killed so many? Well eventually after decades of controversy, influenza was found to be caused by a series of viruses and Haemophilus influenzae was associated with, but accepted as not the cause of, the condition.

When the Health Education Authority told me that the only difference between HIV and AIDS was time, they weren’t only wrong in any terms, they were cruelly misleading. There are of course agents which kill in 100 percent of cases untreated, but they are fast acting agents such as Clostridium botulinum (causing botulism), not viruses claimed to take ten years to cause the condition with which they are associated. This then was the background.

In 1986 I did some work on AIDS on a story about contamination of the blood supply. In the process of doing this research, I and my co-worker discovered that there were a number of scientists who questioned whether the newly named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was actually the cause of AIDS. This was clearly a story of some importance, particularly as the people who had these reservations about HIV were people of some standing in the scientific community. They were people like Joseph Sonnabend who was one of the first doctors to identify and work with AIDS patients. He was formerly of the MRC over here, was the co-founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and a founder editor of the journal AIDS Research. Another critic was Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular Biology at Berkeley who had a lifetime’s experience of retro-biology and who drew the genetic map by which all retro-viruses were understood and still are today. There were other people like Richard Ablin of the State University of New York who memorably said in the Lancet that ‘HIV may be a passenger on an already sinking ship’. In doing this research we came across those and many less distinguished people questioning the HIV theory.

I should say that there was no consensus on what did cause the condition. These serious scientists with experience in the appropriate field were worried that a mistake was being made and their voices were not being heard. So we therefore made the documentary AIDS - ‘The Unheard Voices’ - to demonstrate the genuine doubt and it was transmitted in November 1987 on Channel Four. I subsequently wrote AIDS: The HIV Myth going in much more detail into the history of the virology which had led in 1984 to the announcement in the USA that it had found the probable cause of AIDS. You will remember that that announcement was made at a press conference more than a week before the publication of the scientific papers which were intended to back it up, to demonstrate the truth of this assertion. So it started with science by press release, which is the way AIDS research has largely continued.

The press release, announcing the great discovery, has come before the scientific papers and general peer review in the community of scientists. The isolation of that particular retro-virus, later dubbed HIV, had been a direct result of the involvement of people who had remained with the quest to find viruses which allegedly cause cancer, when most scientists deserted that field.

Cancer is in no way a similar disease to AIDS; AIDS is characterised by diminution of the target cells and cancer by a proliferation of them. However, the techniques were in place to research for retro-viruses and retro-viruses were indeed found in the tissue of AIDS patients. In fact previously these viruses had been found in cancer cells but that did not make them the cause of cancers. I should say the French and the US researchers were using the same techniques and many of the same people who worked in Luc Montagnier’s French laboratory had previously worked in Robert Gallo’s laboratory, and the idea that they are entirely separate institutions is quite false. They were in frequent communication with each other and were working on the same ideas and the same body tissues.

The idea that the virus crossed over from an African Green Monkey to humans was likewise a direct lift from theories constructed to defend the notion that human cancers are caused by viruses; and the immensely financially successful drug AZT was also a development of the cancer research industry: it was first synthesized early in the 1960s as an anti-cancer agent but was unsuccessful.

So ideas and techniques were recycled to serve AIDS after they had failed in cancer.

A retrovirus had been declared the cause of AIDS, not because there was overwhelming evidence to do so, but because it fitted in with the expectations of the experimenters. The HIV Myth book was well received though the New Scientist said ‘Rarely has such a deadly book been published’ and called on scientists to write to my publisher in protest. None did so. There is currently a thriving debate between dissident scientists and the establishment. The codiscoverer of HIV, Luc Montagnier, no longer believes, if he ever did, that HIV is the sole cause of the condition and he is working on co-factors. When AIDS arrived, each of us played the roles that we had been preparing for ourselves. *