VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
FLORIDA PHYSICIAN THROWS A DRAMATIC JAB AT THE EXPERTS VIEW OF AIDS
By Rick Weiss
The Washington Post 1 Nov. 1994
Last Friday at an alternative medicine meeting in Greensboro, N.C.,
a Florida physician stood in the glare of television lights and held the
hand of a young man infected with the human immunodeficiency virus. Squinting
in the lights and a moment later from the pain, he stuck a 20-gauge hypodermic
needle deep into the infected man's finger and quickly jabbed the bloody
needle into his own hand. Twice.
The physician, Robert Willner, said he inoculated himself with the man's
blood to draw attention to "the greatest scam ever perpetrated."
Contrary to expert opinion, he declared that HIV does not cause AIDS. "This
is an innocent virus," Willner said in an interview soon after inoculating
himself. Indeed, he said, it is the AIDS drug AZT that is the leading cause
of AIDS today.
The 65-year-old doctor found a sympathetic audience. "I think what
he is doing is very very brave indeed," said Tim Sara, president of
Nature's Balance, a nutritional supplement company that sponsored the meeting.
"He has the courage of his convictions."
But is Robert Willner really a brave man? Or is he making a tragic mistake?
Willner's statements in public and in a recent book are rich in the
language of conspiracy. He describes the AIDS epidemic as "an intricate
maze of lies" and "an astounding fraud," the creation of
a government-sponsored "brainwashing" campaign. AIDS is neither
caused by HIV nor is it contagious, he says, but is caused by malnutrition,
recreational drug abuse and modern medicines including AZT.
Unconventional as those views are, Willner is not alone in his beliefs.
He is part of a small but vocal group of iconoclasts whose ranks include
an internationally respected virologist and a recent Nobel prize winner.
They have long insisted that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and complain
that their theories have been quashed by a scientific cabal.
The majority of AIDS researchers and public health officials scoff at
such statements, and several said that Willner's eye- catching act would
prove nothing about HIV one way or the other. Studies of intravenous drug
users and health care workers who have accidentally stuck themselves with
HIV-contaminated needles suggest that Willner has a less than one-third
of one percent chance of actually becoming infected from his dramatic demonstration.
But officials said they were disturbed by the event because such actions
help perpetuate a lingering doubt in the public mind over the real cause
of AIDS, and those doubts threaten to undo much of the progress made to
date in AIDS education. It's hard enough, they said, to convince people
to engage only in safe sex, to get tested for HIV and to get proper medical
treatment instead of relying on unproven remedies. Surveys suggest that
young gay men have grown careless in recent years under the illusion that
they are not at risk of infection. And AIDS workers in the District confirmed
that a small but persistent percentage of at- risk individuals refuse to
believe that HIV causes AIDS.
One of the most frustrated among AIDS researchers is Robert C. Gallo,
co-discoverer of HIV. "We'll never have data of a cause of a disease
better than we have for HIV and AIDS, and I don't know why they persist
this way," Gallo said. "They are wrong. It is harmful. I don't
understand it at all."
At the other end of the scientific spectrum is Peter Duesberg, a virologist
at the University of California, Berkeley, and the king of skeptics when
it comes to HIV and AIDS. For 10 years he has argued that in the search
for a cause for AIDS, HIV has been framed.
"My opinion is that AIDS is not an infectious disease," he
said. "All the evidence available to me indicates that [HIV] is just
another harmless virus."
Duesberg invokes three major arguments against what he calls "the
AIDS/HIV hypothesis." First, if AIDS were caused by a virus or a bacterium
it would not strike men more frequently than women, as it does in the United
States. "Microbes don't discriminate by gender," he said.
Second, Duesberg said there are millions of people infected with HIV
who do not have AIDS, and there is no convincing evidence that HIV is present
in everyone who has the disease.
Third, infectious diseases typically occur soon after infection-not
years later, as is the case with AIDS, and not after a person has made
copious amounts of antibodies to fight the microbe.
Duesberg believes that AIDS is caused by immunity-suppressing illegal
drugs-especially amyl nitrate "poppers," popular in the gay community.
He also believes that the anti-HIV drug AZT, through its toxic effects
on the body, is a major cause of the symptoms that together define AIDS.
"I call it AIDS by prescription," he said.
Long a lone voice among scientists, Duesberg gained a high- profile
supporter last year in Kary Mullis, a Nobel prize winner in medicine who
believes the search for an alternative cause of AIDS has not received the
federal attention it deserves.
Meanwhile, other respected scientists, including Luc Montagnier, the
French researcher who who was one of the discoverers of HIV, have said
they suspect that other microbes may serve as cofactors with HIV to cause
AIDS. Still others, including an influential group of gay activists in
New York City, support the theory that AIDS is caused by a herpes virus,
known as HHV-6, which they claim also causes chronic fatigue syndrome.
Anthony Fauci, the usually unflappable scientist who until recently
directed the nation's research effort against AIDS, comes close to losing
his cool when he hears such arguments. The fact that HIV causes AIDS "is
truly overwhelming," he said, with obvious exasperation. "It
isn't questionable. The relationship between the virus and the disease
is truly incontrovertible."
Fauci, Gallo and others said there is nothing strange about a virus
that infects one gender more than the other if it is in large part transmitted
in gender-specific ways, such as gay anal sex. They said that studies of
intravenous drug users and others at high risk of AIDS have consistently
shown that those infected with HIV are the ones that get AIDS. And epidemiological
studies show clear trails of contagion from partner to partner and from
infected blood donors to blood recipients.
They also note that the family of viruses to which HIV belongs, the
so-called lentiviruses, often induce illness in animals months or years
after infection. The virus can be difficult to detect, or may be absent
altogether in people whose AIDS-like symptoms are due to other causes.
And the futility of the body's antibody defenses makes sense considering
that the virus specifically disables the immune system.
So why won't the doubts go away? To a large extent, Gallo said, it's
because some people focus on small scientific gaps and ignore the overwhelming
preponderance of the evidence. There are peculiarities and unknowns about
HIV and about AIDS, he said, but nothing that undermines the basic proof
of causality. Also, community AIDS workers said, some high-risk individuals
may choose to disbelieve they can become infected because it is too emotionally
overwhelming to cope with the prospect.
Whatever the reasons, the enduring controversy poses a threat, officials
said. "It's extremely dangerous to all the educational efforts about
safe sex and IV drug use," Fauci said. "If they were just blowing
off steam and it didn't matter, then we wouldn't care. But these statements
can take a terrible toll on the public health." *
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE