text:
Need an animal model for HHV-6? Try pigs.
If you are an HHV-6 researcher outside the United States and you are interested in finding an animal model that will help you understand the diseases that HHV-6 causes, we suggest you try pigs. Unfortunately, because of the politics of our USDA and Centers for Disease Control, any scientist in America who even suggests such a thing might soon find themselves in a great deal of trouble. Given the similarity of the immune systems of pigs and humans, we think you will make significant progress in HHV-6 research if you work with pigs. Think about it.
Previous HHV-6 University Editorials
July 21, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
The Gaslighting of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Community
For over three decades the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community has been gaslighted by the medical and scientific establishment. Gaslighting has been described in Wikipedia as "a form of mental abuse in which a victim is manipulated into doubting their own memory, perception, and sanity. Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim."
For a detailed history of the gaslighting of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, read Hillary Johnson's Osler's Web, a very detailed history of the early days of the government's Chronic Fatigue Syndrome cover-up. The gaslighting of the CFS patients became a team sport in the medical community. The word went out early that the patients were nuts. It became medically de rigueur to treat the patients like AIDSish CFS was all in their cockamamie heads. And many gullible, desperate patients ended up in the offices of shrinks. Patients were lucky when they found one who could see that the CDC party line was bogus and harmful.
If one wants to see where the the gaslighting buck stops, it seems to be in the office of Tony Baloney Fauci, the man would could be called the "Sociopath-in-Chief" of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Hillary Johnson catches Fauci with his pants down when she writes about a 1989 meeting with Congressman John Porter on page 334 of her book. An aid to Porter told her that Fauci "expressed puzzlement over CFS victims' vehement reaction to being told their difficulties were psychiatric in origin, Fauci said, 'Look, if I tell someone they have an ulcer, they don't get upset, but ulcers are related to the brain.' "
Reading that statement is like seeing the very first aberrant cell in what would soon become a metastasizing cancer. Patients and activists are still trying to undo the damage of Fauci's sociopathic meme. Media coverage of Maureen Hanson's recent research detailing the distinctive CFS gut problems had to include the hoary chestnut about this finally showing that CFS was not in people's heads. That underlines the incredible longevity of Fauci's toxic gaslighting meme.
The really sad and ironic thing about the gaslighting of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients is that many of the CFS sufferers became gaslighters themselves.
When the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community is presented with the inconvenient fact that there are many smart and honest people in the scientific community who insist that the government 's scientific elite are lying to themselves and the public about the nature of the AIDS epidemic and are covering up the truth about it, they generally get gaslighted by the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community. Saying that the government has gotten CFS wrong is totally rational, but questioning or criticizing anything the government elite has told the public about AIDS--now that is really crazy. Like bullies who bully, the gaslighted CFS community gaslights the AIDS critics.
Someone says HIV research is riddled with fraud? The CFS community gaslights them.
Someone says the gay community is being lied to about the nature of the AIDS epidemic? The CFS community gaslights them.
Someone says Anthony Fauci has built a sociopathic empire that is covering up the truth about AIDS and CFS. The CFS communtiy gaslights them.
Someone says that the whole "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not AIDS" paradigm is built on homophobia and racism? The white heterosexual Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community gaslights them.
Someone says the prophylactic medicines being foisted on the gay and black communities are based on fraud? The CFS community gaslights them.
Someone says that AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are on a spectrum and are part of the whole HHV-6 epidemic? The CFS community gaslights them.
In other words, the people on the front of the gaslighted bus say that the people on the back of the bus have a screw loose. It follows the predictable psychological pattern of the bullied becoming bullies themselves.
It's a situation worthy of writers like Kafka and Joseph Heller.
If the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients really want to liberate themselves they must stop gaslighting the AIDS dissidents, the smart brave folks who first recognized that the "science" of sociopaths like Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci and the racist/homophobic CDC was a politically motivated crock. They must stop helping to maintain a Trump-like wall between AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that was created by lying and gaslighting.
Members of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community should look in the mirror if they want to see the gaslighter in their neighborhood.
July 18, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
The Chronic Missteps of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Community
While there is no shortage of misdeeds to focus on in the history of the government's cover-up of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemic, it's time to bring up a nagging question concerning the so-called well-meaning Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patient and activist community. Why are they so breathtakingly ineffective? Why do they never get their message out? Why do they never find the money or media they need? Why do they do silly, self-defeating things like telling people to wear their underwear outside of their clothes like uber-clown Ronald Davis? Why do they make so many whiny hapless documentaries that do nothing to raise the serious questions about the transmission of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and its threat to public health. Why do their sappy documentaries look like they were made by people who don't even know what a real documentary is? Why is so much tiresome narcissism posing as activism?
Why did the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community conveniently forget that Japanese researchers seem to have nailed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome down beautifully when they called it Low Natural Killer Cell Syndrome?
Why do they ignore the fact that CFS researcher Nancy Klimas publish research suggesting that CFS is a form of acquired immune deficiency?
Why do they never discuss the three important books written on the subject of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by Neenyah Ostrom.
Why do they ignore the fact that the New York Native newspaper covered the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome like no other publication in the world for over a decade?
Why do they not discuss the criminality of the Centers for Disease Control meticulously exposed in Hillary Johnson's Osler's Web.
Why do they ignore articulate patients like Mary Schweitzer who reports that her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome improves when her HHV-6 infection seems to be effectively treated with Ampligen and then gets worse when she is off Ampligen and her HHV-6 issues return? Doesn't anyone see that as a kind of front page epiphany for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
We could go on, but a basic pattern emerges.
The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community by and large does not want the public to know that their illness is transmissible, is caused by a biological agent, and that it hovers somewhere between being AIDS-like and actually being part of an HHV-6/AIDS epidemic. (The latter makes the most sense.) The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community would rather live and die trapped in the groundhog day of their own multi-systemic suffering then let the world know the whole inconvenient truth about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemic.
It is simply a bridge too far.
July 14, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
We need a new International HHV-6 Research Organization
Today is Bastille Day. It is time to call for the liberation of HHV-6 research.
Anybody who has studied HHV-6 for decades as we have done at HHV-6 University, knows that it is an international emergency. They also know that HHV-6 is mired in the corrupt American and French politics of AIDS thanks to the involvement of dishonest and incompetent scientists like Anthony Fauci, Dharam Ablashi, Henri Agut, Luc Montagnier, Robert Gallo and Anthony Komaroff.
It's time for competent scientists with integrity who are not in any way under the thumb of America's corrupt NIH/CDC and France's Pasteur Institute to form an independent International HHV-6 Research Foundation dedicated to telling the whole world the truth about HHV-6. America and France have made a total mess of HHV-6.
Nobody in the current American and French HHV-6 establishment wants to tell the truth about HHV-6 because it threatens to expose HIV as a massive Gallo-Montagnier-Fauci Ponzi scheme that could destroy the credibility of America's NIH/CDC and France's Pasteur Institute for decades to come. Anyone who knows the full HHV-6 story is aware of the fact that it is the center of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, just to name two of the disasters it is causing.
We do not need more HHV-6 research that trivializes the virus and ignores the fact that we are in the middle of an HHV-6 public health apocalypse. Too much HHV-6 research ignores the 600 pound gorilla in the room. There already has been enough research to suggest that anyone who calls it a "mystery" is lying. They're whistling in the dark.
Good HHV-6 science doesn't just require brains. It also requires courage. Aren't there any brave and honest scientists out there who can start a new era of HHV-6 research, one that doesn't just cover up the sins of America's NIH/CDC and France's Pasteur Institute?
July 13, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Are Millennials Affected or Infected (or both)?
In the The Sun, a U.K. newspaper, Martha Stewart is described by Jasper Mills as "the latest person to rail against a mollycoddled generation who have turned universities into 'safe spaces' to avoid testing their ideas in the crucible of debate and called on conference attendees to 'make jazz hands' because clapping is too traumatic for their sensitive souls."
The headline of the piece is "Millennials are lazy, self-indulgent and lack the initiative to be successful, warns lifestyle guru Martha Stewart: Millionaire slams feckless, molly-coddled youngsters who live off the bank of mum and dad."
This has become the general shtick about "Millenials," and anyone who has worked in an office with some of the members of that generation knows exactly what she is referring to.
But the matter may be a little more complicated than most people realize. The Millenials are a generation up to their eyeballs in a viral epidemic of HHV-6 which has been covered up for over three decades by Anthony Fauci and the clowns at the CDC and NIH. Many of them have HHV-6 infections in every system of their bodies and don't have a clue that they are infected. Many of them live with it cavorting in their brain cells. This is not to say that a bad economy and misguided parenting aren't in the mix somewhere. But let us not forget that treacherous, multisystemic HHV-6 has been spreading for decades and has integrated itself into the chromosomes of newborns. It's the new normal.
Predictably, observers reach out for sociological, psychological, cultural, political and economic reasons when a whole generation seems to be malfunctioning. But what if we are just staring into the face of the HHV-6 epidemic which has been carefully hidden in plain sight by sociopathic scientists who know how to work the system? (Let's hear Rachel Maddow try to spell that out in one of her fifteen-minute cosmic opening lectures.)
In many ways these troublesome and troubled Millenials are the HHV-6 Generation. They are Fauci's children. God help them. And us.
July 4, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
The science, politics and culture of our time is covered in Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure.
As we watch scientists like Maureen Hanson and Ron Davis pathetically wrestle with the political and scientific complexities of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research, we think it's time to put all the cards on the table so they waste decades going in hopeless circles.
It's time to wake all the scientific newbies up before them just make everything worse.
In the interest of "first doing no harm" it is time for a little truth.
We live in a world created by the sociopathic science of Anthony Fauci and his enablers. That world is covered in Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure. If you don't know what we mean by "Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure," you probably will by the time you finish this and peruse some of the 1800 postings on this site. You might prefer the term "totalitarian pseudoscience," but we think "Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure" does a better job of getting right to the point.
Anthony Fauci has fostered a kind of pseudoscience that is so false and foul that it deserves to be called AIDS manure. And it is everywhere. It sticks to everything. It stinks everything up.
Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure sticks to all of science and it stinks all of science up. It stinks AIDS research up. It stinks Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research up. It stinks retroviral research up. It stinks HHV-6 research up. It stinks MS research up. It stinks cancer research up. It stinks autism research up. The list goes on and on. Do an exhaustive study of this site and you will know what we're talking about.
Thousands of scientists are swimming haplessly around in Fauci's AIDS manure. They are confused.
They try and do this and that, but everything they do is ultimately polluted by Fauci's AIDS manure. What they think is mysterious is really just Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure gumming up the works of legitimate science.
Scientists of good faith who are trapped in Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure inadvertently just spread more of it around in their research every day. Every new paper on AIDS or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to some degree is covered in Fauci's AIDS manure. Every paper on HHV-6, AIDS and CFS should contain this notice: "Warning, the premise of this research is polluted by Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure."
Virtually every Chronic Fatigue Syndrome researcher is unknowing engaged in smearing Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure around everywhere. Their laboratories stink with it. Their well-intentioned, eager-to-help lab assistants are covered in it. Their careers will forever be marked by the time spent swimming in Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure thinking they were doing real science.
There have been other periods in science like this. Nazi medicine was like this. Lysenkoism in Russia was somewhat like this. But in terms of time and consequences, Anthony Fauci's era of AIDS manure takes the cake.
It's not just blind and trusting and fearful scientists who keep the world covered in Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure. You could say it takes a village to maintain the universe of Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure. It takes journalists, celebrities, intellectuals, artists, novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, philanthropists and all kinds of unassuming citizens. Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure has been masked by decades of mindless, hyperbathetic cultural sentimentality. Virtually every work of art about AIDS reeks of Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure.
Like the greatest sociopath who ever lived, Anthony Fauci knows how to keep the world covered in AIDS manure without ever being successfully challenged. So far. More than a few have smelled the stink of his AIDS manure and tried to clean. They have all basically failed. Some have been desrtoyed and others just left the field in disillusionment. Anthony Fauci knows where the vengeful levers of elitist power are and he uses them.
Many in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community have unknowingly smelled Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure, thinking that they had a problem separate from anything going on in AIDS. Had they challenged Fauci and tried to expose their epidemic as one of the many aspects of his AIDS manure they might have gotten someplace. But anyone who has read Osler's Web knows, he pulled a fast one on them and basically said they should not be ashamed to have a mental illness. In other words, they were gaslighted by a major sociopath and his AIDS manure was allowed to spread to every aspect of their lives. Their doctors were covered in AIDS manure. They lost friends and families because of Fauci's AIDS manure. Some died from consequences of Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure without ever knowing they were buried in it. Every day when a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patient wakes up with a new medical issue they are experiencing yet another consequence of Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure.
We can't emphasize enough that Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure and his Chronic Fatigue Syndrome manure are one and the same. Pardon our language, but you can't separate this shit.
What Anthony Fauci has done is basically create a perpetual motion machine that produces AIDS manure day and night without scientists or the public realizing what is going on. It is one of the reasons he is still at this job at the age of 75. If he leaves it there is the possibility that someone will smell the stink of what he has done and try to expose it. And he won't be there to destroy them.
Rachel Maddow has called him a great American, which he is if you have an appetite for AIDS manure.
We will have a lot more to say about Anthony Fauci's AIDS manure, but on this Independence Day let us dedicate ourselves to trying to clean up his mess. America deserves so much better than this.
July 1, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Several big questions for Dr. Maureen Hanson
Now that Dr. Maureen Hanson has stirred the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome pot and identified an "altered composition of the gut microbiome" in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients, it is time for a new direction in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemiology research based on her work. Research to answer four obvious questions would be a good starting point:
1) What percentage of the family members of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients have the same "altered composition of the gut microbiome"?
2) What percentage of the sexual partners of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients have the same "altered composition of the gut microbiome"?
3) What percentage of the close friends and colleagues of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients have the same "altered composition of the gut microbiome"?
4) What percentage of the pets of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients have the same (or similar) "altered composition of the gut microbiome"?
And, of course, there is a fifth very inconvenient question. What percentage of AIDS patients have the same "altered composition of the gut microbiome"?
These are the kinds of questions that the sociopathic scientists in charge of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome generally avoid at all cost. It could be career suicide for any scientist to ask them or even write a grant proposal to research them. Hopefully Dr. Hanson will have the "altered guts" to ask them.
June 29, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
The New Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Microbiome Bullshit Projects
How could anybody be critical of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome microbiome research? It's really trendy right? And isn't the word "microbiome" the coolest? Shouldn't it be the name of a new CFS scent by Chanel? Natural Killer cells, B-cells, T-cells, mitochondria? So yesterday!
While any research into CFS is better than nothing, the problem is that there is a tendency to take a little piece of a multisystemic disease and try to paradigm the whole disease around it. There are not shortage of narcissists like (fill in the blank) riding into town on white horses who want to dismiss all the credible work that predates them. Especially work which indicates that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is multisystemic, transmissible, and dare we say it again, intertwined with the AIDS epidemic.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome microbiome research has a little bit of the aroma of denialism and disinformation to it, so we're not surprised to see Ian Lipkin, Hollywood scientific narcissist extraordinaire, pushing it. Anything to keep from talking about the contagious/transmissible, multisystemic and "AIDSy" nature of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Microbiome research provides the patients with hope (and they are hope addicts) that some kind of palliative Zantac or probiotics (or some kind of cockamamie enema) will be the pot of gold at the end of this latest rainbow.
The problem is that the rush to identify something in the tummy as the biomarker for such a serious disease will most likely trivialize an illness that should be researched as multisystemic, contagious and part of the AIDS epidemic.
June 26, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Six things Hillary Clinton needs to do if she really cares about the gay community.
1) End the HHV-6 pandemic cover-up.
2) End the HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme.
3) End the cover-up of the relationship between AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome..
4) End the Jim Crow epidemiology of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
5) Fire Anthony Fauci.
6) Clean up the sociopathic science at the Centers for Disease Control.
June 23, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
The first scientist to confront Fauci and Gallo's sociopathic science of AIDS that evolved into the sociopathic science of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
To say that the achievement of Peter Duesberg is a glass half full, should never be seen as damning with faint praise. Unflappable, imperfect Peter Duesberg heroically changed the course of the AIDS epidemic and history itself by his actions and part of his personal tragedy is that he could have changed it even more if he had looked deeper and been more critically attentive to the politics of the Centers for Disease Control's heterosexist epidemiology.
In the introduction to his 1987 interview with Duesberg, John Lauritsen wrote, "Peter Duesberg came to the United States about 20 years ago from Germany. He is professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California in Berkeley. It is because of his interest in retroviruses, on which he is an authority, that he became involved in questioning the 'AIDS virus etiology.'" (The AIDS War p.47)
In that interview Duesberg argued that HIV could not be the cause of AIDS because of "the consistent biochemical inactivity of the virus." (AW p.47) He told Lauritsen that "Even in patients who were dying from disease, the virus is almost undetectable, while RNA synthesis is essentially not detectable, (AW p.47) And Duesberg said, "So that is one of the key arguments, and there is no exception to the rule that pathogens in order to be pathogenic have to be active." (AW p.48) He also insisted that "very few potentially susceptible cells are ever infected, and those that are infected don't do anything. The virus just sits here." (AW p.48)
Duesberg also argued that the long latency period of the disease was "a very suspicious signal that the virus is unlikely to be solely the direct cause as they claim." (AW p.48) He insisted that retroviruses "are the most benign viruses that we know" and "they can remain in the cell in latent form." (AW p.49) And most damning of all to the HIV hypothesis, according to Duesberg, was the fact that "When AIDS is diagnosed, they say that now it's possible for the disease—but the virus is not doing any more than it had done before when there were no symptoms of the disease." (AW p.49) Duesberg concluded that the presence of antibodies to HIV was proof that the virus had been neutralized and asserted that it was "a gross injustice to discriminate against anyone on the basis of having antibodies." (AW p.50)
One of the most noble aspects of Duesberg's AIDS criticism and whistleblowing on the HIV mistake (or fraud) issue was his extraordinary—almost visionary—sensitivity to the damage it was going to do to the health and liberties of those who were victimized by it. In general, the people he argued with, those who benefited financially and professionally from the HIV hypothesis, had a rather cold and cavalier attitude toward the effect their brilliant ideas often had on the minorities who were affected. (They certainly never seemed to ask themselves what the consequences would be if they were wrong.)
Duesberg deserves credit for being one of the first people to realize (without saying as much) that the HIV/AIDS theory was an instance of what should be called "abnormal science." One of the wittiest men engaged in the AIDS issue, he could often find the humorous absurdities implicit in the HIV theory. When HIV was called a "slow virus," he said, "There are no slow viruses, only slow scientists." In public forums he always presented his opinions in a collegial manner, but he was also always capable of leaving his opponents hemorrhaging from a cutting sarcasm presented with deadly charm. It may have been the fact that he verbally earned the role of the alpha intellect in any professional gathering that inspired both envy and vengeance from his HIV establishment opponents. They were often simply intellectually outclassed, even if they held all the money and the political cards. Nothing rattles totalitarian or abnormal science more than a clever and steadfast nontotalitarian scientist.
If Duesberg suffered from any deficits in the area of judgment, it may have been an inability to imagine a different AIDS epidemic caused by a dynamic, multisystemic virus like HHV-6 (and its family) which could manifest itself in a variety of surprising ways (like AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome, autism etc.) depending on a variety of factors. Duesberg told Lauritsen "AIDS is a condition which includes so many parameters that it's almost inconceivable to define a simple pathogen as the cause, considering the diverse patterns of the disease." (AW p.52) Duesberg didn't think outside the box of the CDC's epidemiology. He never considered the possibility that the CDC had missed a whole world of undetected epidemiological data (like the data from the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic) that would have completely changed the picture of the disease's patterns. And, unfortunately, the idea that there might be something in the world that could be called a multisystemic virus like HHV-6 which could cause many different patterns of disease, was simply not on his radar.
At the time that Lauritsen first interviewed Duesberg—in 1987—Duesberg remained a bit of an agnostic on what was actually causing AIDS, saying, "We haven't excluded anything" and "I really wonder what it could be." (AW p.53) Compared to where he would end up, he was a demure etiological virgin at that point. He was only beginning to consider the role of recreational drugs as a possible cause saying, "I'm really just guessing here, but I think this is where more research should be done." (AW p.53)
Unfortunately, as time went on Duesberg seems to have been encouraged or even pressured by some of his colleagues to take a stronger public stand on what he thought actually was the cause of AIDS and he became far less tentative and open-minded, passionately adding to his anti-HIV gospel a seemingly unshakable conviction that recreational drugs explained AIDS in gay men. Regardless of its merits, such a position immediately lost him the ready-made constituency of the gay community who seemed to have been invited by Duesberg and his followers to be exonerated for a transmissible infection only to be convicted as a group in an alternative heterosexist fashion for having a unique gay (and—let's not forget— criminal) drug-taking lifestyle. With some notable exceptions, Duesberg walked into a big gay "thanks but no thanks"; he had jumped the gay shark. It was a tragic development for both parties, because politically Duesberg really needed an activist gay community to help him challenge the mistaken HIV hypothesis, which he felt was unfairly threatening the liberties and health of the gay community. He was the enemy of the gay community's determined CDC/NIH enemy but he wasn't perceived as its friend. By rejecting Duesberg's half a glass of truth about the virus, the gay community ended up in the open arms of the AIDS establishment and crusading public health authorities complete with all the goodies they had in store for their willing, eager and all too compliant patient population.
Peter Duesberg detailed his argument about the nature of the AIDS epidemic and his struggle with the AIDS establishment in his book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, which was published by Regnery Publishing in 1996. In the publisher's Preface, Alfred Regnery notes that "AIDS is the first political disease." In his acknowledgments, Duesberg wrote, "I extend my gratitude to my most critical opponents in the AIDS debate, who have unwittingly provided me the great volume of evidence by which I have disproved the virus-AIDS hypothesis and exposed the political maneuverings behind the war on AIDS." (IAV p.x)
Duesberg's book could be used as a primary text if college courses are ever given on the politics, sociology and psychology of abnormal science. He fleshes out many parts of his argument against the HIV theory of AIDS causation already mentioned in his 1987 interview with Lauritsen. While Duesberg is often thought to be someone who encouraged the rethinking of the AIDS issue, the book supports the notion already mentioned that in reality he actually never went far enough, never really did a true radical rethinking of AIDS because he works with a tacit acceptance of the basic epidemiological premises and "facts" provided by the CDC and the HIV/AIDS establishment. By leaving their paradigm's "factual" assumptions standing, he ultimately jeopardized his own analysis. Duesberg's critical tact was to take the "facts" as they were provided by the CDC and to try and poke holes in their etiological logic by showing how they failed to successfully make predictions about the course of the epidemic or by arguing that the facts as given by the CDC contradicted other formally known (hence, published) facts. The problem was that AIDS involved ground zero epidemiological definitions of what an AIDS case actually was, and if that definition had, at the very beginning of the epidemic, been distorted by evidence that had been cherry-picked, or had been ignored because of political blinders, then there was a good chance that Duesberg—even with his superb skills of logic and reason—was trapped in an epidemiological funhouse of "garbage in garbage out." Saying the CDC mistakenly linked the wrong virus to cases of AIDS begs a question: And what if the CDC completely got the definition of AIDS cases wrong to begin with? What if they were correlating apples with oranges? Or, more troubling, that what the CDC thought were epidemiological apples and oranges were really all apples or all oranges? Duesberg never illuminated all of the fundamental possibilities of what could have gone wrong epidemiologically. Duesberg was in a Donald Rumsfeld situation where he didn't know what he didn't know.
Duesberg worked with the epidemiological predictions the AIDS authorities were giving him and tried to show that when the predictions based on them did not work out, they reflected poorly on the credibility of the HIV theory. He argued, "Officials have continually predicted the explosion of AIDS into the general population through sexual transmission of HIV, striking males and females equally, as well as homosexuals and heterosexuals, to be followed by a corresponding increase in the rate of death. . . . In short, the alleged viral disease does not seem to be spreading from the 1 million HIV-positive Americans to the remaining 250 million." (IAV p.5)
Duesberg's logic brilliantly skewered the CDC's notion that AIDS was an equal opportunity disease. But again one has to note that the one caveat he didn't acknowledge was that if the CDC's definition of what an AIDS case was turned out to be dead wrong, then all bets were off about correlated and potentially causative factors. Just debunking the logic behind the weak correlation of putative AIDS cases with HIV was not the same as debunking the notion of some fundamentally different kind of AIDS epidemic still occurring, not only in the gay community, but also in some form in the general population. If, at the very basic level of defining what a case is and what a case isn't, profound mistakes had been made, then one couldn't really know where the disease was and where it wasn't. And then the issue of HIV not being the cause of what was being called AIDS would in that case be totally beside the point. If anything, the HIV mistake should have made people wonder if those in charge at the CDC had gotten something even more profoundly wrong in the initial working definition of AIDS which subsequently was carved in stone thanks to the abnormal, totalitarian scientific culture that protected it.
Insofar as Duesberg recognized that it all just didn't add up, he graciously performed a great humanitarian service over and over again by telling the world that as long as the HIV establishment was in charge of AIDS we were essentially trapped in a realm of unreliable and untrustworthy pseudoscience where people were going to get hurt. And luckily, for three decades, at great personal expense, Duesberg valiantly refused to shut up. Perplexed, Duesberg wrote, "Something is wrong with this picture. How could the largest and most sophisticated scientific establishment in history have failed so miserably in saving lives and even in forecasting the epidemic's toll?" (IAV p.5) Ironically, given that Duesberg himself was blind to what turned out to be the CFS epidemic and HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe, the premise of his rhetorical question turned out to be a tragic understatement.
Duesberg's suggestion about what should be done reinforces the notion that his call to a reassessment of AIDS and HIV just wasn't intellectually radical or fundamental enough. Duesberg's prescription for the problem was that "Faced with this medical debacle, scientists should re-open a simple but most essential question: What causes AIDS?" (IAV p.6) Again, it was not really a radical return to nosological and epidemiological ground zero. A return to ground zero would have involved asking if the epidemiological common immunological denominator that determined what a case actually was itself needed to be audited by looking closely and in an immunologically sophisticated manner at the entire population. Duesberg was like an accountant who looks at the books for discrepancies, but never goes into the warehouse to see if what's there matches the inventory numbers. His due diligence only went so far. Quasi-due-diligence is ultimately not helpful. The definition of AIDS was on the books and unfortunately, taken at face value by Duesberg. It didn't necessarily match what was actually going on in doctor's offices all over America and it didn't necessarily reflect the actual disaster that was occurring in the immune systems of the entire American population. There was a whole immunologically challenged world beyond the CDC's published data and the peer-reviewed papers Duesberg used to play "gotcha" with the CDC's facts, logic and conclusions.
There was an interesting groupthink bias in Duesberg and many of his followers, most of whom were heterosexual—some emphatically so. Not surprisingly, their notion about what was wrong with AIDS etiology was always biased in the direction of heterosexuals being less (or not at all) at risk for AIDS as a result of the CDC's scientific errors. Sometimes one got the uncanny notion that Duesberg and his followers were whistling heterosexually in the dark, engaged in trying to convince themselves that they as a group were safe from the "gay lifestyle" epidemic. Ironically, considering their apparent need for personal immunological safety, though, is the fact that if the CDC was wrong then all bets about their safely could have been off and the actual level of risk could have gone the other way. They could have been in more, not less danger. But that possibility never seemed to dawn on them, and their AIDS dissident movement in all its forms seemed bent on making sure that it never did. They created a kind of dissident groupthink that made them odd bedfellows with the mostly heterosexual HIV establishment who also could absolutely not let themselves see the connection between AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome, HHV-6, and ultimately the simmering autism disaster. (The fact that some "Duesbergians" themselves are rumored to have chronic fatigue syndrome is a kind of Big Bird of irony, but that is another story.)
Duesberg got a lot of things right and a lot of things sort of right. He was right when he wrote that "Without going back to check its underlying assumptions, the AIDS establishment will never make sense of its mountain of data." (IAV p.6) He didn't quite get it right when he concluded that "The single flaw that determined the destiny of AIDS research since 1984 was the assumption that AIDS is infectious. After taking this wrong turn scientists had to make bad assumptions upon which they have built a huge artifice of mistaken ideas." (IAV p.6) Duesberg very simply failed to notice the fundamental wrong turn that was made before that wrong turn. He never considered the possibility that if the nosological definition of AIDS itself was wrong, and that the corrected definition just might support the notion of an infectious epidemic and a virus-AIDS hypothesis, just not the mistaken HIV one.
The great thing about Duesberg—for students of what could be called called "homodemiology" or heterosexist epidemiology—is that he criticized the logical absurdity of what I call GRID-think, (i.e. heterosexist groupthink) which is in part the rather superstitious and bigoted notion implicit in HIV epidemiology that viruses know intuitively who gays are so they can choose to infect them and only them. Unfortunately, Duesberg built his own quasi-GRID-think drug-and-lifestyle-paradigm on a similar reality-challenged premise by saying that something non-infectious must explain an epidemic confining itself mainly to a risk group. By pointing out the logical absurdity of a virus limiting itself to one group of people, he opened the way for a more radical critical political rethinking about what was going on in the CDC's epidemiology than he seemed prepared to do himself. He started the job, but "homodemiological" and sociological analysis had to finish it. Blaming lifestyle factors of gays was just another not-very-great correlation fingered as causation, generating an alternative scapegoating epidemiology of blaming the victims for what turned out to be the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe. Unfortunately, Duesberg exposed one wild goose chase and started another one when he wrote, "The only solution is to rethink the basic assumption that AIDS is infectious and is caused by HIV." (IAV p.7) The only solution? Well, not exactly.
Duesberg's book will always be an important source for anyone who wants to understand the evolution of the AIDS mistake, even if Duesberg's own theory turned out to be wrong. Most importantly, Duesberg details just how abnormal and nearly psychotic the whole scientific process of AIDS was and his work supports the argument that something with a totalitarian je ne sais quoi was unfolding in the name of AIDS science.
The very manner in which the HIV was announced in 1984 as the probable cause of AIDS, according to Duesberg's account, was scientifically deviant: "This announcement was made prior to the publication of any scientific evidence confirming the virus theory. With this unprecedented maneuver, Gallo's discovery bypassed review by the scientific community. Science by press conference was substituted for the unconventional process of scientific validation, which is based on publications in the professional literature. The 'AIDS virus' became instant national dogma, and the tremendous weight of federal resources were diverted into just one race—the race to study the AIDS virus . . . . The only questions to be studied from 1984 on were how HIV causes AIDS and what could be done about it." (IAV p.8)
At that point in time, Duesberg noted that "serious doubts are now surfacing about HIV, the so-called AIDS virus . . . . The consensus on the virus hypothesis of AIDS is falling apart, as its opponents grow in number." (IAV p.8) At that moment Duesberg still seemed optimistic, as AIDS seemed to be taking place in the good faith universe of normal science which was open to change and paradigm shift. Unfortunately, because he was blind to the heterosexist sociological issues underpinning AIDS, he was incapable of perceiving the unmovable backstage anti-gay epidemiological values that were controlling the public health agenda and infecting the science. He couldn't see that it wasn't just a matter of the practitioners of this deviant science were digging in professionally; the whole "homodemiological" culture was dug in, which was far more formidable than anything Duesberg could have imagined. The political consensus about the etiological nature of "AIDS" was not a just stone in the road of scientific process. Peter Duesberg had found his way into normal science's opposite world of abnormal and totalitarian "scientific" shenanigans.
As a paradigm that was supposed to capture people's imagination and cause a major shift or Thomas Kuhn type of conversion—or visual gestalt-shift—from one consensus to another, Duesberg's paradigm was nearly dead on arrival. If he had simply taken his stand as a Nobel-worthy dean of retrovirology and just left the cause of AIDS up in the air and concentrated on demolishing the HIV hypothesis once and for all, the HHV-6 catastrophe and the Holocaust II might have been stopped in their tracks.
Duesberg charged that the CDC's paradigm was "ineffective" and that "public fear was being exploited." (IAV p. 9) From his perspective, the public was being told the problem was bigger than it actually was. True, public fear was being shamelessly exploited, but not in the way Duesberg and his ardent followers thought. By framing the epidemic in an anti-gay manner, public fear of gays, society's sexual outsiders, was being manipulated to hide the painful truth about the public's risk of developing a complex form of immunodeficiency or dysfunction. The public was being provided with what Daniel Goleman called "a vital lie." A terrified public, to the great detriment of its future health was getting the reassuring heterosexist pseudo-facts about "AIDS" it wanted to hear with the gay community losing its epidemiological human rights in the process. And again, ironically, Duesberg and the Duesbergians had their own set of heterosexist concoctions that were even more reassuring to the heterosexual general population. And wrong. Both the CDC paradigm and the cockamamie Duesberg paradigm misled a clueless and anxious public.
Duesberg's shock at the nature of what was going on is exactly why a formal theory of abnormal, totalitarian science is required to comprehend and illuminate the AIDS era, just as the concept of totalitarianism was required to understand the Hitler and Stalin eras. Duesberg asks a big, ugly, rhetorical question: "How could a whole new generation of more than a hundred thousand AIDS experts, including medical doctors, virologists, immunologists, cancer researchers, pharmacologists, and epidemiologists—including more than half a dozen Nobel Laureates—be wrong? How could a scientific world that so freely exchanged all information from every corner of this planet have missed an alternative explanation for AIDS?" (IAV p.9) Too bad he didn't ask how the exact same crowd could not see the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic for what it was. Ditto for HHV-6 and its insidious spectrum.
Again, Duesberg's answer to his own question was that AIDS had been misclassified as an infectious illness and his theory rested on the notion that "the premature assumption of contagiousness has many times in the past obstructed free investigation for the treatment and prevention of a non-infectious disease—sometimes for years, at the cost of may thousand of lives." (IAV p.10) Duesberg was setting the terms of the twenty-five year debate between the mainstream AIDS establishment and what became popularly known as the AIDS dissidents, or the Duesbergians. This unfortunate dichotomy set the course for the wrong kind of debate, a contest between HIV and Duesberg's non-infectious drug lifestyle hypothesis, leaving out the possibility that there might be a dynamic infectious agent other than HIV that did indeed fit the causation criteria of a redefined AIDS epidemic. No space was left in the debate for something like a new multisystemic virus such as HHV-6, which was capable of causing an epidemic of a more broadly defined variable disease state. Dueberg asserted that HIV "could be the most harmful of . . . fatal errors in the history of medicine if AIDS proves to be not infectious. " (IAV p.10) Of course, if AIDS was mis-defined and a dynamic viral agent other than HIV was spreading silently and exponentially while the false Duesbergian debate sucked up all of intellectual and scientific oxygen in the debate on AIDS, the harm could have been exponentially worse. And it was.
In order for abnormal, totalitarian science to hold sway over a society for a long period of time, it must have ample cooperation from both the scientific and media communities and the Duesberg story provides evidence that such was the case in AIDS. To explain how the media was continuously kept in its subservient place during the AIDS debacle, he quotes reporter Elinor Burkett of The Miami Herald: "If you have an AIDS beat, you're a beat reporter, your job is every day to go out there, fill your newspaper with what's new about AIDS. You write a story that questions the truth of the central AIDS hypothesis and what happened to me will happen to you. Nobody's going to talk to you. Now if nobody will talk to you, if nobody at the CDC will ever return your phone call, you lose your competitive edge as an AIDS reporter. So it always keeps you in the mainstream, because you need those guys to be your buddies . . . ." (IAV p.388)
Duesberg insists that the very defensive and insular AIDS scientific establishment was determined to "confine the debate to scientific circles." (IAV p.389) He quotes that rather shocking threat from the de facto AIDS Czar, Anthony Fauci, who said, "Journalists who make too many mistakes, or who are sloppy are going to find that their access to scientists may diminish."(IAV p.384) In a totalitarian world of "homodemiology" and abnormal, totalitarin science the definition of "sloppy" will be that which contradicts the powers that be. Question AIDS and you will need to look for a new career. (Given the degree to which AIDS science often looks like a big unmade bed, it's amusing to hear Fauci say the word "sloppy" with a straight face.)
Duesberg also quotes two of the powerful, public-relations-savvy virologists who suggested another tactic for dealing with Duesberg and the critics of the HIV establishment: "One approach would be to refuse television confrontations with Duesberg, as Tony Fauci and one of us managed to do at the opening of the VIIth International conference on AIDS in Florence. One can't spread misinformation without an audience." (IAV p.39) There's nothing in Thomas Kuhn's theories about the process of normal science about deliberately denying one's critics an audience, or denying the public exposure to scientific second and third opinions. It was a new world.
One of the more outrageous moments in his book occurs when Duesberg reports that "Based on an anonymous source, key officials of the United States government specifically engineered a strategy for suppressing the HIV debate in 1987 while Duesberg was still on leave at the N.I.H. The operation began on April 28, less than a month after Duesberg's first paper on the HIV question appeared in Cancer Research, apparently because several journalists and homosexual activists began raising questions." (IAV p.32) A memo about Duesberg's critique of the HIV theory was sent out from a staffer in the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services: "This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy (If this isn't the virus, how do we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything about transmission? How could you all be so stupid, and why should we ever believe you again?) And we need to be prepared to respond. I have already asked N.I.H. public affairs to start digging into this." (IAV p.390) This is an extremely important memo from the point of view of future what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it histories that try to fathom all the government's motivations throughout this scientific and political disaster. It shows how clearly at least one person in the government could see the potential dire consequences for the government of being wrong about HIV. Somebody knew exactly what was stake.
In his book, Duesberg gives a number of examples of the media seeming to have been pressured by the HIV establishment not to cover the story of the controversy. According to Duesberg, "The MacNeil Lehrer News hour sent camera crews to do a major segment on the controversy. But when the . . . broadcast date arrived, the feature had been pulled. Apparently AIDS officials had heard of its imminent airing and had intercepted it." (IAV p.392) Television shows on Duesberg involving Good Morning America on ABC, CNN, Italian television, and Larry King Live met with a similar fate.
According to Duesberg's book, he "appeared on major national television only twice. The first time was on March 28, 1993 on the ABC magazine program Day One. Even in this case, according to the producer, Fauci tried to get the show canceled days before broadcast.' (IAV p.393) When Duesberg was interviewed for Nightline, he ended up only being given a small amount of air time and Fauci showed up and was given the lion's share of the show to make the HIV establishment's case. And Duesberg fared no better overseas. The British medical and public health establishment greeted a pro-Duesberg program with "stern condemnations" and subsequently the British press "turned around and began criticizing the program." (IAV p.323)
One of the most interesting moments of censorship occurred at the highest level of government when "Jim Warner, a Reagan White House advisor critical of AIDS alarmism, heard about Duesberg and arranged a White House debate in January 1988." (IAV p.394) Duesberg writes, "This would have forced the HIV issue into the public spotlight, but it was abruptly canceled days ahead of time, on orders from above." (IAV p.394)
Duesberg didn't fare much better with the print media. He notes that The New York Times had written about him only three times in the first seven years of the controversy and all of it was negative. The same kind of treatment was doled out by The Washington Post and "the San Francisco Chronicle intended to cover the story, until it encountered opposition from scientists in the local AIDS establishment." (IAV p.394 ) Even the countercultural or alternative press could not be counted on to give the controversy balanced or independent-minded coverage. Duesberg reports that "In 1989 Rolling Stone had commissioned a freelance writer from New York to write a Duesberg article, but then canceled it during the interview with Duesberg in his lab." (IAV p.395) Both Harper's and Esquire killed articles that had been commissioned on Duesberg during the same period. The media was essentially acting as an enabler of the culture of abnormal, totalitarian science.
Even more evidence that AIDS was a manifestation of abnormal, totalitarian science can be found in the way that Duesberg experienced censorship and blacklisting from formerly adoring scientific circles and experienced roadblocks to having his ideas and criticisms presented in the professional scientific literature. Duesberg writes that "Robert Gallo and some other scientists began refusing . . . to attend scientific conferences if Duesberg would be allowed to make a presentation." (IAV p.396) During the same period Duesberg rarely was "invited to retrovirus meetings and virtually never to AIDS conferences, despite seminal contributions to the field, including the isolation of the retroviral genome, the first analysis of the order of retroviral genes, and the discovery of the first retroviral cancer gene." (IAV p.396)
Dueberg reports that his scientific papers on AIDS "would constantly run into obstacles at every turn, from hostile peer reviews to reluctant editors."(IAV p.393) The rules mysteriously changed for "the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where Academy members such as Duesberg have an automatic right to publish papers without standard peer review." (IAV p.397) An editor rejected Duesberg's unique and provocative submission by bizarrely saying that it was not "original." And, supporting the case for AIDS research representing the arbitrary make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of abnormal, totalitarian science, a subsequent replacement editor decided tradition had to be completely ignored for this special case and the Duesberg paper had to be peer-reviewed because it was "controversial." (IAV p.397) It took several months of hostile reviewers negotiating with Duesberg before the paper was finally published. According to Duesberg, "Robert Gallo was asked to write a rebuttal, but never did." (IAV p.357) The strategic silent treatment is part of the arsenal of abnormal, totalitarian science.
The punishments for anyone standing up to totalitarian, abnormal science can be severe. Duesberg reports that "the AIDS establishment made its most effective counterattack by going after Duesberg's funding, the lifeblood of any scientist's laboratory. After coming out against the HIV theory, Duesberg was denied continuation of an "N.I.H. Outstanding Grant" by a group of scientists which included two who were proponents of the HIV paradigm and three scientists who never even reviewed the grant. When a review committee considered Duesberg's grant proposal a few months later, "they did . . . complain about Duesberg's questioning attitude as the major obstacle to funding him and singled out AIDS." (IAV p.402) Subsequently, "every one of his seventeen peer-reviewed grant applications to other federal state or private agencies—whether for AIDS research, on AZT and other drugs, or for cancer research—has been turned down." (IAV p.403) Thus did Duesberg come face to face with one of the telltale signs of abnormal and totalitarian science: blacklisting. The long arms of HIV/AIDS politics reached into his life at his university where "Several fellow professors" maneuvered "against Duesberg in various ways. His promotions in pay were "blocked" and he was denied "coveted graduate lecture courses." (IAV p.404)
One of the most dramatic and creepiest abnormal science moments in the Duesberg saga occurred in 1994 when a high-ranking geneticist from the N.I.H. flew to California to present Duesberg with an unpublished paper titled "HIV Causes AIDS: Koch's Postulates Fulfilled." Duesberg was asked to be a third author on a paper he hadn't even collaborated on. The paper had been commissioned by Nature editor and HIV theory proponent, John Maddox. Duesberg was warned by his high-ranking visitor that by continuing his opposition to the HIV theory he "would even risk his credentials for having discovered cancer genes." (IAV p.406) (The willingness to "disappear" the past is another one of the telltale signs of totalitarianism.) The geneticist told Duesberg that if he agreed to be an author on the paper it would "open the doors for Duesberg's reentry into the establishment." (IAV p 406) Duesberg made his polite "no thank you" in the form of an offer to write something for Nature that said the direct opposite of what that proposed unsigned paper posited.
A very thoughtful and philosophical man in many ways, Duesberg sought to understand the recalcitrant system that was making it so difficult for his ideas to be heard and tested, let alone prevail. He blamed it on "command science" which by his analysis, derived its power from three sources in the medical establishment: "(1) enforced consensus through peer review, (2) enforced consensus through commercialization and (3) the fear of disease, particularly infectious disease." (IAV p.452)
Because all serious medical scientists in America need grants from the NIH to survive, they often need to conform to the establishment viewpoint. While the "peer-review system" is supposed to be like an independent jury system, in reality, according to Duesberg, "a truly independent jury system would be fatal to the establishment." (IAV p.452) The result is "the peers serve the orthodoxy by serving their own vested interests." (IAV p.452) Duesberg warned that "as long as a scientist's work is reviewed only by competitors within his own field, peer review will crush genuine science." (IAV p.454)
Ominously for AIDS patients and the myriad victims of the HHV-6 catastrophe, Duesberg concluded that "Through peer review the federal government has attained a near-monopoly on science." (IAV p.454) Abnormal, totalitarian science loves the absolute power of monopolies. HIV became hegemonic because "a handful of federal agencies, primarily the NIH, dominate research policies and effectively dictate the official dogma . . . . By declaring the virus the cause of AIDS at a press conference sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH researcher Robert Gallo swung the entire medical establishment and even the rest of the world, behind his hypothesis. Once such a definitive statement is made, the difficulty of retracting it only increases with time."(IAV p.454)
Duesberg criticized the huge conflict of interest in science that is caused by its commercialization. He argued that the FDA, by essentially banning competing therapies, often helps the pharmaceutical industry develop monopolies. Profits from products approved by the FDA often find their way back to scientists who sat in judgment on fellow scientists "in the form of patent royalties, consultantships, paid board positions, and stock ownership." (IAV p.455) In addition, "in order for a research product to find a market, the underlying hypothesis for the product must be accepted by a majority of the practitioners in the field." (IAV p.455) In the case of AIDS "commercial success can be achieved only by consensus. For example, an AIDS hypothesis would not be approved unless it miraculously cured AIDS overnight." (IAV p.455) Thus Gallo's royalties from an HIV patent as well as William Haseltine and Myron Essex's financial interest in HIV tests indicate that they may not be the most disinterested parties to make important decisions about the direction of AIDS research. And yet they were among the powerful inner circle of AIDS research. No wonder Duesberg often experienced forms of petulance and hostility from such characters rather than open-minded collegiality. In essence, by telling an inconvenient truth he was a threat to their lifestyles.
The third arm of the "command science" which Duesberg discusses goes in the opposite direction of of what was really happening in the HHV-6 catastrophe which Duesberg was tragically blind to. Duesberg writes, "Traditionally, the power of medical science has been based on the fear of disease, particularly infectious disease. The HIV-AIDS establishment has exploited this instrument of power to its limit." (IAV p.456) Once again, Duesberg assumes that an infectious epidemic has essentially been invented out of whole cloth by incompetent epidemiology. His book would have been more accurately titled "Inventing the AIDS Epidemic." Duesberg accuses the CDC of delusional epidemiology driven by opportunism and hysteria. The manipulated paradigm of an infectious AIDS epidemic was used to create a "stampede," to create "irrational" fear in the public, to cynically manipulate, to mislead. And most importantly, from the Duesberg perspective, to build a lucrative new empire for the CDC.
The truth about HHV-6 pandemic turns the Duesbergian thesis on its head. Duesberg sees a devastating, apocalyptic epidemic being cynically and opportunistically imagined, while in reality, it existed big time. Other than HIV not being the cause of AIDS, the other major thing Duesberg fundamentally got right is the undeniable fact that the AIDS establishment was not really doing science as we expect it to be done. Duesberg might even agree with the premise that the science of AIDS was abnormal, totalitarian and even psychotic.
There is one other thing that Duesberg got very right that deserves special mention. Duesberg performed an heroic whistle-blowing act during dark hours of the epidemic: his fearless adoption of a principled stand against the administration of AZT to AIDS patients. In a chapter of his book aptly titled, "With Therapies Like this, Who Needs Disease?", he discussed Azidothymidine, or AZT. About this very toxic drug that was being given to AIDS patients, Duesberg writes, "AZT kills dividing cells anywhere in the body—causing ulcerations and hemorrhaging; damage to hair follicles and skin; killing mitochondria, the energy cells of the brain; wasting away of muscles; and the destruction of the immune system and other cells. . . . Amazingly, AZT was first approved for treatment of AIDS in 1987 and then for prevention of AIDS in 1990." (IAV p.301) Duesberg didn't say it, but he didn't have to. AZT was more of a cruel, sadistic, toxic punishment than a medical treatment for AIDS patients.
AZT beautifully expressed the AIDS zeitgeist. AZT was invented in 1964 to kill cancer tumors, but the drug also effectively killed healthy growing tissues and was shelved without a patent because it was too toxic. Twenty years later scientists reported that it was capable of stopping HIV from replicating. Duesberg had serious doubts about even the basic AIDS research that was done with AZT which suggested that it could be given in small enough doses so that it would kill the virus without also killing the t-cells and other cells in the body. Not surprisingly, given the nature of AIDS science, the research that supported the safety of using AZT could not be subsequently replicated and showed that "the same low concentration [of AZT] that stops HIV also kills cells." (IAV p.313) Like much of the abnormal science of AIDS, if you looked diligently beneath one fraud, you could find yet another.
The person most responsible for foisting this quasi-genocidal toxic drug on AIDS patients was Sam Broder, the man who was Gallo's boss at the National Cancer Institute. He was the man responsible for the original questionable research suggesting that AZT could be given in doses that wouldn't harm patients. AIDS patients would pay a horrifying price for his scientific slovenliness. Duesberg notes, "Broder and his collaborators have never corrected their original reports, nor have they explained the huge discrepancies between their data and other reports." (IAV p.313)
Duesberg's critique of AZT gets even more devastating when he points out that the virus is dormant and therefore the virus "can only attack growing cells" and "like all other chemotherapeutic drugs, is unable to distinguish an HIV-infected cell from one that is uninfected. This has disastrous consequences on AZT-treated people; since only 1 in about 500 t-cells of HIV anti-body positive persons is ever infected, AZT must kill 499 good t-cells to kill just one that is infected by the hypothetical AIDS virus." (IAV p.313) In a sardonic understatement, Duesberg concluded "It is a tragedy for people who already suffer from a t-cell deficiency." (IAV p.314) Needless to say, as time passes, giving people AZT sounds more and more unquestionably like a form of genocidal insanity. Pure "homodemiology" in pill form. For a few who watched in horror as this transpired, it did then, too. Duesberg wrote "A toxic chemotherapy was about to be unleashed on AIDS victims, but no one had the time to think twice about its potential to destroy the immune systems of people who might otherwise survive." (IAV p.314) AZT belonged more in a court room as Exhibit A of a crimes against humanity trial than in the bodies of AIDS patients.
Unfortunately, given the all the surreal terror and hysteria of the time and the prevalent abject mentality of the patients, the gay community and its doctors wanted something—virtually anything—that could (or seemed to) address the problem. But make no mistake about it. There were also financial considerations that helped create the AZT disaster. Burroughs Welcome, the company that owned the patent on the drug, was eager to win approval for the treatment of AIDS by the FDA. Unfortunately for the AIDS patients, Burroughs Welcome's head researcher worked closely and effectively with Sam Broder to get FDA approval.
The process of testing the effectiveness of the drug was also highly questionable. The double blind, placebo controlled studies of AZT on AIDS patients were not exactly double blind and placebo controlled. They were as abnormal as just about everything else in the Kafkaesque world of AIDS science. The list of things that went off the rails in the study was long. The study was stopped prematurely because the positive "results seemed stupendous." (IAV p.316) But as scientists looked more closely at the details of the study it turned out that the AZT trial was just as unreliable as much of the basic laboratory science that had launched AZT in the first place. More placebo patients had died than seemed reasonable. A close look at the study revealed that many of the AZT users had suffered horrific side effects which were downplayed even though they "more than abolished its presumed benefit." (IAV p.317)
When more information surfaced about the AZT trial, it turned out that the controls for the study were a complete mess. It was virtually impossible to conceal which patients were on AZT because in patients on AZT the drug killed bone marrow cells so quickly, that patients would come down with aplastic anemia, a not-hard-to-detect dreadful disease. According to Duesberg, "the patients, needless to say, often found out what they were taking" (IAV p.318) from clues like throwing up blood or changes in their blood counts. That had a grimly ironic effect on the study because those who discovered they were on the placebo, by comparing the tastes of their pills with the pills of those who were actually taking AZT, wanted to take what they had been told was the life saving AZT. It was a heartbreaking sign of the desperation and helplessness of their situation. According to Duesberg, "the patients had bought the early rumors of AZT's incredible healing powers, and they really did not want to take a placebo. Some of the placebo group secretly did use AZT, explaining the presence of its toxic side effects among those patients." (IAV p.318)
Because doctors easily noticed in the so-called "blinded" study that the AZT patients seemed to be doing better than the non-AZT patients, the study was ended early. The study's credibility was in shambles when it turned out that some of the patients on AZT had to be taken off of it because it was so toxic. According to Duesberg, "many of the patients simply could not tolerate AZT, and the physicians had to do something to save their lives." (IAV p.319) And "15 percent of the AZT group disappeared, possibly including patients with the most severe side effects." (IAV p.319) An inspection of documents pertaining to the study obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed a wide array of abnormalities in the study that suggested the study was one of the more notable frauds of the AIDS Era and "Holocaust II."
While the initial results of the AZT study indicated an improvement of t-cells, it turned out that a temporary increase of t-cells did not really indicate that the patients were getting better. And there might have been some improvement of the patients from a broad spectrum antibiotic effect. The only problem was that the drug was also toxically undermining the immune system. It was opposite world science at its best. AZT was in essence becoming another cause of AIDS.
Tragically, even though the study was a scientific train wreck, the FDA approved AZT. The FDA panel that approved AZT included two paid consultants from Burroughs Wellcome. Duesberg notes "the FDA endorsement could seem a cruel joke perpetrated by heartless AIDS scientists. Patients on AZT receive little more than white capsules surrounded by a blue band. But ever time lab researchers order another batch for experimentation they receive a special label . . . A skull-and-crossbones symbol appears on background of bright orange, signifying an unusual chemical hazard." (IAV p.324)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should consider fighting a pandemic that has already happened (but is being covered up).
We had to laugh when we saw this essay about preparing for epidemics that have not happened yet. How is it possible that these rich folks have never gotten the memo about the HHV-6 pandemic in their very midst? Do Bill and Melinda even have a clue about what sociopathic science is or the fact that it has been covering up the truth about HHV-6, AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
Do they realize that when they readily take he calls of Anthony Fauci that they are taking the calls of the Bernie Madoff of sociopathic science?
Historians will look back at these rich well-intentioned folks and wonder why they had their heads in the sand. While they tried to prepare the world for tomorrow's epidemics, why did they let HHV-6 diseases turn into the new normal?
June 18, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
It's time to fire the Bernie Madoff of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome cover-up
November 2, 1984 was an especially tragic day in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/AIDS epidemic. That was the day Anthony Fauci became the Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (NIAID). (Good Intentions p.128) It was the day a thin-skinned, physically ultra-diminutive man with a legendary Napoleonic attitude was positioned by destiny to become the de facto AIDS Czar. In the fog of culpability that constitutes what could be called "Holocaust II" one thing is clear: the HIV/AIDS buck, on its way to the very top of the government, at least pauses at the megalomaniac desk of Anthony Fauci.
In his book, Good Intentions, Bruce Nussbaum writes, "Fauci looked as if he had just stepped out of a limousine. Trim and athletic, Fauci's tailored suits, cuff-linked shirts, and aviator glasses set him far apart from the rest of the scientists and administrators at the NIH." (GI p.128) Fauci had risen quickly at NIH. According to Nussbaum, he began work at NIH in 1968 after his residency and "by 1977 he was deputy clinical director of NIAID." (GI p.128) Nussbaum describes Fauci as "an aggressive administrator," not a "details man," "a big picture kind of guy." (GI p.128) Nussbaum reports that "Fauci saw AIDS as a dreadful disease—and an opportunity for NIAID to grow into a much bigger, more powerful institute. AIDS was his big chance. He wasn't known as a brilliant scientist, and he had little background in managing a big bureaucracy; but Fauci did have ambition and drive to spare. This lackluster scientist was about to find his true vocation—empire building." (GI p.128) Unfortunately, the empire his extreme ambition would build was "Holocaust II." If the mantra during Watergate was "follow the money," the mantra for uncovering the crimes of "Holocaust II" (other than "follow the heterosexism") could be "follow the empire building." And one of the morals of the story is that "lackluster" can have extreme consequences.
According to Nussbaum, in order to make his dreams come true, Fauci had to fight "for a bigger piece of the AIDS research pie" which he succeeded at by getting a sizable amount of the funds that Congress appropriated for AIDS research. (GI p.129) Fauci also had to fight to get AIDS out of the claws of the National Cancer Institute where the virus that was believed to be the cause of AIDS had been discovered (or, more accurately, stolen). Fauci argued that it was his institute's right to take on the lion's share of the research because, although AIDS did involve cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma), it was, after all, an infectious disease. Fauci got his way and his success is reflected in the evolving financial numbers Nussbaum provides: "A growing budget for AIDS research, like a rising tide, lifted Tony Fauci's profile considerably on the NIH campus. In 1982, NIAID received $297,000 in AIDS funding. In 1986 it received $63 million. In 1987, the sum reached $146 million. By 1990, NIAID's annual AIDS funding was pushing half a billion dollars. Tony Fauci's ship had come in." (GI p.132)
Fauci's ship coming in meant the gay community's would be sinking fast. It would fall to Anthony Fauci to be the Enforcer-in-Chief of the homophobic and racist HIV/AIDS and "chronic fatigue syndrome is not AIDS" paradigms of Holocaust II. No one can argue that he didn't do a spectacular job of paradigm enforcement for three dreadful decades.
Starting in the mid 1980s an organization called the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) played a multifaceted role of raising money for HIV research and enlisting celebrities in a glamorous and ultimately shameful HIV propaganda campaign that made the putatively private organization essentially a de facto arm of the government's HIV/AIDS establishment. If one considers the HIV theory of AIDS a Potemkin biomedical village that gays were forced to live in, then amfAR as one of its leading real estate agents. John Lauritsen, in his book, The AIDS War, writes that "[amfAR] was founded as an alternative to the AIDS establishment, to provide funding for research that was not predicated on the 'AIDS virus' hypothesis. It didn't last long. . . . I am not aware that even a penny has ever been given to a researcher who publicly expressed doubts as to the etiological role of HIV or the benefits of the nucleoside analogues." (AW p.437)
In addition to becoming one of the leading private promoters of the government's HIV/AIDS paradigm propaganda, amfAR played a disturbing role in squelching serious scientific criticism of the HIV hypothesis and in helping turn the entire field of AIDS into a world of heterosexist, totalitarian, abnormal science. Lauritsen describes an historically important amfAR moment in the AIDS disaster in his first book Poison by Prescription: "A 'Scientific Forum on the Etiology of AIDS,' sponsored by the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), was held on 9 April 1988 at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the words of the amfAR 'fact sheet', the forum was convened to critically examine the evidence that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or other agents give rise to the disease complex known as AIDS." (PBP p.143)
According to Lauritsen, it was supposedly an opportunity for Peter Duesberg, the University of California at Berkeley retrovirologist who first challenged the HIV theory of AIDS "to confront members of the 'AIDS Establishment' over their hypothesis." (PBP p.143) He reports, however, that "Despite these praiseworthy intentions, the forum appears to have had a hidden agenda; to discredit Duesberg." (PBP p.143) Lauritsen characterized the forum as a "Kangaroo Court." The forum would make great scene in a play about the nasty, zany world of AIDS and HIV pseudoscience. It was anything but an honest, open collegial discussion about the nature of AIDS. Scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn Kuhn would roll over in his grave if anyone called it genuinely scientific. By Kuhn's standards, some of the leading voices at the forum may have even demonstrated that they should not even have been considered real scientists. Politicians, yes, scientists not so much. Even the HIV theory's ardent acolyte, Michael Specter, the reporter from The Washington Post (and future New Yorker writer) who was among the 17 journalists at the Forum, saw through the charade, noting that the meeting "was billed as a scientific forum on the cause of AIDS but was really an attempt to put Duesberg's theories to rest." (PBP p.144) It was more like they wanted to put Duesberg himself permanently to rest.
The meeting had the tone and style that was endemic to HIV/AIDS research and characteristic of abnormal science. Lauritsen reported that "While no blows were struck, some of the HIV protagonists fell below the standards of civility that are expected in scholarly debate . . . . At all times Duesberg retained good manners and a sense of humor, in the face of invective, insults, and clowning from his opponents." (PBP p.144)
One of the signs that AIDS in general was being conducted in the opposite world of what could be called abnormal, totalitarian science was the uncanny willingness of the scientists to abandon the traditional rules of evidence known as Koch's postulates. Instead, AIDS researchers, including the ones at the amfAR forum, were willing to "revise Koch's in a more permissive direction: it would no longer be necessary to find the microbe in all cases of the disease. Mere correlations between microbial antibodies and the progression of the disease would be sufficient. HIV could be proved 'epidemiologically' to be the cause of AIDS." (PBP p.145) Given the unrecognized sexual politics of the science that was operative among this crowd, they were basically saying, without realizing it, that causation could be established "homodemiologically." The presumptions of heterosexist and political epidemiology would trump the traditional rules of evidence. And those rules could basically be summed up as "Heads I win and tails you lose." "You" basically being gays and eventually blacks.
Lauritsen caught the powerful HIV advocates in the act of doublespeak that is common to abnormal, totalitarian science: "Actually, the HIV advocates talked out of both sides of their mouths with regard to Koch's postulates. On the one hand, they disparaged them as in need of 'modification' (read abandonment); on the other hand, they were doing their best to come up with data that would satisfy at least the first postulate." (PBP p.145)
Duesberg's opponents at the forum included a living, breathing example of scientific conflict of interest, William Haseltine, a scientist who was in the process of making a lot of money from HIV testing, and Anthony Fauci, the empire-building Director of NIAID.
At the amfAR Forum, Fauci and others played a curious unfair game with Duesberg. Hypocritically they accused Duesberg of citing research that was out of date even though it was basically the same research quoted at that time by the AIDS establishment. On the other hand, when Duesberg would ask Fauci and others for actual references to support their statements at the amfAR forum, he was "rudely rebuffed," and according to Lauritsen, they tried to shore up their viewpoint about HIV with unpublished data, or "their own private facts." (PBP p.147) "Private facts" not on the public record are another sure sign that AIDS was a manifestation of the opposite world of abnormal science. Unfortunately their private facts about AIDS were also connected to each other by a private scientific logic.
The 800-pound gorilla at the amfAR forum was the fact that evidence of HIV could not be found in all AIDS patients, which should have been strong—damning even—evidence that HIV couldn't possibly be the cause of AIDS, that is, if Kuhnian normal science was being practiced. As scientist Marcel Beluda pointed out at the meeting, "sometimes even a single exception is sufficient to disprove a theory." . . . This is the crux of the matter. The virus cannot be found in all cases of AIDS." (PBP p.151) One could say that still believing that HIV is the cause of AIDS in the face of evidence that it could not be found in all patients is Exhibit A that delusion and denial were running the show.
Fauci's answer belongs in a beginner's textbook on the card tricks of abnormal science: "Fauci responded to Beluda by saying that a good lab was able to isolate the virus in 90-100% of the cases, that there was 'no question about it.' Fauci did not provide a reference to published data, nor did he indicate what the 'good labs' were, or how exactly they differed from the not-so-good labs." (PBP p.151) References belong to the abandoned Kuhnian world of normal science.
Duesberg made a number of arguments, based on his years as one of the celebrated deans of retroviral research, about why HIV could not possibly be the cause of AIDS.
Lauritsen wrote that Fauci's presentation "while aspiring to be a point-by-point rebuttal to Duesberg, consisted mainly of disconnected assertions, delivered in a tone of petulant indignation. Epidemiological studies conducted in San Francisco and unpublished laboratory reports seemed to be the basis of most of his statements. So far as I could tell, he understood none of Duesberg's arguments . . . ." (PBP p.155)
The role of the AIDS politics of epidemiology in AIDS research showed itself dramatically at the forum. According to Lauritsen, "In the question period, Beluda asked if the evidence were sufficient that HIV is necessary for the development of AIDS, Fauci replied that he hoped the epidemiologists would answer that question." (PBP p.157) (Given the political and heterosexist nature of AIDS epidemiology, one could guess how that was going to turn out.)
The most shocking and downright hilarious episode at the forum occurred when Harvard Medical School's William Haseltine spoke. Lauritsen reported that "His presentation was devoted largely to personal attacks on Duesberg." (PBP p.157) Ironically, he accused Duesberg of resorting to personal attacks. In another telltale moment of abnormal science, Lauritsen caught Haseltine trying to explain away the anomalies about the evidence of AIDS in men and women in America: "He attacked Duesberg's 'paradox,' that the AIDS virus seemed to be able to discriminate between boys and girls, by saying that this was not true outside the U.S.—in Africa, about equal numbers of men and women develop AIDS. (He seemed oblivious to the paradox that a microbe should be able to discriminate in one country, but not in another.)" (PBP p.158) In a memorable moment that perfectly captured the essence of the past and future of AIDS research, Haseltine showed the audience a slide of a graph that was meant to absolutely demolish Duesberg's argument. The slide was supposed to show a correlation between the rise in HIV titers with the decline of T cells in the progression of AIDS. There was just one small problem: Duesberg quickly noticed that there were no units on the vertical axis of the slide. Haseltine was angry and flustered by the charge and had to ask Dr. Robert Redfield, an AIDS researcher from the military, how the slide was prepared. At the forum Redfield said "different measurements were used," but later that night at a post-forum party, according to Lauritsen's report, Redfield told Duesberg and other people at the gathering that "the graph had been prepared to illustrate a theoretical possibility. It had no units on it for the simple reason that it was not based on any data at all. In other words the slide was a fake." (PBP p.161) That's the kind of ideology-based data that was used to back up the HIV theory of AIDS which changed the course of millions of lives and fostered the autism catastrophe.
In terms of the habitual use of political epidemiology (or "homodemiology") rather than real science to deal with AIDS during Holocaust II, the most disturbing talk was given by Warren Winkelstein, Professor of Biomedical Environmental Health Sciences at U.C. Berkeley. Essentially, he too suggested that AIDS would require a new kind of science. According to Lauritsen, "the point of Winkelstein's presentation is that Koch's postulates should be superseded by new standards for establishing the causal relationship between microbes and disease, and that these standards should be based upon 'epidemiology' or, as it were, correlations of various kinds." (PBP p.162) If this crowd had superseded traditional science anymore than they did, we all would probably be dead. (But wait. There is still time.)
Most of the scientific world was not aware of the degree to which this zany cast of characters was improvising a questionable newfangled science as they went along. And it was being done in a Fauci-style of "petulant indignation," to reprise Lauritsen's very apt phrase. That it was all dependent on a loosey-goosey, all too subjective political "discipline" like epidemiology should have disturbed Lauritsen's sixteen journalistic colleagues who were at the amfAR affair. But there was already a tragically cozy relationship between the media and the abnormal scientists of Holocaust II. For three decades as the HIV/AIDS paradigm held sway, most of the reporters who covered AIDS were a self-satisfied, inattentive, group-thinking, intellectually slothful bunch who wouldn't know independent, journalistic due diligence if it bit them.
Lauritsen's eyewitness record of the forum (originally published in New York Native) was an important contribution to the history of the flakey beginnings of the science and politics of AIDS. His diligent and critical reporting is proof that not every journalist was hoodwinked by these charlatans. He didn't buy into this new improvised epidemiological science that the AIDS establishment was dumping on the public: "I do not accept the proposition that Koch's postulates should be abandoned in favor of epidemiological correlations. This would be a step backward, a step away from scientific rigor, a step towards impressionism and confusion." (PBP p.162) Lauritsen didn't acknowledge it, but it was also a big heterosexist (and ultimately racist) step backwards.
Like many others, Lauritsen came face to face with totalitarian, abnormal science. Unfortunately, even though he was openly gay himself, he didn't grasp the manner in which the infernal game was being played—or what the game was actually concealing. He didn't fully perceive the homodemiological underpinnings of what was happening before his very eyes. But he definitely grasped the fact that the science of the budding AIDS Establishment was utterly bogus. He concluded his report by writing "I am more convinced than ever that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. If the HIV advocates were sure of their hypothesis, they would want to enlighten Duesberg and the rest of us; they would want to publish their arguments in a proper scientific journal complete with references. They would not need to resort to stonewalling, deception, and personal abuse." (PBP p.168)
The 1988 amfAR Forum was another one of the tragic "What if?" moments in the dark history of AIDS. What if the reporters had looked closer at Haseltine's fake slide and realized that it was the tip of the iceberg, a little like the scientific version of the Watergate break-in that would have led them to a much bigger crime if they only followed the lies? What if they had reported that AIDS science, as practiced by Anthony Fauci, was simply out-to-lunch? What if they had been independent enough to notice that epidemiology was overplaying its arrogant, biased hand and that, in reality, it is actually a soft, subjective enterprise vulnerable to political manipulation? Why was it beyond the pale to wonder if this petulant, hostile gathering was actually the expression of some rather unsavory feelings and hostilities directed at the so-called beneficiaries of this new kind of "science," namely the gay community? Maybe someone should have asked if there was something funky about a group of hostile, petulant, white heterosexual mostly-male scientists performing their jerry-built kind of seat-of-the-pants epidemiological science on gays. Wasn't that a formula for all kinds of prurient, heterosexist pseudoscientific mischief if ever there was one? In terms of majorities doing their science on minorities, hadn't anyone ever heard of Nazi science or the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment? God only knows what personal sexual issues were being acted out by this elite motley crew under the cover of what has turned out to be high-falluting retroviral claptrap. Why didn't anyone other than Lauritsen notice the peculiar, unscientific defensiveness of the whole affair, i.e. that the ladies had protested too much? And most importantly for the main event, why was HHV-6, which had been discovered in AIDS patients two years before that curious amfAR forum, not put on the table for discussion?
Fauci believed in the kind of transparency and communications with the public that are typical of abnormal science. He laid out the draconian media policy that he would maintain for the nearly thirty years he ran the totalitarian HIV/AIDS empire in a brief piece he wrote for the AAAS Observer on September 1, 1989.
Fauci wrote, "When I first got involved in AIDS research, I was reluctant to deal with the press. I thought it was not dignified. But there was a lot of distortion by those who were speaking to the press so I changed my mind." The "distortion" was, of course, coming from those who didn't agree with the very dignified Fauci about the etiology of AIDS. Fauci had his own idea of what the media's responsibility is. He notes that his interpretation of what the media is supposed to do "doesn't even jibe with what competent journalists think." He asserts that the big dilemma for journalists is between what is "important" and what is "newsworthy" and he notes that they sometimes "are not the same." He whines about the fact that journalists are more interested in the latest story of a cure than the "magnificent science" involving the regulatory genes of HIV.
Fauci describes what he thinks is the hierarchy of media. It ranges from The New York Times and The Washington Post all the way down to publications that "care only about sales or have axes to grind." (He had yet to face the unwashed barbarians of the blogs and the commenters of the online forums.) One can safely assume that the publications with axes to grind were the ones who didn't agree with the axe that Fauci himself was grinding.
It is amusing that Fauci pontificated in 1989 that "the media are no place for amateurs, particularly when talking about a public health problem of the magnitude of AIDS." Especially when one considers the magnitude of the public health problem that this very self-reverential scientist (that Bruce Nussbaum described as "lackluster") himself helped create for the whole human race. While Fauci would make one think that the real problem in AIDS journalism was the clownish journalist who can't spell "retrovirus" or one who didn't listen carefully after asking questions, his real quarry in this peevish little piece is something far more serious. Fauci's real problem was journalists who not only could spell "retrovirus" but could also actually hear what he was saying all too well. The kind of journalists who also knew things about retroviruses and listened to what he was saying so closely and critically that they could make life unpleasant for Fauci and his powerful AIDS cronies by asking inconvenient questions.
It is amusing that Fauci pontificated in 1989 that "the media are no place for amateurs, particularly when talking about a public health problem of the magnitude of AIDS." Especially when one considers the magnitude of the public health problem that this very self-reverential scientist (that Bruce Nussbaum described as "lackluster") himself helped create for the whole human race. While Fauci would make one think that the real problem in AIDS journalism was the clownish journalist who can't spell "retrovirus" or one who didn't listen carefully after asking questions, his real quarry in this peevish little piece is something far more serious. Fauci's real problem was journalists who not only could spell "retrovirus" but could also actually hear what he was saying all too well. The kind of journalists who also knew things about retroviruses and listened to what he was saying so closely and critically that they could make life unpleasant for Fauci and his powerful AIDS cronies by asking inconvenient questions.
Fauci's nose should have grown several feet when he wrote, "We know that reporters must consult more than a single source and make room for dissenting opinions." What was yet to come in the AAAS piece made that one of the biggest fibs in the history of American science. Under the pretense of giving us a little lesson in the relationship between science and the media and warning that people too often believe what they read in the papers, Fauci reveals his real agenda: "One striking example is Peter Duesberg's theory that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. I laughed at that for a while, but it led to a lot of public concern that HIV was a hoax. The theory had a great deal of credibility just on the basis of news coverage." This was Fauci being intellectually dishonest on a couple of counts. Duesberg never said it was a hoax. He said it was a mistake. A hoax is a whole other ball of wax, and it is an example of using language politically to deliberately misrepresent the opposition. Duesberg wasn't saying something similar to those who say that the landing on the moon was just staged with props and a camera. He was a Nobel caliber expert on retroviruses pointing out the deficiencies of the HIV theory in AIDS using basic logic and analyzing the available evidence. And blaming the media for the credibility given to Duesberg's ideas ignored all the scientists, (eventually including two Nobel Prize winners), who publicly supported Duesberg's skepticism
Fauci then introduces us to the smarter member of his family, his sister: "My barometer of what the general public is thinking is my sister Denise. My sister Denise is an intelligent woman who reads avidly, listens to the radio, and watches television, but she is not a scientist. When she calls me and questions my integrity as a scientist, there really is a problem. Denise has called me at least ten times about Peter Duesberg. She says, 'Anthony'—she is the only one who calls me Anthony, 'are you sure he's wrong?' That's the power of putting someone on television or in the press, although there is virtually nothing in his argument that makes any scientific sense." This captures how touchy Fauci was. No one was questioning his "integrity as a scientist." His sister was simply asking him if it was possible that he was wrong, and the answer that would have shown some scientific integrity would have been "Yes, my dear Denise, it is always possible that I'm wrong, although I think the evidence suggests I'm right." The fact that Fauci took this soooooo personally speaks volumes about the petulant chip-on-the-shoulder attitude problems of those in charge of AIDS. Fauci put it all on the line. Questioning his so-called science was a threat to his very being. It shouldn't surprise anyone that he was willing to viciously fight for so long during Holocaust II to keep everyone from seeing what a house of cards he had helped build. The funny thing is that in a number of ways this very piece of his writing suggests he did have serious problems in the integrity department. (Between the lines of the piece Freudian historians may one day even find the glimmer of a guilty conscience.)
Fauci, like most of the crowd that gave us "Holocaust II," knew only too well what normal science is supposed to look like: "People are especially confused when they see divergent viewpoints about the same thing. They do not understand that the beauty of science is that it is self-corroborating and self-correcting, that it is important for scientists to be wrong." (If that's really the case Fauci was indeed doing something incredibly important with HIV.) It was actually Fauci who didn't understand that the whole process of self-corroboration and self-correction was being short-circuited by the totalitarian hijinks of the petulant HIV/AIDS establishment that was growing more dominant by the day. The very tone of Fauci's piece, its extraordinary imperiousness and presumptuousness about the stupidity of the public, points to the fundamental problem for a society in which petulant elite scientific communities have more and more power. Fauci would not only be the judge and jury of what was true in science, but he also wanted to decide who deserved to write about it and what they should write. He clearly left no room for the possibility that the really good journalists would be the kind that questioned what he had to say.
Fauci also made it pretty clear in the piece that, try as they might, AIDS critics and dissidents would get absolutely nowhere because he was permanently stacking the deck against them: "The lack of clear-cut black-or-white answers plagues the biomedical sciences compared with the physical sciences. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann said they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. Other scientists tried, but they could not reproduce it. Bingo it's over. But because we cannot ethically do clinical trials to establish that he is wrong, I am probably going to be answering Peter Duesberg for the rest of my life." Someone near him should have tried to convince Fauci that it wasn't all about him. One also loves the presumption that he was going to control the official etiology of AIDS for the rest of his life. Unfortunately he almost has. Beyond the breathtaking megalomania of the statement is the stupidity that the only way to show HIV wasn't the cause of AIDS was to do clinical trials with patients. All it would have taken would have been a few patients with AIDS who had no evidence of HIV. The only people that would be hurt by the implications of that finding would be the scientists, like Fauci, whose undeserved reputations and incomes had depended upon the HIV theory. Those HIV-negative patients would be forthcoming—in spades. In fact those patients were basically the very immune-compromised chronic fatigue syndrome patients Richard DuBois had seen in his Atlanta practice in 1980 before the socio-epidemiological construction of the heterosexist and racist HIV/AIDS paradigm.
Hillary Johnson reported on the DuBois Atlanta cases in Osler's Web Inside the Labyrinth of Chronic FatigueSyndrome Epidemic, her epic work of journalism detailing the CDC's failure to acknowledge the true nature of the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic. It is now all too painfully obvious that the DuBois cases—with the telltale signs of hypergammaglobulinemia, t-cell perturbations and persistent reactivated EBV and CMV infections—were the beginning of the real AIDS/CFS/autism/HHV-6 disaster. According to Johnson, in 1980 Richard DuBois "saw a thirteen-year old girl who suffered from a seemingly endless case of mono. As the months passed, he identified several more cases of the curious syndrome in his practice." (OW p.7) He wasn't alone. According to Johnson he was in touch with other clinicians who had seen similar cases and he and his colleagues eventually had a research article published about it in the Southern Medical Journal in 1984, the same year the big consequential government mistake of certifying HIV as the official AIDS virus occurred. According to Johnson, "they [DuBois and his colleagues] had believed that they were describing a new syndrome, one that would have increasing importance and was worthy of national attention." (OW p.7) The DuBois patients morphed into the millions of chronic fatigue syndrome and HHV-6 patients that Fauci and his organization (which was supposed to handle infectious diseases) were willfully ignoring while building their Potemkin AIDS empire.
At the end of Fauci's little AAAS piece comes the shot across the media's bow from the uberpetulant AIDS czar: "Scientists need to get more sophisticated about expressing themselves. But the media have to do their homework. They have got to learn the issues and the background. And they should realize that their accuracy is noted by the scientific community. Journalists who make too many mistakes, who are sloppy, are going to find that their access to scientists may diminish." In other words, the scientists that journalists reported on were going to be the petulant final arbiters of what the public knows about science. They could decide to cut off journalists they defined as making mistakes and being sloppy, and one would assume that one of those sloppy mistakes would probably entail giving any coverage to scientists like Peter Duesberg, who raised serious questions about what was being called good science by Fauci and the rest of the HIV/AIDS establishment. Fauci was basically saying that he and his cronies would only be accountable to themselves which is the hermetically-sealed, closed-community essence of should be called totalitarian, abnormal science.
If anyone ever makes a serious film about "Holocaust II" it will have to include the shocking revelation that came to light during the Eighth International Conference on AIDS in Amsterdam during July of 1992. Its historic importance rivals that of the Wannsee conference during World War II or the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It was the moment of no turning back, the moment a line was crossed, a life of virtual pseudoscientific crime against humanity was virtually signed onto and those responsible for "Holocaust II" lost all forms of plausible deniability. AIDS almost overnight became AIDSgate and a very unique biomedical assault against humanity. And, ultimately, the man who stood at the center of the developments that came out of Amsterdam was Anthony Fauci. Before Amsterdam one might be able to say that Fauci wasn't exactly the Bernie Madoff of the Ponzi Scheme that maintained AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome and the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe. But not after Amsterdam
Hillary Johnson provided a detailed account of what happened at that Amsterdam conference in her book, Osler'sWeb. She recounts how the conference was electrified by news from a small press conference that was held in California at which a scientist named "Subhir Gupta, a University of California immunologist, reported he had isolated particles of a previously unknown retrovirus from an HIV-negative, ailing sixty-six-year-old woman, her symptomless daughter and six other patients." (OW p.600) According to Johnson, "Investigators and the lay press gathered in Holland were riveted by Gupta's announcement that the older woman suffered from an 'AIDS-like' condition wherein a component of her immune system, a subset of T-cells called CD4 cells, were severely depleted. In addition, she had suffered a bout of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a so-called opportunistic infection that afflicted many AIDS patients whose CD4 cells were depleted." (OW p.600)
That announcement was soon outdone by a flurry of shocking revelations from additional scientists at the Amsterdam conference who had "findings of retrovirus particles in HIV-negative patients with AIDS-like symptoms." (OW p.601) A near panic was almost set off internationally by the possibility that there was a second previously unrecognized AIDS epidemic on the horizon that was caused by a non-HIV agent. (OW p.601)
According to Johnson, it turned out that the Centers for Disease Control was already aware of such HIV-negative cases of an AIDS-like illness. (OW p.601) Johnson reported that months before Gupta's press conference two CDC scientists had reported on "six cases of non-HIV positive AIDS." (OW p.601) Their conclusion was that "HIV may not be the only infectious cause of immune deficiency." (OW p.601)
The HIV-negative cases of AIDS-like illness set off an explosion in the press, most notably from Lawrence Altman, the reporter who guided The New York Times dreadful, sycophantic reporting on AIDS throughout "Holocaust II." In the Times Altman wrote that the CDC's embarrassment was "huge because the agency had lost control over the dissemination of new information in the field of AIDS." (OW p.602) (That anyone at the Times could stress the importance of a government agency controlling information with a straight face is pretty amazing. And revealing)
According to Johnson, the CFS research community was especially fascinated by the fact that the Gupta HIV-negative AIDS-like cases were chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers. (OW p.604) And for anyone following the bizarre scientific politics of AIDS, it was interesting that Gupta's colleague, the man who supposedly isolated the new retrovirus was none other than Zaki Salahuddin, the scientist who had worked for Robert Gallo and had faced criminal charges for creating a company that garnered illegal self-dealt income from his position at the National Cancer Institute. Johnson reported that when Salahuddin was asked whether HIV-negative AIDS might be chronic fatigue syndrome, he said, "It's a fair statement. But I'm not a prophet. Time and money [are] required for this." (OW p.604) Johnson also reported that "Salahuddin confirmed that he and Gupta, who had a cohort of CFS patients in his clinical practice and who had presented papers on the immunology of CFS at medical conferences on the disease, had discussed the possibility that CFS and non-HIV positive AIDS were the same disease." (OW p.604) Also, according to Johnson, the non-HIV positive AIDS cases caught the attention of Paul Cheney, one of the two pioneering Lake Tahoe chronic fatigue syndrome researchers. Johnson reported that "For years he had observed that some CFS patients met the government's defining criteria for AIDS on every count except infection with human immunodeficiency virus." (OW p.604) He also told Johnson that "It was hardly unheard of . . . to diagnose the kinds of opportunistic infections that torment AIDS victims—maladies like thrush, candida and pneumonia—in CFS." (OW p.604)
The AIDS conference in 1992 should have been one of those great moments in normal science as described by Thomas Kuhn. It could have been a moment when "anomalies" should have attracted the "attention of a scientific community." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions p.ix) But this would not be a moment for AIDS research that "the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice" which would "begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science." (SSR p.6) This would not be one of those eureka moments in science characterized by "the community's rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it." (SSR p.6) There would be no "transformation of the world within which science was done." (SSR p.6) There would be no "change in the rules governing the prior practice." (SSR p.7) As a result of what happened in Amsterdam, scientists would not alter their "conception of entities with which [they] had long been familiar." (SSR p.7) Amsterdam would not cause the AIDS researchers' worlds to be "qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory." (SSR p.7) After the revelations of HIV-negative AIDS cases, the researchers would still not give up their "shared paradigm." (SSR p.11) No new AIDS (or chronic fatigue syndrome = AIDS) paradigm was allowed to reveal itself in Amsterdam and subsequently be fairly examined and debated. The HIV-negative cases of AIDS would not be recognized as an important scientific surprise that would lead scientists "to see nature in a different way." (SSR p.53) The scientific world of AIDS researchers did not change "in an instant" (SSR p.56) the way it might have if AIDS research was taking place in the world of normal science. (And consequently, immune-system-destroying HHV-6 would remain locked in the basement of "science.")
Tragically, the HIV-negative AIDS cases were not a wake-up call for the scientists that "something had gone wrong" and hence the anomalous cases were not "a prelude to discovery." (SSR p.57) Even though the HIV-negative AIDS cases "violated deeply entrenched expectations," (SSR p.59) they were not allowed to change anything about the AIDS paradigm. In Kuhn's world of normal science the "traditional pursuit prepares the way for it own change.' (SSR p.65) Amsterdam showed that AIDS research was being conducted in normal science's opposite world,one that should be called "abnormal, totalitarian science." Even if the HIV-negative AIDS cases could have ultimately led to a new paradigm that was "able to account for wider range of natural phenomena," (SSR p.66) they were dead on arrival. No "novel theory" about AIDS which was a "direct response to crisis" (SSR p.75) was allowed to emerge because the abnormal, totalitarian science of AIDS was politically invulnerable to crisis. At that conference there was never any chance that the HIV/AIDS theory would be "declared invalid" even though a new "CFS is a form of AIDS" paradigm was staring out at the conference from the new anomalous data and was a perfectly credible "alternate candidate." (SSR p.77) Kuhn wrote that the decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other." (SSR p.77) The HIV-negative AIDS cases were not allowed to catalyze that kind of intellectual process in Amsterdam. Kuhn would probably argue that absent a new paradigm to examine and accept in Amsterdam, there was no exit from the HIV/AIDS paradigm because "To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself." (SSR p.79) In a way, much of what happened at the AIDS conference was based on appeals to something quite characteristic of the AIDS establishment and abnormal science: authority. The petulant HIV/AIDS authorities basically said "Nothing here, folks. Please move along." And unfortunately the scientific community and the media (with a few notable exceptions) did exactly that. Kuhnian anomaly didn't turn into Kuhnian crisis and that in turn did not explode into Kuhnian scientific revolution as it should have. The HIV-negative cases in Amsterdam should have led to a period of what Kuhn called "extraordinary science" (SSR p.82) in which "the rules of normal science become increasingly blurred." (SSR p.83) (Although one could argue that the rules of AIDS research already actually were a shocking mess.) Amsterdam would not be the moment when "formerly standard solutions of solved problems are called into question." (SSR p.83) The conference should have been a fruitful time when scientists were "terribly confused." (SSR p.84) If things had gone the way they should have at that conference, the assembled AIDS researchers would have ultimately changed their view of "the field, its methods, and its goals." (SSR p.85)HHV-6 might have been allowed to reveal itself in all its viral glory.
Had the science of Amsterdam been normal, both AIDS research and chronic fatigue syndrome research might have morphed into one unified discipline. The dismantling of the "chronic fatigue syndrome isn't AIDS" paradigm should have begun in earnest. HHV-6 (and its spectrum or family) might have emerged quickly as the unifying viral agent(s) of those two epidemics which should have always been considered one in the first place. What happened in Amsterdam was a virtual scientific crime. It was the deliberate attempt to use sheer political force to make a legitimate scientific crisis disappear. As a result, scientists would not turn to what Kuhn describes as a "philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field." (SSR p.88) The crisis was not allowed to play itself out and would not loosen what Kuhn calls the "stereotypes" and provide "the incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift." (SSR p.89) There would be no Kuhnian "transition from normal to extraordinary research." (SSR p.91) It should have been painfully clear in Amsterdam "that an existing paradigm [had] ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way." (SSR p.92)
A potentially life-saving scientific revolution in AIDS research was politically nipped in the bud in Amsterdam and in the months that followed. No "new theory" was allowed to surface that would "permit predictions that are different from those derived from its predecessor" (SSR p.97) Kuhn asserted that "the price of significant scientific advance is a commitment that runs the risk of being wrong."(SSR p.101) Those in control of the abnormal science of AIDS had no interest in engaging in any kind of science that would prove them wrong. "Wrong" was not in their petulant vocabulary. They had bet their white heterosexual malereputations and the credibility of American science on their ridiculous and dangerous HIV/AIDS and "chronic fatigue syndrome is not AIDS" paradigms. Fake dividends of their scientific Ponzi Scheme would be paid out for decades.
What happened in Amsterdam was the opening and almost simultaneously closing of a Pandora's Box of incredibly important scientific questions. The person most responsible for keeping that box closed then and for the next two decades was the de facto AIDS Czar, Anthony Fauci. This may have been the last chance for Fauci and the HIV/AIDS establishment to turn back from the precipice of the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe.
According to Hillary Johnson, "On August 15, federal scientists convened a meeting in Atlanta to discuss the emerging health threat of non-HIV positive AIDS. In the three weeks since Sudhir Gupta's paper on his isolation of a new intracisternal retrovirus in a handful of cases, the number of reported cases had risen from approximately thirty to fifty. Nobel prize winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, CDC's AIDS administrators, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, formed a panel to query scientists Gupta, David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Center in New York and Jeffrey Laurence, a Cornell Medical College cancer and AIDS specialist and associate professor of medicine, each of whom had been studying cases of the syndrome and discovered evidence of retroviral infection in patients." (OW p.606) It didn't matter how many brilliant scientists from different institutions were queried at the meeting, because their mindsets about HIV were all the same. It was like a mini-Woodstock of groupthink. There was no turning back from the HIV/AIDS and "chronic fatigue syndrome isn't AIDS" paradigm. It was eight years old at that point and the nation's heterosexist and racist AIDS propaganda and public health policies had been built around it. It was another moment in abnormal science in which the foxes had formed a panel to investigate the henhouse. The homodemiological and Afrodemiological HIV/AIDS and "CFS is not AIDS" paradigm was in very little real danger.
The manner in which Fauci and his colleagues basically covered up the shocking anomalies of HIV-negative AIDS was relatively simple and Orwellian: they disingenuously gave the HIV-negative cases an obfuscational new name (Idiopathic CD4 T lymphocytopenia or ICL) and they insisted by fiat that they were not really AIDS cases. The HIV/AIDS elite insisted that because there was no unifying geographic or chronological "risk factor" (OW P.603) to be found in these ordinary Americans and they shared no official AIDS risk factors, there was no HIV-negative AIDS or AIDS-like epidemic covertly occurring in the general population.
Because the "chronic fatigue syndrome is not AIDS" paradigm was not challenged by what happened at the Amsterdam Conference in 1992, for at least another two more decades, the chronic fatigue syndrome patients were locked into their pathetic heterosexist wild goose chase to find a cause while constantly avoiding the obvious links between their medical issues and AIDS. They had Tony Fauci's blessing for that fool's errand. His basic attitude toward CFS was that people shouldn't be ashamed of being told that their problem was psychiatric, (OW p.334) which was how the disease was deceptively framed by the government for nearly three decades. And of course they were only the tip of the iceberg. Everyone suffering from multi-systemic problems of the HHV-6 spectrum (like multiple sclerosis, autistic spectrum and even Morgellons patients) would ultimately pay a heavy price for the intellectual dishonesty of the 1992 AIDS conference.
Fauci and his colleagues told the public that the HIV-negative cases of AIDS-like illness were rare, but of course it all depended on deisease definitions and who was doing the defining and counting. Fauci disingenuously sent out a call that summer asking that all HIV-negative cases be reported immediately to him. An editorial in New York Native heeded his call: "Last week Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases asked that all cases of HIV-negative AIDS be reported to him. We reported thirteen million American cases. That's the estimate of the number of cases of chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction, a condition that research (if anyone bothers to read it) suggests is essentially HIV-negative AIDS." (OW p.605)
The editorial had no impact on Anthony Fauci and it would not be the only time he would ignore the New York Native during Holocaust II.
One could ultimately say that Denise Fauci's petulant brother himself represented one of the most significant paradigm shifts, one that moved the whole world from normal to abnormal, totalitarian science. During the Fauci years, The Age of Scientific Racketeering began in earnest.
Please send an email to Dr. Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health.
Francis S. Collins
Director of the National Institutes of Health
9000 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, Maryland 20892
Dear Dr. Collins:
It's time that the public knew about all the diseases HHV-6 is causing in our society. The days of using the fraudulent HIV paradigm of AIDS to cover up the HHV-6 pandemic must come to an end!
You shouldn't try to control panic about HHV-6 by lying to the public.
It's time that the public knew about all the diseases HHV-6 is causing in our society. The days of using the fraudulent HIV paradigm of AIDS to cover up the HHV-6 pandemic must come to an end!
You shouldn't try to control panic about HHV-6 by lying to the public.
I urge you to support the goals of International HHV-6 Protests and Teach-ins that will be taking place at universities all over the world during the next several years.
Those goals include the support of freedom of thought, speech and dissent in science in general and in research of HHV-6-related diseases in particular. HHV-6-releated diseases include so-called "AIDS" and "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," but are by no means limited to them. I also urge you to declare your support of the Harvard Declaration of the HHV-6 Rights of Man.
The Harvard Declaration of the HHV-6 Rights of Man
1. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in AIDS.
2. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
3. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Autism.
4.The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Multiple Sclerosis.
5. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Brain Cancer.
6. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Heart Disease.
7. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalitis.
8. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cognitive Dysfunction.
9. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Drug Hypersensitivity Syndrome.
10. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Bone Marrow Suppression.
11. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Lymphadenopathy.
12. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Colitis.
13. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Endocrine Disorders.
14. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Liver Disease.
15. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
16. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Glioma.
17. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Cervical Cancer.
18. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Hypogammaglobulinemia.
19. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Optic Neuritis.
20. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Microangiopathy.
21. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Mononucleosis.
22. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Uveitis.
23. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.
24. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Rhomboencephalitis.
25. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Limbic Encephalitis.
26. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Encephalomyelitis
27. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pneumonitis.
28. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in GVHD.
29. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Ideopathic Pneumonia.
30. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in Pediatric Adrenocortical Tumors
31. The right not to be lied to about the role of HHV-6 in the reactivation of endogenous retroviruses.
32. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on T-Cells.
33. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on B-Cells
34. The right not to be lied to about the impact of HHV-6 on Epithelial Cells.
35. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Natural Killer Cells.
36. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 on Dendritic Cells.
37. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the brain.
38. The right not to be lied to about the the impact of HHV-6 infection of the liver.
39. The right not to belied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect cytokine production.
40. The right not to be lied to about the ability of HHV-6 to affect Aortic and Heart Microvascular Endothelial cells.
41. The right not to be lied to about the role of an HHV-6 cover-up in a massive HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme that in a number of ways resembles the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and Nazi medicine.
June 17, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
What Every Black Woman Should Know About PrEP (Truvada) and the Scientific Fraud Involving AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
According to a recent report, "the first citywide program to get Black women on PrEP is coming to Washington D.C." We assume the PrEP is Truvada. Before any Black woman takes any toxic treatments for AIDS prevention, it is important for them to research the question of whether the government scientists who have been running the AIDS agenda for over three decades have been practicing what could be called sociopathic science and lying to the American public about AIDS and its relationship to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and a virus called HHV-6.
Anyone familiar with the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment should be very wary of trusting anything that comes out of government institutions like the Centers for Disease Control, which did not end the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment when they were first informed about it.
Anyone who studies the relationship between AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome will quickly discover that in many ways the same kind of racial and sexual politics that inspired the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment are involved in the lies about AIDS which have hoodwinked the public into thinking that AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are not related and that they are not caused by the HHV-6 family of viruses. It is painfully obvious that we are living in a state of CFS/AIDS apartheid in which one epidemic has been politically divided into the gay and black epidemic of AIDS and the white epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. There is a good reason one never hears of a massive Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemic in white and Black gay men. And it also explains why Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a problem that predominately strikes white heterosexuals, especially white heterosexual women.
We will have more to say about this in the future, but every Black woman in Washington D.C. should research the racist nature of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome cover-up before they endanger their lives as a result of the lies coming out of an institution that supported the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. Class action lawyers in Washington should begin to get organized because we predict this will result in the biggest lawsuit in history, one that will make the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment look like a misdemeanor.
To be continued.
June 16, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Why does anybody in AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research trust the sociopathic science of Robert Gallo?
What the world didn't know, of course, is how much Gallo had done to create the image of an obsessed [Chicago Tribune reporter—and chronicler of Robert Gallo's misdeeds—John] Crewdson. Only Crewdson, who recorded the defamation of his character with the same diligence and care that he recorded everything else, knew. He knew it from having to answer when his sons asked why the police were coming to the door at dinner time [after Gallo suggested to police that Crewdson might have broken into his house]. And he knew it from the rumors he kept catalogued in a file at home. Only one of those, he says, truly bothered him, because it reflected on his family. It was that Crewdson had divorced his wife to join a gay commune in San Francisco, and had then "set up housekeeping with his boyfriends" in Bethesda. Though it was unclear if this tale, like the others, had originated with Gallo, Gallo had often tried to label his critics in AIDS as being gay; the story seemed to bear his stamp."I've caused problems for other people in my career," says Crewdson, understating the damage he helped unleash upon the Nixon White House, the FBI and the CIA, all of which were known to retaliate against journalists for less. "But I don't ever remember a government official engaging in a sustained personal attack on me or any other reporter." That Gallo is a physician, sworn to compassion, seems to make the situation all the more unusual. —Barry Werth, "By AIDS Obsessed," GQ, August, 1991"Gallo was certainly committing open and blatant scientific fraud," Sonnabend says. "But the point is not to focus on Gallo. It's us—all of us in the scientific community, we let him get away with it. None of this was hidden. It was all out in the open but nobody would say a word against Gallo. It had a lot to do with patriotism—the idea that this great discovery was made by an American." —Celia Farber, "Fatal Distraction," Spin, June 1992
Robert Gallo was a sine qua non of what should be called "Holocaust II." It is unimaginable without him at the very core of its deadly insanity. He wasn't just a run-of-the-mill scientific villain. He was larger than life, someone you would expect to see in a Batman movie. One where Batman dies. The world owes a great debt of gratitude to John Crewdson, the Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune journalist who mastered the irritating minutiae of retrovirology (and pseudoretrovirology) in order to capture Gallo in all of his exasperating and pathological glory.
In Science Fictions, the under-appreciated book of microscopic reporting, John Crewdson piles up detail after detail of Gallo's career like a skilled novelist, determined to sear Gallo's essence into our consciousness and to leave us in a state of shock about what actually took place behind trusted laboratory doors while people were dying horrific AIDS deaths all over the world. When Crewdson is done with his awesome dissection of Gallo, and we have seen the innards of the world's most amazing pathological liar laid out on the autopsy table, no reasonable observer should take anything Gallo said about AIDS seriously. Yet Crewdson himself seems to have ultimately had no qualms about leaving Gallo's theory of HIV-causes-AIDS standing totally hegemonic and unchallenged amid all the shocking evidence of Gallo's chronic perfidiousness. It's a real puzzlement.
According to Crewdson, the early career of Robert C. Gallo, the world's most famous AIDS researcher at the National Cancer Institute, got off to a precocious start as a lab chief at the age of twenty-seven. But it was subsequently unsuccessful and frustrated until Gallo accomplished what appeared to some scientists at the time to have been his first viral theft. That may have involved stealing credit from the Japanese who discovered a virus named ATLV by renaming the same virus HTLV. Regardless of whether Gallo did steal credit for that virus, the questionable fog of its discovery certainly fit the funky pattern of what occurred in his lab during the 1980s when Gallo sank his teeth into the search for the cause of AIDS. And even beyond that. Crewdson establishes early in his lengthy book that Gallo is a man of great manipulative schtick. Gallo's mythological song and dance about himself and his origins is a somewhat revealing Dickensian story about the source of his professional drive and his great destiny: Crewdson writes, "In newspaper and magazine articles, Gallo's single-mindedness was frequently attributed to the death of his five-year old sister, Judith from childhood leukemia, an event Gallo recalled as the most traumatic of his young life, and which had transformed the Gallo household into a grim and joyless place without music or laughter where Thanksgiving and Christmas was no longer observed." (SF p.15) How could anyone question a man of such noble motives? (Actually, how could anyone not?)
In Science Fictions, Crewdson presents a Gallo who is a loud, crass braggart who people either loved in a toadying manner or, if they were streetwise, considered him to be what one scientist once described as a "black hole" that destroyed everything in its vicinity. Crewdson describes a period of early disgrace at the NCI during which Gallo had supposedly discovered the first evidence of reverse transcriptase "in human leukemia cells" which subsequently turned out to be irreproducible when another scientist tried to replicate the finding. (SF p.14) Bad luck struck again when Gallo was celebrated on the front page of The Washington Post only to have his discovery, a virus called HL23, undermined by one of his enemies who proved that what Gallo had was not a human retrovirus "but a melange of three animal viruses—a woolly monkey virus, a gibbon ape virus and a baboon virus—jumbled together in a retroviral cocktail." (SF p. 19) A humiliating retraction was made subsequently in Nature. Unfortunately, this kind of failure in the life of a character like Gallo only made the man more determined to vindicate himself at all costs as a great scientist. The whole world would pay a terrible price for his extraordinary determination.
There is something about Robert Gallo—if you've ever met him in person or seen him on television or talked to him on the phone—that makes you wonder what planet or species he is from. Crewdson captures his uncanny strangeness when he notes that, "Gallo's conversations often sounded as though a tape recording were being played back at faster than normal speed, and his syntax frequently lent the impression of someone whose first language was not English." (SF p.19) By the time Crewdson is done with him 600 pages later, one is convinced that Gallo's first language is falsehood.
Crewdson presents Gallo's lab in its early days as a place where things were always mysteriously going wrong. It wasn't just that the scientific findings the lab produced couldn't be replicated, but there were also odd break-ins and very peculiar acts of sabotage. But the best was yet to come.
Unfortunately, as Gallo's desperation for a big discovery grew, so had the budget of the National Cancer Institute as the nation committed itself to the desperate hunt for the viral origins of cancer. Richard Nixon cancer initiative was the wind beneath Gallo's wings. However, things got off to a disappointing start for many years and, in a moment of political bad timing, Gallo's HL23 scientific embarrassment happened shortly after there had already been numerous viral dead ends at NCI and the whole program was losing its luster and in real jeopardy of being cut back.
That the HL23 virus turned out to be a laboratory contaminant rather than a new virus after it had been touted in the press, even before its publication in a scientific journal became a familiar pattern in Gallo's scientific lifestyle (and may have been adopted by some of his underlings). Also to be repeated throughout his career was his inability to admit he was wrong about this HL23 until it couldn't seriously be denied. (SF p.19) The fact that the contaminant looked like it had to have been a deliberate act of sabotage by somebody suggested that even darker things were going on at the National Cancer Institute around Gallo, things that even super sleuth John Crewdson may have been unable to nail down. This dark possibility of an even bigger missed story is a cloud that hovers over all the events in the Crewdson's narrative.
According to Crewdson, the only reason that Gallo's career didn't go down the tubes over the HL23 debacle was because he had a protector at NCI, his boss Vincent DeVita, someone who would come to Gallo's rescue more than once during his troubled tenure at the Institute. (SF p.20) According to Crewdson, DeVita was one of a number of people who held the opinion that Gallo was basically a genius who was also a handful. This was a tragic flaw in DeVita's judgment that would have terrible consequences for the legacy of American biomedical science and the health of every person on this planet.
Crewdson portrays Gallo as a man obsessed with winning a Nobel Prize (SF p.20) He was ready to do whatever needed to be done and to elbow out everyone who got in his way. He had no qualms about cheating his subordinates out of appropriate credit for their (sometimes questionable) discoveries. He was also happy to reward achievement of subordinates by unceremoniously getting rid of them when they threatened to outshine him. (SF p.23) Gallo's bizarre, paranoid laboratory was the object of suspicion from other scientific quarters. When his lab supposedly discovered HTLV, Gallo refused to let samples of that virus leave his lab and Crewdson quotes a colleague of Gallo's as saying there was "a feeling around the N.I.H. that there was something, ah, wrong with HTLV." (SF p.31) Gallo may have realized early in his career that if you didn't want people to find anything wrong with your work the best thing to do is to not share your viruses—or anything else—with them.
The funny thing about Gallo, surely one of the most paranoid people to ever call himself a scientist, is that he was always accusing others of paranoia and baseless suspicion—toward him and his eminently questionable motives. When it seemed to some scientists that Gallo's lab had switched the Japanese virus, ATLV, with the Gallo lab's supposed version of the same virus (the soon-to-be celebrated HTLV), he argued that it was paranoid for anyone to even dare to think that way. (SF p.32) For Gallo, there was always something structurally wrong with the brains of the people who witnessed his crimes. They were always crazy, and he was always sane. You could say that Gallo was from the blame the victim school of scientific fraud.
Adding insult to injury, after what looked like a viral theft of ATLV from the Japanese, he barely gave them any credit at all for their research into the very virus his lab seems to have taken advantage of. And he mocked the work of the Japanese on ATLV several times (SF p.36) The Crewdson picture of Gallo throughout the book is of a man with absolutely no shame.
Two of Gallo's subordinates, the so-called hands-on discoverers of the suspiciously discovered HTLV, Bernard Poiesz and Francis Ruscetti, got the usual treatment that putatively successful people (or co-virus-lifters) got in Gallo's lab. Ruscetti went on "the endangered list" and was never cited in the award Gallo was given for the discovery of HTLV. Poiesz was betrayed by Gallo in the form of receiving a lukewarm endorsement from Gallo when he applied for a grant. Crewdson quotes Poiesz as saying about Gallo's credit-grab for the discovery of HTLV that it was "like saying that Queen Isabella discovered America after Columbus came home told her about it." (SF p.37)
Unfortunately, in terms of the world's biomedical safety, Gallo was in the wrong place at the wrong time when AIDS occurred and initially he had the wrong virus at the ready: HTLV, of course, because that's what he was working on. Just the adoption of the idea that HTLV might be the cause of AIDS (an idea supposedly given to Gallo by others) was patently absurd and raises questions about Gallo's scientific judgment. It may have been purely driven by the prurient fact that the Japanese, according to Crewdson, "had shown that HTLV was transmitted by sexual intercourse." (SF p.39) The fact that the CDC had given him a gay-obsessed and sexual epidemiological paradigm to work with didn't help matters. One feels a sense of dread at the prospect of Gallo getting involved in anything with a sexual angle when Crewdson quotes the CDC's Cy Cabradillo talking about Gallo: "He [Gallo] didn't seem that interested. . . . I don't think he wanted to get involved with a gay disease. What turned him around was Max [Essex]." (SF p. 41) One almost wishes that Gallo's homophobia or gay-antipathy had been even more pronounced and that Essex had weaker powers of persuasion and that Gallo had blown off requests to get involved in AIDS. It would have saved the gay community and the rest of the world from decades of grief. (And one in fifty or so kids right now might not be on the HHV-6/autism spectrum.)
What was so intellectually challenged about Gallo's notion that HTLV could even remotely be the cause of AIDS was the fact that, as most retrovirologists knew, "quite apart from killing T-cells," HTLV "transformed them into leukemic cells." (SF p.44) But that didn't stop Gallo once it became his idée fixe. Gallo was always light-years ahead of his data—imaginary and real.
While Gallo was promoting the silly notion that HTLV was the cause of AIDS, French researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered a retrovirus they called "LAV" in the lymph nodes of AIDS patients. Gallo pulled off one of his many fast ones when he offered to submit Pasteur's LAV paper on the discovery to Science. When they took him up on the offer, he noticed the Pasteur scientists had failed to write an abstract, in a moment of fake generosity he called Luc Montagnier and said he would be willing to write the abstract (SF p.56) One should always beware of Gallos bearing gifts. According to Crewdson, "To his everlasting regret, Montagnier agreed." (SF p.56) What Crewdson described at this early point in his account of Gallo is so egregiously crooked that it boggles the mind that anyone subsequently ever took at face value any of the science that came out of that NCI den of biomedical iniquity. Gallo completely distorted the meaning of the Pasteur paper in the abstract he concocted, an intellectual act of dishonesty so in-your-face that it takes one's breath away. In the true spirit of the opposite world of abnormal science, Gallo twisted the whole meaning of the Pasteur paper to point towards his own birdbrained notion that their AIDS related virus was actually HTLV. According to Crewdson, "As summarized by Gallo . . . the French manuscript appeared to be reporting, if not the isolation of HTLV itself, then a very closely related virus." (SF p.56) And to add humor to injury, Gallo ran the abstract by the French on the phone, reading it so quickly that, according to Crewdson, they didn't even understand it. It didn't stop there. Robert Gallo also altered some of the text of the French paper, again in the direction of making it sound like the French retrovirus was from the same viral family as his own misguided HTLV. Montagnier had deliberately called it a "lymphotrophic virus" to make sure it was not confused with the members of the HTLV family. Montagnier criticized Gallo's obsession with HTLV, insisting "Gallo didn't believe there could be more than one kind of human retrovirus. He was fully convinced that HTLV was the right one, that there was only one human retrovirus involved in AIDS." (SF p.57) As was typical in the self-dealing abnormal, totalitarian science of AIDS, the reviewer for the paper turned out to be the paper's re-writer himself, Robert Gallo. Not surprisingly, he gave the French paper that he himself altered "his enthusiastic endorsement." (SF p.57) And for good measure he basically misled again in his letter to Science with the paper, telling the editor that Montagnier agreed with it all. (SF p.57)
Curiously, in terms of the underlying HHV-6 truth about AIDS, Crewdson notes the fact that at that point Gallo's boss, Vince DeVita, thought that HTLV, the virus Gallo was pushing, was actually a passenger virus.
Gallo's HTLV baloney gained credibility when his Harvard pal, Myron Essex, published a very questionable report that "between a quarter and a third of the AIDS patients he tested had antibodies to HTLV." (SF p.58) The publication made Essex an instant millionaire the day after its publication because Essex owned stock in a company that manufactured tests for HTLV, the virus that ultimately would turn out to have nothing to do with AIDS. (SF p.58) He wasn't the only one to get rich peddling bogus science during Holocaust II.
What could have been a cautionary note about the herd-of-sheep psyche of the abnormal, totalitarian world of AIDS research in general can be found in Crewdson's amusing passage about other scientists' ostrich-like inattention to the total lack of logic in blaming a leukemia causing virus for a disease that involved the killing of t-cells. Instead of questioning Gallo and Essex's bizarre HTLV logic, according to Crewdson, potential critics and people who should have known better doubted themselves. He quotes one of the deferential self-doubters: " 'I didn't consider myself capable of questioning Max Essex,' one researcher recalled. 'Max Essex was a person at Harvard. That meant that Max Essex would probably be right. The likelihood that he needed me to re-evaluate his data was zero.' " (SF p.59) This was Myron "FOCMA" Essex he was talking about. In the abnormal scientific community of AIDS research your data wasn't the issue. The school you were associated with was all that mattered. (If historians ever wake up and there is any justice in the world, one day, thanks to Essex, the word "Harvard" will be a metaphor for scientific fraud. Maybe one day it will be even used as a verb, as in "to Harvard the data" or "to Harvard the books.")
Much like Gallo, Essex always had a reason why he was always right and others were always wrong. According to Crewdson, "asked why if [HTLV] was the cause of AIDS, he had only found antibodies in fewer than half the AIDS patients he tested, Essex replied that his test probably wasn't sensitive enough." (SF p.59) When Gallo was asked the same question about his own study that found HTLV in only four of three dozen AIDS patients Crewdson notes that "Gallo suggested that the virus was difficult to find when the number of remaining T-cells was small." (SF p.59) And Crewdson reports that Gallo even had a Galloesque answer for why there was virtually no AIDS in Japan where there was a great deal of HTLV: "Gallo replied that AIDS simply hadn't been noticed in Japan or maybe the Japanese responded differently to HTLV than Africans or Americans." (SF p.59) Anyone who lived through the early days of what was called "AIDS" knows that it was kind of hard not to notice.
Gallo's prestidigitations were very successful at making the media and the public think the French researchers were barking up the same HTLV retroviral tree he was. He highhandedly went so far as to suggest the French should actually stop working on their virus if it wasn't the same as HTLV. And Gallo did everything he could do to encourage other scientists not to take the French discovery seriously. Crewdson artfully captures Gallo constantly talking out of both sides of mouth about the relationship—or lack of one—between the French virus and his beloved HTLV. Crewdson reports that Gallo's own staff had in fact done the necessary research to determine that they were different viruses and according to Crewdson, "Whatever Gallo was saying in public, in private he agreed with his staff." (SF p.63) One could always count on there being two sets of books in the abnormal science of AIDS, especially in Gallo's laboratory.
The French were in a vulnerable position where Gallo was concerned because, according to Crewdson, they were afraid that he might cut off their access to scientific publication. (SF p.71) Gallo was a serious power broker in the world of science and that certainly should have been more of a warning sign to the scientific community that the very essence of AIDS science was mired in hardball politics. Gallo even had enough power to be able to threaten the Centers for Disease Control. When the CDC dared to complain that Gallo was not sharing his HTLV probes, according to Crewdson, Gallo sniffily threatened to not cooperate with the organization. (SF p.74) "There was a fight," one scientist told Crewdson, "between the CDC and Gallo over who was supposed to be gathering data from research. Gallo felt they should be gathering data, and he should be doing the science." (SF p.74) Whatever that means. Gallo didn't realize what a perfect match his kind of virology actually made for the CDC's kind of epidemiology. Scientifically speaking, it was like the mafia families of two major cities joining forces.
One crossed Gallo at one's great peril. According to Crewdson, when a scientist named David Purtillo began to finds serious evidence that not a single AIDS patient in his study was positive for HTLV, he found that Science magazine "wasn't interested in undercutting its high-visibility articles." (SF p.75) When Joseph Sonnabend, a New York AIDS doctor who was the first editor of AIDS Research, a small journal, dared to publish the Gallo-challenging Purtillo findings, according to Crewdson, "the publisher of AIDS Research replaced Sonnabend with [Gallo crony] Dani Bolognesi, who promptly installed Gallo on the journal's editorial board." (SF p.75) That's how scientific publishing worked during "Holocaust II." You scratch my back and I'll destroy your enemies.
As evidence piled up showing that the French had found the so-called AIDS retrovirus, Gallo imperiously dug in his heels for his HTLV. So did his Harvard pal Myron Essex who had spent his formative years with his buddy Gallo just trying to convince the scientific community that retroviruses do really cause cancer. Together they did their best to dampen the world's enthusiasm for the French virus as the probable cause of AIDS. It was one of the great examples of teamwork in science.
Gallo saw his HTLV dream start to fade when Montagnier showed up at a scientific meeting that was focused on Gallo's own candidate for AIDS virus. Montagnier presented evidence that patients who were positive for the French retrovirus were not positive for Gallo's HTLV. (SF p.81) And even worse, according to Crewdson, he "pointed out the similarities between LAV and the Equine Infectious Anemia Virus rather than HTLV." (SF p.81) And most threatening of all to Gallo's dreams of a Nobel Prize was the fact that Montagnier had found LAV in "63 percent of pre-AIDS patients and 20 percent of those with AIDS but less than 2 percent of the general population." (SF p.81) At the meeting at which Montagnier made his dramatic presentation, Crewdson wrote that Gallo did his best to cast aspersions on the research, bizarrely "questioning the reality of the reverse transcriptase activity." (SF p.81) According to one scientist at the meeting who is quoted by Crewdson, "[Gallo] insulted Montagnier. It was a disgusting display, absolutely disgusting. He told him it was terrible science, that there was no way it could be true. He ranted and raved for eight or ten minutes." (SF p.81) And of course, while Gallo was publicly humiliating Montagnier, privately he was asking for more samples of the French virus. (SF p.81)
The French discovery made it clear that Gallo had led the whole scientific community into a retroviral cul-de-sac, but at a later conference in Paris, he was at it again, playing the same tiresome duplicitous game, pushing bogus HTLV while evidence was clearly accumulating against it. Gallo could feign and bully like nobody else in the history of science. One scientist described to Crewdson a fight Gallo had with Montagnier: " . . . during that fight one had the impression Montagnier was a little boy and Gallo was a genius. Because Montagnier didn't argue well." (SF p.87) Gallo wore his opposition down with over-the-top verbal displays.
Gallo changed gears from the deadender HTLV to a virus that he could get away with calling the cause of AIDS the old fashioned way: he stole it. The complicated manner in which that was obfuscated and outrageously covered up makes up the main investigative feast in Crewdson's book. Gallo's decade of gymnastic AIDS mendacities might have been lost to history without the laser vision and crystal clear exposition of John Crewdson. If not for New York Native and John "Javert" Crewdson, Gallo would have gotten away with murder. Make that "genocide."
Even when Gallo's lab was pursuing a new virus like the one the French had, Gallo kept up the public pretense that HTLV was the very best candidate for the cause of AIDS. His laboratory was secretly and frantically playing a game of catch-up with the French. They had received samples of the French virus and were not honest about what they were doing with them. Gallo's subordinates privately confirmed that the French virus could be found in AIDS patients, but it would never be admitted publicly. Adding insult to deception, because Gallo had so polluted the scientific community with his stubborn, delusional notion that HTLV had to be the only possible cause, the French had trouble getting their growing body of research on LAV published. Science turned down an important paper that made it clear once and for all that the French LAV was not the Gallo HTLV. (SF p. 98) Gallo was dismissing their discovery with one hand and appropriating it with the other.
At a conference in Park City, Utah in late 1983, Gallo played his familiar game of asking disingenuous and disparaging questions publicly after a Pasteur presentation on LAV. Meanwhile, Gallo ignored doubts about his own HTLV by scientists like Jay Levy, "who wanted to know why, if HTLV caused AIDS, AIDS patients didn't have T-cell leukemia." (SF p.99) According to Crewdson, the obdurate Dr.Gallo insisted to Levy that "HTLV itself . . . could still cause AIDS." (SF p.99)
Luckily for the French, scientists at the CDC, home of the "impeccable" original AIDS nosology and epidemiology, had growing doubts themselves about HTLV, and even Myron Essex's old protege, AIDS researcher and retrovirus aficionado, Donald Francis, was ready to jump ship. Crewdson captures one of many ironic moments in Holocaust II when he quotes Francis as saying, "It had become clear . . . that we had made a very big mistake." (SF p.100) Unfortunately, Francis didn't have a clue that he and his associates at the CDC and NIH were about to make an exponentially even bigger virological mistake that would threaten the whole world's health.
Thanks to the fact that his staff was working with the retrovirus foolishly supplied by the gullible French scientists, Gallo was finally seeing some interesting numbers of AIDS patients testing positive—and given what he was working with why wouldn't he? After he developed his own blood test for his purloined retrovirus, the CDC tried to determine if the French or Gallo had the best test for detecting an AIDS case. The Pasteur test did slightly better in a competition between the two country's tests and lest things be done on the up and up, according to Crewdson, Gallo wanted the CDC to alter the results so as to reflect a better score for Gallo's version of the test—another typical moment in the abnormal science of Holocaust II. To his eternal discredit, Jim Curran, the top AIDS researcher at the CDC, actually agreed to Gallo's ridiculous request to alter the results. To do otherwise would have been to commit normal science. Giving Gallo that unholy advantage was just one more enabling act that helped Gallo become the top spokesman for the infernal HIV/AIDS paradigm throughout "Holocaust II."
The minute that the CDC gave Gallo the word that his test for the so-called AIDS retrovirus was as good as the Pasteur one (or sort of as good), Gallo went into extreme Gallo mode, crowing to the world about his supposed achievement, and even more charmingly, according to Crewdson, he began "denigrating the work in Paris." (SF p.109) He told people he was "far ahead of the French." (SF p.109)
Gallo subsequently submitted data on his retroviral "discovery" in four papers to Science. The papers never said where the virus actually came from because they didn't dare. Mika Popovic, the unlucky scientist in Gallo's lab who did most of the bench work on the virus Gallo stole, watched as his manuscripts about the so-called discovery of the AIDS virus were methodically altered by Gallo. According to Crewdson, "entire sentences, even whole paragraphs had been excised, replaced with Gallo's scrawled additions. Crossed out altogether was the paragraph in which Popovic acknowledged the Pasteur's discovery of LAV and explained here that the French virus was 'described here' as HTLV-3." (SF p.111) From the scientific documents that would change the world forever, Gallo had taken out any acknowledgement of the Pasteur discovery. (SF p.111) In one of the most notorious notations of Gallo's whole wackadoodle career, next to a passage in which Popovic wrote something about LAV, Gallo scribbled, "Mika, are you crazy?" (SF p.111) (Screamed the pot to the kettle.)
One of the most important of the four seminal Science papers contained the egregious falsehood that Gallo's virus, which he called HTLV-3, had been isolated from 48 patients. Gallo also made sure, according to Crewdson, that the only reference to the French virus in the paper "sounded as though the French had the wrong virus." (SF p.111) Even though Gallo had basically used LAV to "discover" HTLV-3, he kept disingenuously insisting that LAV and HTLV-3 were different viruses. And even though the French had provided Gallo with LAV, and Gallo's staff knew all too well that they were not different in the least, Gallo lied to the French when they asked why he had not compared HTLV-3 to LAV and reported on it in the seminal science papers. One of Gallo's biggest lies to the French was "that Popovic hadn't been able to grow enough LAV to make comparisons." (SF p.118)
As Gallo was preparing to present the world premiere of the so-called virus that causes AIDS he at first offered to include the French in the announcement to the world about the "discovery" of the virus and to cut the CDC—which had also played a role in the process—out of the deal. He then turned around and offered to make the announcement with the CDC and cut the French out of the deal. (SF p.119) Polyamory in the Gallo universe consisted of everyone having a chance to screw other people with Gallo before they themselves got screwed.
A sign of Gallo's enormous power in the intellectually challenged world of abnormal, totalitarian AIDS science was the fact that his "manuscripts were accepted by Science nineteen days after their submission." (SF p.123) A suggestion from Science that four papers were too many got the Gallo threat that he could easily take his papers elsewhere. (SF p.123) The original papers had needed pictures of the virus that Gallo had supposedly discovered, and Gallo had them: they were pictures of the French virus relabeled as Gallo's HTLV-3. At least Gallo was consistent.
Crewdson's book doesn't just focus on the fact that Gallo's historic AIDS papers in Science were full of purloined credit he didn't deserve. In terms of the thesis that much of AIDS science was the work of pseudoscientific sloppiness, it is important to point out that Crewdson also wrote that "An astute reader might have noticed that Gallo's condition for labeling a virus HTLV-3 were so ambiguous that nearly any retrovirus, animal, or human, would have qualified." (SF p.124) In the opposite world of abnormal science here are no rules to keep science from becoming a big Alice-in-Wonderland mess. About the original papers Crewdson said something that only increased the irony and tragedy of Crewdson ultimately himself accepting the HIV/AIDS paradigm: ". . . a perceptive reviewer might even have questioned Gallo's claim to have found the presumptive cause of AIDS." (SF p.124) (If only Crewdson had jumped in for the sake of the whole world and done with his acute journalistic skills what a perceptive reviewer should have done. Two frauds were passing in the night.)
A strange incident that occurred just prior to the publication of the big four papers in Science, one that captures Gallo in all his zany treacherousness. Gallo had voluntarily given a European reporter copies of his forthcoming Science papers, and when the reporter published a story about them—under the reasonable impression that he wasn't breaking any embargo—Gallo accused the reporter "of having stolen the four Science manuscripts from his office while Gallo's back was turned." (SF p.126)
The theft of the French virus was not just a theft of credit from the French. It was also a theft of money in the form of lost royalties for the tests that would be developed from the purloined virus thought to be the cause of AIDS. Gallo's lab had essentially pulled off an unarmed scientific robbery; the French were destined by Gallo's shenanigans to lose millions of dollars. The matter was made even ethically worse (if one believed the virus actually was the true cause of AIDS) by the fact that the test Gallo's people developed using the stolen virus was inferior to the test developed by the Pasteur Institute. (SF p.128)
As previously noted, some in the American government knew from the start that Gallo was pulling off a scientific heist. On the eve of the announcement by HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler, NIH Director Ed Brant received a phone call from James Curran and Donald Francis of the CDC warning him "that Heckler was about to make a huge mistake: the French, not Gallo, had been the first to find the cause of AIDS." (SF p.130) Unfortunately, the duplicitous train had left the station and the American government's scientific establishment was about to apply several layers of egg to its face. (And that didn't even involve the fact that the stolen, supposedly exogenous, retrovirus wasn't even the cause of AIDS.) During the April 23, 1984 announcement debacle Gallo even went out of his way to make sure that absolutely no credit was given to the French for their role in the discovery. As if it wasn't absurd enough that the Secretary of HHS was celebrating a stolen discovery, she also confidently announced "We hope to have . . . a vaccine ready for testing in about two years." (SF p. 135) She seems to have been off by, well, like forever.
The credulous media fell for the Gallo scam, generally downplaying the French contribution and the Pasteur scientists were appropriately apoplectic. Predictably, Gallo, according to Crewdson, "set about expunging the evidence that he had spent two years chasing the wrong virus. (SF p.144). Not only could Gallo do viral theft, but he was also one of science's greatest expungers and time travelers. He rewrote the remarks he had given at past scientific conferences to make it look like he was on the trail of the AIDS virus (which he called HTLV-3) all along when in actuality he had aggressively been pushing the lost cause, HTLV. In abnormal, totalitarian science the past is carved in sand.
After Gallo's big splash in Science, he often bragged about things that were not even in the papers, findings that had actually never even been accomplished in his lab. He also violated one of the collegial rules of science by refusing to share his viruses or cell lines with other scientists unless they agreed to certain bizarre and highly suspect preconditions. (SF p.149) According to Crewdson, for some scientists "Gallo tried to impose conditions on which experiments they could perform and which they could not." (SF p.149) Gallo forced one scientist to sign an agreement not to compare Gallo's virus to other viruses. (SF p.150) One either played by the rules of abnormal, totalitarian science or one did not play at all. Gallo wanted to control what people said about his virus and who they shared it with. He knew what was at stake if the truth ever came out.
Even the powerful Centers for Disease Control could not get Gallo to cooperate by sharing his cell lines. When noises started to be made in Paris and down in Atlanta at the CDC that Gallo had not really discovered the "AIDS retrovirus," Gallo went grandiosely ballistic, saying strange things like "We started the field. We predicted AIDS." (SF p.153) He accused anyone who tried to tell the truth about the matter of spreading "plot and innuendo." (SF p.156) The husband of Flossie Wong-Stahl, a woman who worked closely (actually, more than closely) with Gallo in his lab astutely described Gallo and his milieu to Crewdson: "The whole business has the ethics of a used-car lot. It's what you can get away with. The older-style scientists are falling by the wayside. To be a success in science these days, you need a big operation. . . . It's become an entrepreneurial business and Gallo's good at that . . . He was one of the first big-time laboratory operators." (SF p.158) One could say that "Holocaust II" was partly born in a used-car lot.
The world fell easily for Robert Gallo and his stolen virus and his questionable science. According to Crewdson, Gallo received a major honor from "the Italian-American Foundation . . . that compared Gallo to Galileo." (SF p.158) If that wasn't enough, both his boss and the future Director of the NIH would compare him to Mozart. To the rest of the world he would be the great man who had discovered the cause of AIDS.
When his luck did start to change and people spoke more openly and brazenly about the virus-lifting, Gallo predictably tried to turn the tables and actually suggested that the French had made the mistake as a result of a contamination by his virus, which was patently ridiculous, as Crewdson shows in his book with detailed chronology of the actual events. All the evidence pointed to a contamination in Gallo's lab—at best. (SF p.162)
Unfortunately for the future scientific credibility of the American government, Crewdson points out that "The National Cancer Institute preferred Gallo's version of events." (SF p.162) It's interesting that the NIH uncharacteristically tried to silence Gallo when he actually may have been inadvertently tried to tell the truth about the nature of the real epidemic. Crewdson writes that the Director of NIH "tried to muzzle [Gallo]" when he "speculated publicly on the risk of transmitting AIDS to women via heterosexual contact." (SF p.163) But, Crewdson writes, "Gallo wouldn't stay quiet. After Jerry Groopman and Zaki Salahuddin reported detecting the AIDS virus in the saliva of nearly half of pre-AIDS patients, Gallo warned the American people that direct contact with saliva 'should be avoided,' setting off alarms about the safety of oral sex, water fountains, restaurant cutlery, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation." (SF p.163) That wasn't exactly how the government wanted to frame the epidemiological image of the AIDS epidemic. Very interesting, in retrospect.
Even after it was clear that HTLV-3 (as Gallo renamed LAV) was not a member of the HTLV family of retroviruses, Gallo stubbornly and perversely continued to promote the bogus notion. He even published data trying to fudge the issue. (SF p.163) And as could be expected, according to Crewdson, he continued his two-faced act: "Whatever Gallo was saying in print, in private he was far from certain that the AIDS virus had anything in common with the HTLVs." (SF p.163)
One of the more bizarre things about the so-called discovery of the AIDS virus in Gallo's lab was the fact that early on, according to Crewdson, "Gallo hadn't said a word about the patient in whom Popovic had found it." (SF p.164) It turned out that it hadn't even been found in an individual patient but it had "been isolated from the T-cells of several AIDS patients, whose cultured cells Popovic had pooled together." (SF p.164) As was typical of the kind of science and reporting that underlay the HIV/AIDS paradigm, this Frankenstein of a "patient pool" was not mentioned in the seminal, history-changing paper published in Science, the cornerstone of the HIV/AIDS paradigm. According to Crewdson, Donald Francis of the CDC "thought it odd still that Popovic had pooled patient material in the first place, something Francis viewed as a certain way not to know which patient was the source." (SF p.164) Not really knowing where a virus had come from was the characteristic way science was done in the opposite world of AIDS research.
Like many of Gallo's lies, the LAV lie was not without its dark humor. Not only was the virus Gallo worked with the same virus that the French had discovered, but most damning, it even turned out originally to be from the exact same patient. ( SF p.165) A scientist named Murray Gardner confronted Gallo about this malarkey and according to Crewdson, Gardner said, "Bob browbeat me, in his way, for about an hour. . . . He questioned my patriotism, He asked me, 'Are you French or are you American? Aren't you an American?'" (SF p.167) If nothing else, the pseudoscience was patriotic.
At a time when Gallo should have been bathing in the glow of being the discoverer of the so-called AIDS virus, according to Crewdson, "Most of his energy was being devoted to fending off suspicions that his discovery was really somebody else's discovery." (SF p.177) It was becoming clearer to the world that "the virus discovered in Paris in 1983 was the same virus Gallo claimed to have discovered in 1984." (SF p.178)
Even after the discovery issue was on its way to being resolved in the favor of the French scientists, Gallo, without one single qualm, bizarrely insisted in retaining his HTLV-3 name for the virus. It mattered not to Gallo that the virus was obviously not a member of the HTLV family. And just as absurdly, he performed all kinds of silly mental acrobatics to try and explain why his virus was exactly like the French virus, suggesting that his virus came from someone who must have gotten infected at the same place and the same time as the French AIDS victim from whom the French had isolated their virus. According to Crewdson, "The French dismissed Gallo's explanation as balderdash. (SF p. 180)
What was it like to be a part of the Gallo team during those heady days when the French virus was stolen and the pseudoscientific foundation of "Holocaust II" was laid down? Omar Sattaur, a journalist who covered Gallo for the publication New Scientist, recounted to Crewdson that one of Gallo's subordinates told him "that everybody in Gallo's lab felt paranoid in some way and that it was quite an awful place to work. Because it was very high-pressure and he ran it like an autocrat. They were his minions." (SF p.183) Nobody messed with Captain Hook.
The New Scientist reporter was one of the first people to nail the details of the Gallo theft in print. The piece resulted in one of Gallo's biggest critics, Oxford scientist Abraham Karpas referring to the affair as "Gallogate." (SF p.184) Karpas was on the money in more ways than he realized. But the real "Gallogate" went way beyond the stealing of a retrovirus. Unbeknownst to Karpas and Sattaur, it was ultimately about something that would cause a potential consequences for every member of the human race. Gallo's world class narcissism manifest itself in the fact that he told Sattaur that he was of a mind to have the government start a libel action against him. What is even more absurd is that given the government's bizarre (and not fully-fathomed in Crewdson's book) relationship with Gallo, one could almost imagine that actually happening. Sattaur astutely captured the Gallo psyche when he said to Crewdson, "Gallo has this ability to just absorb everything . . . He's wonderful at it. He's so good at manipulating things that I'm pretty sure that unconsciously he's doing it most of the time. If you talk to him about other people's work, he'll say, 'Well, he worked in my lab for six weeks. I taught him everything he knew.' He's a real megalomaniac." (SF p.185) There was something uncanny about Gallo that, unfortunately, seemed to bemuse people at the same time that it disturbed them, so that even some of the most sober minds that came into his outrageous orbit somehow missed that fact that they were in the presence of a very unique kind of monster, a human whose actions and statements, from his victim's and history's point of view, heralded from a psychic netherworld located somewhere in the vortex of clownishness, sociopathy and downright evil. Once can't help but speculate that because the marginalized people whose lives hung in the balance were "gay,"—or "very gay," as the CDC's James Curran would say—that extreme moral outrage on the part of most heterosexual scientists (and some gay ones too, unfortunately) often took a vacation in Gallo's presence. Gallo wasn't playing his infernal games with breast cancer, prostate cancer, or heart disease. No matter what lip service people gave to broaden the perceived social spectrum of this particular disease, from the extant scientific community's perspective (and the public's) it was gay through and through.
As previously pointed out, Gallo's crime against the French was not just the intangible one of falsely claiming primacy of discovery. The theft was also a major financial crime in that he was also stealing the Pasteur's rightful royalties from the test for the so-called AIDS retrovirus. The American government's patents had all been hurriedly filed under the false pretenses that Gallo had created them with a virus that he had actually discovered. And to make matters even crazier, in terms of testing for the retrovirus virus that was now considered to be the cause of AIDS, his fraud-based test didn't even work as well as the French test. (SF. p.188) Gallo's rushed filing for the AIDS test patent, according to Crewdson, "had been approved in near-record time," (SF p.191) another indication that the government was in bed with Gallo. Crewdson reported that "The French application had fallen between the cracks, and nobody at the patent office seemed to have noticed." (SF p.192)
One of the zanier details of the Gallo biography is the fact that he had a baby with one of the married scientists who worked with him, Flossie-Wong Stahl, which was awkward for the rest of his staff—and for Wong-Stahl's husband. According to Crewdson, the messy affair resulted in Gallo "being put in the hands of a psychiatrist for a while." (SF p.194) In terms of Gallo's impact on the world, it may be a shame that it was only for "a while." (The catastrophic HHV-6 pandemic might have been nipped in the bud if the whole Gallo lab had been put in the hands of a psychiatrist.)
When journalists all over the world started to wake up to the fact that Gallo had stolen credit for discovering the AIDS virus, Gallo became a Whirling Dervish. One science reporter told Crewdson that "Bob Gallo would write to every journalist in the world who would publish an article that wouldn't be completely in favor with his point of view. He would explode. He would immediately conclude that the journalist who had written the article that was not in favor of his genius was prejudiced, was poorly informed, was a friend of Pasteur or something like that." (SF p.196)
Ever proactive, Gallo went to Paris and got Jean Claude Chermann, (one of the members of the Pasteur's LAV team) drunk and had him sign a phony, Gallo-friendly re-write of the history of the discovery of the so-called AIDS virus. (SF p.198) According to Crewdson, "Gallo promised the document would never see the light of the day. Back in the United States, however, Gallo sent a copy to Jim Weingarten [the Director of NIH]." (SF p.198) And when the incorrigible Gallo sent documents to a French journalist in order to bolster his claims that he had not stolen the virus from the French, he included an old letter from Chermann which had been doctored in classic Gallo style. Chermann happened to see the doctored letter and according to Crewdson, "When Chermann compared the letter sent by Gallo to the original in his files, he saw that someone had cut out his signature and posted it at the end of the third paragraph, transforming what had been a scathing two-page critique of Gallo's behavior into a one-page testimonial. (SF p.199) This is not exactly what Thomas Kuhn would call "normal science."
It will forever be a dark blemish on the integrity of the top people in the American government's scientific establishment that the Health and Human Services elite went to bat for this scientific shyster. The Pasteur Institute could not believe the institutional support that the Gallo was getting, but now they were not about to be intimidated. They were ready to sue their way to the truth about the discovery in the American courts and to secure their just rewards from the AIDS test patent. What is really disturbing in the Crewdson account of the affair is that the government gradually did start to realize that Gallo's discovery claim was bogus, but the authorities shamefully continued to push on with Gallo's defense. And, in keeping with the Gallo habit of leaving no supportive deed unpunished, he turned around and blamed the American government itself for filing the patent that had enriched him and had enhanced his reputation. Even more outrageous was the fact that he was telling people that he made no money from the patent, about which one government official said to Crewdson, "Well I didn't see him turn his checks down when they came to him." (SF p.204) According to Crewdson, " . . . with the AIDS test earning millions—both Gallo and Popovic qualified for the maximum payment—$100,000 a year during the lifetime of the patent, a total of $1.5 million a piece over fifteen years. The AIDS test had made them millionaires."(SF p.278)
One of the most stunning revelations in Crewdson's book, as we have already pointed out, is that Gallo's lab wasn't just mendacious, but at the same time it also seems to have been surprisingly sloppy and disorganized which is just what one wants to hear about the place that helped lay down the foundation of the AIDS paradigm. The Pasteur Institute, on the other hand, (at least on the surface) seems to have been a model of fastidiousness. Crewdson describes their record keeping: "Pasteur scientists kept the records of their experiments in the European style, in sequential hardbound volumes that made it impossible to insert or remove pages of what had transpired in their labs." (SF p.206) In the opposite world of Gallo's lab, Mika Popovic, who did much of the work on the discovery or rediscovery of the AIDS virus "didn't have any notebooks." (SF p.206) Gallo is quoted as saying, about Popovic's record keeping, "We were finding stuff in drawers, pieces of paper . . . I mean we pulled out stuff that Mika didn't even know he had. And there it was. You know, old stuff, old archaic papers with scribbles on them." (SF p.206) Crewdson reported that "the scraps proved to be the only records Popovic could produce of what the government now counted a landmark achievement." (SF p.206) Given what the landmark "achievement" would actually turn out to be, it shouldn't surprise anyone that it was arrived at in such a ramshackle "scientific" style. Popovic was quite generous with his scraps of paper once under investigation. According to Crewdson, when investigators came to look at his records he said "Take whatever I have. I don't want to go to jail." (SF p.207)
It was convenient for Popovic's records to be that sloppy because the Humpty-Dumpty pieces of evidence almost made it impossible to reconstruct a credible narrative of exactly how Gallo had succeeded in using the French virus to pretend he had discovered his own. (Lesson to fraudlent scientists everywhere: sloppiness creates plausible deniability.) But Crewdson, the master detective, worked his way patiently though the devious trails of disorganized paper to make Gallo's theft of credit for the discovery painfully obvious. In the process, Crewdson found evidence that Gallo altered memos to reflect fraudulent dates for when important experiments were done. (SF p.208)
Gallo stonewalled when Health and Human Services tried to find out what happened in his laboratory in order to put together a defense for Gallo's claims in court. As Gallo tried to rewrite the past, Crewdson reports that all kinds of discrepancies emerged. There was a clear record that he had been pursuing HTLV-1 as the cause in the period that he now was disingenuously trying to convince the world that he was actually pursuing HTLV-3, which of course turned out to be the LAV which the French had provided his lab with.
The smoking gun moment that destroyed Gallo's credibility for all eternity came when it was discovered that the so-called AIDS virus was incredibly changeable and every isolate was dramatically different from every other isolate. When it was discovered that there was virtually no difference between Gallo's isolate of HTLV-3 and the French isolate of LAV, it was obvious that Gallo had indeed been working with the Pasteur's isolate, not an isolate that he had discovered.
As Gallo's luck would have it, his test for the AIDS virus, which was based on the stolen French virus, was not very reliable. The French test was supposedly much better but the Gallo test had won the licensing race politically and was often failing to detect blood that was supposedly infected. Gallo's test not only had a high rate of false negatives, but it also had false positives. Gallo's incompetent test ended up ruining a number of people's lives. (SF p. 228) (Of course the real problem with the testing for the retrovirus by either the French or American test was that it begged the larger theoretical question of whether either test was really the test for the true cause of so-called AIDS.)
Gallo exceeded his usual standard for craziness in the fight over the name of the virus he had stolen from the French. How dare the French want to name the virus they discovered! According to Crewdson, "When Gallo discovered the French were using the term LAV alone, he sent Montagnier a peevish letter." (SF p. 235) In the end the French were only half-screwed when the Gallo name of HTLV-3 did not prevail and the virus was labeled "Human immunodeficiency virus or HIV." (SF p.236) The fact that the new name was a kind of Orwellian way of disingenuously establishing that the virus was the cause of AIDS without the inconvenience of further debate was lost on most people. The lesson of this episode of abnormal, totalitaran science is that if you want to prove that a virus is the cause of a disease, just give it a name that implies that it is the cause. With "Human immunodeficiency virus or HIV" that mission was brilliantly accomplished. A fun bit of trivia about the voting on the name change is that the only person to support Gallo's preference of HTLV-3 was—guess who?—Myron Essex. (SF. p.236) (The name of the virus was "Harvarded" into history.)
One of the most embarrassing moments in the Gallo affair was the point at which it was discovered that the photographs that Gallo's lab had submitted to Science as being photos of their virus turned out to actually be photos of the French virus. According to Crewdson, "the revelation dealt a major blow to the [National Cancer Institute's] credibility. (SF p.240) Gallo himself had a copy of the photo of the purloined virus in a framed collage on his office wall and Crewdson reports that "When Gallo found out the virus in the collage was LAV, Salahuddin [his subordinate] recalled 'he took it down from the wall and threw it on the floor, smashing glass everywhere.'" (SF p.241) One can only assume that like every other Gallo mess, someone else in his lab cleaned it up. The fake photo caper was one of the things that according to Crewdson, helped turn Gallo's boss, Vince DeVita, against him. Crewdson wrote that "DeVita was determined that Gallo would correct the record." (SF p.241)
What is mind-boggling about Gallo is that even while under investigation for the LAV fraud, he and his staff still continued to churn out more fraud. A letter from the Gallo folks published in Nature in May of 1986, meant to exonerate Gallo, contained brand new fibs. Gallo claimed to have isolated HTLV-3 from a patient he hadn't even been looking for the virus in at the time that was clearly impossible because it was the same period in which all the evidence showed he was still obsessed with HTLV-1. Gallo reconstructed a fictional past in the letter and included a picture that had just happened to have both HTLV-1 and LAV/HTLV-3 in it. According to Crewdson, he pretended to have discovered HTLV-3 earlier than he really did just by the happenstance of it being in the same photo. (SF p.244) One could call it a classic Gallo scientific discovery. Once again it was as if Gallo had a time machine that allowed him to go back into the past and fashion history more to his liking. Crewdson describes NCI scientist Berge Hampar's reaction to the new photo caper that appeared in Nature: " 'When we saw Nature, we laughed,' Hampar said. 'We said, "Is this the only photograph they got? They're staking all their claims on one photograph with two particles in it." That's when I said to myself, 'These people are crazy.'"(SF p.245) It's too bad that the NCI scientist didn't do more than just say truthful things to himself because these crazy people helped give us "Holocaust II."
Gallo still wouldn't back down in the spring of 1986 when, at an AIDS conference, according to Crewdson, he referred to "the Pasteur's contribution to the search for the cause of AIDS as inconsequential." (SF p.246) The Pasteur scientists gave as good as the got. One of their lawyers, Jim Swire, according to Crewdson, "upped the ante by accusing someone in Gallo's lab of having stolen LAV. 'They simply studied it,' Swire said 'concluded we were correct, renamed it, and claimed it as their own.'" (SF p.247) Otherwise known as the classic Gallo Hokey Pokey.
The person in Gallo's lab who would ultimately get hung out to dry for the handling of the fake discovery of HTLV-3, Mika Popovic, was eager to give investigators the impression that if anything untoward had happened, it was just an innocent mix-up. But according to Crewdson, the French were just not having any of that. (SF p.248) The bottom line for the French was that they wanted their "share of the patent royalties."(SF p.249) After all, Gallo had used their supposedly exogenous retrrovirus to make his lousy test.
Things got even more sinister in this story when the lawyer for the Pasteur Institute used the Freedom of Information Act to try and obtain documents from Gallo's lab that would support the French case against Gallo's claims. According to Crewdson, "the memos that would have been most helpful to the Pasteur's case—and most detrimental to the government's—were withheld, in some cases without any indication that they even existed." (SF p.259) One of the withheld documents which Crewdson ultimately obtained, made it clear that Gallo had lied about when he had isolates of his so-called AIDS virus. (SF p.260) According to Crewdson, the most damning document that was withheld was a memo from Gallo about growing the French virus at a time that he later insisted he had not been growing it. (SF p.260) The only documents that seem to have been withheld were ones that supported the unavoidable conclusion, that Gallo was one of science's greatest pathological liars.
Joanne Belk, the government's person in charge of providing the documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act, described her interaction with Gallo to Crewdson: "I didn't know how rude he was . . . . This man called me and started blasting me on the phone. 'Who the hell do you think you are?' He was terribly profane. Nobody ever talked to me like that. That was my introduction to this so-called eminent scientist." (SF p.260) Gallo was totally uncooperative. Interestingly, in terms of the basic quality of Gallo's science, Belk's overall impression of his lab from a visit was that it was "impressively messy." (SF p.261) When Gallo finally did comply with the F.O.I.A. request, Belk got a call that she could pick them up at "Biotech Research laboratories in Rockville which Beck thought surpassingly odd." (SF p.262) One wonders, like so many other parts of this sometimes mysterious story, what was that about?
The documents that were turned over to Belk were very much in the Gallo lab's signature style. According to Crewdson, ". . . none of Popovic's pages was signed. Neither were any of the pages evidently kept by others in Gallo's lab.' (SF p.262) Most shockingly considering his pivotal role in creating the scientific paradigm at the heart of "Holocaust II," "Popovic's notes, written in an unmistakable middle-European hand, resembled a diary or a journal, filled with retrospective observations and abbreviated descriptions of each day's work, but scarcely any experimental protocols or new data." (SF p.262) The lawyer for the Pasteur Institute is quoted by Crewdson as saying that the notes looked like they had been "shuffled like a deck of cards," and when he "tried to assemble the notes in chronological order, he found that the follow-up results for one experiment were dated three weeks before the experiment." (SF p.262) This was the orderliness of the abnormal, totalitarian science of HIV/AIDS at its very best. According to Crewdson, one Popovic page "dated Jan 19, 1984 was continued on a page Nov 7, 1983." (SF p.262) The Mad Hatter would have been at home in a white coat at a workbench in this laboratory. Best of all, according to Crewdson, "Several of Popovic's pages weren't dated at all." (SF p.262) As was typical for a laboratory skilled at rewriting the past, Crewdson reports that several of the Popovic pages "were whited out." and "In a sequential log of laboratory specimens, the year '84' had been crossed out and replaced by '83.'" (SF p.262) That describes what they found, but according to Crewdson, once again the scarier thing was what the lawyers did not find: "In the notes that did exist, Swire and Weinberg could find no support for many of the experiments described in Popovic's Science article." (SF p.262) Swire could find no evidence of the isolation of the so-called virus from patients that Gallo had written about in his letter to Nature which was meant to exculpate him. (SF p.262) Most importantly, in terms of the French lawsuit, important documents reflecting the Gallo lab's work with the French retrovirus were missing, and one of Gallo's subordinates told Crewdson that the staff had been told to leave them out. Crewdson wrote that "to Swire, it looked as if somebody had systematically tried to replace the evidence of Popovic's work with LAV [the French virus] with something that would appear innocuous to the Pasteur's lawyers." (SF p.265) There was also evidence that the French virus had gone through a process of renaming in the documents in order to obscure the origin of the virus the Gallo lab worked with. (SF p.265)
None of this came as a surprise to Gallo's close observer and arch enemy in England, scientist Abraham Karpas, who watched all of this unfold in an "I told you so" mode. He told Crewdson, "Dr. Gallo still believes that in this age of communication and science he can get away with not only saying, but even writing, that black is white and vice versa." (SF p.269) If only people like Karpas, who seemed to astutely recognize that Gallo lived psychologically in some kind of scientific opposite world, had gone a step or two further and realized that when Gallo said that HIV was the indisputable cause of AIDS that "killed like a truck," he was also saying something akin to "black is white and vice versa."
As the noose tightened, Gallo went into advanced paranoia, suggesting that the lawyer for the French was "hiring people to come to restaurants to sit where I go to eat, to try and hear what I say." (SF p.271) Crewdson quotes one rant that makes Gallo sound like he had completely lost it: "I look at the French capitalizing on their food industry from some places where my ancestors came from . . . I think they do great in getting credit for nothing half the time, more than any people I've ever seen. That's the bias I would have against France . . . They helped us get into Vietnam." (SF p.273)
One of the more revealing Freudian moments in Crewdson's portrait occurs when he quotes Gallo telling the editors of Nature in an unpublished interview that Montagnier "hasn't a single collaborator left, because no one trusts him. I find him extremely political, always not sure what he believes. People who are full of distrust and see the world scheming to screw them. That's the way I look at the guy . . . Montagnier's an example of a small guy who stumbled into shit. And he got famous. More than he deserves. He can't handle it, sees everybody as plotting against him." (SF p.273) This from the most paranoid man in science, the man who was always accusing everyone of being out to get him. The real tragedy of "Holocaust II" was that the world was not and is not out to get him. At least not yet.
In the unpublished Nature interview, Gallo contradicted things that had been published in that very publication. According to Crewdson, "Nature had previously assured its readers that Gallo had grown LAV for one week only and in small quantity. Now Gallo admitted that LAV had grown for at least three months and there had been plenty of virus." (SF p.275) The fact that this vital information was never published is consistent with what we have said about the manner in which information is managed in the world of abnormal, totalitarian science. Crewdson writes, "Had the Gallo interview been reported, it would have dramatically changed the face of the dispute with Pasteur. But Nature never published a word of what Gallo had said—or anything else about its investigation." (SF p.275) Gallo could even count on international protection for his kind of science.
As the Gallo dispute with the Pasteur Institute got more cantankerous, the scientific community began to fear the collateral damage it was doing to the image of science itself. Legendary scientist Jonas Salk sought to lower the temperature of the conflict and according to Crewdson, he "spent the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987 shuttling between Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier in search of a shared version of history." (SF p.293) These scientists seem to have had a very abnormal idea of what history actually is. It is not the difference you split between two warring scientists, especially when one of the scientists is a pathological liar. Eventually, according to Crewdson, "Jonas Salk had nearly given up hope of working out a history acceptable to both Gallo and Montagnier. 'Insanity afloat,' was the way Salk described the process to Don Francis." (SF p.295) "Insanity afloat," unbeknownst to Jonas Salk, was the best way to describe the all of the science and epidemiology of "Holocaust II."
Eventually, worn down, Montagnier stupidly agreed to a publication of a joint chronology of the discovery of the so-called AIDS virus with Gallo in Nature. As is typical of abnormal, totalitarian science, it was published without any peer review which, according to Crewdson, "may explain why it contains a number of factual mistakes, why several names were misspelled and why portions of the text read as if they had been translated from Chinese." (SF p.296) And Crewdson notes that the chronology's preamble began with a real mutually-agreed-upon whopper: "Both sides wish it known that from the beginning there has been a spirit of scientific cooperation and a free exchange of ideas, biological materials and personnel between Dr. Gallo's and Dr. Montagnier's laboratories. The spirit has never ceased despite the legal problems and will be the basis of a renewed mutual cooperation in the future." (SF p.296) Beyond enjoying the hilarious "WTF" absurdity of this big lie one also starts wondering about the integrity of the French discoverers of the so-called AIDS virus. Note to future historians: Gallo apparently wasn't the only one willing to cut corners.
Crewdson reports that despite whatever peace Gallo got from the pile of revisionist lies published in Nature, he was soon disturbed by a new investigative piece in New Scientist written by Steve Conner. The article began, "In the war against AIDS scientific truth was among the first casualties. No one listened when Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute in Paris said that he had found the virus that causes AIDS. Scientific journals and scientists preferred to hear what Gallo was saying from The National Cancer Institute in the U.S." (SF p.298) The article included Gallo's photos which had been misrepresented as HTLV-3 as well as the accusation that Gallo's outrageously dishonest behavior had cost many lives. Gallo's protectors didn't waste time coming to his rescue. Crewdson reported that one of Gallo's cronies, Dani Bolognesi, wrote a letter to his colleagues urging them to respond to the article. (SF p.299) And even the Reagan administration got involved in trying to get the French AIDS officials to join Health and Human Services in condemning the article, even though, as Crewdson points out, "no one could say what inaccuracies Connor's article contained." (SF p.299) Such awesome power can only make one wonder what Gallo had on the government that made the authorities so ready and willing to always come to his rescue.
When a settlement agreement was finally signed by the French—so that they could at least get their royalties for the AIDS test—they had to agree to renounce "any statements, press releases, charges, allegations or other published or unpublished utterances that overtly or by influence indicated any improper, illegal, unethical or other such conduct or practice by any scientists employed by HHS, NIH, or NCI." (SF p.299) The royalties the French would receive had officially become hush money. Crewdson notes that, "With the stroke of a pen, the accusations and contentions of the past two years had been erased." (SF p.299) More importantly for the larger issue and the real history of Holocaust II, the French agreed not to tell the whole truth about the history of AIDS, again making them in some ways not all that different from their American counterpart.
In the Gallo tradition of biting the hand that had saved him, Gallo, according to Crewdson, threatened the White House if they dared to try and take any credit for the mendacious agreement. (SF p.300) Who the hell did the American government think it was? After the bizarre, egregiously dishonest agreement with the French was signed, in a statement that should have made everyone who died of AIDS roll over in their graves, Gallo said, according to Crewdson, "Now, instead of being distracted by all the legal business, I'll be able to return full time to trying to do something about this disease." (SF p.301) In other words, the bad luck of the gay community (and the black community) was about to get much worse.
The agreement rankled the Pasteur team who felt that French politicians like President Chirac who had put pressure on Pasteur to sign the agreement had betrayed them. According to Crewdson, "Jean-Claude Chermann couldn't comprehend why someone who had chased the wrong virus for so many months was now being anointed in the press as the co-discoverer of the right virus." (SF p.302) Of course the whole situation was even wackier than Monsieur Chermann realized.
One of the absolute worst things that happened to the world as a result of the Gallo crime was that Gallo became the go-to spokesperson for AIDS science. According to Crewdson, "The settlement not withstanding, the newspapers and magazines continued to laud Gallo as the discoverer of the AIDS virus while rarely mentioning Montagnier" and "whatever Gallo said was likely to make news." (SF p.310) He had become the spokes-scientist for AIDS based on false pretenses. Even David Remnick, The Washington Post reporter who would years later become the editor of The New Yorker, had a warm shoulder for Gallo to whine on: Gallo complained to him that the settlement with the French had failed to end the "accusations" and "hatred" from some of his scientific colleagues. (SF p.310) In a hyper-ironic candid confession, Gallo said to Remnick, "I'm telling you, there are days when I wake up in the morning and feel like the Archangel Gabriel. By the time I go to bed at night, I feel like Lucifer. What's going on? Please tell me why they do this to me. Why do they say these terrible things about me? Do you know? Do you?" (SF p.310) Is it possible that deep down Gallo may have known himself that the questionable science of the HIV/AIDS paradigm was crafted in part by a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
Gallo's propensity for boiler plate homophobia kicked in a bit when Randy Shilts's book, And the Band Played On came out. Crewdson quotes Gallo as saying, "It never ceases to me to be a source of great wonder . . . How people such as a gay young man on the West Coast think they know more when they're stimulated [sic] by the same two people over and over again. Namely Don Francis and what I would regard as a psychotic who lives in Cambridge." (SF p.311) In the heterosexist world of abnormal, totalitarian, "homodemiological" science that characterized AIDS, there was nothing more threatening than a "stimulated" gay reporter, especially one who had been "stimulated" by a psychotic. As for Gallo's ludicrous charge of psychosis clearly directed at his critic Abraham Karpas who was at Oxford, well, let's just say that science's largest glass house had rocks flying in every direction.
Gallo was so angry at the things that Randy Shilts quoted the CDC's Donald Francis saying about him that he penned a letter of retraction and he demanded Francis sign it. He told Francis that if he didn't (according to Crewdson), he had a "plan of action against Don Francis, which included evidence like letters and tape recordings, that would show financial impropriety in Francis's relationship with Randy Shilts." (SF p.313) One wonders: What, no gay sex? But wait. According to Crewdson, he also threatened to expose things from Don Francis's personal life. (SF p.313) Gallo was the J.Edgar Hoover of science with a real or imagined dossier on everyone. The long arms of this vindictive scientist are reflected in the fact that, according to Crewdson, "When it became clear Francis had no intention of signing Gallo's letter, word reached Berkeley [where he was happily working] that he was being transferred back to CDC headquarters in Atlanta—to work not on AIDS, but on tuberculosis." (SF p.313) It was the career equivalent of sleeping with the fishes.
Eventually, even Gallo's boss, Vince DeVita, tired of his antics. He told Crewdson, "there was always some crisis with Bob Gallo . . . He has an arrogance about him, that he felt he could talk to you and persuade you to his way of thinking. And he almost always failed." (SF p.314) Crewdson reports that Gallo, as per usual, refused to share his "AIDS" viruses and his cell lines which prompted people like Nobel Laureate David Baltimore to join another scientist, Howard Temin, "in worrying that Bob's way of handling himself does significant harm to both himself and to the national AIDS effort." (SF p.310) Baltimore and Temin were only aware of the tip of the iceberg. (Of course Baltimore himself wasn't exactly the Mother Teresa of science.)
Gallo exhibited the censorious style typical of abnormal, totalitarian science when a book which was critical of him by Michael Koch was published in Europe. Koch's book contained entertaining sentences about Gallo like, "He was so fond of his own ideas that he saw evidence where there was no evidence." (SF p.320) Koch in due course got the Gallo treatment. According to Crewdson, when Koch ran into Gallo at a scientific conference, Gallo told him, "Here is a five-step program to destroy you. You, your job, your position, your damned Carnegie Institute in Stockholm." (SF p.320) One thing you could say about Gallo is that even his rants had power points. (SF 320) One thing Gallo said about Koch underlines the danger of ceding absolute power to scientific elites. According to Crewdson, Gallo insisted "I do not feel he was qualified to write such a book. Moreover, Koch has no experience in retrovirology . . ." (SF p.321) Perhaps the only person qualified to write about Robert Gallo was Myron Essex or Gallo himself.
After Gallo's administrative assistant, Howard Streicher, wrote a threatening letter to Cambridge University Press, the firm that was going to publish the English language edition of the Koch book which had been first published in Germany, the book was cancelled. Streicher wrote in his letter that the book was "both maliciously damaging and likely to be scientifically, historically and medically unsound." (SF p.322) Translation: the book told the truth.
On the heels of the settlement with the French, a new Gallo scandal emerged. It turned out that the cell line Gallo's lab had supposedly created to grow the stolen French AIDS virus was also basically, well, stolen. Gallo had used his familiar modus operandi; he just changed the name of the cell line which had actually been created by a scientist named Adi Gardner and—Presto! Chango!—it was Gallo's. According to Crewdson, "When Gazdar told a Public Health Service lawyer he thought Gallo and Popovic had appropriated his discovery, he was advised not to pursue the matter. (SF p.333) Some scientists are said to have green thumbs because they are so good at growing things like viruses and creating cell lines. Gallo didn't need a green thumb. He had sticky fingers.
The idea that this character seriously thought he would win a Nobel Prize by operating in the manner he did challenges all definitions of sanity. Scientist Sam Waksal (who went to jail for the insider trading financial scandal that involved Martha Stewart) described a special night with Gallo in which "Gallo was drunk, and he had a tear in his eye, and he said, 'You know, I would do anything—anything—to win the Nobel Prize.' I always thought it was the most telling thing about him. Because in the world of science the goal is the pleasantry of the discovery and he could never find as much satisfaction in the discovery as he could in the limelight." (SF p.336)
There was still more public humiliation in store for Gallo when sophisticated genetic analysis of Gallo's so-called HTLV-3 made it painfully, embarrassingly clear that it was LAV and that whatever happened in terms of contamination or theft, it had definitely all happened in Gallo's lab. (SF p.341) And then the darkest moment of Gallo's travails happened on November 19, 1989 when John Crewdson's 55,000 word piece with all the details of his pseudo-discovery of the AIDS virus was published in The Chicago Tribune. The piece's conclusion was that "What happened in Robert Gallo's lab during the winter of 1983-84 is a mystery that may never be solved. But the evidence is compelling that it was either an accident or a theft." (SF p.343) The Chicago Tribune piece aired all of Gallo's dirty laundry, exposing him making bogus claim after bogus claim; it showed him perpetually rewriting history, and the article displayed his stealing-and-renaming habit as well as his penchant for deliberately altering scientific documents. As was typical of this master double-talker, according to Crewdson, in an interview about The Chicago Tribune piece, "Though [Gallo] claimed not to have read the Tribune, Gallo nonetheless took umbrage at a number of the quotes it contained." (SF p.344) What Crewdson had done in his amazing Tribune piece (and subsequently in his book) was to show the dark side of science: "The reality that scientists often engaged in the same kind of back stabbing and throat-cutting as politicians and businessmen had remained behind laboratory doors."(SF p.347)
As Congress began to wake up to the general issue of fraud in science, the NIH had been guilt-tripped into creating "a new agency, the Office of Scientific Integrity" which was responsible for "investigating and deciding cases of suspected plagiarism, falsification, or other scientific misconduct." (SF p.349) In other words, all the dishes that could be found in the Gallo buffet. After reading the Crewdson article on Gallo, the acting director of the new Office of Scientific Integrity decided that the Gallo affair deserved to be investigated." (SF p.351)
Even as the Gallo investigation was getting underway, he was out in the public serving up more scientific baloney. According to Crewdson, he "was at Fordham University in the Bronx where he announced a breakthrough discovery—a cure for Kaposi's sarcoma, the malignant lesions that account for about one in five deaths among AIDS patients." (SF p.354) The only problem, according to Crewdson, was that "Gallo hadn't published any such results, and he hadn't presented any data at Fordham to back up his claims." (SF p.354) In other words, for Gallo it was business as usual. When a desperate AIDS patient contacted one of the scientists in Gallo's lab he was treated badly. The man subsequently wrote a letter to the scientist and Crewdson quotes it: "You have probably forgotten our conversation . . . But I have not and I will not forget it in a long time. I have never in my life been talked to in such a demeaning, condescending, rude and abrupt manner by anyone let alone an alleged health care professional on the public payroll. I am dying from AIDS and in particular Kaposi's sarcoma . . . Which is what motivated me to call Dr. Gallo's office in the first place . . . How cruel it is to publicly talk about a cure and then refuse the information to the public." (SF p.354) Demeaning? Condescending? Rude? Cruel? What the man with AIDS tragically didn't realize was that the very epidemiological paradigm he was trapped in (and probably died in) was all of that and more. When Gallo's boss heard about the exchange, he ordered Gallo to apologize to the man, and, according to Crewdson, "to explain that he didn't have a cure for Kaposi's sarcoma after all." (SF p.354) It was one of the few times that being Robert Gallo didn't mean never having to say you're sorry.
As the full-scale investigation of the Gallo affair by the Office of Science Integrity got under way, Gallo was fully cooperative. Not. Crewdson reports that "It had been early January of 1990 when Suzanne Hadley requested the originals of the Gallo lab's notebooks, but by mid-March she still didn't have them." (SF p.355)
Because of both Crewdson's Tribune piece and the OSI investigation, Monagnier felt emboldened to ignore the agreement to "ferme la bouche" and he admitted to Le Monde that there was a real possibility that Gallo had stolen LAV. (SF p.356) Gallo was furious and once again ran to the sympathetic Washington Post with his bogus version of the story. (SF p.357) (This was clearly not the same paper it had been during the Woodward and Bernstein era.) Gallo also hired a P.R. firm and a lawyer but, according to Crewdson, told his staff that "It should not be obvious that we are using a P.R. firm or a lawyer." (SF p.358) Abnormal science can not be conducted without a P.R. firm and a lawyer that agree to keep a low profile.
The list of property crimes committed by Gallo's gang expanded while he was under investigation by OSI when it was discovered that Zaki Salahuddin, the Gallo subordinate who was supposedly the co-discoverer of HBLV (eventually called HHV-6) had set up a company called PanData in order to funnel money into his own bank account by selling medical supplies to the National Cancer Institute—supplies which he himself ordered. (SF p.322) (At least he wasn't out stealing viruses, although, when the whole story of HHV-6 is told, that might not exactly be the case.) According to Crewdson, Congress got wind of the scam and John Dingel eventually called it "'a gross conflict of interest . . . on the part of a prominent AIDS researcher at the National Institutes of Health' who had hidden his 'improper financial interest in a biomedical firm doing substantial business with his own laboratory at NIH.'" (SF p.362) According to Crewdson, Gallo told the General Accounting Office that he knew about the Salahuddin company only three months before the investigation, but he told The Washington Post he had known about it for a year. (SF p.362) Crewdson reports that Salahuddin was also selling viruses and cell lines derived from Gallo's lab. One could say that abnormal science and abnormal commerce are bosom buddies.
Salahuddin was ultimately investigated by a Grand Jury. During his tribulations, Salahuddin said an all too true and disturbing thing about Gallo, "Here's Gallo, they provide him double coverage, internal investigation and so forth, all this moral turpitude he is accused for such a long period of time. No one ever talks of suspending him. In my case they go immediately for the knife and throw me to the wolves." (SF p.363) Salahuddin was eventually "formally accused of violating conflict-of-interest statues and accepting illegal gratuities in the PanData case." (SF p.375) As part of his punishment the was supposed to perform community service by researching HHV-6, the virus he purportedly discovered, which was a little like sentencing Bernie Madoff to selling stocks.
During the OSI investigation more mindblowing information surfaced. Mika Popovic provided a shocking description of his period in Gallo's lab: "When I came here nobody gave me whatsoever any instructions how we should write out notes or anything else. And when the litigation started, suddenly I was asked for notes." (SF p.364) (That anyone in any way trusted the basic science that came out of this scientific pig pen is unbelievable.) The OSI investigation identified new misrepresentations that Popovic had made in the Science papers that had supposedly nailed HIV down as the cause of AIDS. According to Crewdson, Popovic didn't have data to back up statements in the signature AIDS papers about patients he had described as showing evidence of reverse transcriptase. (SF p.364)
According to Crewdson, in the course of the OSI investigation, Gallo's testimony basically revealed that he had misrepresented the truth during the period in which the government was aggressively and groundlessly defending him against the French lawsuit. (SF p.371) He admitted he had no AIDS virus before his lab got its hands on the French virus. (SF p.371) He also confessed he didn't have the isolates of the AIDS virus that he had bragged about at the time of his Science paper appeared. (SF p.371) It had all been just the usual Gallo malarkey. According to Crewdson, Gallo told the OSI that he had made the false claim about the isolates because "to be quite frank, I was nervous." (SF p.371) Crewdson points out that if Gallo had been as honest during the French lawsuit, Pasteur would have walked away with complete ownership of the patent of the so-called AIDS blood test. (SF p.372) And reporters might not have been calling up Gallo and hanging on to his every word of wisdom about AIDS.
A panel drawn from the Academy of Science that was called in to oversee the OSI investigation voted to move the OSI investigation from an inquiry to "a formal misconduct investigation of Gallo and Mika Popovic." (SF p.373) They were shocked by "the apparent lack of supporting data for Popovic's key experiments." (SF p.373) The Academy of Science panel didn't realize that they were conducting an investigation in the opposite world of abnormal, totalitarian science. One of the panelists noted—about the basic work on the AIDS virus done in Gallo's lab—that "It may not be that you will be able to find a written record of all the data that are in print." (SF p.374) One could say that the data that helped build the HIV/AIDS paradigm of "Holocaust II" wasn't worth the paper it was not written on.
Gallo kicked and screamed when OSI went so far as to requisition materials that had been used in the original AIDS experiments. When Suzanne Hadley arrived to collect those materials, according to Crewdson, she "felt like the vampire surrounded by angry villagers." (SF p.375) She told Crewdson, "His whole lab, they just worship Gallo and will not challenge him. Anybody who gets a bunch of people around him who gets a mindset that he can do no wrong and that everybody else is wrong and wants to get him, you know that's a prescription for disaster. Because nobody is asking the tough questions on the inside." (SF p.375) Gallo's own description of his gang in Crewdson's book is quite revealing: "About seventy-five percent of the people with me are from foreign countries, their salaries are twenty to thirty thousand dollars, they're M.D.-PH.D.s, they work day and night, they work seven days a week." (SF p.385) It would appear that the virological fraud that helped created "Holocaust II" may have been crafted in what could be deemed a scientific sweatshop. What Zaki Salahuddin said about Gallo's rosy prospects during the investigation deserves close scrutiny by anyone trying to understand the nature of Gallo's political power: "Nothing will come out of it. No one wants America to go down. They just rally around the flag. NIH and Gallo are inseparable right now. If he goes down, NIH goes down." (SF p.376)
One of the more amusing moments in the Crewdson book concerns an NPR radio show on which Business Week reporter and author Bruce Nussbaum was being interviewed during the promotion for his book on AIDS, according to Crewdson, which purported "to show that Wall Street and NIH had conspired to slow the approval of potential AIDS drugs." (SF p.384) One of the people calling into the radio show attacked Gallo by name, saying that he had "'done a disservice to research in general.'"(SF p.384) Gallo just happened to be listening to the radio and he angrily called the show. When Gallo started going on and on about how he and his associates had risked their lives doing AIDS research and basically suggested that Nussbaum didn't have "a depth of understanding of science," (SF p.385) Nussbaum responded, "I think you're expressing the type of attitude which is part of the problem. . . . You simply dismiss anyone who is criticizing NIH in any way." (SF p.385) He also said, "Your attitude is one of incredible arrogance . . . . I think you're really expressing the type of attitude that is really at the core of the problem of the NIH . . . . And you're not open to criticism . . . . Even if that criticism is valid. You simply dismiss all criticism as invalid." (SF p.386)
Popovic's defense of himself during the OSI investigation continued to provide evidence that Gallo's lab had the rigorous organization of a town dump. According to Crewdson, he told investigators that he had been "working under a great deal of pressure, under very difficult conditions, and without technical support," and he complained that the equipment was of "poor quality." (SF p.387) Unfortunately, we now know that the science that came out of that equipment was of the same quality. He complained that the seminal AIDS virus articles in Science had been written in his bad English very quickly because of intense pressure from Gallo. (SF p.387) And the world would live with the tragic effects of that bad English and that rush job for many decades.
The Office of Scientific Integrity wasn't buying anything Popovic was selling. The committee was especially concerned about a key falsehood in the original Science papers which was that the French virus LAV hadn't been growing in the Gallo lab at the time the so-called Gallo virus, HTLV-3 had been discovered. Popovic betrayed the boss by saying that he wasn't the one who wrote the offending sentence in the Science paper and according to Crewdson, that basically left Gallo as the chief suspect. (SF p.389) Popovic had dared to be honest about the matter. He is quoted by Crewdson as telling OSI, "I am sure that originally I had referenced the LAV in my very rough draft. Even I think I insisted on it. I thought that we should include the LAV data in the paper . . . . Then it was changed in the editing . . . LAV was put to the end of the manuscript, in the end, and I think it was Dr. Gallo's decision not to include LAV." (SF p.389)
While this investigation was underway, another scandal broke out in the Gallo lab. Gallo's deputy lab chief, Prem Sarin, had taken money under false pretenses from a company that wanted Gallo's lab to test a potential AIDS drug called AL-721. (SF p.390) Sarin, according to Crewdson, was convicted "of embezzlement and making false statements to the NIH" and he "got two months in a halfway house in Baltimore." (SF p.391) While he had been under investigation, his fellow financial felon in the Gallo lab, Zaki Salahuddin, had urged Sarin to avoid going to jail by spilling some beans on Gallo, but given Gallo's psychological and professional iron grip on his staff that would never happen. (SF p.391) It will fall to future historians to determine the nature of the beans that were never spilled and what bearing they might have on the true and complete narrative of the AIDS era.
Peter Stockton, an aide to Congressman John Dingell, was amazed to see Gallo get off while his subordinate was nailed. (SF p.399) When Dingell's committee staff interviewed Gallo about his responsibility for all the financial misbehavior in his lab, Stockton, according to Crewdson, said that Gallo excused himself by saying, "'Hey, come on, it's not my job to be doing that kind of thing. I'm a scientist and I'm trying to cure AIDS, and I can't be bothered with this kind of crap.'" (SF p.392) And Stockton's committee basically said back to Gallo, according Crewdson, "Somebody's got to be concerned about this. You just don't turn laboratories over to felons to run wild. You've got to keep some control over what's going on." (SF p.392) What Stockton didn't realize was that AIDS research in general had been turned "over to felons to run wild." Gallo was an iconic role model for everyone in that field. He was their Fagin.
The Pasteur Institute eventually published a paper in Science that settled the matter genetically and established conclusively that LAV and Gallo's supposed discovery were the same virus and that everything Gallo had said about the matter was a crock. It was the beginning of the end of Gallo at N.C.I. He had embarrassed the whole NIH. (SF p.402-403) But with Gallo there was always time for one more scandal and the next one may have been his ugliest one yet because it involved the deaths of human guinea pigs. Gallo had gotten involved with French researcher named Daniel Zagury in a research project that involved testing experimental vaccines on Africans. And not just any Africans—the test subjects were children. In the course on testing the vaccine, there were three deaths. Gallo and "Zagury had failed to mention that in the report on the vaccine." (SF p.406)
One of the most fascinating revelations in Crewdson's book is the fact that while using LAV in his experiments, Popovic was so afraid that Gallo might screw the French that he had given his sister in Czechoslovakia "the early drafts of the Science article for safe keeping" because, according to Popovic, "I believed that sometimes in the future I might need them as evidence to prove that I gave fair credit to Dr. Montagnier's group." (SF p.411) According to Crewdson, "the hidden manuscripts suggests that Gallo was guilty for his rewriting of Popovic's paper." (SF p.411) Popovic clearly knew all too well what Gallo was capable of.
The OSI report which was drafted by Suzanne Hadley stated that both Gallo and Popovic were guilty of scientific misconduct. (SF p.414) But when the higher ups saw it, they balked and wanted the guilty verdict against Gallo erased. (SF p.414) Gallo once again ducked the bullet thanks to what looks like just an old fashioned act of looking the other way by the government. But Gallo didn't go completely unscathed. According to Crewdson, the OSI report "said that Gallo's behavior 'had fallen well short of the conduct required by a responsible senior scientist and laboratory chief.' Gallo had 'acquiesced in Dr. Popovic's wrong doing.' He 'may even have tacitly encouraged, and at a minimum, he did not discourage, the conditions that fostered the misconduct.'" (SF p.418) What was actually fostered in those conditions was far worse than anyone could have imagined.
Suzanne Hadley, according to Crewdson, felt that the conclusions of OSI supported the perception that Gallo had lied under oath during the dispute with the French over the AIDS virus patent. (SF p.419) She was upset when her superior, NIH Director Bernadine Healy, wanted her to rewrite her report. (SF p.420) She asked Healy to make the request for a change in writing and warned that it would compromise "the OSI independence from NIH." (SF p.420) Healy then backed down. But Hadley would pay a price for standing up to her boss. She was told she was being "reined in" and would make no more "decisions in the Gallo case." (SF p.421) Crewdson notes that previous to her involvement with the Gallo case, Hadley "had been one of the NIH's rising stars." (SF p.420) But given her perception of Healy's power and temperament, Hadley completely withdrew from OSI's Gallo case, saying, according to Crewdson, "The hell with it, I just want to get rid of it. I don't need this shit anymore. . . . I never wanted anything out of this . . . except to do it right. But I certainly never wanted to get just absolutely destroyed. I would have been demolished by Bernadine. She absolutely would have destroyed me." (SF p.422) That's what happens in abnormal, totalitarian science in general when one tries to tell the truth or do the right thing.
When the OSI report was released, Gallo got the kind of cover he often received from an uncritical press. According to Crewdson, "The Associated Press declared Gallo's vindication," and said nothing about the Popovic misconduct verdict. (SF p.422) Crewdson reports that all that Healy did to Gallo was issue a directive ordering him to "'familiarize himself with all HHS and NIH regulations relevant to his job, including standards of conduct for federal employees and the rules governing medical experiments on human subjects.'"(SF p.423) Gallo was also, according to Crewdson, ordered "to review 'all primary data' produced by any scientist under his supervision before the data was submitted for publication, and to ensure that his assistants maintained 'written laboratory notebooks and records sufficient to permit scientific peers and supervisors to adequately interpret and duplicate the work.'" (SF p.424) If such rules had been in place for Gallo—and followed—before he got his mitts on AIDS research, HIV may never have become the central fraud of "Holocaust II."
Gallo decided to set the record "straight" in his inimitable style by writing a book called Virus Hunting, which was as flattering to himself as one would expect, and according to Crewdson, was a project in which he didn't even get Montagnier's first name correct. (SF p.429) According to Crewdson, "Buttressed by scant documentation, Gallo's book was drawn mainly from his own recollections and those of his staff. Perhaps for that reason, it frequently left the impression that some insight or discovery occurred sooner than it did." (SF p.429) It was interesting that according to Crewdson's account at least one member of the French team seemed to also be capable of playing the kind of games that Gallo played. Crewdson writes that "a preface by Jean-Claude Chermann recounting the discovery of LAV . . . read as though Chermann had done it single-handedly." (SF p.430) One begins to wonder if any leading scientist during the AIDS era got enough love and attention as a child.
According to Crewdson, when the OSI report came out, the "publicity in Paris" inspired the Pasteur Institute to consider "the possibility that the 1987 agreement [with Gallo] would have to be renegotiated." (SF p.430)
Looking back on her work on the Gallo OSI investigation, Suzanne Hadley, according to Crewdson, was most "dismayed" by her failure "to get an early handle on the full compass of the case—to see how some of the entries in Mika Popovic's notes, or some of the phrases in his Science article, while seemingly disconnected might have implications in a larger context for the patent, the blood test, the veracity of the Reagan administration, and the settlement with the French." (SF p.434) Crewdson reports that she said, "It was so much bigger than we imagined. Once I began to get my wits together, it was too late." (SF p.434) Crewdson summed up the dilemma: "So broad was the scope of the Gallo case that it seemed ludicrous in retrospect, to have attempted to fit it into the narrow framework of a scientific investigation, which typically focused on the misreporting of an experiment in a published article. Even more than whatever had happened in Gallo's lab, Hadley was appalled by the government's behavior, in and out of court." (SF p.434) Hadley told Crewdson, "Whatever one thinks about Gallo . . . he had support all the way up the line. They had data back in 1984 showing they were the same virus . . . There never was an iota of a chance that HHS would do an honest thing. Before anything had even happened the die was cast, the decision was made. After that it was simply a matter of crafting a litigation strategy." (SF p.434) Hadley deserves great honor for doing the right thing but even her intense epiphany about Gallo and the realization about what she was actually staring at was just scratching the surface of the main event. Beneath the mendacities by Gallo and the Reagan administration concerning who discovered the so-called AIDS retrovirus lay far more catastrophic secrets and lies that would ultimately blossom into a world of HHV-6 related immune dysfunction.
When the scientific community saw the watered down OSI report—which Crewdson described as almost completely changed from the Suzanne Hadley version (SF p.436)—with its main misconduct charge focused on Popovic, and Gallo once again ducking the main bullet, many were horrified. But The Washington Post, once again played the role of Gallo enabler and declared Gallo vindicated. (SF p.436) One scientist, Gene Myers, when he heard Gallo was still not willing to admit that his discovery was actually the French retrovirus, is quoted by Crewdson as comparing Gallo to Dostoyevsky's Karamazov. (SF p.436)
When Bernadine Healy met with the panel that was overseeing the final watered-down OSI report, one of the members described what she said to them and it was chilling and ironic. Crewdson quotes Alfred Gillman's account of Healy's remarks: "What she wanted to know . . . is does Gallo have no redeeming qualities at all? Is this guy the scum of the earth? Or is there a spark of genius there that ought to be nourished? Or is he mentally ill?" (SF p.438) One can reasonably guess that the victims of "Holocaust II," voting from their graves, would probably vote "no" on redeeming qualities, "yes" on scum of the earth, "not so much" on spark of genius and "absolutely yes" on mentally ill.
While The Washington Post bent over backwards to help Gallo, ABC's Sam Donaldson went in the other direction when he took up the story. Donaldson's TV report began, "It may be the greatest scientific fraud of the twentieth century." He also warned that "important elements of the United States government seem reluctant to have all the facts revealed." (SF p.442) If he only knew. Donaldson was just one more reporter who didn't see the even more important issue lurking beneath the surface of the LAV story.
One of the most disturbing moments in the government's peculiar protection of Gallo, and one that should be pondered and investigated by historians of "Holocaust II" for many decades to come happened when Congressman John Dingell's office began their investigation of the Gallo affair. Dingell brought the beleaguered Suzanne Hadley into his congressional investigation of Gallo because she knew where all the Gallo bodies were buried. But when the committee requested the files from the preceding OSI investigation she herself had conducted, it turned out that notebooks from the investigation had been shredded by Hadley's replacement at OSI. (SF p.461) Gallo was a cat with more than nine lives. Abnrmal and totalitarian science had abnormal and totalitarian oversight.
For anyone who believes that some kind of bizarre group psychosis characterized the whole enterprise of AIDS research, it is of interest that when Peter Stockton talked to famous Nobel Prize winning scientist James Watson during this period about Gallo, according to his account in Crewdson's book, Watson's "big point was that Gallo is a manic depressive. He thinks the subcommittee should back down because Gallo's crazy. He thinks we should talk to Gallo's shrink." (SF p.473) One could say that to comprehend all the pseudoscientific underpinnings of AIDS or "Holocaust II" one must talk to Gallo's shrink.
As could be expected in the arbitrary and opposite world of AIDS science, OSI itself was changed into the Office of Research Integrity and the rules were changed even while the Gallo investigation was ongoing—just like the rules of science were altered by bogus AIDS research. Instead of simply finding scientists guilty of publishing fabricated scientific results, under the new rules the committee had to show that the scientists who was charged had intended to do so. (SF p.466-475) That ridiculous new standard made it nearly impossible to find any scientist guilty because, according to Crewdson, the scientist "could simply claim he hadn't intended to deceive anybody." (SF p.454) Gallo's most powerful Guardian Angel had arrived on the scene in the form of this crazy new rule. Another dark legacy of AIDS and "Holocaust II" would be that the government's process of trying to defend Gallo would make it easier for all American scientists to commit fraud and get away with it. Gallo was truly an historic figure in that he paved the way for many more years of plausibly deniable scientific fraud. It is a breathtaking legacy.
Even with the rules of evidence loosened in Gallo's favor, he continued to behave like a cornered Mafioso as he told scientists who were expected to testify before the new committee that if they testified it might not turn out too well for them. (SF p.499) He told one scientists that he might "spill the beans on him." (SF p.480) Gallo was a virtual Boston of spillable beans.
The final OSI report on the Gallo affair was basically a whitewash, a true blue cover-up. Suzanne Hadley described it as a "version of history" that "parroted the government's arguments years before in defense of the blood-test patent." (SF p.503) She told Crewdson, "There's too much pseudoscience in the opinion. They got it from somewhere." (SF p.503) Again, what Hadley didn't grasp was how catastrophically deep the pseudoscience laid out before her actually was.
When an appeals board reversed the verdict of the ORI, Gallo was elated. According to Crewdson, Gallo said, "I will now be able to redouble efforts in the fight against AIDS and cancers. There are several hopeful new avenues of AIDS research that my laboratory is pursuing." (SF p.505) The business of Holocaust II could continue in earnest. The New York Times reporter, Nicholas Wade, one of the AIDS paradigm's truest believers, wrote that Gallo was "the one scientific hero who has yet emerged in the fight against AIDS." (SF p.505) With heroes like that, gays, blacks and anyone suffering on the HHV-6 spectrum illnesses didn't need enemies.
But John Dingell wasn't done with Gallo. His staff attempted to get prosecutors to charge Gallo and Popovic with making false statements under oath, but between complications involving the statute of limitations for the crime and problems of involving the jurisdiction the crimes took place in, that never happened. (SF p.510) Bullet ducked again.
All of this mishegas took its toll on Gallo's new boss, Sam Broder, who had succeeded Vincent DeVita. According to Crewdson, "Since replacing Vince DeVita, Sam Broder had defended and protected Gallo. Now there were indications Broder, like DeVita before him, was growing disillusioned. Reportedly, horrified by Daniel Zagury's use of Zairian children in his AIDS vaccine research, Broder had ordered Gallo's name removed from the pending HHS patent on Zagury's vaccine. When Suzanne Hadley showed Broder Gallo's outrageous statement that the patent had been initiated by Broder himself, Broder exploded, 'He said, "That's bullshit!" Hadley recalled." As if that wasn't enough, according to Crewdson, Hadley used the same meeting with Broder to tell him that her investigation "had turned up evidence that several of Gallo's subsequent articles also contained false statements." (SF p.514) Hadley told Broder about a paper Gallo published in 1985 which contained false statements about the AIDS virus isolates he had in 1982. According to Crewdson, "The paper was a political exercise, a pollution of the scientific literature intended to help lay the groundwork for a defense against the French." (SF p.515) Crewdson reports that Sam Broder told Gallo that if he didn't retire he would order a new NCI investigation of him. (SF p.515) Suzanne Hadley is quoted by Crewdson as remembering that Broder said to her, "I told Bob, 'You've degraded the institute, you've degraded the public and you've degraded reporters by lying to them . . . . We owe things to the people of another time. They need to know what things were really like during the era of AIDS research.' One of Bob's biggest sins is his overdriven compulsion to claim all the credit and to trace it all to his great intellect." (SF p.515) As true as Broder's words were, he was still missing the sin beneath the sin, not the sin of stealing credit, but the sin of egotistically leading the world down a deadly misbegotten path, manipulating science and the public into thinking he had delivered the truth about AIDS to the world. And as far as that sin was concerned, Broder himself was joined at the hip with Gallo.
As quoted by Crewdson, something else Hadley remembered Broder saying sizzles with irony: "He was confused out of his mind. Bob was so thoroughly wrong. The AIDS virus had to fit the retroviruses as he knew them, and he was wrong. He needed to listen to his data, and he did not want to do that . . . Bob writes all these historical things that have no relationship to the way it really was. I told Bob, 'I have not forgiven you for this. People are dying of real diseases, and this is not a game.' . . . Frankly Suzanne, it was a Nobel Prize run. You guys don't talk about that, but I was there, and I know. And frankly he almost got it. And if he had gotten it, he would have been truly invincible." (SF p.516) Where to begin? Well, first of all Gallo's word of choice for the people this science involved, at least on occasion (as reported by New York Native), was "fag" which may have had a little something to do with the level of moral seriousness with which Gallo dealt with the AIDS issue. Second of all, who is Broder to talk? He was the scientific genius behind the aggressive pushing of AZT into the bodies of AIDS patients, something akin to pouring gasoline on a fire.
In 1994 there was a revised settlement with the French which Crewdson described as "a clear victory for the French." (SF p.585) Suzanne Hadley, working for the Dingell Committee, wrote a 267-page account of the whole matter that according to Crewdson "spared no one" in assigning culpability "starting with the Department of Health and Human Services." (SF p.526) Crewdson writes that the report said that "HHS did its best to cover up the wrongdoing" and "meanwhile the failure of the entire scientific establishment to take any meaningful action left the disposition of scientific truth to bureaucrats and lawyers, with neither the expertise nor the will essential to the task. Because of the continuing HHS cover-up it was not until the Subcommittee investigation that the true facts were known, and the breadth and depth of the cover-up was revealed. . . . One of the most remarkable and regrettable aspects of the institutional response to the defense of Gallo et. al. is how readily public service and science apparently were subverted into defending the indefensible." (SF p.527) As profound and disturbing as the report was, it was naively focused on the tail of a far bigger unseen monster, namely the HIV-is-the-cause-of-AIDS mistake itself and the entrenched world of abnormal, totalitarian science that it represented. The report was clueless about the psychotic and deeply biased paradigm at the very center of Holocaust II. It was commendable for Dingell, Hadley and Stockton to nail Gallo on the viral theft from the French, but relatively speaking, it was in essence a successful prosecution of a misdemeanor that missed the exponentially more important underlying medical and scientific crime against mankind.
To say that Gallo landed on his feet after this disgrace is an understatement. When he left NCI he had to rough it at the brand new, built-just-for-him, multi-million dollar research Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore financed by the state of Maryland. And as one could expect in the opposite world of Robert Gallo, one of the people he invited to come work for him at the spiffy new institute was the paragon of great science, Mika Popovic, a man who will probably take some of Gallo's juiciest secrets to the grave with him. Gallo's ability to either discover things or steal them, depending upon how you looked at his career, seems to have diminished in Baltimore. According to Crewdson, "During its first five years of life the Institute for Human Virology hadn't come up with any marketable discoveries." (SF p.537) AIDS patients were clearly safer with Gallo out of NCI and eating crab cakes in Baltimore.
Near the end of his account of the Gallo affair, Crewdson writes his most chilling sentence: "The Popovic-Gallo Science paper, among the most-cited scientific articles of all time, is laden with untruths that have never been retracted or corrected." (SF p.539) In other words, the very foundation of "Holocaust II" is laden with untruths that "have never been retracted or corrected." Every living scientist and doctor should hand their head in shame. They are the apathetic, compliant "ordinary Germans" of this period in history. And anyone who describes Science as a prestigious publication worthy of any kind of reverence at all should put on a pair of clown shoes.
Crewdson closes his awesome dissection of Gallo's deeds and character on a philosophical note: "Being wrong in science is hardly a sin. Scientists are wrong every day, and their mistakes are what pushes science forward. What set Gallo apart, was his profound disinclination to acknowledge his mistakes, preferring instead to ignore them, insist they hadn't occurred, blame someone else, or propagate outlandish explanations and outright fictions that only confused science further and slowed its forward march . . . . In the end, the most compelling question was one only Gallo could answer: Had he somehow convinced himself that all the lies were true? Or had he known better all along?" (SF p.540) Actually, a more fundamental and philosophical questions would be whether Gallo was capable of honestly answering that question or even understanding it. Was Gallo a true sociopath? And that leads to the larger historical question about the degree to which a kind of enabling group psychosis went way beyond Gallo and underwrote all of "Holocaust II." It may have taken a whole psychotic village to empower a Gallo.
While the world owes journalistic genius John Crewdson a debt of gratitude for laying bare the mind-numbing complexities of Gallo's scientific fraud regarding the discovery of the so-called AIDS virus, the larger story that Crewdson missed, the one he failed to see beneath all the masks that he did rip off, was the game-changing story that the so-called stolen AIDS virus wasn't even the cause of AIDS. While Crewdson was writing his masterpiece, which was ultimately published in 2002, evidence was accumulating that the other virus that Gallo claimed to have discovered, HHV-6, actually did play a major role in AIDS. In fact, the major role. The virus was not an unimportant pathogen as portrayed by Crewdson in Science Fictions.
The New York Native, the little gay newspaper that pioneered the Gallo story even before Crewdson got to it, followed the HHV-6 trail that led to a far bigger and more disturbing story about AIDS than just Gallo's appropriation of LAV. While covering HHV-6 the New York Native broke one of the biggest AIDS stories of all, the breakout of acquired immune deficiency in the general population which the CDC and the NIH hid behind the ridiculous euphemism of "chronic fatigue syndrome." The New York Native's reporter, Neenyah Ostrom covered chronic fatigue syndrome, AIDS and their relationship to HHV-6 from 1988 until the paper went out of business at the end of 1996.
The parent company of New York Native published three books on Ostrom's reporting about the relationship between HHV-6, AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome. The first book, What Really Killed GildaRadner? Frontline Reports on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, was published in 1991. In the book's introduction, Ostrom wrote "For whatever reasons—like reluctance to admit the presence of another AIDS-like epidemic sweeping the nation in the shadow of (and linked to) the official AIDS epidemic, simple incompetence, or more sinister reasons—health authorities have tried to deny the very existence of the chronic fatigue syndrome epidemic in the U.S., have tried to prove that the illness of immune dysfunction is caused by 'psychoneurosis,' [and] have delayed for years determining how many cases actually exist in the country . . . ." (WRKGR p. 10) The next Ostrom book, 50 Things You Should Know About the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic was published in 1992. In its introduction, she wrote, "America is facing a health crisis of unprecedented proportions, a crisis that has been misleadingly labeled chronic fatigue syndrome. This health crisis has been bungled by government health officials from the very beginning: It has been ignored, misrepresented, and investigated ineptly until, as I write this in January, 1992, untold millions of Americans already have contracted this potentially disabling, AIDS-like illness. . . . CFS is clearly an AIDS-related illness that puts the entire population at risk." (P.13-14) The final Ostrom book, America'sBiggest Cover-up, which was published in 1994 was even more uncompromising in its conclusions. Ostrom attempted to explain why officials refused to admit a link between AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome: "AIDS patients, and people who test HIV-positive (whatever that actually turns out to mean), have been so badly treated, so discriminated against, so scapegoated and demonized that it is not surprising that there is an almost reflexive recoiling from the possibility that AIDS is not the narrowly-defined illness that it has been portrayed as being." (ABC xvi) She asserted that "Until the denial among medical professionals about the relationship between the AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome epidemics is overcome, however, it is difficult to imagine how either epidemic can be ended." (ABC xvi) Had John Crewdson not just taken the lead on Gallos's theft of HIV from New York Native, but also followed the trail of Ostrom's reporting on chronic fatigue syndrome and HHV-6, he might have broken a bigger and far more important story.
Two years before Crewdson's book on Gallo hit the bookstores, Nicholas Regush's book on HHV-6, The Virus Within: AComing Epidemic was published. Regush had been a reporter for the Montreal Gazette as well as an award-winning and Emmy-nominated medical and science journalist at ABC News, where he produced segments for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Regush's book covers the history of HHV-6 from its discovery through a succession of shocking discoveries made by two researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Konnie Knox and Donald Carrigan. Regush's picture of HHV-6 bears little resemblance to the failed Gallo co-factor of Crewdson's book.
The HHV-6 that emerges from Regush's book should have made the scientific community's collective head spin. In a series of experiments on a variety of patients, the two relatively young Wisconsin researchers showed, without even fully admitting it or shouting it out to the world, that HHV-6 was the real villain in AIDS. They showed that HHV-6 is capable of wreaking havoc in both the central nervous system (TVW p.9) and the immune system itself. Prior research by R.G. Downing had shown that HHV-6 was capable of destroying T-cells (curiously, the only so-called herpes virus to do so) which was something that the AIDS establishment insisted on blaming HIV alone for doing indirectly even though HHV-6 destroyed the cells dramatically, directly and unambiguously. As Regush pointed out, "Here was a herpes virus that could destroy T-4 lymphocytes at least in the test tube more powerfully than HIV." (TVW p.54) Had Crewdson dug deeper on the HHV-6 story, he would have learned that there are supposedly two strains of HHV-6, an A and a B strain. And he would have found out that HHV-6A was indeed starting to look more and more like the significant co-factor in AIDS or even more surprisingly, like the chief viral culprit itself. Gallo wasn't lying about the power of HHV-6. According to Regush, "In November 1993, Robert Gallo's lab published data gleaned from autopsies of five people who had died of AIDS, demonstrating an abundance of HHV-6 infection. Footprints of the virus were found in areas such as the cerebral cortex, brain stem, cerebellum, spinal cord, tonsil, lymph nodes, spleen, bone marrow, salivary glands, esophagus, bronchial tree, lung, skeletal muscle, myocardium, aorta, liver, kidney, adrenal glands, pancreas and thyroid." (TVW p.84) If anything, Gallo was underestimating the power of HHV-6 in order to keep his beloved stolen virus HIV alive. Ironically, one of the reasons Gallo didn't do more work on HHV-6 during the 80s was because he was busy fending off investigations from Congress and journalists like Crewdson (and pesky newspapers like New York Native.)
One of the early HHV-6 research projects conducted by the Wisconsin researchers showed that HHV-6 is a major lung pathogen in AIDS, a fact that tragically had been largely ignored in the treatment of AIDS. And one of the most important findings on HHV-6 that could have an impact on everyone's health was Carrigan and Knox's determination that "Direct infection of the [bone] marrow by HHV-6" was possible (TVW p.62) According to Regush, their research showed "that HHV-6 could infect—and suppress—bone-marrow cells." (TVW p.64)
While Konnie Knox was focusing on HHV-6's relationship to HIV, her research actually began the shocking process of pulling the rug out from under HIV itself. Her work with Carrigan showed that HHV-6 could also seriously dysregulate monocytes and macrophages, making it a very creative and dangerous pathogen. (TVW p.68) She made HHV-6 the subject of her doctoral thesis and Regush reports that she wondered if she was "throwing herself into the hurly burly of Big Science politics." (TVW p.69) Actually, she was throwing herself into the hurly burly of Big Abnormal Science politics.
Knox started sealing the deal for HHV-6's role in AIDS when she studied tissue samples of a group of people who had died of AIDS. According to Regush, "The results of her experiments gave her a jolt: all 34 tissue samples of lung, lymph node, liver kidney and spleen revealed that at the time of death there was active HHV-6 infection as opposed to merely a biological sign that the virus was 'latent' (embedded in tissue)." (TVW p.83) Her experiment also showed that one of the big AIDS showstoppers, CMV, wasn't even as important because she found it active in only nine of the 34 tissue samples. (TVW p.84) Most alarmingly in terms of the way lung issues had been treated in AIDS was the fact that she found evidence in some of the patients that HHV-6 as probably responsible for the destruction of the lungs. (TVW p.84)
Knox, not knowing the real nature of AIDS politics, told Regush that she was "amazed that so little HHV-6 research had actually been done on AIDS patients . . . . It didn't make much sense." (TVW p.85) She was another scientist who had found her way into HIV/AIDS Wonderland. She didn't have the right compass for the science of opposite world or the nasty retroviral and heterosexist politics that had laid its foundation.
The profile of HHV-6 as a virus capable of destroying the immune system was dramatically increased when, according to Regush, "various labs exposed HHV-6 as" capable of targeting T-8 cells and when scientists at the National Cancer Institute showed that "HHV-6 infects and kills natural-killer cells. These are the immune cells that destroy abnormal cells in the body, particularly those that are infected by viruses. HHV-6 is the first virus known to be capable of targeting and seriously damaging such a vital element of the immune system's antiviral defenses." (TVW p. 87) (The fact HHV-6 was capable of killing natural-killer cells should have alerted the whole scientific community to the link between AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome which are both low natural-killer cell syndromes.)
Knox found that HHV-6 "could cause major damage during the early development of AIDS," (TVW p.89) and didn't need HIV to do it. According to Regush, "Her autopsy-tissue study had already shown that macrophages were often depleted in the lungs of HIV-infected AIDS patients," and she was determined "to know how HHV-6 was capable of knocking out those cells . . . . Her tests showed that, besides destroying macrophages, HHV-6 interfered with the normal functioning of the scavenger cells by blocking the release of a type of oxidant, a substance that cells normally generate to attack microbes. Knox noted that HIV was not known to be capable of this specific type of action." (TVW p.95) She concluded that HHV-6 had the potential to destroy the macrophages in the lungs without HIV, a totally sacrilegious idea in the abnormal science of AIDS. According to Regush, she dared to wonder heretically if HIV was "doing any killing in the body, or was HHV-6 the lone assassin?" (TVW p.96)
Knox also found that HHV-6 was capable of causing brain infection or encephalitis without any signs that HIV was involved. (TVW p.97) And the same no-show behavior on the part of HIV occurred in the case of the bone marrow in AIDS: "Knox's lab studies demonstrated that HHV-6-infected marrow cells—not the HIV infected ones—blocked the ability of the marrow to produce mature, differentiated cells." (TVW p.97) The same scenario was manifest when she looked at the brain damage in AIDS patients. Regush writes that "When Knox studied the brains of six people who died of AIDS and found extensive damage in four to their nerve fiber sheathe she also detected active HHV-6 infection. The infected cells were only in areas where the damage had occurred and never unhealthy tissue. The damaged tissue tested negative for signs of HIV, CMV, and other microbes. Again, their was only HHV-6." (TVW p.101) Again, according to Regush, all of this inspired the very dangerous doubt in Carrigan and Knox about whether "HIV was even necessary for AIDS to occur." (TVW p.101)
The pièce de résistance of the Knox and Carrigan research involved the lymph nodes of AIDS patients. According to Regush, "the development of AIDS has largely been viewed as a progressive destruction of the networks of lymphocytes and fibers known as the lymphoid tissue. AIDS scientists, however, have been unable to associate the presence of HIV in the lymph nodes with any damage to the tissue." (TVW p.98) While the conventional wisdom was that HIV was hiding in the lymph nodes and destroying them, what Knox and Carrigan found turned the conventional wisdom upside down. In perhaps their most important study they found that "16 lymph-node biopsies from HIV-positive patients all contained cells actively infected with HHV-6A. Twelve of 16 patients who had been diagnosed with progressive disease had more dense infection that the four patients who had been diagnosed as having a stable condition. Knox and Carrigan also found more dense infection in areas where the lymph nodes were losing lymphocytes than in areas free of destructive change or where normal tissue in the nodes was already being replaced by the formation of scar tissue. HHV-6 was the apparent cause of the destruction of lymphoid tissue that occurred in these HIV positive people." (TVW p.114) Regush didn't mince words about the implications: "HHV-6 was not only at the scene of the crime, but it appears to have committed the crime as well." (TVW p.114) Regush describes Knox and Carrigan as wondering if they had found a "smoking gun" because "there were no convincing studies demonstrating that HIV could cause similar pathology."(TVW p.114) They submitted their research to The Lancet, but as could be expected, it was not accepted. It was ever thus during "Holocaust II."
In the world of Kuhnian normal science Carrigan and Knox would have had their Nobels by now for showing that HHV-6 was the real AIDS virus and was even more important than just that as other research began to connect it to many other diseases that would turn out to be part of an HHV-6 spectrum of disorders. But not in the opposite world of abnormal, totalitarian science that was dominated by the heterosexist HIV/AIDS paradigm. HHV-6 threatened the whole epidemiological house of cards the CDC and the NIH had presented to the world. Good luck to future HHV-6 scientists all over the world when they try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
In an interview with Robert Gallo, Regush asked him about Knox and Carrigan. Regush reported that "Gallo spoke very generously about what Knox and Carrigan had accomplished, but he also emphasized that they work in too much obscurity to obtain any funding. 'They have clearly shown that HHV-6 is a powerful pathogen,"' Gallo said. 'If they were headliners at a major university, it would make a huge difference.'" (TVW p.223) How two scientists who were essentially doing a controlled demolition on the HIV/AIDS paradigm would ever even hope to be allowed positions of prominence in a scientific world dominated by people like Gallo requires a huge stretch of the imagination. As Regush concluded, their research "suggests that HIV may not always be necessary as a companion to HHV-6 when the herpes virus is destroying tissue. But even suggesting that in writing would raise the hackles of HIV researchers. In fact, some AIDS scientists compare any questioning of the HIV hypothesis as it currently stands, to denial of the Holocaust. With such emotions running strong in AIDS science, why take a chance of boldly presenting alternative hypotheses?" (TVW p.224) Unfortunately for the world, Regush reported that Knox and Carrigan didn't have the stomach to go more public with their story or to join forces with the AIDS critics and dissidents: "Knox and Carrigan, while aware of the issues, want no active part of this often hostile debate." (TVW p.224)It was very unfortunate that the brilliant, tireless John Crewdson never found his way into this shocking HHV-6 part of the AIDS story. His expose of Gallo and the purloined retrovirus had caught the eye of the NIH's investigative body and Congress itself. Had Crewdson found his way to the Knox and Carrigan laboratory at the University of Wisconsin and done the same kind of Pit Bull due diligence on the primary role of HHV-6 in AIDS, he might have helped bring "Holocaust II" to an early end and everything would have been different for people on the HHV-6 spectrum. And knowing how Gallo had stolen HIV, Crewdson might have eventually looked into the allegations that he also stole credit for discovering HHV-6, which is another story. And just as creepy.
June 13, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Another Reason James Curran Should be Asked to Resign from Emory University
When historians attempt to deconstruct the sociopathic science that has given us the cover-up of a major HIV/AIDS Ponzi scheme and a massive epidemic of diseases related to HHV-6 (like AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, etc.), they should look closely at a shocking moment back in the 80s when the CDC's James Curran (now a Dean at Emory University) altered AIDS research data.
In Science Fictions, John Crewdson's meticulous documentation of the frauds of Robert Gallo, the scientist who makes Bernie Madoff look like Mother Teresa, that moment is described. Under political pressure to name something the cause of AIDS, James Curran, then a kind of de facto AIDS Czar, basically did something scientists often do when their data doesn't perfectly fit their hypothesis: he altered it.
Gallo, as everyone now knows, stole the so-called exogenous retrovirus that the French scientists at the Pasteur Institute supposedly found in AIDS patients. Gallo and his toadies then created their own fraudulent test from their stolen French retrovirus and then, in Three-Card-Monte fashion, they had an Americanized test for an Americanized retrovirus. When the Centers for Disease Control compared the French and Gallo tests for accuracy, according to Crewdson, the Pasteur Institute's test was slightly better. According to Crewdson, in typical Gallo style, he wanted the CDC to alter the results so as to reflect a better score for Gallo's version of the test. It was just another day in the sociopathic science of AIDS, so of course James Curran agreed to Gallo's outrageous request.
This is just another reason Emory University immediately should ask for the resignation of James Curran, a scientific crook who should not be the Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health. Unless of course the whole purpose of universities is to turn out sociopathic scientists who can compete against other sociopathic scientists in the brave new world of sociopathic science that AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research have created.
June 10, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
It's time for the students and faculty at Emory University to dump James Curran, one of the people who helped craft the homophobic, racist and sociopathic science of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Why is he the Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health?
The Centers for Disease Control's James Curran was one of the chief architects of the original AIDS paradigm. Curran had the perfect medical background for laying down the formative heterosexually-biased interpretations of the early data that epidemiologists gathered about the sick gay men who were thought to be the patients zero of a new supposedly gay epidemic. Jacob Levinsen described Curran in The Story of AIDS and Black America: " . . . Jim Curran, the Chief of the CDC's Venereal Disease Control Division was tapped to head up a Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infection Task Force. Despite being short staffed and underfunded, the Task Force managed to bring together experts from diverse fields like virology, cancer, and parasitic diseases in addition to a small team of epidemiological intelligence officers, who were the agency's foot soldiers for disease prevention. . . . He had done quite a bit of work on hepatitis B with gay men in the 1970s, and he almost immediately suspected that the had a similar sexually transmitted and blood borne disease on their hands." ( The Story of AIDS and Black America) And that suspicion paved the way for one of the biggest conceptual mistakes in the history of epidemiology.
According to Shilts's Band, when Curran saw the first reports on PCP in gay men, he wrote an odd note to one of his colleagues saying "Hot stuff. Hot stuff." (ATBPO p.67) Shilts also described a rather revealing meeting at a subsequent CDC conference at which Curran was briefed on the sexual behavior of gay men by a gay physician named David Ostrow. According to Shilts, "Ostrow mused on the years he had spent getting Curran and Dr. Jaffe [Curran's CDC colleague] acculturated to the gritty details of gay sexual habits. . . . Curran had seemed uptight at the start, Ostrow thought, but he buckled down to his work. Both Jaffe and Curran were unusual in that federal officials rarely had any kind of contact with gays, and the few who did rarely wanted to hear detailed gymnastics of gay sex." (ATBPO p. 68) They clearly buckled down to their work a little too well. With their heterosexual sense of noblesse oblige (venereal division), these high-level clap doctors gone wild, set out to understand what the mysterious new gay epidemic was all about. Gay men would have run for the hills or hidden in basements if they had known what would result from the efforts of these two quick learners about "the gymnastics of gay sex" who were headed their way. Again, I must point out, if only the CDC had recognized the 1980 DuBois CFS cases as the actual beginning of the AIDS/CFS/autism pandemic of HHV-6, the two quick learners might never have gotten their mitts on the "hot stuff' that was happening in the gay community. They never would have become experts on the joy of gay sex.
Curran was married and the father of two children. Three days into what he thought was the sexually transmitted epidemic he was examining gay patients and, already, according to Shilts, he "was struck by how identifiably gay all the patients seemed to be (ATBPO p.70) These gays were apparently really gay, not the plainclothes kind who could pass. According to Shilts, these gays "hadn't just peeked out of the closet yesterday." (ATBPO p.71) It may have been the perceived intense gayness of the first patients—the really gay ones—that resulted in Curran's huge, consequential mistake of erecting a mostly gay venereal epidemiological paradigm that would become the virtual thirty year hate crime against all gays, both the ones who could pass and the ones who were really gay. It wasn't just the patients who were strange. The strangeness of the people who had the disease would inspire a strange new kind of science, epidemiology and virology that was in essence "homodemiology." It was destined to make everything worse for gays and everyone else who had the bad luck of getting caught up in the CDC's paradigm. And that would ultimately even include members of the heterosexual general population.
Shilts tried to capture Curran's thought process when he wrote, "It was strange because diseases tended not to strike people on the basis of social group." (ATBPO p.71) He added that "To Curran's recollection . . . No epidemic had chosen victims on the basis of how they identified themselves in social terms, much less on the basis of sexual lifestyle. Yet, this identification and a propensity for venereal diseases were the only things the patients from three cities—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—appeared to share. There had to be something within this milieu that was hazardous to these people's health. (ATBPO p. 71) Well, there certainly was something about to enter this "milieu" that would be extremely hazardous to these people's health, and that was Curran himself and his merry band of gay-sex-obsessed groupthinking epidemiologists who were about to hang the albatross of the venereal AIDS paradigm around the neck of the entire gay community.
When Shilts discussed Curran confronting "sociological issues" that were involved in the mysterious illness, it escaped Shilts that Curran and his associates were themselves sociological (and political) issues as they plopped themselves in the middle of the gay community (at a time when the community was most vulnerable and nearly hysterical) with all of their own peculiar heterosexual and heterosexist baggage. According to Shilts, "About a dozen staffers from all the disciplines potentially involved with the diseases volunteered for the working group. They included specialists in immunology, venereology, virology, cancer epidemiology, toxicology and sociology. Because the outbreak might be linked to the Gay Bowel Syndrome, parasitologists were called in. (ATBPO p. 71) The fact that any illness was labeled "Gay" should probably have been a red flag for the kind of heterosexist thinking that would soon be rolling across the gay community like a tsunami.
Once the guiding gay-obsessed premise (an example of a Arendtian "image") was set, it was a matter of gay epidemiological garbage in and gay epidemiological garbage out. Questions with mistaken premises were about to lead the researchers and their medical victims down a deadly primrose path. Shilts summed up the basic direction of the inquiry: "Researchers also sought to determine whether the disease was indeed geographically isolated in the three gay urban centers. Did the detection of cases in the three centers make the patients appear to be only fast-lane gays because gay life tended toward the fast track in those cities? Was the disease all over gay America but in such low numbers that it had not been detected?" (ATBPO p. 81) Now we know, of course that there was indeed something else out there, but not just "all over gay America." Something wasn't playing by the rules of the CDC's gay-obsessed epidemiology. Something was making even the heterosexual DuBois Atlanta cases of 1980 ill, and those non-fast-lane, non-gay cases represented what was going on all over straight general population America in a whole spectrum of ways. Biased epidemiological premises have consequences.
There is something almost laughable about the notion of Curran's CDC working group going out into the gay world and asking themselves "What new element might have sparked this catastrophe." (ATBPO p.82) One brand new element in the gay community that actually was the most significant spark for the coming catastrophe that was about to unfold was the CDC's own incompetence and heterosexist epidemiology.
Given the way AIDS would evolve into the kind of abnormal science that doesn't even require the usual rules of evidence, common sense and logic associated with real science, it is interesting that Curran did apply those old-fashioned rules early on when they were needed to build the venereal AIDS paradigm. Shilts wrote, "To prove an infectious disease, Curran knew, one had to establish Koch's postulate. According to this century-old paradigm, you must take an infectious agent from one animal, put it into another, who becomes ill, and then take the infectious agent from the second and inject it into still a third subject, who becomes ill with the same disease." (ATBPO p.105) Curran certainly tried to apply some semblance of the paradigm—or the logic of it anyway—when, by finding people who had AIDS often had slept with people who also had the disorder, he saw the links as a kind of epidemiological proof of transmission even though they weren't strictly speaking the fulfillment of the animal experimentation inherent in Koch's postulate. At least Curran knew the basic rules of science. Unfortunately these very same rules would subsequently be thrown out the window to maintain the belief that the retrovirus eventually linked to AIDS was the one true cause of AIDS. Had those Koch's postulates been adhered to faithfully throughout the epidemic we might be calling HHV-6 the virus of acquired immunodeficiency today and there might have been no Holocaust II to write about.
The CDC, in an evolving and de facto manner, conducted something that could be called "the Atlanta AIDS/CFS/autism public relations experiment" at the expense of everyone's health. What I mean by that coinage is a kind of postmodern public health political experiment in which rather than truly controlling an epidemic by being truthful and effective and scientific, the public health institutions of the CDC and the NIH tried to control and manipulate everything the public knew about the epidemic of AIDS/CFS/autism. It may have been quasi-innocent and simply the product of unrecognized sexual bias and old-fashioned self-deception when it started, but it evolved into something far more sinister and destructive. In the early days of AIDS, as described by Shilts, Curran was seemingly the embodiment of good-egg innocence when it came to the realization that it would be necessary for him to figure out some way to get the media's attention in order to increase public pressure for providing the funding the CDC needed for AIDS research. Unfortunately, the manipulation of the media by scientists or public health officials can—and did—have grave consequences for scientific, medical and epidemiological truth. In AIDS it became a kind of cancer.
In 1982 Curran appeared before a group of gay physicians in New York and told them "It's likely we'll be working on this most of our lives." (ATBPO p. 134) Historians one day will want to probe deeply into whether he knew anything that everyone else didn't know at that point. At the very least, it was as though he was an inadvertent prophet. He and his colleagues were indeed in the process of screwing things up for many generations to come. Curran's mistakes assured that his grandchildren's grandchildren will probably still be working on this problem. If they're not autistic.
Shilts, in another moment of ironic journalistic naiveté, wrote this about Curran: "As a federal employee Curran had a thin line to walk between honesty and loyalty" (ATBPO p. 144) when he was describing the AIDS situation to Congress. Shilts notes that Curran could not ask Congress for money when he testified, "but he could nudge facts toward logical conclusions." (ATBPO p. 144) The nudging of facts would become an art form at the CDC over the next three decades and sometimes the facts that had to be nudged were so large they virtually had to be moved with bulldozers and the conclusions they were nudged towards were always more political than logical. One could almost faint from the irony of Curran telling Congress in 1982 (two years after those first Atlanta DuBois cases of immune dysfunction, "The epidemic may extend much further than currently described and may include other cancers as well as thousands of persons with immune defects." (ATBPO p. 144) Had he or his colleagues at the CDC recognized the DuBois 1980 Atlanta cases as the canaries in the HHV-6 mine, he would have been talking about millions (if not billions) of cases and he would not have had to play games with words to get Congress and the White House to do the right thing financially. One disturbing aspect of his manner of thinking was reflected in how Shilts summed up his testimony: "With death rates soaring to 75 percent among people diagnosed with GRID for two years, the specter of 100 percent fatality from the syndrome loomed ahead, he added." (ATBPO p.144) It would be nearly impossible to dial back on the distorted image of the epidemic he was presenting and frankly, dialing back on anything was something that the CDC (like the NIH) would turn out to be constitutionally unable to do. That, as we have said, is another sign that we are living in a period of totalitarian abnormal science.
Curran's peculiar attitude towards gays surfaced revealingly again when Shilts described his refusal to meet Gaetan Dugas, the unfortunate gay man who would be eternally scapegoated in the echo chambers of the media as the "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic because he had supposedly slept with a number of the original AIDS cases: "Jim Curran passed up the opportunity to meet Gaetan, the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary. Curran had heard about the flamboyant [flight] attendant and frankly found every story about his sexual braggadocio to be offensive. Stereotypical gays irritated Curran in much the same way that he was uncomfortable watching Amos n' Andy movies." (ATBPO p.158) One doesn't know quite where to begin on this one, except to note that Curran would be able to use his clap-doctor and gay-obsessed epidemiology to act on his feelings and beliefs about both stereotypical and non-stereotypical gays, and every other kind of gay in between. The way that Shilts described Gaetan Dugas should have been a warning to the whole gay community of what kind of medical and social treatment was in store for them: "Gaetan Dugas later complained to friends that the CDC had treated him like a laboratory rat during his stay in Atlanta, with little groups of doctors going in and out of his hospital room. He'd had his skin cancer for two years now, he said, and he was sick of being a guinea pig for doctors who didn't have the slightest idea what they were doing." (ATBPO p.158) Of course when those doctors eventually thought they had figured out what they were doing—that was precisely when they really didn't really have a clue about what they were doing. The Holocaust II era of the gay guinea pig had only just begun. The CDC's epidemiology would create a whole new gay stereotype. Curran's difficulty in getting researchers to come into the field was the fallout of the gay and sexual way the frightening disease had been framed for the public—something that might never have happened if the DuBois 1980 wholesome heterosexual Atlanta cases had been the epidemiological and virological template for the epidemic rather than the kind of Amos n' Andy gay people that made Curran so jiggy with embarrassment that he wouldn't even meet with them.
It's amazing how many people seem to have been assigned credit (by different sources) for bringing (dragging?) Robert Gallo into AIDS research. Shilts has Curran on that Washington-slept-here list too, noting that he said to Gallo when he was receiving an award at a medical conference in 1982, "You've won one award. You should come back when you win another award for working on AIDS." (ATBPO p. 201) Bringing Gallo into the field was like putting a pair of retrovirus-obsessed eyeglasses over a pair of gay VD-obsessed eyeglasses and expecting to see the epidemic for what it was. Otherwise known as the blind recruiting the blind.
One of the more grimly amusing passages in Shilts's book concerns Curran's thought about the fears in the gay community that AIDS would result in gays being put into concentration camps: "Curran thought the train of thought was curious. After all, nobody had suggested or even hinted that gays should be in any way quarantined for AIDS. The right-wing loonies who might propose such a 'final solution' were not paying enough attention to the disease to construct the Dachau scenario. Still, it was virtually an article of faith among homosexuals that they should end up in concentration camps." (ATBPO p. 228) Silly gays. Frankly, who needed concentration camps or "the Dachau scenario" when you had CDC epidemiology. CDC epidemiology saved the country a load of money on barbed wire. And Holocaust I, where gays actually were made to wear pink triangles in real concentration camps—that was so 1940s.
One of the most unfortunate and tragically wrongheaded things about Curran is that, according to Shilts, he held his colleague Donald Francis "in awe, given Francis's international reputation for smallpox control." (ATBPO p.262) As one looks back at the circle jerk that also got Holocaust I going, one might hypothesize that all holocausts begin in passionate mutual admirations societies.
Something began to surface during James Curran's reign over AIDS at the CDC that bears close scrutiny by any enterprising historian interested in identifying the institutional roots of Holocaust II. In 1983, when Susan Steinmetz, an aide to Congressman Ted Weiss, visited the CDC in an oversight capacity, she was prevented from seeing files she automatically should have been able to audit as a representative of a Congressional Committee that had oversight responsibilities on health and the environment. According to Shilts, she was told by the then CDC Director William Foege, "she would not have access to any CDC files, and she could not talk to any CDC researchers without having management personnel in the room to monitor the conversations. The agency also needed a written, detailed list of specific documents and files Steinmetz wanted to see." (ATBPO p.292) Shilts reported that "Steinmetz was flabbergasted. What did they think oversight committees did? Their work routinely involved poring through government files to determine the truth of what the high-muck-a-mucks denied, and then privately talking to employees who, without the prying eyes of their bosses, could tell the truth. This was understood, she thought." (ATBPO p.292) What she didn't realize was that the CDC's de facto little counterrevolution against science and the ideal of transparency in democratic processes had begun before her unassuming eyes and this would become business as usual at the clandestine CDC for the next three decades. The shroud of secrecy (de rigueur in all abnormal science) that would enable Holocaust II and the cover-up of the CFS, autism and Morgellons epidemics was descending on the CDC in Atlanta.
While Steinmetz was just trying to find memos that would contradict the CDC's public posture that it had enough money to research the emerging epidemic of AIDS, without realizing it, she had stumbled onto the fact that the CDC had begun acting more like a government intelligence agency with vital national secrets—possibly even embarrassing ones—to keep, than a public health organization that was committed to truthful science and was accountable to the American people. In essence the CDC was showing that it wasn't above any of the legerdemain that any other part of the government was capable of. It was showing us that it was very much cut from the same cloth as the government gremlins that gave us Watergate and Vietnam.
Steinmetz wanted to see files that pertained to budgets and planning, but she was bizarrely told that she couldn't see the files because they had patients names in them and that violated patient confidentiality. It strained credulity to argue that patients names were involved in organization budgets and planning. and in retrospect, it was a very lame excuse. This wouldn't be the first time in Holocaust II that a dishonest explanation with a fake concern and compassion for patients' welfare would be used by those in authority to stonewall the very people who were actually trying to do something about the welfare of patients. The CDC was already in a paranoid circle-the-wagons mode that characterizes abnormal and totalitarian science. According to Shilts, "The CDC personnel, who struck Steinmetz as peculiarly contentious, wanted to conduct their own review of the files before letting Steinmetz see them . . ." (ATBPO p. 292) And "as another demand, the CDC insisted that before any interviews with CDC staff took place, the agency would screen questions that Susan Steinmetz put to scientists." (ATBPO p.292) On the eve of the HHV-6 catastrophe and Holocaust II, government science was going into the lockdown of abnormal science. Shilts wrote, "This is getting pretty strange, Steinmetz thought." (ATBPO p.292) Strangeness was but a puppy at that point.
This new emerging opposite world of public health and scientific duplicity and defensiveness didn't make sense to Steinmetz's colleagues back in D.C.: "On the phone, other oversight committee staffers in Washington confided that they had never heard of an agency so recalcitrant to Congress . . ." (ATBPO p.292) It got even worse for Steinmetz at the CDC in Atlanta when, on the second day of her oversight visit, she was told by the CDC manager who was handling her visit that her "presence would no longer be permitted in the CDC building and that no agency personnel would be allowed to speak to her." (ATBPO p. 293) The stonewalling and the lockdown were not confined to the CDC in Atlanta. Shilts reported that Steinmetz also faced new obstacles in her path when "The National Cancer Institute officials issued a memo demanding that all interviews with researchers be monitored by the agency's congressional liaison. At first the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease was cooperative, but then, in an apparent NIH-wide clampdown, information became difficult to excavate there as well." (ATBPO p.293) Science and public health in America were about to play the same kinds of political games that are played in totalitarian countries. Public health information was about to be totally controlled by the government.
Curran can himself take a great deal of personal credit for the HIV mistake. Shilts writes that "During the summer of 1983, Dr. James Curran had grown fond of citing the 'Willie Sutton Law' as evidence that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus. The notorious bank bandit Willie Sutton was asked once why he robbed banks, to which he replied, "Because that's where the money is." Curran, according to Shilts, would ask "'Where should we [at the CDC] put our money? . . . 'Where would Willie Sutton go? He would go with retroviruses, I think right now.'" (ATBPO p. 331) There is a revealing amount of cockiness and arrogance in Curran that remind one that pride goeth before a fall. But one Willie Suttonish thing was certainly true: retroviruses turned out to be exactly where the big money was for a number of dishonest and incompetent retrovirologists
It is fascinating to see Shilts catching Curran red-handed as he lies about the inadequate funding for AIDS. Publicly Curran would say "we have everything we need," (ARBPO p.331) but Shilts was able to use the Freedom of Information Act to locate documents that "revealed that things were not so rosy at the CDC, and Curran knew it. Even while he reassured gay doctors in San Francisco, he was writing memos to his superiors begging for more money." (ATBPO p. 331) For anymore cognizant of the overwhelming mendacity that characterized just about everything concerning Holocaust II, it is especially disturbing to read Shilts's account of Curran's excuse: "'It's hard to explain to people outside the system,' he said. 'It's two different things to work within the system for a goal and talking to the people outside the system for that goal,' he said." (ATBPO p. 332) Curran was basically making the anti-transparency excuses people inside of the government always make for talking out of both sides of their mouths. It's too bad Shilts didn't consider the possibility that this character trait was also reflected in the basic science and epidemiology of AIDS that was being churned out by the CDC. It would turn out over the next few decades that indeed government science spoke out of both sides of its mouth.
Curran got the venereal HIV/AIDS paradigm he and his colleagues wanted, the one that could be expected to materialize given his background. It wasn't surprising then, that he said in 1984, according to Shilts, "Gay men need to know that if they're going to have promiscuous sex, they'll have the life expectancies of people in the developing world." (ATBPO p.416) Actually, given the crazy treatments some gay men were going to be medically assaulted with, he was a true visionary.
As could be predicted, according to Shilts, "Jim Curran also viewed testing as essential to any long term strategy in fighting AIDS." And so the Pink Triangle medical apartheid agenda of testing and stigmatizing gays as HIV positive (or as an HIV risk group) began in earnest. And the gay community got specially tailored forms of communication from Curran. According to Shilts, "Curran was always cautious when he talked to newspaper reporters, fearful that his observations on the future of the AIDS epidemic might be fashioned into the stuff of sensational headlines, but he felt no inhibition with the gay community. Instead he felt his mission was to constantly stress the gravity of the unfolding epidemic." (ATBPO p.483) Of course, while he was giving the gay community the tough love, behind his epidemiological back was the looming HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe, a situation which was exponentially worse than anything his little team of clap doctors and pseudo-epidemiologists could possibly have imagined. Given that it was the CDC's AIDS paradigm that in essence scapegoated the gay community for what would turn out to be everyone's HHV-6 problem, it is the epitome of irony that according to Shilts, Curran thought that "the question was not if there would be a backlash against gays, but when. It might come soon. 'You should get ready for it,' he said." (ATBPO p.484) How does one prepare for a backlash against gays? Buy extra canned goods? Bake an extra quiche? It was certainly nice of him to give the gay community a heads up, but in truth, the pseudoscience, the incompetent fact-gathering implicit in ignoring the DuBois 1980 Atlanta cases, and the homodemiology of the CDC, constituted a kind of epidemiological backlash before the backlash. Curran and his team needed only look in the mirror to see the kind of anti-gay values that could do far more mischief to the gay community than an army of right wing loons.
Journalist David Black caught some of the underlying psychological problems at the CDC in his book The Plague Years. He wrote, "In fact the CDC, like many physicians and scientists, seemed embarrassed by the gayness of the disease." (TPY p.57) We now know only too well in retrospect is that the best science and epidemiology can not be conducted in an atmosphere of gay-sex-related embarrassment. Black quoted one CDC researcher as saying to a visiting gay activist, "This never would have happened if you guys had gotten married." (TPY p.57) When the activist asked if the researcher meant to each other, the researcher said, "To women." (TPY p.58) The CDC researchers conducted their epidemiology and science in an awkward atmosphere of antipathy to gays, surely not a fertile field for objectivity. According to Black, when he asked Curran to explain exactly what he means by "'intimate contact' [between men] the phrase researchers kept using to describe the conditions under which the syndrome spread, he seemed uncomfortable, squeamish. He stammered and glanced anxiously around the room." (TPY p.58) If some of Jim Curran's best friends were gay, they had clearly done very little to make him comfortable with their sex lives. One suspects that most of Jim Curran's best friends were not gay.
One absolutely show-stopping moment in Black's rich little book is a criticism that was leveled at Curran: "He started making up these 'facts' from the data as he interpreted it,' said one unnamed gay critic of Curran." Who was that astute gay critic? Please stand up now, take your bow.
June 9, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
It's time to reconsider the Jane Teas African Swine Fever Virus AIDS Hypothesis
McInnis and Gregg suspect iridovirus — a virus that suppresses the immune system — could be infecting honeybees and keeping them from returning to their colonies. The virus, McInnis said, may have an "AIDS-like effect" on the bees, making them more susceptible to common diseases that wouldn't normally be fatal to them."I think this could be earth-shattering information if we're right. Everybody depends on honeybees to help grow the food that we eat," said Gregg, who while working at Plum Island treated African swine fever in pigs — a virus similar to the one he's investigating with McInnis. "Most other people trying to solve this problem are looking at pesticide use. There are very few others who are investigating the possible spread of a virus." (Newsday, June 7, 2016)
Now that African Swine Fever is back in the news in the context of an AIDS epidemic in bees that is causing colony collapse disorder, it's time to reconsider the hypothesis of Jane Teas that African Swine Fever is the real cause of AIDS. What is the relationship of African Swine Fever to HHV-6 and HHV-8? Is African Swine Fever really the trigger for both AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Are American pigs now infected with some new strains of African Swine Fever Virus? There are a number of articles on Jane Teas and her colleague John Beldekas available on the internet. Here is one at Spin Magazine. And here is an AP story that appeared in The New York Times.
June 4, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Before Ron Davis, Ian Lipkin and Maureen Hanson start doing new rounds of CFS hocus-pocus in their laboratories, we suggest they test what could be called the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis.
The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis:
For over three decades, the Centers for Disease Control has been covering up the relationship between so-called AIDS and so-called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by a massive deception and self-deception involving nosology, epidemiology, HIV and HHV/6/7/8 fraud.
(Please read and reread this metahypothesis very, very carefully and make sure you thoroughly understand it before any research commences. Ponder its implications before you even start to form your own hypotheses.)
Good luck testing the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Metahypothesis! If you ignore it may the best CFS hocus-pocus win!
June 1, 2016 HHV-6 Editorial
Ron Davis, CFS Reinvent-the-Wheelism and CFS Virgin Birtherism
Geneticist Ron Davis, who has a son suffering terribly with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is getting involved with CFS research. According to the End ME.CFS Project, "Under the guidance of world-renowned geneticist Ronald W. Davis, PhD., we have brought in top experts in a variety of fields for a bold and new collaborative research project. Our ultimate goal is unlocking the mystery of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and end the suffering caused by the disease. The project's first study is the ME/CFS Severely Ill-Big DATA Study that is designed to find a clinically useful diagnostic biomarker."
Cool, right? Open the champagne, right? World-renowned? Whoopty do!
Not so fast.
We fear all this smells of "CFS Reinventing-the-Wheelism" and "CFS Virgin Birtherism."
Anyone who comes to CFS and starts throwing around the word "mystery" has a serious ethical problem. Scientists are not supposed to ignore previous work on something they are researching. When they do that in the realm of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you pretty much know you are in the presence of "CFS Reinventing-the-Wheelism." You also know you are in the presence of the kind of naive folks who think that science is not political and government scientists never lie about anything. Poor things. Sad.
There are hundreds of studies about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that make this illness very unmysterious. Painfully so.
Read the work of Hillary Johnson and Neenyah Ostrom and ten years of reporting on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in New York Native.
To call it mysterious is to promote a very Big Lie.
All of the science that has been published on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is bullshit? Says who? A renowned geneticist? One who wears his underpants on the outside of his pants and a cape?
What is mysterious is the cockamamie act of CFS scientists ignoring what has preceded them.What is mysterious is CFS scientists ignoring all the damage HHV-6 is doing to the bodies of CFS patients.
Over the years a number of scientific narcissists (Hello Ian Lipkin!) have entered the field who have basically implied that nobody should worry because now a real rootin'-tootin' scientist has arrived. These narcissists generally are anti-history and anti-intellectual and have have not bothered to do their homework, But then scientists are not paid to read deeply or widely, think or seriously challenge authority. (Read Betrayers of the Truth if you have any doubt about that).
Does Ron Davis have a clue about the sociopathic science that forms the foundation of the CFS and AIDS cover-up? We doubt it. We suspect that his illustrious colleagues are probably clueless, too. A new variation of an old-boy network is not the antidote to an ongoing era of sociopathic science.
One of the nonmysteries about CFS is that it is transmissible. Families come down with it. Orchestras, classes, people who have slept with the same woman who was suffering from CFS. (Go to the index in Johnson's Osler's Web and check out "transmission" in the index.)
To not talk about transmission is to go down the road of "CFS Virgin Birtherism," a belief that somehow, out of nowhere, one suddenly comes down with CFS, a disease that should be called AIDS Lite or AIDS Spectrum Disease, but never is by the politically correct CFS crowd that is trying to control the activist narrative. (They would rather die than talk about the intertwined relationship of CFS and AIDS. Unfortunately, many have.)
To talk about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and AIDS in the same breath results in the kind of exile that Judy Mikovits has experienced. First Mikovits was screwed by the scientific establishment for basically finding AIDS-like retroviral activity in CFS and now she is being screwed by the CFS community for referring to CFS as "Non-HIV AIDS." In a world of sociopathic science she just can win for losing.
The big questions directed at Ron Davis should be "Does your son possibly have a virus or some other agent that he is capable of spreading to you and the rest of your family? Are you already infected and showing the effects of that agent in different ways? Can people who come in close contact with your son develop the disease? Can they then infect other people? Has that agent been spreading for over three decades and are millions of people now on the CFS Spectrum or more appropriately, the AIDS Spectrum? Is your son just one of many millions of infected people who are victims of a pandemic that has been ignored at best and covered up at worst? Are scientists emphasizing genetics actually aiding and abetting a public health cover-up of a contagious illness capable of destroying the immune system?"
If Davis thinks that such questions don't really matter and we just need a genetics genius like him and a team of big names (all male) to ride in on white horses and reinvent the CFS wheel, then we suggest that he could be of more use running around the world with his underpants on the outside of his clothes (he is pictured below). Nothing gets the world's attention more than a world-renowned geneticist wearing his underwear outside of his pants. If his science is as good as his public relations strategies, all CFS patients should make sure their wills are in order.
A renowned geneticist who will save the world.
May 25, 2016 HHV-6 Editorial
The Millions Missing campaign utilizing shoes is perhaps the most effective effort we have yet seen on behalf of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Congratulations to everyone behind it. You're hitting it out of the park.
We have a suggestion.
Everyone involved should now send one of their shoes to Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health (9000 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20892). The other shoe should be sent to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (3012 43rd St NW, Washington, DC 20016).
We have little doubt that every major media outlet in the country would eventually cover this story.
May 24, HHV-6 Editorial
How Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Threatens to Expose AIDS Czar Fauci and the CDC's Perfect Scientific Crime
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers are constantly puzzled by the remorselessly contemptuous manner in which they are treated by AIDS Czar Anthony Fauci and government scientists at the CDC. Hillary Johnson did a wonderful job of capturing that contempt in her masterpiece Osler's Web.
The treatment has been uncanny and never seems to really change. The patients cry, "Why, why, why, why?" To many it makes no sense. Many of the sufferers are white middle class heterosexuals are used to being treated with a modicum of respect from their government and its bureaucrats. They feel a certain amount of white heterosexual privilege and just can't fathom why they are being so ruthlessly disrespected and "disappeared."
The patients don't realize that they are being gaslighted by a grotesque empire of sociopathic science. The patients are treated like they are whiny nuts. When they complain they are almost driven crazy by sadistically being told that they are crazy.
It's a shame that CFS community doesn't understand what is going on. Patients operate from a basis of naive good faith, totally unaware that they are petitioning a system full of all the bad faith and consciencelessness that is characteristic of sociopaths and sociopathic science.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients do not understand that they are potentially ruining and exposing a perfect sociopathic scientific crime. Sociopaths hate when they are recognized for what they are and the sociopaths who are in charge of AIDS are no different from classic sociopaths.
Wikipedia defines a perfect crime: "Perfect crime is a colloquial term used in law and fiction (especially crime fiction) to characterize crimes that are undetected, unattributed to a perpetrator, or else unsolved as a kind of technical achievement on the part of the perpetrator. In certain contexts, the concept of perfect crime is limited to just undetected crimes; if an event is ever identified as a crime, some investigators say it cannot be called 'perfect.'"
By not recognizing exactly what Fauci and the CDC are doing, CFS patients help keep a perfect crime "perfect."
Serious research into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from day one has always pointed to a relationship between Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and AIDS. Anyone who disputes that is either seriously uninformed or lying to themselves. Newbies should start their research with the 1990 paper by Nancy Klimas in which she describes as "a form of acquired immunodeficiency." Hello!
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ruins the perfect crime of systemic AIDS fraud.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to expose the perfect crime of AIDS epidemiological fraud.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to show that AIDS Czar Anthony Fauci has been in charge of one of the most perfect scientific crimes in the history of mankind.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome threatens to expose the massive retroviral fraud that has been used to cover up what HHV-6 is and what it does. (This goes for HHV-7 and HHV-8 too.)
When Elaine DeFrieitas detected some retroviral activity in CFS and tried valiantly to sort it out, she came too close to exposing the fraud of HIV and the cover-up of HHV-6 and HERV-K18. She had to be derailed.
The same thing happened to Judy Mikovits when she detected retroviral activity in CFS and got too close to exposing the perfect scientific crime of HIV fraud and the cover-up of HHV-6 and HERV-K18. Mikovits now sadly and pathetically travels around the country doing talk shows and giving interviews in which she describes CFS as "Non-HIV AIDS." CFS patients don't like to talk about her as much as they once did because "Non-HIV AIDS" is just a little too much truth for their tastes. And the AIDS establishment must also be terrified of that expression because it is yet another threat to the perfect scientific crimes that AIDS pseudoscience and pseudo-epidmiology are.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients who treat AIDS as a separate epidemic have basically become accessories to AIDS Czar Fauci and the CDC's perfect scientific crime. The inconvenient truth is that they have become Fauci's useful idiots and his enablers.
Until CFS patients can accept the relationship between CFS and AIDS, the sociopathic science of Fauci and the CDC will continue to roll over them with impunity.
May 21, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Is Ian Lipkin Some Kind of Idiot?
"ME/CFS is a global problem that we need to address – it robs people
of the most productive years of their lives, it causes immunological
dysfunction, profound fatigue, cognitive dysfunction. It really
destroys peoples' lives. It is underappreciated, it is underfunded,
and with your support we hope to find solutions to this crippling
problem". ~Dr. Ian Lipkin
If Ian Lipkin doesn't see Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as part of the AIDS epidemic and if he doesn't examine the role of HHV-6 in CFS as well as the endogenous superantigen retrovirus HERV-K18 it transactivates, then he is just playing games with people's lives and money. At best he is an enabler of the socipathic science that has characterized CFS/AIDS research for over three decades. At worst he is just another CFS/AIDS charlatan and rip-off artist.
Lipkin needs the members of the CFS community to play his patsies. Don't oblige him.
May 16, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
Dating while Disabled (Uhhhh, with a Contagious Disease)????
Litsa Dremousis has written a an op-ed piece in The Washington Post that raises questions she seems to not even be aware of. The title of the piece, "Dating while disabled: From Day One with someone new, I feel vulnerable" immediately caught our attention.
Ms. Dremousis writes about breaking up with an man who had been her fiance "until two weeks ago." She notes, "when you're disabled, you feel indebted every day, making dating that much harder than it is for the average person." As we read that sentence we thought, well, yes, especially since you have a contagious illness, Ms. Dremousis. She outlines some of the challenges: "And no matter how fiercely autonomous and intelligent you are, you're starting each relationship as the one who needs help doing otherwise simple tasks, such as walking downstairs or driving. Even with healthy self-esteem, it's hard not to feel intensively vulnerable."
We of course wondered about the challenges of the uninfected person without CFS who might end up dating her, someone who might be exposed to a contagious illness that seems to effect every system in the body. Oh, but that's their problem.
Ms. Desmousis is not slacker when it comes to describing CFS. She's not from the "too tired to get out of bed school" of CFS self-description. She writes, " . . . struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome makes me often feel as if I have a powerful flu. I deal with constant temperature fluctuations; extreme sensitivity to light and sound; dangerously low blood pressure; and fatigue so powerful it feels like a Buick is sitting on my chest." And she adds, "I'm unable to stay upright more than a few hours on a good day; for the past several years, I have needed to be wheeled through airports (if you think air travel is a nightmare, try doing it in a wheelchair). And when I'm on a plane or bus, I have to wear a surgical mask because my immune system is so compromised. Twice in recent years, someone else's cold became my pneumonia."
She writes, "For 24 years I've had ME/CFS (formerly known as "chronic fatigue syndrome"), a disabling neuro-immune illness similar in many ways to multiple sclerosis" Imagine if she had written, "For 24 years I've had ME/CFS (formerly known as "chronic fatigue syndrome"), a contagious disabling neuro-immune illness similar in many ways to multiple sclerosis and AIDS. "If she had she would have been exiled from the CFS community and The Washington Post would probably not have published the piece in the first place.
But the real bombshell in the piece was what she wrote about Trent, her fiance: "Five days after Trent asked me to marry him, a routine check-up unearthed a brain tumor behind his left ear. A longtime professor, Trent is deeply intelligent and tenacious. We were in love and determined to remain upbeat about his prospects. I took care of him over six months, as we assembled his surgical team, spent a week in the hospital as he underwent and recovered from the successful but complicated brain surgery, and then as he went through months of physical therapy. I was his main source of emotional support, but it took a huge toll on my health."
While we sympathize with Ms Dremousis and Trent, what really turned our head was the possibility that the two of them might have shared something more than their love, namely a virus called . . . drum roll . . . HHV-6. For any newbies visiting HHV-6 University, we have done numerous items on the relationship between HHV-6 and cancer. HHV-6 is very oncogenic. Did we say very?
Did it never dawn on Ms. Dremousis that Trent's brain cancer and her CFS could be virologically related? Is she unread on the subject of CFS. No book in her library by Hillary Johnson or Neenyah Ostrom? No awareness of the New York Native? Really? Ms. Dremousis seems to be some kind of intellectual. She writes, "I give literary readings several times a year and am diligently working on the manuscript for my second book." We suspect she has a library card or access to Amazon.com. What gives?
It is uncanny that Ms. Dremousis notes, "Our relationship became a constant cycle of doctor appointments and medical tests — and the stress eroded the joy we once found in each other. And because everyone asks: Yes, of course we had sex. All the time. Even at my sickest, I've been sexually active. I'm disabled, not dead." For anyone familiar to HHV-6, that could be called "sex in an HHV-6 cluster." Otherwise known as the new normal in sex these days, thanks to our NIH and CDC.
The irony burns like Hiroshima when she write, "I remain optimistic. Each relationship I'm in is affected by my health. For instance: Am I strong enough to go to the movies tonight, or should we stay in and watch Netflix? Can we eat breakfast with the curtains open, or are my eyes too light-sensitive this morning? For a relationship to be successful, the person I'm with has to be empathetic and understand that some things are beyond my physical control. Yet so many of these relationships have profoundly enriched my life. I'd be foolish to waste the rest of my life convinced that I won't find love."
Oh yes, the person she finds had better be empathetic and even downright forgiving because the big unspoken and unmentionable problem is that when she finds love, the person she gets involved with may have found a woman who is infected with a contagious virus that not only can cause Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and cancer but so many other illnesses that this website, which is devoted to reporting on them, now has over 1725 posts (as of this day).
May 15, 2016 HHV-6 University Editorial
If members of the so-called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community really want to get to the bottom of their epidemic (and sometimes we doubt that is true), they should stop making sob sister documentaries and prancing around with their underwear outside of their clothes. One more boo-hoo story about how awful CFS is will just make the world yawn and say, "Get in line, buddy. We all have problems." The misguided underwear-on-the-outside campaign will only make the patients look silly, but we won't get into that here.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is first and foremost a political matter. Untrustworthy scientists in power are controlling and masking what the public knows about CFS. Anyone who has watched the CFS narrative unfold, in all of its sociopathic glory, knows that what is being hidden from public consciousness is its obvious contagiousness and the intertwined relationship between CFS, AIDS and HHV-6. For more on that we suggest you look at some of the hundreds of posts on HHV-6 University.
Stop whining. Stop being silly. Get political. Face facts. Get real.
If the contagious nature of their illness and the relationship between CFS, AIDS and HHV-6 are too much truth for CFS patients, then Houston, we have a real problem. If CFS patients, researchers and activists can't handle the truth, they're destined to live out the rest of their days in a cockamamie wild goose chase full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.