Science Guardian

Disparaging Duesberg won’t get DAIDS defenders very far this time, we predict

The comment of Ed Tramont to the inclusion of Peter Duesberg ’s name and views in the Harpers article - “As soon as I saw it I knew it wouldn’t be taken seriously” or the equivalent - is widely shared by poorly informed blog commenters.

Since we know from experience that, on the contrary, anything Duesberg writes is always impeccably precise, factually accurate, and finely argued, we believe we should contradict this politically aimed, scientifically unjustifiable remark.

The kind of response to Duesberg’s critique he has gotten in the past and is getting now is worth noting because it is not only inappropriate to Duesberg but because it indicates the very weakness of the HIV case.

Rated by some as one of the finest intellects at work in science today, on the basis of his remarkably precise and comprehensive papers damning the selection of HIV as the cause of AIDS, and his recent work in cancer, Duesberg nonetheless has been successfully smeared by the political defenses mounted by those of his peers who are seriously invested in HIV, having based their entire career on it for twenty years.

Having dealt with Duesberg as a reporter for those two decades, having read all his papers, and having never found him anything but precisely accurate in his observations on HIV?AIDS or any other scientific topic, including especially cancer, and corrected only in very minor ways by peer reviewers in areas outside his core expertise, we have to agree with those who give him a top rating, and say his treatment has been shameful.

We’ve interviewed scores of other scientists at the top of their field over the years, and we can assure these Duesberg denialists, that is, those who deny Duesberg’s stature, that they are scorning an unusually powerful scientific intellect and analyst, clearly superior to his opponents in the HIV?AIDS matter.

This is easily evidenced by the quality of his papers eviscerating the rationale for HIV?AIDS from the Cancer Research and the Proceedings articles right up to the Journal of Biosciences paper in 2003. We are certain that no one of any intelligence can read these papers without appreciating that they are written by a major scientific mind. (A researcher of our acquaintance who has read Duesberg’s papers very closely says he is convinced that Dueberg is a “scientific genius.”)

But of course, the foot soldiers of HIV?AIDS will never read them. So let’s note that of all the graduate students at Harvard that Walter Gilbert made read these papers as examples of high grade paradigm challenge, not one decided to make a name for him or herself by writing a rebuttal.

This salient point is made by Harvey Bialy, in his book of 2004, “Aneuploidy, Oncogenes and AIDS: The Scientific Life and Times of Peter Duesberg”, a highly revealing account of the specious and egregious manoevering over the years by scientists, bureaucrats and editors in HIV?AIDS to evade the impact of Duesberg’s challenge as a professional threat by castrating him financially and in terms of platform.

Bialy, writing from the safe distance of a university appointment in Mexico, spares none of them in reporting such incidents as the notorious invitation to the opera, where a scientific player flew into San Francisco and invited Duesberg to the opera and drinks afterwards.

There he produced from his jacket pocket a document Duesberg was to sign repenting of his sins and renouncing his objections to HIV, whereupon he would be accepted back into the fold, and invitations extended once again, funding approved and publication of his papers accepted. Duesberg, though facing professional ruin, declined.

His recent progress in understanding cancer is also recognized as extremely important and promising by many senior scientists in that field, in spite of the fact that he demolished the intellectual foundation of their current fashion in cancer research in Cancer Research in 1987. (See his website Peter Duesberg on Cancer for the article in Scientific American which published a timeline of cancer research recognizing Duesberg’s contribution as seminal).

The essential theme of the Harpers piece by Celia Farber is the abandonment of scientific standards. Duesberg has never shown any sign of this weakness in anything he has written. He remains a classic scientist of the old school, subscribing without reserve to the very highest standards of logic and evidence.

It is a sad commentary on the general abandonment of those standards in the HIV?AIDS debate that he has to be defended against such politics.

We return from the heart of darkness, having seen the light, courtesy of Tony Fauci

The morning session at the HIV Prevention Trials Network Annual meeting at the $309 a night Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington began with a bounteous breakfast buffet including unlimited fresh orange juice, scrambled eggs, sausages of two kinds and long and perfectly done slices of bacon, meeting the highest standard of English country house weekends of the past century.

We ate as much bacon as we reasonably could, in honor of the hapless victims of AIDS around the world and the public spirit of many of them in agreeing to participate for very small reward ($10 or $20, we were told, is typical) in testing revolting drugs which may help stave off the depredations of a retrovirus which is entirely to blame for their ailments, according to every single person present at this meeting, for which no fewer than 861 people had signed up.

Bleary from a unsuccessful fight to find anything but trash on the 27 inch tv in our room last night, this morning we simply sat down beside two Thai girls at the nearest table. Destiny, however, took a hand. A friendly woman sitting at the same table proved to be administering the very pilot study that had Myron Cohen exploding with enthusiasm yesterday afternoon.

She informed us of the answer to the puzzle that had challenged us since. She explained how the “statisticians” had allowed them to launch a study which would detect the effects of nevirapine on the transfer of HIV positivity from man to woman or vice versa, even though this mostly (after initial infection) occurs at such a low rate that for all practical purposes it can be ignored as nil.

This was the last point in the day when pure logic ruled, as it turned out, and it was interesting to explore it with her. We have to say we are still not quite sure if the study design makes sense in principle. In case you can and wish to comment, we explain our difficulty in a hidden section which will emerge if you click (show):

That was the last time we examined anything with a critical eye today, it turned out. For having demolished as much bacon and orange juice as possible on behalf of the trial participants unable to attend this meeting, we joined the 861 listeners in the main hall presentations, and from that moment on we found ourselves increasingly unscientific in mood, as we were caught up in the group spirit.

By the end of the day, in fact, we had seen the light. Suddenly there was no need to criticize at all. Right in front of our eyes was the best evidence that HIV medication research was on the right track, and that anyone who was going to criticize was simply an outsider who hadn’t got the message.

This overwhelming evidence included:

1) The vivacious and warm personae of the participants, who seemed so much more content and agreeable than complaining HIV critics, one has to say, and who set an extremely good example for the populations of underdeveloped countries to follow. If belief in HIV had conferred such vibrant health and energy on the 861 people gathered in this meeting, surely it would bring the same blessing to the people of Africa and Asia.

2) The extraordinary cohesion and sense of mission shared by all. There was not a single doubter or skeptical mind in the bunch, as far as we could tell. This was enormous team spirit, equal or perhaps even greater than a school of fish, all swimming in unison in the same direction. The effect was overwhelming. The latest science has revealed that the mirror neurons in one’s brain tend to bring one’s mind in line with another human being as one observes them in action. We found it impossible not to empathize with 861 people in close proximity who have the same idea all at once.

3) The inspiring positive spirit of the HTPN and DAIDS leaders, including at least three with enormous charisma and oratorical talent, who we found could stir even a skeptical outsider with a sense of mission and accomplishment as we all moved forward together into the future where thanks to advanced science and sophisticated drugs the entire world will be able to live with HIV/AIDS, if not actually avoiding HIV altogether.

Such exceptional orators included Myron Cohen, Jonathan Kagan and the celebrated Anthony Fauci, whose sense of mission, vigor and confidence in the future imbued us as well as everyone else listening to them. In fact, we suggested to all three that perhaps we should name them “Heroes of AIDS” in a magazine piece, but unexpectedly Anthony Fauci, after three seconds reflection, declined.

4) The powerful arguments advanced to this reporter to the effect that any doubts in the relevance of HIV medication to AIDS were as absurd as Holocaust denial, and probably the moral equivalent. “Come and see for yourself!” cried at least two busy researchers with massive trials ongoing on the Dark Continent. One tall African-American active in Zambia told me that I would see how they brought in ailing AIDS victims so weak they had to be wheeled in barrows. Three months later, the anti HIV regimen had them returning to their villages.

5) The level of organization and authority reflected in the slides presented, with their perfectly worked out diagrams, arrows, columns, tables and lists, jargon, acronyms, and labels, showed everything labeled, named, ordered, computed and Powerpointed and explained clearly and logically (we assume, since the slides often slid by too quickly for real inspection). Nothing is more convincing and authoritative than a scheme mapped out and charted in clear order, we found.

6) Clear agendas. All Friday morning one agenda after another was presented and explained, in slide after slide - the currently very popular microbicides research agenda, the pediatric research agenda, the antiretroviral, behavioral, substance use and STD control research agenda. In fact, it could be said that nowhere had the public monies been more intensively applied than in this effort to map a future research agenda, which had so clearly achieved its goals. One could have nothing less than complete confidence in all these agendas, whatever their underlying rationale.

Questioning any agenda so thoroughly mapped would be like questioning the course of a tightly disciplined, immaculately maintained ship - a Navy ship, say, with clean uniforms (in fact there was one officer of the CDC present in full gold banded cuffs and medals, of whom we took this snapshot) and all sailors at their posts, steaming ahead to do battle, guns polished and loaded and course steady. As an observer on the bridge you would never dream of challenging the competence of the captain, even if the prow was aiming at a stone harbor wall dead ahead.

7) Keeping their own house in order. Nothing instils confidence in an operation than keeping its own house in order, as we say. One half hour presentation, by the proud designer of a new DAIDS computer reference system, explained how it would allow everyone applying for a trial grant to check at any moment, day or night, the precise position the application had reached in winding its way through the bureaucracy. This admirable order of priorities in the concerns of all involved won appreciative applause.

The tremendous presentation by the NIAIDS director. The week long session ended on a high note as Anthony Fauci, looking extremely dapper in a nicely tailored dark grey suit with subtle color threading, reassured his troops that funding might have leveled off from its previous 45 degree ascent, but they shouldn’t feel depressed. He had found a slide from the early years of the plague in which he predicted that funding would be tight, but as it turned out it was only just beginning its steep climb. The same thing might happen again, he suggested, and meanwhile he personally would make sure that the number of trials they were administering didn’t drop too far.

Fauci’s confidence was fortifying, and we felt quite reassured that the whole effort to test the effect of rather unpleasant drugs on the world’s ailing poor was unlikely to slow down noticeably.

In fact, we took the opportunity to ask him about his reaction to the new Harpers article, by Celia Farber, mentioned earlier, which calls into question the entire scientific quality and even the rationale of the 20 year effort to combat HIV?AIDS that Fauci has led with such success in the eyes of the world and the White House.

Unlike every other major figure in the NIAIDS and out of it that I had asked yesterday and this morning, Fauci, however, informed me that he hadn’t yet read it. By sheer coincidence, however, his talk had contained a spirited defense of the HIVNET nevirapine trial in Uganda which Farber had revealed was a complete mess, according to its embarrassing initial internal reviews.

Fauci had repeated the endorsements of the Institute of Medicine and other defenders of the study, who had claimed that despite the failures of controls and other flaws pointed out by critics, the final result, as rewritten by the responsible official in NIAIDS, was that nevirapine was an effective drug and should be funded with large chunks of the $15 billion in AIDS aid promised by President Bush.

Apparently this section of the speech was not in any way designed as a response to Harpers, then, but Fauci was interested to hear that it applied. When I mentioned that he hadn’t replied to the second half of the Harpers piece, however, he asked me what I meant. I told him it contained a fine summary of Peter Duesberg’s activities and critique of HIV. “Oh, that’s all been dealt with on our web site!”, he said dismissively.

Ed Tramont, Director of the Division of AIDS (DAIDS) of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH) and others, who all admitted to having read the Harpers piece, seemed to think there was no cause to take it seriously either. His reason, he said, was that as soon as he saw Peter Duesberg mentioned in it, he knew he didn’t have to take it seriously. (However, having discovered that we took Duesberg’s reviews seriously as scientific literature, peer reviewed in the best journals, he rushed to tell Tony Fauci that we believed in Duesberg’s critique.)

With the single exception of one key bureaucrat at DAIDS, who when asked his reaction to the Harpers piece looked miserable, and said “I just do my job”, noone seemed to feel that it deserved taking seriously. “They can write anything they like but it doesn’t make it right!” said a female John Hopkins scientist. Those willing to discuss the topic - and there were several of these - insisted that the drugs, including nevirapine, worked very well, and any time I wanted to visit Africa I could confirm this for myself. Their very real conviction was apparent, even in private conversations.

But one thing was noticeable. No one was able to explain how Peter Duesberg had been able to publish continuously over two decades complete scientific eviscerations of the HIV claim in some of the most reputable peer-reviewed journals in the world, where the referees included the greatest experts in the field, often extremely wary of his cause and anxious to prevent publication but evidently unable to prove what he said was factually wrong.

The only answer to both Peter Duesberg and Celia Farber seemed to be as the brunette scientist from John Hopkins put it, “They can publish what they like but it doesn’t mean it’s right!’ Fauci’s “Go to my web site!”, and the testimony of African trial administrators (one from Harvard, no less) that if one didn’t believe the drugs were valuable, “come to Africa and see for yourself.”

Immersed in today’s clubby experience, however, that seemed good enough. Power and money certainly provided a more attractive form of truth than tiresome and remote scientific journals that no one important needs to take seriously.

After Tony Fauci had presented several networking awards to a handful of hard working trial administrators, the meeting broke up and closed lunch sessions planning the future of trials took place.

But we had already learned enough, and full of enthusiasm for the marvelous example of these lively servants of a great cause, which they had so powerfully reassured us was the right one, we returned on the train to New York with what we had sought from the horse’s mouth - replies from the mouths of the biggest horses in the business to the best written and most tightly edited and checked challenge to HIV research and ideology to be published in mainstream journalism for two decades.

An important meeting in Washington of a large number of key people who mount HIV?AIDS trials of all kinds took place this week, and we decided to get down there in time for the talk this afternoon of Myron Cohen, who did not disappoint.

Myron, of the University of North Carolina, has developed a heroic level of enthusiasm for mounting a very large trial to see how anti-retrovirals might interfere with the dread possibility of man transferring HIV positivity to woman and vice-versa.

In a fast talking slide presentation involving “logs” and “g”s Myron rushed the audience through what purported to be a preliminary trial of some kind, which had cleared the way for the $100 million real thing, if funding for that was made available, as it no doubt will be if Myron is in the room. What a dynamo!

There was one very interesting slide which we will examine in detail later for what it tells us about the obstacles he has to contend with.

Meanwhile sitting in the audience was Nancy Padian whose study was the first that established the Mount Matterhorn that Myron will have to climb in discovering any effect whatsoever, which is that heterosexual contagion is effectively nil, according to Padian and other mainstream literature.

We will expand on this theme after returning from the conference, which includes cherry pie and some kind of soft dessert of a celestial order undreamed of by the unfortunate sufferers from HIV?AIDS in far away continents, who are about as far removed from the living style of their saviors as they are in mileage.

We read the Harpers piece again as we trained down to this networking node, and we will report on the surprising responses of key NIAIDS stalwarts such as Ed Tramont, Director of the Division of AIDS, when we asked them if they had read it.

But what a delightful experience the whole affair is. How healthy - positively glowing with nutrition and fulfilment - seem all the people here. I must say they set a good example for the people who are the object of their attentiveness, at least in persuading them to be public spirited enough to offer themselves for experimenting on in these trials, which as Celia Farber points out are the most lucrative scientific and medical activity in view these days.

We have been repeatedly reassured by everyone here that any criticism of these activities or the science behind them is sheer ignorance. In fact we were told by more than one person that it was comparable to Holocaust denial.

No one could yet explain how it was that the scientific journals that had published Duesberg had been taken over by sheer ignorance but we will find out tomorrow, we are sure.

Tony Fauci will come and give the final talk and then hand out awards for “networking”. At the rate we are collecting cards we think we might get one too.

Reasons to expect the HIV?AIDS cruise ship to take on water

That Harpers should be the one journal which has finally broken out of the group hynotic trance of mainstream-liberal-progressive editors in this area now seems inevitable, even though fifteen years ago it rejected an early, 1990 piece on Duesberg and HIV?AIDS politics along similar lines that was written for the magazine, which we happen to know editor Lewis Lapham liked at the time as “the kind of thing we should be publishing”.

As described in an earlier post, however, this fell by the wayside when Jack Hitt, the sub-editor on the piece, passed a newstand one morning and saw on the cover of Policy Review, the magazine of the right wing Heritage Foundation, two articles by Duesberg and Bryan Ellison, his graduate student co-author at the time, on the topic.

These two Policy Review articles and the correspondence they elicited have remained ever since the most intelligent public debate ever conducted on the theory of HIV as the cause of AIDS to this day, with the later debate in Reason a close second.

Why Harpers was shy of joining in such a debate in the wake of Policy Review was never explained, but one can speculate that the editor either felt scooped or was unwilling to lie in the same bed as those at the other end of the political spectrum, even on a non-partisan scientific issue. Or it could have been simply that the writer wasn’t able to peg it on on-the-record scientific mischief, as Celia Farber is able to do this time around.

Now, after fifteen years, Harpers has been finally moved to put its reputation on the line with a new and more powerful cannonade fired by writer and critic Farber, who has been an indefatigable chronicler of the scientific and medical war over HIV?AIDS from its beginning in 1987, when she interviewed Peter Duesberg for SPIN magazine.

We are glad she has finally been rewarded for her courage and perseverance in the face of so many years of social and journalistic punishment. For the path that an HIV?AIDS critic has to follow is not a happy one. There are probably more anti-free-speech religious zealots at large in this field than in a Muslim anti-cartoon rally, and few editors even among science publications with the strength of mind and purpose willing to flout them or the scientific establishment in HIV?AIDS.

Farber’s achievement here rests on a number of factors, it seems to us. First, she writes in a exceptionally honest fashion, which tends to win over the reader from the beginning with its lack of ego. With a deep moral sensitivity and empathy for the victims of injustice and neglect at the hands of officious arrogance, Farber couches her stories in human terms that every reader can relate to.

Probably this talent is inherited from her father, the longtime radio chat pioneer and now grand old man of broadcasting Barry Farber, who speaks 26 languages and is the subject of a new Swedish documentary.

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“Possibly the only liberal monthly whose editors are sufficiently worldly and independent to host such non-pc material in this area.”

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Beware the public relations functionary who makes a revealing remark within earshot of his daughter. The current piece has a classic specimen towards the end, a foolish remark Celia heard that all by itself sums up and embodies the burden of conformist prejudice and pr antagonism which weighs down free public discussion of the questionable science of HIV?AIDS.

I noticed a very angry-looking NIH publicist standing at the back of the room admonishing a colleague, a scientist. who’d posed a question that somehow connected (cancer) to HIV. “You opened it up,” she scolded. “We got through it OK and you opened it up.” As the questioner tried to defend himself, a thickset man who’d been standing in the circle said loudly, as though intending to broadcast it across the room: “Well at least if he’s wrong about this he won’t be be killing millions of people.”

But her success in gaining the imprimatur of Harpers also reflects the responsive character and nature of one of the country’s more enlightened publications, possibly the only liberal monthly whose editors are sufficiently worldly and independent to host such non-pc material in this area.

Given that most of the press and the public has been successfully bamboozled by the HIV?AIDS scientific establishment and their activist (and often drug company financed, Farber notes) supporters, so that the science of HIV?AIDS is beyond criticism, many will wonder how this came about. How did one of the most reputable magazines in the States come to commit what may be a decisive political act, one which breaks the liberal silence on HIV?AIDS and its suspect science?

Perhaps because it isn’t essentially a political act at all. For example, asked about this, Farber, by nature an observer rather than an activist, typically bridles at the characterisation of the editorial action as political. “I think you are committing the same error as the orthodox media and science establishment”, she responds. “There is no mystery. It’s journalism. Simply put, Harpers is run by very intelligent, conscious people who read. And who know the difference, as (Yale mathematician and accuracy scourge) Serge Lang famously phrased it, between a fact and a hole in the ground. This is pure reportage. It is not interrupted, as it has been so many times, by social anxiety. For that I thank them.”

Anxious to repudiate the idea that she is anything less than an objective writer, she recalls being interviewed by Malcolm Gladwell sixteen years ago, for a piece he never wrote, examining the psychology of so-called AIDS dissidents. “I said to him, we could talk about my childhood if you like, and your head might spin, but it would contain no revelations about why I see what I see. I see what I see. Because it’s there. You’re looking through the wrong end of the lens. Look at the story. Eye on the ball.”

Fair enough. That’s probably why Harpers likes her. At 156 years old and financially above the fray (it is supported largely by a private foundation) Harpers is essentially a generally skeptical rather than politically partisan magazine, given to politely but mercilessly deconstructing cultural attitudes and exposing the unwitting foolishness they often give rise to.

That power and money now drive great swathes of scientific research and may have led to the Enron of science in the case of HIV?AIDS is not something which Harpers was likely to overlook once they found the right writer, and it seems that destiny brought them Farber, whose feeling for the tragedy of human weakness on display throughout HIV?AIDS is a match for the Harpers predilection for pointing out the human flaws of the culture.

With a young editor, Roger Hodge, now taking the reins from Lapham after this issue, the magazine’s deep rooted realism about human nature seems likely to be applied to other scientific topics in future. For Hodge, who edited the Farber piece, is a philosophy scholar who hails from a ranching family in West Texas, and he is evidently not fazed as so many liberal editors and columnists are by scientific material.

In fact, there is more science in this new March issue, which follows Farber’s piece with “Viral Marketing”, a two page deconstruction of the Bird Flu medication panic by Peter Doshi, a young Harvard postgraduate who is also studying the inconsistencies of HIV?AIDS, and then a lengthy piece on the history of flash mobs adorned with several graphs. The few science-as-culture critics in the nation have a new space, it seems.

Reported and edited over nearly two years, “Out of Control” is polished to a careful brilliance and seems factually unassailable when measured against what we know of the deplorable situation in HIV?AIDS science.

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“It is a real contribution to sanity that a clear call for reexamination of HIV?AIDS has been made by a respected journal on the basis of a thorough report.”

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Clearly Farber with her years of practiced investigative reporting on this topic is on firm ground with her revelations of malpractice at the NIH, given that her main source from public records was a key figure in the scandal, the whistleblower Jonathan Fishbein, who was initially fired by DAIDS for discovering the very flaws in research studies he was explicitly hired to uncover.

Not really a whistleblower, but merely a man who tried to do on the inside the job he was hired to do, Fishbein has now been reinstated with full pay, and it looks as if the investigation into the extent of the coverup of bad research will continue.

The impact of the story

But what will be the impact of this story, the first serious exposure in a politically influential journal of the corruption in the state of HIV?AIDS, and the arguably false science upon which it is based? Given the psychological politics of this twisted scientific issue, it is a real contribution to sanity that a clear call for reexamination of HIV?AIDS has been made by a respected journal on the basis of a thorough report. While the editors take no sides the very publication of the piece is an powerful endorsement of its content as factually accurate (Harpers fact checks its authors assiduously, unlike the New York Times) and worthy of serious consideration.

One immediate blessing is that its factual credibility should spike the gunbarrels of the shoot-from-the-hip armchair gunslingers who interfere with honest discussion on the Web with their trolling and reflexive defense of the status quo in HIV?AIDS, and who torment the very few skeptical bloggers such as Dean Esmay (at http://www.deanesmay.com) who have tried to open up the debate.

Esmay was the first and still the only blogger to provoke serious discussion of the HIV issue in the blogosphere more than a year ago, and his files contain lengthy discussions which are worthwhile further reading (see the Category “Questioning the HIV/AIDS Establishment” on his site). As a result Esmay became personally convinced Duesberg’s critique is sound, and that HIV probably does not cause AIDS, but he tired of the way the dispute affected his reputation and popularity, and moved away from the topic.

Will Harpers’s more restrained editorial view, which merely asks for renewed and open debate, succeed in that goal in the corridors of power in government, science and the media?

There are several reasons we think so, though it is all too easy to be naive in the field of fantasy that is politics. In the first place, Harpers has a good deal of influence in liberal Democratic circles, and is widely respected across the political spectrum, partly because of its style is more literary and its critiques more cultural than politically partisan.

In this case, however, the glaring headline “Impeach Him” may put off as many readers as it attracts and provoke many to dismiss the adjoining story in the issue, as tainted with the same partisan brush, though of course neither is partisan. On the other hand, some suggest it will get plenty of brief exposure on the desks of the White House, and rest longer on those of the New York Times editors and other media people of influence, who have been so long been the docile puppets of the NIH and AIDS activists in the HIV?AIDS matter.

In the second place, the piece after two years of writing, editing and fact checking - and two decades of experience on the part of the writer - is armor plated against factual criticism, with few chinks visible, and surely impossible for the public relations flacks at the NIH or any other institution, such as the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, to turn aside with their usual casual disparagement and hints of discredited science and danger to the public health.

(Following an AP story on Hafford’s death) so-called community AIDS activists were sprung like cuckoo birds from grandfather clocks at the appointed hour to affirm the unwavering AIDS catechism: AIDS drugs save lives. To suggest otherwise is to endanger millions of African babies. Front and center were organizations like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which extolled the importance of nevirapine. Elizabeth Glaser’s nevirapine defenders apparently didn’t encounter a single media professional who knew, or cared, that the organization had received $1 million from nevirapine’s maker, Boehringer Ingelheim, in 2000. This was no scandal, but part of a landscape. Pharmaceutical companies fund AIDS organisations, which in turn are quoted uncritically in the media about how many lives their drugs save. This time the AIDS organizations were joined by none other than the White House, which was in the midst of promoting a major program to make nevirapine available across Africa.

It is hard to see how much of an explicit defense can be mounted against such revelations, which are supported by footnotes added throughout. We expect a significant silence on the part of such targets as the Glaser Foundation, which asked for an early copy of the issue last week. In fact, we predict that ignoring and poo-pooing Harpers will be the theme of the week in Washington at NIAID, just as it has been for twenty years the successful strategy in the paradigm debate. But this time, we predict, it won’t work very long.

Why it cannot be easily dismissed

For most importantly, the piece doesn’t hinge on the rightness or wrongness of that vexed paradigm, the HIV?AIDS theory of causation, even though its scientific impeccable critic Duesberg is given a full run for his money in the final section of the piece. So its complaints cannot be dismissed as those of inexpert journalists contradicting science they do not fully understand.

Instead, the piece’s moral and political outrage centers on the abominable abortion of scientific process and the lethal flouting of scientific standards that Farber has reported so clearly in the most important of the four hundred of so trials that the DAIDS has conducted over the past few years. The scandal of nevirapine which includes the misreporting and even reversal of the results of a trial in Uganda that indicated that the drug was too dangerous to use is something which will continue to be investigated, it seems clear, especially after this piece is widely read.

So all in all, we expect that the publication of this piece may be a watershed in the politics of HIV?AIDS science, which may at long last turn the tide towards reexamination of the science of HIV?AIDS from the outside. Probably editors in the press and producers in television will now be emboldened to consider alternative points of view in covering HIV?AIDS instead of merely parroting the party line as dictated by Anthony Fauci and his pr force.

It even seems possible that the continuing investigation by the Inspector General’s office of and awareness of the rot at DIAIDS may well result in a committee hearing of some kind, which will if it comes about provide the incentive and the opportunity for questioning scientists about the validity of the paradigm, and why it has had to be so strenuously protected as politically sacrosanct and scientifically unquestionable if it is in fact so clearly true.

Since such enquiry will no doubt call upon testimony by Peter Duesberg, we see every chance that a reassessment will be demanded of the theory at the heart of HIV?AIDS to see whether public funds are being spent on the right basis.

If this is the case, we forsee early retirement and perhaps eventually an orange jumpsuit for Anthony Fauci and his key underlings at the NIAID who have perpetrated what looks like scientific fraud in the administration and reporting of nevirapine trials, and renewed hope of placing HIV?AIDS medical thinking on a firmer scientific foundation than the current ideology, which has been so long refuted by the most tested scientific literature in the field, the intensely refereed (and thus validated) critical reviews of Peter Duesberg.

And lastly, a final reason for expecting “Out of Control” to begin a slow turning of the mammoth drug company cruise liner HIV?AIDS onto a new course. As we have noted, Farber’s contribution is by no means over with this seminal piece. For as noted on the first page of “Out of Control”, she is writing a book on her years of AIDS reporting for Melville House, a small but distinguished publisher in New York City.

Anthony Fauci may spill his coffee when he read “Out of Control”, everyman’s guide to the HIV?AIDS scam

Duesberg gets his due as the whistleblower of the Enron of science

The red and white cover flap of the new Harpers that will appears on news stands Tuesday (and is already in some mailboxes) will surprise many with one of its headlined stories, and we are not referring to the most obvious bombshell.

The immediate attention getter will be the white headline that shouts IMPEACH HIM in giant capitals, a demand which is Lewis Lapham’s climactic swansong as editor. The urbane long time editor and social critic is leaving the helm of the influential journal this month, and his cover essay, “The Case For Impeachment: Why We Can No Longer Afford George Bush” is a nine page indictment of our friendly President as a outlaw and a “thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use”:

The Conyers report doesn’t return to the President’s focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleeza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.”…

Footnote 13: As of January 17, 2006, the rap sheet listed 2,229 American military dead in Iraq together with an unknown number of Iraqi civilians; what looks to be the sum of $1 trillion, by some estimates $2 trillion, already committed to The Project for the American Century’s real estate development in the Mesopotamian desert.

This manifesto (which we haven’t had time to read properly yet) will be followed by a public forum titled more politely “Is There a Case for Impeachment?” at Town Hall on March 2, featuring Lapham, Rep. John Conyers, Michael Ratner, and Elizabeth Holtzman, with Sam Seder as moderator.

What this loud Parthian shot into the White House from Lapham should only initially upstage in reader’s minds, however, is a much more unexpected indictment of skulduggery in Washington listed second on the ad flap and the cover: “The AIDS Machine: Celia Farber on HIV Drugs and the Corruption of Science”.

The article, which otherwise has the title “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science” on the actual white cover and inside the magazine, takes up 15 center pages without a break.

As a literary work, “Out of Control” can be crudely but fairly described as an armor penetrating, morally fueled missile aimed at the heart of the HIV?AIDS medical-scientific-pharmaceutical complex, the corrupt administrative headquarters of the many hundreds of ongoing, illfounded and lethal (to some participants) HIV?AIDS drug trials at NIAID.

It will grip the ordinary reader with its beginning. The article starts off with the chilling story of the obviously needless death of Joyce Ann Hafford, a pregnant single mother, from nevirapine, the toxic drug which supposedly stops HIV transferring to a newborn. The trial did not even have a placebo group, because it was simply intended to compare the known unpleasant if not deadly impact of nevirapine with the equally nasty medication AZT. This black 33 year old, otherwise in perfect health, whose AIDS diagnosis was based one questionable HIV antibody test, soon suffered monstrous symptoms, but was not taken off the drug until just before she gave birth and then died.

“Her health started to deteriorate from the moment she went on the drugs,” said (her older sister) King….She said to me, ‘Nell’_that’s what she called me-’I have to get through this. I can’t let my baby get that virus.’”…By this time all she could keep down was cans of Ensure. Her blood was drawn for lab tests, but she was not taken off the study drugs… She was admitted to the hospial’s ICU with “acute and sub-acute necrosis of the liver, secondary to drug toxicity, acute renal failure, anemia, septicemia, premature separation of the placenta”, and threatened “premature labor.” She was finally taken off the drugs but was already losing consciousness…. Hafford’s last words were a request to be put on a breathing tube.

Following this story to make strong men weep, the relentless Farber demolishes the credibility of all nevirapine work at NIAID and calls into question the ethics and the scientific control of the entire DAIDS operation.

One can imagine NIAIDS director Anthony Fauci having difficulty breathing as he reads this work. Long and judiciously phrased, the finely polished piece seems irrefutable as it exposes the horrors of HIV?AIDS drug trials at NIAID as little more than knowing medical murder in one case, and then shows how the vicious corruption and antiscience they embody has been enabled and protected by the religious doctrine of HIV=AIDS, a paradigm which has been thrown like a protective mantle over everything that vast federal funds have been spent on in this area.

That the fabric of this theoretical mantle is threadbare to the point of disintegration is convincingly suggested by a final section describing the ideas and activities of Peter Duesberg, fairly presented as the one scientist with the intellect, the expertise, the public spirit and the sense of scientific honor to review the HIV claim objectively when it was first made, and when he found that it was worthless, to stick to his guns through twenty years of funding strangulation and professional ostracism.

The section on Duesberg completes the piece in a way which should leave very little doubt in the reader’s mind that he is right, and that the calumny heaped upon his reputation and the refusal to listen to his critique is political, sociological, and emotional in nature, and without scientific merit. The clincher in the final paragraphs is a brief account of how the promising results of his research into the source of cancer have won him renewed respect and attention from his peers at the NIH and other leading institutes, whose public relations people are now striving in the service of NIAIDS director Fauci to prevent this spilling over into a second look at Duesberg’s sustained HIV?AIDS critique.

Farber’s contribution is by no means over with this seminal piece. For as noted on the first page of “Out of Control”, she is writing a book on her years of AIDS reporting for Melville House, a young but already distinguished publisher in New York City.

The title is “Serious Adverse Events”, the euphemism used in the NIAID drug trials for death. As this reminds us, the consequences of maintaining a false paradigm in HIV?AIDS over two decades, which is what all the signs point to, have been deadly for thousands of individuals.

Lang Memorial tomorrow, Friday February 17

The memorial day for Serge Lang is upon us. Friends, colleagues and perhaps one or two of those he harassed, politely but firmly, for misinforming students and the public, will be attending the event tomorrow in Yale’s Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 102. The proceedings will start with an open stage for everyone who wishes to recall the lively virtues of this extraordinary man and mathematician, who was unique in the entire world in the style and execution of his life of truthseeking, academic and political.

After lunch four of the top mathematicians who have collaborated with Lang in his distinguished career in math will be appreciating his contributions in that field, which included not only a slew of current textbooks but some seminal contributions in his field. Here is the Yale Daily News obituary of Lang (there is no proper biography on the web pages of the Mathematics Department any longer, if there ever was, which is a point to be checked tomorrow) which sketches Lang’s math achievements for those that are familiar with that esoteric universe.

Lang’s career research focused on algebra — for which he won the prestigious Frank Nelson Cole Prize — as well as algebraic geometry, number theory, and analysis. Jones said that he often stayed at his office late into the evening, and did not stop theorizing even when he got home. For years at a time, Jones said, Lang would call him each night to pose mathematical problems without pausing to identify himself or say hello.

Many of their discussions centered around the “heat kernel,” a mathematical concept that Lang believed could be used to approach research and instruction across a variety of mathematical branches. As with “The File,” he made publicizing the heat kernel his personal mission.

Despite Lang’s prolific research, teaching undergraduates was his principal passion. Geankoplos met Lang as a freshman at Yale in 1971, when Lang was touring the dining halls of various universities to evaluate their job offers.

“He decided that the best way to find out what the school was like was to sit down and have meals with the undergraduates,” Geanakoplos said. “He was tremendously engaged in what his students were doing and thinking.”