Science Guardian

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1: Science. 1984 May 4;224(4648):500-3. Related Articles, Links

Frequent detection and isolation of cytopathic retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and at risk for AIDS.

Gallo RC, Salahuddin SZ, Popovic M, Shearer GM, Kaplan M, Haynes BF, Palker TJ, Redfield R, Oleske J, Safai B, et al.

Peripheral blood lymphocytes from patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or with signs or symptoms that frequently precede AIDS (pre-AIDS) were grown in vitro with added T-cell growth factor and assayed for the expression and release of human T-lymphotropic retroviruses (HTLV). Retroviruses belonging to the HTLV family and collectively designated HTLV-III were isolated from a total of 48 subjects including 18 of 21 patients wih pre-AIDS, three of four clinically normal mothers of juveniles with AIDS, 26 of 72 adult and juvenile patients with AIDS, and from one of 22 normal male homosexual subjects. No HTLV-III was detected in or isolated from 115 normal heterosexual subjects. The number of HTLV-III isolates reported here underestimates the true prevalence of the virus since many specimens were received in unsatisfactory condition. Other data show that serum samples from a high proportion of AIDS patients contain antibodies to HTLV-III. That these new isolates are members of the HTLV family but differ from the previous isolates known as HTLV-I and HTLV-II is indicated by their morphological, biological, and immunological characteristics. These results and those reported elsewhere in this issue suggest that HTLV-III may be the primary cause of AIDS.

PMID: 6200936 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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Why I Quit HIV

by Rebecca V. Culshaw

As I write this, in the late winter of 2006, we are more than twenty years into the AIDS era. Like many, a large part of my life has been irreversibly affected by AIDS. My entire adolescence and adult life – as well as the lives of many of my peers – has been overshadowed by the belief in a deadly, sexually transmittable pathogen and the attendant fear of intimacy and lack of trust that belief engenders.

To add to this impact, my chosen career has developed around the HIV model of AIDS. I received my Ph.D. in 2002 for my work constructing mathematical models of HIV infection, a field of study I entered in 1996. Just ten years later, it might seem early for me to be looking back on and seriously reconsidering my chosen field, yet here I am.

My work as a mathematical biologist has been built in large part on the paradigm that HIV causes AIDS, and I have since come to realize that there is good evidence that the entire basis for this theory is wrong. AIDS, it seems, is not a disease so much as a sociopolitical construct that few people understand and even fewer question. The issue of causation, in particular, has become beyond question – even to bring it up is deemed irresponsible.

Why have we as a society been so quick to accept a theory for which so little solid evidence exists? Why do we take proclamations by government institutions like the NIH and the CDC, via newscasters and talk show hosts, entirely on faith? The average citizen has no idea how weak the connection really is between HIV and AIDS, and this is the manner in which scientifically insupportable phrases like “the AIDS virus” or “an AIDS test” have become part of the common vernacular despite no evidence for their accuracy.

When it was announced in 1984 that the cause of AIDS had been found in a retrovirus that came to be known as HIV, there was a palpable panic. My own family was immediately affected by this panic, since my mother had had several blood transfusions in the early 1980s as a result of three late miscarriages she had experienced. In the early days, we feared mosquito bites, kissing, and public toilet seats. I can still recall the panic I felt after looking up in a public restroom and seeing some graffiti that read “Do you have AIDS yet? If not, sit on this toilet seat.”

But I was only ten years old then, and over time the panic subsided to more of a dull roar as it became clear that AIDS was not as easy to “catch” as we had initially believed. Fear of going to the bathroom or the dentist was replaced with a more realistic wariness of having sex with anyone we didn’t know really, really well. As a teenager who was in no way promiscuous, I didn’t have much to worry about.

That all changed – or so I thought – when I was twenty-one. Due to circumstances in my personal life and a bit of paranoia that (as it turned out, falsely and completely groundlessly) led me to believe I had somehow contracted “AIDS,” I got an HIV test. I spent two weeks waiting for the results, convinced that I would soon die, and that it would be “all my fault.” This was despite the fact that I was perfectly healthy, didn’t use drugs, and wasn’t promiscuous – low-risk by any definition. As it happened, the test was negative, and, having felt I had been granted a reprieve, I vowed not to take more risks, and to quit worrying so much.

Over the past ten years, my attitude toward HIV and AIDS has undergone a dramatic shift. This shift was catalyzed by the work I did as a graduate student, analyzing mathematical models of HIV and the immune system. As a mathematician, I found virtually every model I studied to be unrealistic. The biological assumptions on which the models were based varied from author to author, and this made no sense to me. It was around this time, too, that I became increasingly perplexed by the stories I heard about long-term survivors. From my admittedly inexpert viewpoint, the major thing they all had in common – other than HIV – was that they lived extremely healthy lifestyles. Part of me was becoming suspicious that being HIV-positive didn’t necessarily mean you would ever get AIDS.

By a rather curious twist of fate, it was on my way to a conference to present the results of a model of HIV that I had proposed together with my advisor, that I came across an article by Dr. David Rasnick about AIDS and the corruption of modern science. As I sat on the airplane reading this story, in which he said “the more I examined HIV, the less it made sense that this largely inactive, barely detectable virus could cause such devastation,” everything he wrote started making sense to me in a way that the currently accepted model did not. I didn’t have anywhere near all the information, but my instincts told me that what he said seemed to fit.

Over the past ten years, I nevertheless continued my research into mathematical models of HIV infection, all the while keeping an ear open for dissenting voices. By now, I have read hundreds of articles on HIV and AIDS, many from the dissident point of view but far, far more from that of the establishment, which unequivocally promotes the idea that HIV causes AIDS and that the case is closed. In that time, I even published four papers on HIV (from a modeling perspective). I justified my contributions to a theory I wasn’t convinced of by telling myself these were purely theoretical, mathematical constructs, never to be applied in the real world. I suppose, in some sense also, I wanted to keep an open mind.

So why is it that only now have I decided that enough is enough, and I can no longer in any capacity continue to support the paradigm on which my entire career has been built?

As a mathematician, I was taught early on about the importance of clear definitions. AIDS, if you consider its definition, is far from clear, and is in fact not even a consistent entity. The classification “AIDS” was introduced in the early 1980s not as a disease but as a surveillance tool to help doctors and public health officials understand and control a strange “new” syndrome affecting mostly young gay men. In the two decades intervening, it has evolved into something quite different. AIDS today bears little or no resemblance to the syndrome for which it was named. For one thing, the definition has actually been changed by the CDC several times, continually expanding to include ever more diseases (all of which existed for decades prior to AIDS), and sometimes, no disease whatsoever. More than half of all AIDS diagnoses in the past several years in the United States have been made on the basis of a T-cell count and a “confirmed” positive antibody test – in other words, a deadly disease has been diagnosed over and over again on the basis of no clinical disease at all. And the leading cause of death in HIV-positives in the last few years has been liver failure, not an AIDS-defining disease in any way, but rather an acknowledged side effect of protease inhibitors, which asymptomatic individuals take in massive daily doses, for years.

The epidemiology of HIV and AIDS is puzzling and unclear as well. In spite of the fact that AIDS cases increased rapidly from their initial observation in the early 1980s and reached a peak in 1993 before declining rapidly, the number of HIV-positive individuals in the U.S. has remained constant at one million since the advent of widespread HIV antibody testing. This cannot be due to anti-HIV therapy, since the annual mortality rate of North American HIV-positives who are treated with anti-HIV drugs is much higher – between 6.7 and 8.8% – than would be the approximately 1–2% global mortality rate of HIV-positives if all AIDS cases were fatal in a given year.

Even more strangely, HIV has been present everywhere in the U.S., in every population tested including repeat blood donors and military recruits, at a virtually constant rate since testing began in 1985. It is deeply confusing that a virus thought to have been brought to the AIDS epicenters of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the early 1970s could possibly have spread so rapidly at first, yet have stopped spreading completely as soon as testing began.

Returning for a moment to the mathematical modeling, one aspect that had always puzzled me was the lack of agreement on how to accurately represent the actual biological mechanism of immune impairment. AIDS is said to be caused by a dramatic loss of the immune system’s T-cells, said loss being presumably caused by HIV. Why then could no one agree on how to mathematically model the dynamics of the fundamental disease process – that is, how are T-cells actually killed by HIV? Early models assumed that HIV killed T-cells directly, by what is referred to as lysis. An infected cell lyses, or bursts, when the internal viral burden is so high that it can no longer be contained, just like your grocery bag breaks when it’s too full. This is in fact the accepted mechanism of pathogenesis for virtually all other viruses. But it became clear that HIV did not in fact kill T-cells in this manner, and this concept was abandoned, to be replaced by various other ones, each of which resulted in very different models and, therefore, different predictions. Which model was “correct” never was clear.

As it turns out, the reason there was no consensus mathematically as to how HIV killed T-cells was because there was no biological consensus. There still isn’t. HIV is possibly the most studied microbe in history – certainly it is the best-funded – yet there is still no agreed-upon mechanism of pathogenesis. Worse than that, there are no data to support the hypothesis that HIV kills T-cells at all. It doesn’t in the test tube. It mostly just sits there, as it does in people – if it can be found at all. In Robert Gallo’s seminal 1984 paper in which he claims “proof” that HIV causes AIDS, actual HIV could be found in only 26 out of 72 AIDS patients. To date, actual HIV remains an elusive target in those with AIDS or simply HIV-positive.

This is starkly illustrated by the continued use of antibody tests to diagnose HIV infection. Antibody tests are fairly standard to test for certain microbes, but for anything other than HIV, the main reason they are used in place of direct tests (that is, actually looking for the bacteria or virus itself) is because they are generally much easier and cheaper than direct testing. Most importantly, such antibody tests have been rigorously verified against the gold standard of microbial isolation. This stands in vivid contrast to HIV, for which antibody tests are used because there exists no test for the actual virus. As to so-called “viral load,” most people are not aware that tests for viral load are neither licensed nor recommended by the FDA to diagnose HIV infection. This is why an “AIDS test” is still an antibody test. Viral load, however, is used to estimate the health status of those already diagnosed HIV-positive. But there are very good reasons to believe it does not work at all. Viral load uses either PCR or a technique called branched-chained DNA amplification (bDNA). PCR is the same technique used for “DNA fingerprinting” at crime scenes where only trace amounts of materials can be found. PCR essentially mass-produces DNA or RNA so that it can be seen. If something has to be mass-produced to even be seen, and the result of that mass-production is used to estimate how much of a pathogen there is, it might lead a person to wonder how relevant the pathogen was in the first place. Specifically, how could something so hard to find, even using the most sensitive and sophisticated technology, completely decimate the immune system? bDNA, while not magnifying anything directly, nevertheless looks only for fragments of DNA believed, but not proven, to be components of the genome of HIV – but there is no evidence to say that these fragments don’t exist in other genetic sequences unrelated to HIV or to any virus. It is worth noting at this point that viral load, like antibody tests, has never been verified against the gold standard of HIV isolation. bDNA uses PCR as a gold standard, PCR uses antibody tests as a gold standard, and antibody tests use each other. None use HIV itself.

There is good reason to believe the antibody tests are flawed as well. The two types of tests routinely used are the ELISA and the Western Blot (WB). The current testing protocol is to “verify” a positive ELISA with the “more specific” WB (which has actually been banned from diagnostic use in the UK because it is so unreliable). But few people know that the criteria for a positive WB vary from country to country and even from lab to lab. Put bluntly, a person’s HIV status could well change depending on the testing venue. It is also possible to test “WB indeterminate,” which translates to any one of “uninfected,” “possibly infected,” or even, absurdly, “partly infected” under the current interpretation. This conundrum is confounded by the fact that the proteins comprising the different reactive “bands” on the WB test are all claimed to be specific to HIV, raising the question of how a truly uninfected individual could possess antibodies to even one “HIV-specific” protein.

I have come to sincerely believe that these HIV tests do immeasurably more harm than good, due to their astounding lack of specificity and standardization. I can buy the idea that anonymous screening of the blood supply for some nonspecific marker of ill health (which, due to cross reactivity with many known pathogens, a positive HIV antibody test often seems to be) is useful. I cannot buy the idea that any individual needs to have a diagnostic HIV test. A negative test may not be accurate (whatever that means), but a positive one can create utter havoc and destruction in a person’s life – all for a virus that most likely does absolutely nothing. I do not feel it is going too far to say that these tests ought to be banned for diagnostic purposes.

The real victims in this mess are those whose lives are turned upside-down by the stigma of an HIV diagnosis. These people, most of whom are perfectly healthy, are encouraged to avoid intimacy and are further branded with the implication that they were somehow dreadfully foolish and careless. Worse, they are encouraged to take massive daily doses of some of the most toxic drugs ever manufactured. HIV, for many years, has fulfilled the role of a microscopic terrorist. People have lost their jobs, been denied entry into the Armed Forces, been refused residency in and even entry into some countries, even been charged with assault or murder for having consensual sex; babies have been taken from their mothers and had toxic medications forced down their throats. There is no precedent for this type of behavior, as it is all in the name of a completely unproven, fundamentally flawed hypothesis, on the basis of highly suspect, indirect tests for supposed infection with an allegedly deadly virus – a virus that has never been observed to do much of anything.

As to the question of what does cause AIDS, if it is not HIV, there are many plausible explanations given by people known to be experts. Before the discovery of HIV, AIDS was assumed to be a lifestyle syndrome caused mostly by indiscriminate use of recreational drugs. Immunosuppression has multiple causes, from an overload of microbes to malnutrition. Probably all of these are true causes of AIDS. Immune deficiency has many manifestations, and a syndrome with many manifestations is likely multicausal as well. Suffice it to say that the HIV hypothesis of AIDS has offered nothing but predictions – of its spread, of the availability of a vaccine, of a forthcoming animal model, and so on – that have not materialized, and it has not saved a single life.

After ten years involved in the academic side of HIV research, as well as in the academic world at large, I truly believe that the blame for the universal, unconditional, faith-based acceptance of such a flawed theory falls squarely on the shoulders of those among us who have actively endorsed a completely unproven hypothesis in the interests of furthering our careers. Of course, hypotheses in science deserve to be studied, but no hypothesis should be accepted as fact before it is proven, particularly one whose blind acceptance has such dire consequences.

For over twenty years, the general public has been greatly misled and ill-informed. As someone who has been raised by parents who taught me from a young age never to believe anything just because “everyone else accepts it to be true,” I can no longer just sit by and do nothing, thereby contributing to this craziness. And the craziness has gone on long enough. As humans – as honest academics and scientists – the only thing we can do is allow the truth to come to light.

March 3, 2006

Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D. [send her mail], is a mathematical biologist who has been working on mathematical models of HIV infection for the past ten years. She received her Ph.D. (mathematics with a specialization in mathematical biology) from Dalhousie University in Canada in 2002 and is currently employed as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at a university in Texas.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

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Mar. 08, 2006 – 11:13 AM

AIDS – What AIDS?

Harper’s Races Right Over the Edge of a Cliff

Gal Beckerman

The essay on AIDS in this month’s Harper’s magazine by Celia Farber starts off like a scientific whodunit — as Farber herself puts it, the tale she tells sounds eerily like the “Constant Gardener,” the recent movie based on a John Le Carre novel about evil pharmaceutical companies engaged in unethical human testing.

In the first half of her article titled, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science,” Farber describes what led to the death of a pregnant HIV-positive woman who was taking an experimental drug, Nevirapine, to avoid transmitting the virus to her unborn child. The drug’s toxicity, which had never been properly tested, killed the woman, and Farber traces the negligence back to tests in Uganda that were improperly conducted on human subjects. She also tells the story of a whistleblower at the NIH who was attacked for exposing the faulty trials.

It’s an engaging piece of investigative journalism that exposes deep problems with the standards of medical research when it comes to AIDS. As she writes, “the emergence of the syndrome in the 1980s sparked a medical state of emergency in which scientific controls, the rules that are supposed to bracket the emotions and desires of individual researchers, were frequently compromised or removed entirely.”

Her argument is that AIDS has become an industry and a certain kind of sloppiness has entered the search for new anti-retroviral drugs. So far, so good, and if this were the only story Farber hoped to tell, we might well be tipping our hat to her.

But she goes on to use the Nevirapine trial as a launching pad for what she really wants to say — that big pharmaceutical companies have basically invented the concept of AIDS in order to sell their product, which, being extremely toxic, is what is actually killing people who are diagnosed HIV-positive.

She doesn’t take responsibility herself for this startling — some might say preposterous — thesis, but rather approvingly points to UC Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, who has taken much heat for questioning the causality between HIV and AIDS. Duesberg has gained a name as a “denialist” for asserting that AIDS is actually a “chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use,” or that “75 percent of AIDS cases in the West can be attributed to drug toxicity. If toxic AIDS therapies were discontinued … thousands of lives could be saved virtually overnight.” And, most bizarre to our ears: “AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that currently do not command high rates of international aid. The money spent on anti-retroviral drugs would be better spent on sanitation and improving access to safe drinking water.”

Farber takes up that banner and complains that AIDS researchers “have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or co-factors.” Which, again, would be a legitimate complaint to make — were it not for the implication that HIV as the cause of AIDS has been invented for the sake of keeping certain scientists and pharmaceutical companies in business.

The article has inspired great anger among “so-called AIDS activists,” as Farber dismissively refers to them, who are seething at Harper’s decision to give Farber such a prominent soapbox. One example is a letter from Gregg Gonsalves, director of Gay Men’s Health Crisis: “Farber is a well-known AIDS denialist and publishing her work is akin to giving the folks at the Discovery Institute a place to expound upon the ’science’ of intelligent design, Charles Davenport a venue to educate us about the racial inferiority of the Negro or Lyndon LaRouche a platform to warn us about aliens, bio-duplication, and nudity.”

The debate between the public health community and the “denialists” is an old one. What’s most interesting in this latest dustup is that the Nation has decided to join the incensed scientists in shaming Harper’s for running the Farber piece.

On the magazine’s blog, The Notion, Richard Kim claims that Farber does not do justice to the varying approaches taken by those researching AIDS, writing that “conspiracy theories like Duesberg’s warp and exploit some of the best political interventions made by AIDS activists: that patients should be engaged with their medical diagnosis and treatment, that clinical drug trials should be grounded in sound ethical practices, that the emphasis on virology has circumvented immunological approaches to AIDS and that attention to the effects of poverty, malnutrition and other diseases is vital to preventing and treating AIDS.”

Kim also writes that “it’s a shame that a magazine as well respected as Harper’s has shirked its duty to report on these issues and instead published Farber’s article.”

We have to agree. The if-it’s-conventional-wisdom-it-must-be-wrong ethos that Harper’s has come to embrace in the last days of the counterintuitive Lewis Lapham as editor has served the magazine poorly here, giving space to an idea that, as Kim points out, has been widely refuted for years — and one that, frankly, has been consigned to the dustbin of crackpot theories.

In short: when the Nation, of all places, is criticizing you for your knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism, it’s a pretty good bet that you have probably wandered off the deep end.

Next time, Harper’s should be more careful about giving so much legitimacy — 15 pages of it — to such an illegitimate and discredited idea.

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Gay City News Volume 5, Number 9 | March 2 – 8, 2006

HEALTH

HIV Denialism in Harper’s Faulted

Researchers worldwide castigate magazine for giving credence to view virus unrelated to AIDS

By DUNCAN OSBORNE

AIDS groups around the globe are condemning a Harper’s magazine article that features leading AIDS denialists and makes a sweeping attack on AIDS research based on two clinical trials.

AIDS denialism directly kills a lot of people, said Nathan Geffen, policy coordinator at the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. It’s disgraceful and it needs to be stopped.

Geffen was among roughly 40 AIDS activists, researchers, and clinicians who sent an open letter to the monthly magazine denouncing the article that ran in its March issue. They have demanded a retraction, an apology, and that their documentation of the errors in the piece be published on the Harper’s Web site and in the magazine.

So far it’s well over 50 and counting, Geffen said, about his count of the article’s flaws. We’re not talking about trivial errors.

The story was written by Celia Farber, a journalist who has authored many pieces that have drawn on the views of researchers and activists who believe that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Her work has appeared in Spin, USA Today, Gear, and other leading mainstream publications. She did not respond to a phone message seeking comment or an e-mail sent to her on behalf of Gay City News from a Harper’s editor.

Farber is on the board of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, a group that includes AIDS denialists among its members, though her views are less clear. In a 2000 interview with Poz magazine she said, Does HIV cause AIDS? I’ve never said that it does or it does not. I’m not really equipped to know. But when I look around and see legions of respectable scientists arguing that it does not, then I cannot see why I shouldn’t report it. It’s not only news, it’s great human drama.

In part, the piece investigated two clinical trials, one in the U.S. and the second in Uganda, that weighed the efficacy and safety of nevirapine, an anti-HIV drug, in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Both studies gave the drug to pregnant women.

The U.S. trial recruited 38 women, but it was shut down after several women experienced serious side effects and one woman died. The Uganda trial, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a U.S. health agency, was criticized for sloppy record-keeping and mismanagement, but its conclusion that the drug is safe and effective has been endorsed by U.S. agencies that investigated the trial.

The story also described the mistreatment of an NIH employee after he blew the whistle on the Uganda trial.

Farber wrote that while the two trials should raise questions about the safety of nevirapine and the conduct of drug trials, the 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.

The piece also cited Dr. Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Dr. Kary B. Mullis, a chemist who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing the polymerase chain reaction. Both men have long denied that HIV is the cause of AIDS and, the piece asserted, Duesberg has effectively been blackballed in the scientific community.

Roger D. Hodge, the Harper’s deputy editor and editor of the Farber story, told Gay City News that the story was not about whether HIV is the cause of AIDS, but concerned the mismanagement of drug studies and the censoring of debate.

It’s not as if this is happening in isolation, he said. There has been scandal after scandal after scandal… It’s not as if human experimentation doesn’t have it problems… Celia has covered the story for a long time. Part of the story is that a certain kind of name-calling, a certain kind of moral blackmail, takes the place of scientific debate. People like Peter Duesberg have been persecuted for trying to have a scientific debate. Hodge said the story was carefully vetted.

It was very, very thoroughly fact-checked over the course of three months, he said. A lot of what people are describing as errors are differences of opinion about the data.

Asked whether he believed that the HIV virus was the cause of AIDS, Hodge, who will become the magazine’s editor within a month, said, I don’t feel like I am qualified to judge it. Am I a partisan? My general position is I am very skeptical about absolutist arguments, so I want to hear the entire argument. More argument is better.

The open letter called the article pseudo-science and dangerous because of its potential to convince people in desperate need of antiretroviral medicines not to take them, with life-threatening consequences.

Farber is sympathetic to, and has herself long perpetuated, the factually incorrect views that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and that the risks of antiretrovirals outweigh their benefits, the letter read.

The view that HIV causes AIDS is supported by what most people would see as overwhelming evidence and that is the consensus among scientists and researchers. While AIDS drugs can have unpleasant side effects, they have maintained the lives and health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with HIV.

AIDS denialism can have serious consequences, Geffen said.

The only reason that AIDS denialism is so rampant in South Africa is because it has the support of the president and the health minister, he said, referring to Thabo Mbeki and his controversial top health adviser, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

Geffen said that some denialists were actively recruiting South Africans to participate in studies meant to prove the effectiveness of vitamins against HIV.

What they are doing is they are convincing people, very sick people with AIDS, not to take AIDS drugs and take vitamins instead, he said. It’s unbelievable that they are getting away with this. We are going to court to try and stop them.

Julie Davids, executive director of the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), said that denialists had not had a significant impact in the US.

I think so much of what happens with HIV, whether it’s prevention or care, there are so many factors that can weigh in on whether someone can access care, I don’t think the Harper’s article is going to have an impact, she said.

CHAMP was among the signatories on the open letter. For Davids, the article was about a misplaced desire to challenge accepted wisdom and be entertaining.

I understand that Harper’s wants to be outrageous and feel like they are doing things that others won’t, she said. I just have to ask why they would print an article that they know includes dramatic misinformation…There is an admiral role for challenging suspect consensus that’s not what this story is. It’s full of holes.

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AIDS DENIALISM IN HARPER’S

March 2006

LISTING AND DESCRIBING IN DETAIL THE ERRORS IN CELIA FARBER’S

AIDS DENIALIST ARTICLE AS PUBLISHED MARCH 2006 IN HARPER’S

AIDS DENIALISM = SEEING WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE

Dear Sam Stark, Lewis H. Lapham and Roger D. Hodge

CC: Publishers and all staff of Harper’s

CC: Robert Gallo, Gregg Gonsalves Richard Jefferys, Daniel R. Kuritzkes, Bruce Mirken, John P. Moore, Jeffrey T. Safrit [co-authored response]

As promised, attached is a document listing and describing in detail the errors in Celia Farber’s March 2006 article in Harper’s. My co-authors are copied on this email. Because of the rush to get this to you, we reserve the option to make modifications to it during the next week. We do however consider it a public document.

We have categorised the errors as follows: 25 are outright false. 16 are misleading. 10 are biased. 5 are unfair. (i.e. 56 errors) These are underestimates, because in some cases we classified several errors as one. I have also not counted errors listed in table 2. Furthermore it would be unsurprising that if you properly fact-check the areas which we have not covered in detail (i.e. Farber’s allegations against the NIH, Jonathan Fishbein, the Hafford case) more errors would come to light. Every one of the errors we list should have been caught by a fact-checking team with appropriate scientific expertise. Many did not even require scientific expertise and just amount to sloppy journalism.

The printing of Farber’s error-filled piece by a prestigious magazine that has a fact-checking mechanism in place is scandalous. In contrast to the Stephen Glass case at New Republic, Farber’s distortions should have been spotted easily by a competent editor because all sources demonstrating her errors are public domain. Admittedly, spotting many of her errors requires some scientific expertise in your fact-checking team. If Harper’s does not have this scientific expertise then it is irresponsible to publish articles purporting to debunk the scientific consensus.

I note a number of disingenuous quotes attributed to Roger D. Hodge in Gay City News. In particular Hodge is quoted as stating “It was very, very thoroughly fact-checked over the course of three months,” and “A lot of what people are describing as errors are differences of opinion about the data.”

I sincerely hope these are misquotes. If they are not, it demonstrates that Mr. Hodge is unqualified to edit articles relevant to science and cannot differentiate between fact and opinion. To characterise research published in credible peer-reviewed scientific journals and the opinions of people with no track record of published AIDS research as differences of opinion is to have a very flawed understanding of truth. Farber’s article was not simply provocative or controversial, it is factually incorrect and unfair.

Hodge is further quoted as claiming that the story was not about whether HIV is the cause of AIDS. This is ridiculous. The story contains numerous assertions related to HIV as the cause of AIDS. Hodge is quoted that the story is rather about the mismanagement of drug studies and the censoring of debate. While this is certainly part of the focus of Farber’s story and an important topic to cover, Farber has covered this part of the story incompetently and unfairly.

To save its good reputation, Harper’s should do the following:

* Withdraw editorial support for Farber’s article and publish this withdrawal on the Harper’s Magazine website.

* Publish a retraction in the April or May issue of Harper’s Magazine and on the website immediately.

* Publish the list of errors and corrections in a prominent position on the website as soon as you have been able to fact-check it (the fact-checkers obviously should not include the individuals who “fact-checked” Ms. Farber’s article, or any other individuals suggested to you by her, or them).

* Publish a general rebuttal of the Farber piece in the April or May issue of Harper’s Magazine. One or more of the authors of the errors’ document will prepare such a rebuttal once we hear from you that you will print it.

* Undertake to review Harper’s fact-checking process, with special regard to articles on science (the common procedure of a writer suggesting fact-checkers for the article is seriously flawed).

We expect a satisfactory response from Harper’s by Monday evening.

Regards, Nathan Geffen

download attachment: “Errors in Farber article in Harpers” (pdf) (273 KB)