Science Guardian

His original paper’s result ignored by the world for twenty years

Robert Gallo’s recent letter to Harper’s, just published in the May issue (see previous post), provoked a thought which we thought deserved a post of its own, for the result of checking one of his sentences reminded us of a little known fact: one of his original papers at the beginning of the HIV?AIDS affair in May 1984 had a surprising result which has been long overlooked.

In fact, the press conference at which Margaret Heckler, Heath Secretary of the Reagan administration, presented Gallo as the savior of the day in being about to publish four papers in Science finding HIV was the probable cause of AIDS, appears to have been mistaken.

Contrary to the report typed rather too hastily by Larry Altman for the front page of the New York Times the day after the press conference, the ebullient Bob had actually proved that HIV was almost certainly not the cause of AIDS. In fact, in this helpful result he preceded Peter Duesberg by at least two years in demonstrating that the linkage between HIV and AIDS was unsustainable.

Going back to the Gallo letter in Harper’s, this is why the most remarkable sentence Gallo pens is the one saluting his moment of epiphany when he decided that HIV was the cause of AIDS: “In 1984, when my colleagues and I were first to claim—and in my view demonstrate—the linkage of HIV to AIDS, we showed that we could isolate HIV from forty-eight individuals who had AIDS.”

The bold effrontery will amuse seasoned admirers of the pr genius of HIV?AIDS’s greatest scientist, and not just because in the first place it was Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur who first “linked” HIV to AIDS in a 1983 paper. Luc Montagnier hadn’t claimed that HIV alone could be the cause of AIDS, and he was happy to forward HIV to Robert Gallo on request, and in fact did so twice, since Bob lost the first batch.

Montagnier was not amused when Gallo subsequently claimed to have discovered it all by himself, however, and after an extended international wrangle at the governmental level over royalties, which established that Gallo’s virus was in fact Montagnier’s, discovered by Gallo in the two Federal Express packages from France when they arrived at the NIH and the receipts were signed and returned to Montagnier, found he had to share credit for HIV with Gallo as the “co-discoverer”. But that’s another story.

For the paper Gallo is referring to in his letter to Harper’s is “Frequent Detection and Isolation of Cytopathic Retroviruses (HTLV-III) from Patients with AIDS and at Risk for AIDS”, the key paper of four published on May 4, 1984 in Science, which demonstrated that HIV was almost certainly not the cause of AIDS.

How Gallo managed to pass this off so brilliantly at a press conference before it was published, as suggesting so powerfully that HIV was the cause of AIDS that the celebrated Larry Altman of the Times reported that inverted conclusion the next day, is a puzzle that science historians have yet to solve. We put it down to the fact that Larry was in a hurry to get his story on the front page, and no one ever bothered to read the paper itself once the Times had spoken.

But that paper’s landmark finding is the reason why Gallo is forced to leave the number “forty-eight” standing out there in his letter all by itself, not saying 48 out of how many, because in fact he found the virus in blood from 48 individuals out of 119, and 22 of the 48 did not have AIDS, rather than all of them being “individuals who had AIDS”, as he states above in what must have been a slip of his pen in writing to Harper’s.

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“So the historic irony is that the man who proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS twenty years ago was Robert Gallo himself. Luckily for him, however, the science of AIDS has been run by press conference ever since, so no one has noticed.”

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In fact, the paper shows that he found virus more often in “pre-AIDS” people without AIDS (18 out of 21, or 86%) than people with AIDS (26 out of 72, or 36%), and he found that it wasn’t able to survive in a dish more than “2 to 3 weeks” in the blood of AIDS patients and “pre-AIDS” patients, while it flourished in established T-cell lines.

“Pre-AIDS” patients were people in a risk group – ie gay in this case – who had developed some chronic swelling of the lymph glands (lymphadenopathy), or some undefined low count of white blood cells (leukopenia). They must have often been in the early stage of HIV infection, before antibodies had mounted sufficiently to erase the infection, as this paper revealed happens in the majority of cases even in people who progress to AIDS.

Clearly, according to the paper, the best way to get rid of HIV is to get AIDS proper, easily achieved by taking large amounts of designer drugs and eating badly. In other words, if you think that HIV is the problem, hurry up and have fun and get AIDS, and you’ll likely get rid of HIV entirely. We are saying no more than the paper says with its data.

Thus the paper suggested not “strong evidence of a causative involvement of the virus in AIDS,” as Gallo wrote at the end of it, but the exact opposite. That is to say, it demonstrated that HIV was almost certainly ruled out as the cause of AIDS, since not only did it flout Koch’s first postulate by being found in only one third of AIDS patients’ blood samples, but it was more likely to be seen in pre-AIDS patients than people with AIDS, in whom it mostly wasn’t found.

So the historic irony is that the man who proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS twenty years ago was Robert Gallo himself. Luckily for him, however, the science of AIDS has been run by press conference ever since, so no one has noticed.

If a Nobel prize is ever awarded for solving AIDS, however, surely Gallo as well as Peter Duesberg is in line for this honor. For nothing could have been more helpful that to rule out HIV at that early stage in the search for the true solution to defeating the novel outbreak of immune system deficit.

Clearly the real culprits in this gross neglect of Robert Gallo’s initial breakthrough finding are the people, whoever they are, who prevented this original scientist from getting his true message across to the press and public, and instead pressured him to stick with a misunderstanding of his true achievement for over twenty years, at the cost of many lives lost to AZT and current antiviral medications, which his paper showed so long ago are inappropriate, and which we now know have unpleasant side effects involving large humps and dying of liver failure.

Whoever they are, they must have exerted massive pressure on this leading figure in the drama of what was the best reported health disaster of all until bird flu came along. For Bob Gallo is not famous for his reticence. The financial or political interests behind this must have been very large to win this distinguished scientist’s presumably reluctant coperation.

“Gallo versus Farber” headlined on cover – A torrent of overclaiming by Robert Gallo – Farber suggests solution: do the experiments

Here’s a first look at Harpers this month, for those still bereft of their subscription or newstand copies, as we are (click the photos twice for supersize). This copy is from Barnes and Noble on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, one of the few places to have it today. On the front flap, there is a special listing for the Gallo versus Celia Farber letters column debate, six pages of it: “Robert Gallo and Celia Farber, an Exchange”. On the cover, also, “Robert Gallo and Celia Farber”. Not a word about the Impeach Nixon essay by Lewis Lapham, which attracted so much attention to the same March issue. Clearly Roger D. Hodge, the new editor, recognizes the importance of continuing the debate.

The lead letter is by Rebecca Culshaw, the assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Tyler who modeled HIV?AIDS for ten years until she recently gave up on it making any sense, and posted her renunciation of HIV as the cause of AIDS, Why I Quit HIV on LewRockwell. She commends Harper’s, saying that the paradigm is a model which neither accounts for observations nor yields good predictions, and after twenty years without a cure or a vaccine, it is high time for a scientific debate.

Next is Mark Biernbaum, Ph.D., a gay, HIV+ psychologist and researcher who had not heard of the issue before he read Farber’s piece, and found it confirmed doubts that had long gathered in his mind. “I wondered why my friend passed away from liver failure…” He has often interrupted medications on his own initiative and recently his doctor has backed him on the stand, advising him to stay off the drugs as much as possible because they are immunosuppressive. He is baffled by the “vitriolic, character assassinating responses” he had seen to the Harper’s piece and sees no reason why Duesberg should be called “crazy” and Farber a “crackpot” for suggesting chronic drug use and malnutrition cause illness. “In science”, he says, we “test rival hypotheses in order to rule them out. No hypothesis regarding AIDS can be rejected until its espousers receive funding to test it.”

This is followed by what may be the most politically significant letter, by activist playwright Larry Kramer, the HIV+ founder of ACT-UP. It is a classic example of how the Farber’s piece, appearing in the very long established (a century and a half) and well trusted Harper’s, throws a spanner in the mental works of all who have long taken the conventional wisdom of HIV?AIDS as scientific and medical gospel, only to find the reputable Harper’s questioning not only the way the research is done, but the science itself. First Kramer hurries to mark the piece as outlandish – “putting aside the question of how (it) got into an estimable magazine like Harper’s” – “scary”, “validating secret fears, irrational as these fears may or may not be”,”, “even I can see holes in her arguments”, “she portrays the NIH as horrific (but) millions of us who a few years ago were counted as dead are still alive” which “in my eyes this alone makes Dr Anthony Fauci… a hero of great stature”, “much of what Farber dredges up is not new”.

That comforting set of beliefs out of the way, Kramer then allows that “her argument has not been answered to the satisfaction of a lot of people. I would guess that it is going to be a lot less easy now to sweep this debate under the carpet by naming Farber and Duesberg and other “crazies” and “HIV-deniers.” Agreeing that “too much money and greed” control treatment he calls for a more mature discussion with “less namecalling”, and returning AIDS to the top of the agenda because it “is still spreading like wildfire”

Next up to bat, a couple of MDs at the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Richard Marlink and Catherine Wilfert, who claim to have devoted a substantial portion of their lives in pursuit of the truth about AIDS, without finding a single persuasive reason to doubt that HIV causes AIDS – to think otherwise is to “fantasize”, they say – or that nevirapine is not “safe and effective” in preventing mother-to-child transmission. Without treatment “millions of children across the globe will sicken and die by the millions”.

Marlink and Wilfert claim rather wildly that the Harper’s piece is “grossly inaccurate”, “years of careful research has proven beyond doubt that HIV causes AIDS”, that antiretrovirals “save lives”, the “egregious errors’ include confusing “longterm use of drug cocktails including nevirapine” with “a single dose to prevent mother to child transmission” which is not “harmful”, and that several studies have confirmed this, including HIVNET 012, whose records may have been a mess but whose conclusions were still valid, as the Institute of Medicine panel confirmed. Placebos were not included in the trials because once “AZT (sic) was shown to dramatically reduce the likelihood of transmitting the virus it would have been unethical, according to accepted international standards, to deny protection to infants by providing their mothers with a placebo.”

(How this result is scientifically established without the use of a placebo is not made any clearer than it was in the trial of AZT, with which their Freudian slip confuses the nevirapine trial.)

The next letter is a heart rending cry from Joyce Ann Hafford’s sister Rubbie King, who reports that when her sister joined the drug trial she “experienced a severe reaction almost immediately, but it was never suggested she stop taking the medicine. The idiots did not take her off the drugs until it was too late.” To these scientists the life of her sister meant nothing, she writes. “She was just another black guinea pig, whose life was reduced to nothing more than an “oops”. Meanwhile, I am left to raise her two children.”

She says her sister was an “incredible person, not a lab rat” and thanks Celia and Harper’s for the “dignity and respect” they have granted in “caring enough to tell the truth.”

Following this, the least pointed letter of the bunch, a long screed by a Greenwich Village MD, Paul Bellman, in private practice as a specialist in HIV+ patients for twenty years, who seems to have long been vaguely aware that things are not adding up but permanently unable to grasp the nettle that HIV is as irrelevant as Duesberg reasons it is. After the obligatory insulting description of Celia’s work he says its “rhetoric and poorly drawn examples” inspire him to add some “historical perspective”. He outlines how little was understood in the early days of HIV?AIDS, including “why it was so hard to find the virus”, so co-factors were thought crucial, and that this has led to the current notion that “overactivation of the immune system induced by HIV” might be the answer to some of the loss of CD4 cells. Some “desperate patients latched on to Peter Duesberg’s radical hypothesis that HIV wasn’t the cause of AIDS”, hoping for another therapy, but “Duesberg offered little more than rhetoric” and was “remarkably ignorant about the clinical realities.”

In the mid-90s the landscape was transformed by an “accurate viral-load test” and “virus shown to correlate strongly” with “clinical progression to AIDS”, so it became “crystal clear that HIV causes AIDS.” The only question is how, which is “far from being fully answered” and is crucial to meet the challenges of toxicity of the meds and drug resistance. David Ho’s promise ten years ago of a cure from antivirals has not been realized and we need to know how they can be “complemented” with other therapies.

Bellman names examples of drug companies funding members of the panels who control treatment guidelines and formulate clinical trials, and says he has sarcastically suggested that the HIVNET group at the NIH be “moved to the Department of Highways” because it only “greases the wheels of the pork barrel system.” He suggests “a great story” would be on the “small core group of key opinion leaders” who set guidelines and direct clinical funding, “run medical education and profoundly retard research into areas that frontline clinicians plead is important”, who need to be “exposed by brilliant reporters” and “careful editors.”

Finally, the letter from Robert Gallo, who as we understand it was actually the first to respond to “Out of Control:AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science” with a bullying letter before this one that he worked out jointly with other HIV researchers and activists, with its peremptory demand “by Monday evening” for Harper’s to apologize for printing Celia Farber’s article amd agree to retract it and publish a long correct version of the true science of HIV?AIDS.

Apparently Gallo eventually cooled down enough to write a more temperate and less presumptuous missive, which starts off well by saying Harper’s is a magazine he has “trusted for its high standards”. From then on, however, the comments of the Director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore are a characteristic stream of Gallo sloganeering, overclaiming, and misrepresentation all aimed at dodging the bullet by denying the single issue that concerns him, which is Farber’s “misinformed view that HIV does not cause AIDS,” and not her other “innumerable other problems of fact and interpretation” (which possibly have less bearing on Gallo’s position and royalty income). “I will only say this,” Gallo promises, “There is more evidence that HIV causes AIDS than there is for the cause of any other single human disease caused by an infectious agent, past or present.” (Italics ours)

Gallo then explains that “not only has HIV fulfilled Koch’s postulates but also additional criteria that have been developed through the advent of new scientific methods.” Moreover “that HIV is the single cause of AIDS has been concluded by every single qualified group that has studied the question, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Centers for Disease Control, the US Institute of Medicine, the US National Institutes of Health, the American Medical Association, the Canadian Centre for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, the Pasteur Institute and the World Health Organization.”

Following this full dress parade of top level institutions who have adopted his scientific opinion Gallo replays his vision of how the culprit was identified and prosecuted, beginning with his 1984 claim of a “linkage” of HIV to AIDS.

He recalls finding “evidence of declining CD4 T-cells” in the “1 in 1000 to 2000 “healthy” Americans with HIV antibodies”, his early finding that the “virus primarily targets immune-system cells (now known as CD-4 cells), which he doesn’t mention is now abandoned by the field; he remembers that “we could pick out patients with AIDS or pre-AIDS within blind coded samples”, that “infected blood donors went on without fail to develop AIDS”, and other claims which are less than meets the eye either because the possibility that drugs administered to HIV+ patients lead to “AIDS” is discounted, or because any symptom without HIV is not counted as “AIDS” (transfusion cases have predictably “all but disappeared”, for example). Gallo denies any trouble isolating virus from any patient with antibodies, and says his HIV blood test is close to perfect.

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Special note:

How Gallo proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS

The most remarkable sentence Gallo pens here is the one saluting his moment of epiphany when he decided that HIV was the cause of AIDS: “In 1984, when my colleagues and I were first to claim—and in my view demonstrate—the linkage of HIV to AIDS, we showed that we could isolate HIV from forty-eight individuals who had AIDS.” This has a special effrontery will tickle long time admirers of the pr genius of HIV?AIDS’s greatest scientist, and not just because it was Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur who first “linked” HIV to AIDS in a 1983 paper.

For the little appreciated result of the paper from 1984 that Gallo is talking about is actually the opposite of what Gallo said it was, and which the New York Times reported. The paper actually demonstrated that HIV was almost certainly not the cause of AIDS. The world, however, was misinformed by the hasty front page reporting of Larry Altman of the New York Times, who wrote that the four unpublished papers would identify HIV as the cause of AIDS, and the rest is history.

We describe the true contents and result of the paper in our next post, just in case anybody is interested. These show that Bob Gallo actually preceded Peter Duesberg by two years in demonstrating that the least likely candidate for the cause of AIDS was the retrovirus which, it later transpired in a legal battle between the US and France over royalties, Gallo had newly discovered in two federal Express packages from Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute.

Since this result is not widely appreciated we will cover it in detail in our next post so that Robert Gallo can get the full credit he so richly deserves.

End of special note

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Gallo says that “Ms. Farber” completely misrepresents the history of HIV therapy by following the “strange logic of a few dangerous people” that these medications are harming people or may themselves cause AIDS – (does Gallo realize this includes Larry Kramer?)-. On the contrary current antiretroviral treatments have allowed people to live to a “reasonably normal age” and all but ended pediatric AIDS in the developed world, which “alone could prove that HIV is the single cause of AIDS.”

In the mid-1980s he and his colleagues worked with “several lab technicians” who “accidentally infected themselves with HIV and in every case went on to develop AIDS. This is more evidence than Robert Koch ever had before he claimed a microbe caused a disease.”

He is sorry that after 25 years there are people who refuse to accept this overwhelming body of evidence. He puts it down to a “disturbing rise in anti-science opinion” and he is surprised that Harper’s has embraced this trend “especially given the tragic consequences of the anti-IV nihilist rhetoric in lives lost.” This is “about preserving human lives” and “there is no room for.. shallow and sensationalist thinking.”

This parade of propaganda lines interspersed with faulty claims presents a tempting target for Celia Farber in her two and a half column reply, but in the imperturbable Harper’s manner she smoothly avoids falling into that muddy pit. “Much of the critical response generated by my article has focused on a very brief summary of Peter Duesberg’s critique of the medical consensus regarding HIV and AIDS”, she notes, and a long article could certainly be written about that and other critiques of the HIV hypothesis. But “I did not write that article”. She has instead written the story of three lives changed, one ended, by the war on AIDS, and how AIDS science has been corrupted by quasi-religious zealotry and powerful financial interests.

The heart of the piece, she says, was how whistleblower Jonathan Fishbein exposed the NIH coverup of the disastrous clinical trial in Uganda (HIVNET 012) of the highly toxic nevirapine from Boehringer Ingelheim, which killed Joyce Ann Hafford in Tennessee. Scientific standards have slipped and controls for safety and scientific validation have been removed, while bad science is “defended with missionary zeal”.

To say that the HIVNET trial suffered merely from “record-keeping problems” is “obscene”, she says.

Drug company money is everywhere – Boehringer Ingelheim funds the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (source of the letter from two MDs above) substantially, and the panel that judged the HIVNET 012 results valid included six (of nine) receiving annual NIH grants from $120,000 to nearly $2 million, some from the division responsible for the trial. If it was valid, “why did the FDA tell Boehringer Ingelheim to withdraw its application or face a public rejection?”

Contrary to the Glaser MDs, her article did distinguish long-term nevirapine treatment from single-dose, and reported continuous treatment killed Joyce Hafford, illustrating “the callous disregard with which many patients are treated by the medical establishment that speaks in their name.” Meanwhile the “life saving” nevirapine is being given poor pregnant women around the world while the FDA has refused to approve it for mother-to-child transmission of HIV in this country.

As to Gallo’s response, his “research has been the subject of several devastating investigations, one of which found him guilty of scientific misconduct”. He minimizes the the HIVNET scandal and ignores Joyce Ann Hafford, “which is typical”, her life and those of five others Celia has more recently discovered safely filed away under “lessons learned” in the long march against HIV, like the thousands of lives cut short by high dose AZT.

His letter is “riddled with assertions of fact that dissolve under careful scrutiny into highly debatable interpretations of ambigious data”. But the letters section of a magazine is no place to debate the fundamentals of AIDS science.

And this is the heart of the issue, she says: the claims and counter claims of Gallo, Duesberg, David Ho and the Perth Group (”which has advanced its own highly original critique of the HIV paradigm”) cannot be adjudicated in magazines or on blogs.

“Mark Biernbaum gets it exactly right. Only carefully designed studies that rigorously test the various hypotheses about AIDS can advance our understanding of this disease. The suppression and demonization of competing viewpoints, and the refusal to acknowledge mistakes, especially when those mistakes cost lives, will accomplish nothing.”

Referee wins the first round in a knockout

Rather like a referee parting two boxers and telling them the match is over till they get weighed, Farber and Harper’s thus win the first round (there will be another round of letters we hear) decisively by rising above the fray with what seems to them the only possible constructive suggestion for outsiders to make. Let’s stop all the namecalling and wrangling over untested claims, they say, and the interpretations without proof (there is none yet for HIV as the cause of AIDS or explanation of how it works and no sign there ever will be) and give money to Duesberg and others to test the validity of HIV and the best alternatives as the cause or causes of AIDS.

We at NAR would say that the longed for conclusive evidence is in fact already there, in the literature, if only people would read it, though confirming studies will always be welcome. In fact, in the Fermat manner we plan soon to post the promised solution to HIV?AIDS that the literature seems to us to indicate without much doubt as soon as we have time to do so.

Meanwhile, we certainly agree with the emphasis on providing funds to Peter Duesberg and anybody else who wants to provide further evidence that HIV is or is not the cause of HIV?AIDS. Duesberg has already suggested experiments which the ex-editor of Science, Daniel Koshland, strongly supported without avail at the NIH. The most telling sign that something has been very wrong with the science of HIV?AIDS from the very beginning has been the scorning of Peter Duesberg, an effort to consign him and his questioning to oblivion which now even extends to a refusal to fund his research in cancer.

For it is this reluctance to support, ie effort to silence a scientist who enjoyed the best reputation of anyone involved in the field then and who has done nothing since to deserve any less regard, and who may even be the most promising cancer researcher now at work, which is precisely what makes the HIV/AIDS hypothesis reek like fish which has been rotten for twenty years.

Signs he may yet acknowledge his own historic oversight

Larry Kramer has noted via Peter Duesberg that we have been unfair to him in the preceding posts A confused Larry Kramer asks Peter Duesberg to explain his own case,Larry Kramer billed $19,000 annually for drugs “I never took”.

We are alarmed to hear this, and hurry to try to make amends for the unfairness he can point out. We have no special desire to make Larry unhappy, since like many people we find his public persona charming for its warmth, openness, vulnerability, expressiveness, idealism and community spirit, not to mention his urging restraint in the baser pleasures.

Nor do we severely blame him for being misinformed and misleading others in this great issue, since virtually everyone else of influence is in the same boat. The AIDS danger is really the HIV?AIDS meme, which has now infected billions.

Why Larry is unique, so far, in this debate

The prime responsibility for the almost universal misapprehension among the political leaders of the world, that they don’t need to be aware of the Duesberg critique of HIV?AIDS because there is nothing in it, belongs to those who have forcibly peddled bad science so authoritatively for twenty years to people high and low who had no easy means of checking it.

Moreover, it is clear from Larry’s initial concerned reaction to Celia’s article in Harper’s and now his letter to that magazine, printed in copies of the May issue reaching subscribers last weekend and on the newstands now, that he is openminded to the whole idea that there may be something seriously wrong with the HIV?AIDS hypothesis, now that people he respects have raised the issue so convincingly.

We blame Larry only for a mistake which the whole world has made, which is not listening well enough to people of standing and integrity who warned him repeatedly that the science of HIV?AIDS was an empty box, and for assuming that all modern scientists and medical men and women are in some sense godlike creatures who are above error, let alone the mortal sin of sacrificing human lives to maintaining their career paradigm.

But even for his blind faith in scientists and doctors we don’t blame him overmuch, because we imagine that like everyone else whose brain is infested with the AIDS meme he must fundamentally be in terror of what is happening, and naturally cling to the only saviors he sees, that is to say, the health authorities, led by friendly, super bureaucrat and global bug buster Tony Fauci, the best dressed man at the NIH.

As Peter Doshi demonstrated in the April issue of Harpers, the art of raising money from the public by terrorizing us with new bugs such as the flu virus is considered an official strategic weapon in the government health game at the CDC and a skill worth instructing in lectures.

In a predicament where your very life is threatened by a lurking invisible microbe, as Larry has long believed, ideas rule emotions and vice versa, and in a career artist, whose stock in trade is the emotions created by ideas, this symbiosis is almost a professional qualification.

In other words, there are few people more likely to come down with the brain infection of the AIDS meme, one of the most powerfully insidious and infectious memes on the planet, than a poet and playwright.

So we actually congratulate him for showing an openminded willingness now to consider a different point of view, which is an attitude shown by no other leading figure in this arena so far. If anything does happen politically to move this mountain of a paradigm, Larry Kramer will be able to take some of the credit, it is clear.

A correction in response to Larry Kramer

He has three complaints. First, the publishing of his note was an invasion of privacy. Secondly, Tony Fauci was not the facilitator of his liver transplant. Thirdly, he never had Hepatitis C.

Our answers in short are (a) if he thought the email was private, we apologise, but the material we reproduced was only the same as he has often said in public, even as testimony to the FDA. Duesberg did not reveal the truly personal mail he sent him, in further correspondence, merely the public level intial query; (b) we certainly accept his correction that Tony Fauci was helpful in the initial treatment of his liver disease but didn’t arrange his transplant in any way, and we apologize for saying that, and have corrected it; and finally (c) we never did say that he had hepatitis C, we just mentioned it as one of the possibilities which might have caused liver damage when he said he never took drugs, which we took to mean all drugs, though he may have meant simply recreational ones. Larry Kramer does not have hepatitis C.

On the privacy issue, we did reproduce what Larry wrote to Duesberg initially only because it was purely public material that he had mentioned many other places, including testimony to the FDA. But since we feel that email privacy is an increasingly knotty issue these days, we discuss it further here, but hide the section because it is not directly relevant to the blog theme, which is the appalling neglect of the scientific literature by virtually everybody in HIV?AIDS, from scientists and doctors to reporters, activists and patients.

But there is something else at work in this case. We don’t think it should be overlooked that Larry is writing not to an established friend but to a man that he has helped, unwittingly or not, to torment for twenty years. Unfortunately Peter Duesberg is not someone he has supported in that scientist’s Olympic, self sacrificial effort to bring truth and light to this life and death issue. Instead, he has compounded Duesberg’s experience of professional ostracism, which, the scientist has said, has been the most painful penalty exacted for his scientific integrity in saying publicly what he reasons to be true.

Duesberg’s difficult and morally and scientifically outrageous public rejection, which has raised a huge obstacle to his own research, has been magnified by the unresponsiveness of Larry Kramer. As political leader, he could have acted earlier to change everything, simply by listening to the Duesberg side at all.

Over the years he has instead chosen to pal around with Dr Fauci and say that any questioning the science of HIV?AIDS was “beyond any intelligent comprehension”, as quoted in our last post, referring to ACT-UP San Francisco’s unusually disruptive activism in support of questioning HIV theory.

It is a tragedy of HIV?AIDS that Larry, the great questioner of officials and drug companies, did not as far as we know show any serious move in Duesberg’s direction earlier, any serious interest over two decades in attentively examining what Duesberg has said about HIV?AIDS. Instead, in odd contrast to his alertness to the possibility of HIV drugs ruining his health, we have to note his continuing neglect of truthseeking in a life or death issue, where even though his own life is at stake he has played a leading role in denying re-examination of the central premise. But we salute his reaching out now to Duesberg, and his new openmindedness about the problems with HIV?AIDS science.

Dr Fauci did not arrange for Larry to jump the liver queue

Larry primarily writes to say that we have mistakenly written that Tony Fauci helped him win a liver transplant, and this is not the case. We accept that completely. However, the rapprochement between the two is legendary in the field, an unfortunate one if it has kept Larry from evaluating what Duesberg had to say without prejudice, which seems likely.

“You have to remember that for the first six years, no one paid much attention to AIDS in Washington,” said Larry Kramer, an ACT UP co-founder and playwright, who once called Fauci a “monster” and an “incompetent idiot.”Now 20 years into the AIDS battle, Fauci has the grudging respect of Kramer and other activists, a testament to both his scientific and political skills.

Fauci was able to turn them around by seeking their input. When protesters demonstrated at his office at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, in the late 1980s, he invited them up to talk. “If you got beyond the theatrics and listened to what they were saying, a lot of what they were saying made sense,” Fauci said.

How Tony came to Larry’s play attacking him, and how the two embraced in the lobby afterwards, makes a touching legend:

Fauci, meanwhile, has won round many of his critics in the activist community. His most complicated relationship has been with Larry Kramer, the writer who helped form protest groups ACT UP and Gay Men’s Health Crisis and who used to regularly call Fauci a “monster” and an “incompetent idiot”. In 1991 Kramer wrote a play called The Destiny of Me in which an Aids patient spends much of his time attacking his physician, a man called Anthony Della Vida – Anthony of Life. No prizes for guessing who he is based on. “The mystery isn’t why they don’t know anything, it’s why they don’t want to know anything,” the lead character shouts.Gamely, Fauci turned up to the premiere at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village. After the show, the two men met in the lobby and embraced. Kramer was overheard to say, “Will you still take care of me? Will you still be my doctor?” Fauci replied: “I will always take care of you Larry.”

That’s from this article, a good rundown of Tony’s comet like progress through the HIV?AIDS universe, where he was present at the creation.

As these stories make clear Larry’s warm feelings towards Tony Fauci developed far earlier than his liver transplant, and have nothing to do with the director of the NIAID department of the NIH easing his path through to obtaining a replacement of his liver, which we have no evidence for at all.

Correcting the record, Larry writes that

dr. fauci had nothing to do with my obtaining a liver transplant. i applied and qualified and was accepted into a ucsf study run by dr. michelle roland that was attempting to learn if transplants would be effective in people with hiv and/or hepB and/or hepc. i believe i was the 20th or so person to be accepted. indeed they were having trouble early on in getting qualified candidates to apply because the fear of death from the t/p was great and the early results were mixed. indeed my partner was very nervous about my entering. but since several of my ny doctors had told me that i had only six months left to live on my old liver, i figured i had nothing to lose. needless to say the success of my t/p so early on was of great value to both the study and myself.

So we apologize wholeheartedly to Larry and to Tony Fauci for ever believing otherwise. Why did we believe it? We thought we had a very good source for it – none other than Larry Kramer. We read that implication in the following words, part of the long interview Larry gave to the MIX Film festival of 2003. A second look shows that it wasn’t stated as a plain fact, and that the quote may not have meant what we reasonably took it to mean, and on the contrary, Fauci did not intervene to ensure Kramer got any priority in the line for new livers:

(November 15, 2003) LK: I don’t know. I don’t know. You don’t know how close I came to dying a couple of years ago because of the Hepatitis B in my liver. I was given six months to live. I don’t know if you remember – I looked like this. And, I had no energy. And they told me that was the end, because livers were not available. And the days were ticking away. Just prior to that, Dr. Fauci the man I had called a murderer many years before has become one of my closest friends. Talk about a moving story of irony. He saw me somewhere and he said, You look terrible. And they put me in the NIH hospital, and they discovered a lot of this shit, that had not been discovered in me before.

But then it continues,

And there was a Hepatitis B experimental drug in trial there. And so, I got what is called Adefovir, and that calmed down my liver for a while, but then it stopped calming down the liver and that’s when I only had six months to live. And I was down there one day to pick up the medicine – you had to go there once a month to get the medicine – and my doctor down there – a woman called Judy Falloon said, I think you may be eligible for a liver transplant. The minute she said that, I knew I was going to get that fucking liver. I just knew it! And she didn’t say how I could get it. She said I had to apply. They were just beginning to transplant people with HIV and Hep-B co-infecteds we were called – and there was, in fact, a NIH trial out of San Francisco, with Michelle Roland – our old ACT UP lady out there – putting it together – that wanted people like me. So, that’s how I got the liver. I didn’t get it because I was *Larry* *Kramer*. I got it because they had this trial just starting and nobody wanted to go into it.

So when Larry writes,

i hope i can have a straight-forward correction of this mistake and its unkind implications.thank you.

larry kramer

we do apologize. We were wrong in concluding that Fauci was behind the offer of a liver transplant, although that was what seemed to be implied, since he initiated his NIH care. Apparently it was only that he saw Larry looked terrible and got him into the NIH clinic.

The mistake is easy to make. In another account Larry thanked Dr Fauci for his repaired conditon but again, did not say that he had helped to arrange the transplant:

I received the liver of a 45-year-old man. Dr. Fung and his fellow surgeons say in all seriousness that we are as old as our livers, and he thinks it possible I have another 20 years of life. Indeed, I feel 45 at most.

Thank you, Drs. Fung, Fauci, Faloon, and Kottler, and thank you, Gilead, for saving my life.

(Here is the full quote – click show}.

Sorry, Larry, for any implication on our part that Fauci moved you ahead of others on the line, which we didn’t mean to imply, and which is probably what worries you. Here is the full quote for reference (click show):

Finally, Larry does not have Hepatitis C, just B.

i do not have and did not have hepC. heb B and hiv are my lot. both are now undetectable and have been since the transplant.

Of course, we didn’t say he had Hepatitis C, only speculated that was one of the reasons why his liver might have declined in the absence of any drugtaking, which was his claim. As noted earlier, however, the interview and other quotes elsewhere in fact make it clear that he was taking drugs before his liver transplant, including AZT, by the mid nineties.

The fate of many may now ride on Kramer’s actions

We are still not sure why the activist playwright told Duesberg that he took no drugs, but it may have been that he meant he did not take hard drugs, or recreational ones.

The important thing is that he now shares a suspicion of the toxicity of anti-HIV drugs with Duesberg, who has argued all along that the main attack on the immune system of HIV?AIDS patients comes from alien chemicals snorted or injected. Will Kramer now take a greater interest in learning what Duesberg has to say on the cause of AIDS? Let’s hope so. The whole battle that Kramer has fought is for the patient’s right to take charge of his or her own destiny.

We hope that the signs are correct, and that this most important player finally realizes that this means above all taking charge of the facts of medicine and science behind the treatment he is offered. The challengers to this conventional treatment give twenty different reasons for concluding that HIV is not the cause of anything and that the anti-HIV medicines he is taking after his liver transplant are damaging to …. the liver.

Let’s hope he will now listen to Duesberg, as he has shown he is willing to do. This might contribute to a great turnaround in a matter which is a life and death issue for so many, not to mention vast sums of public money in an era where every dollar counts in the fight for global health.

Much hangs on what Larry Kramer does now. Will he investigate and confirm that Peter Duesberg deserves to be taken seriously, and help to win funding for the embattled scientific idealist to bring a resolution through experiments to a twenty year old dispute which never should have gone on so long, putting at risk the lives of so many, including Kramer’s own?

But the shoot-from-the-hip talking head is misled about his own predicament

It now seems clear that it is not just Larry Kramer whose homework on the rationale of HIV?AIDS has been neglected in favor of partying, politicking, playwriting, appearing on television and on panels and performing rhetorically on the eternal theme “They all want to murder us”. Though very different in stance ebullient Brit Andrew Sullivan’s political instincts have led him to make the same knee-jerk responses as Kramer when he hears that HIV is questioned.

Thus in his “Daily Dish” blog two weeks ago, ironically on April 1, he reveals that it goes without saying that HIV causes AIDS and to think otherwise is a superstition peddled by magazines “like Harper’s”, whatever that phrase means (Saturday, April 1, 2006 Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish – Elites and Medicine 1 Apr 2006 02:01 pm:

One of the most persistent sub-currents out there among people with HIV and AIDS is superstition, or the notion that all drugs are somehow poisonous, or that homeopathic quackery can replace actual science, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and so on. This is particularly widespread among some gays and African-Americans, some of the populations most at risk. You have magazines like Harper’s giving credence to “theories” that HIV is unrelated to AIDS – in 2006!

To this cheeky dismissal of his betters, one can only say, if Andrew is truly interested in demonstrating empirical skepticism perhaps he should make a supreme effort to heave himself out of his pundit’s armchair and hit PubMed on his desktop to find out the difference between superstition and “actual science” as peer-reviewed in leading journals, and the difference between “theories” and professional scientific reviews of those “theories”, if only for his own benefit, since he seems to be so cheerfully taking a standard range of HAART drugs known to have rather unpleasant effects on the body, though not in his case, he tells us.

I’ve been on the new meds for a couple of months now and after a week or so of torpor, have no side-effects that I can speak of. My viral load – i.e. the amount of virus in my bloodstream – went from 141,000 particles per cubic mililiter of blood in late May to 1500 after ten days on June 2 and has now come down to a grand total of 121. Still not good enough. We’re hoping for under 50 at the next count. My CD4 cell count – a sign of the strength of your immune system – has gone back into its normal range. Thank God for the evil pharmaceutical companies. One day, when the history of this period is written, I have a feeling we will look back with astonishment as we recognize that advances in medical science, particularly pharmaceuticals, were arguably one of the most significant developments of this era. And yet the people who pioneered these breakthroughs were … demonized and attacked. Baffling and bizarre. I’m merely grateful the attacks haven’t stopped the research progress.

Here’s the whole post:

All very impressive, with those specific numbers.

“My viral load – i.e. the amount of virus in my bloodstream – went from 141,000 particles per cubic milliliter of blood in late May to 1500 after ten days on June 2 and has now come down to a grand total of 121. Still not good enough. We’re hoping for under 50 at the next count. My CD4 cell count – a sign of the strength of your immune system – has gone back into its normal range.”

There is something very persuasive about quantitities one can measure so precisely. Gauging precisely with instruments is the essence of good science, after all. You get away from human speculation and nail down the facts with cold, objective measurement.

But maybe Andrew should read Peter Duesberg’s letter in Nature on May 19, 1995 (page 197) and mathematician Frank Bulanouckas’s even more damning letter that follows it and see that all these “virus particles” are not measured accurately by PCR (they cannot be, as Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel for inventing PCR, has said) and probably exceed by as much as 60,000 fold the real count of virus in his blood, so it is not as impressive as readers may think.

Plasma virus levels determined by QC-PCR correlated with, but exceeded by an average of 60,000-fold, virus titers measured by endpoint diln. culture.

That’s from the abstract of the 1993 paper Duesberg quoted in his letter to Nature, which letter read as follows – we quote it in full since it is a classic statement which illuminates the shell game perpetrated by the HIV wide boys with Maddox acting as the muscle:

“HIV an illusion”

Letter from Peter Duesberg and Harvey Bialy, Nature 375: 197, 18 May 1995

SIR-In an editorial in the 19 January issue of Nature, John Maddox invited “Duesberg and his associates” to comment on the “HIV-1 dynamics” papers published the previous week, indicating that these new results should prove an embarrassment to us. Although we do not think that a scientist should be embarrassed for pointing out inconsistencies and paradoxes in a hypothesis that have only been reportedly resolved 10 years later, we nonetheless prepared a fully referenced, approximately 2,000-word critique of the Ho et al.2 and Wei et al.3 papers that we believed met the criteria of “not being longer than it needs to be, and pertaining to the papers at hand” that Maddox set out in his widely read challenge.

Unfortunately, he did not share our view and agreed to publish only a radically shortened version, and only after he had personally “gone over it with a fine-tooth comb” to remove our perceived misrepresentations of the issues. We found these new conditions so totally at variance with the spirit of free and fair scientific debate that we could not agree to them.

Readers of Nature who are interested in these questions, and feel that they do not need to be protected by Maddox from our ill-conceived logic, can find the complete text of our commentary in the monograph supplement to the most recent issue of Genetica4. Here we would point out only that the central claim of the Ho et al.2 and Wei et al.3 papers-that 100,000 HIV virions per ml plasma can be detected in AIDS patients with various nucleic-acid amplification assays is misleading. The senior author of the Wei et al. paper has previously claimed that the PCR method they used overestimates by at least 60,000 times the real titer of infectious HIV5: 100,000/60,000 is 1.7 infectious HIVs per ml, hardly the “virological mayhem” alluded to by Wain-Hobson.6 Further, Ho and a different group of collaborators have just shown7 that more than 10,000 “plasma virions,” detected by the branched-DNA amplification assay used in their Nature paper, correspond to less than one (!) infectious virus per ml. And infectious units, after all, are the only clinically relevant criteria for a viral pathogen.

Finally, in view of Wain-Hobson’s statement6 that “the concordance of their [Wei and Ho's] data is remarkable,” note that Loveday et al.8 report the use of a PCR-based assay and find only 200 HIV “virion RNAs” per ml of serum of AIDS patients-1,000 times less than Ho and Wei. So much for the “remarkable concordance.”

Peter Duesberg. Harvey Bialy.

Here is the full abstract from Science in 2000:

Andrew Sullivan joins him in setting a very bad example

Having been called out of order for crucifying the increasingly bewildered playwright Larry Kramer by a distinguished comment writer to the last post, we feel rather guilty at having to drive the nails in further, but after all, the self-serving arrogance of the misinformed exploiting the trust of the ignorant and vulnerable is the theme of this blog. (Click photos twice for maximum size)

At 71 Kramer is still the grand old activist hero of the gay community when it comes to HIV?AIDS, influential in media circles and a performer who can pack the great Cooper Union hall with hundreds of men so attentive that you can hear a condom packet drop as he declaims his poetically styled despair at their unwitting cooperation with the Bush administration in murdering each other with irresponsible partying.

Meanwhile Tony Fauci, that he once called a “murderer”, is now his savior and best friend since he arranged for Larry to get a new liver, at a time when HIV-positive patients were typically low priority candidates for these organ transplants.

All Larry’s crowd-swaying rhetoric and newfound fondness for Tony Fauci is precariously predicated on one tragically questionable premise, however, and that is that the decline in gay men’s immunity to the impressive range of chemical and biological assaults on their bodies to which they are exposed in heavy partying is not due to the alien substances and internal flora and fauna themselves but to a negligible wisp of RNA whose genetic machinery is so limited that it cannot even reproduce without the help of a healthy cell.

That wisp is HIV, a 9 kilobase retrovirus, an otherwise inert entity belonging to a species of virus which has never been proven to cause any harm to any person (pace Robert Gallo and his not so leukemic HTLV-1 for which the US blood banks test blood for his profit and our supposed security, although most of the population in Japan in a certain large region have it in their veins with nil effect on their leukemia rate – Hi Bob!) despite billions being spent on testing them in the Nixon War on Cancer in the vain hope that such retroviruses might be a cause of human cancer, since one and only one of the species is able with a little encouragement to cause a tumor in chickens, which is hardly a cell killing activity.

Faced with long and alien words like ‘retrovirus’, however, it’s possibly understandable that the artistic temperament of key players in HIV?AIDS gay politics such as Larry and the ebullient Brit Andrew Sullivan should be short circuited into a kind of mental paralysis which leaves them the passive recipients of whatever their more authoritative connections want to tell them.

Kramer has paid no attention even to members of ACT-UP the organization he founded when they changed their tune. A typically presumptuous 2000 piece by a reporter in POZ, always resolutely head-in-the-sand when it comes to HIV?AIDS, contains this quote:

But if the ((ACTUP/SF HIV rejecting)) members see themselves as unheeded, others see them as unhinged, and increasingly a public health menace. “To maintain that AIDS is not caused by HIV, to disrupt government and other official hearings to argue that money should not be voted for AIDS research and patient aid, to utilize vicious smear campaigns and to threaten legitimate activists with physical harm is beyond any intelligent comprehension,” said ACT UP founder Larry Kramer in a widely circulated e-mail in June. “Truly, in the face of our worldwide plague, such actions can only be construed as crazy”

*************************************************

“Larry’s research method into whatever is really going on in HIV?AIDS, scientifically and medically, consists of a) palling around with Tony Fauci of NIAID and b) forwarding copies of articles by Celia Farber to his well placed media and activist friends and asking what they think of them.”

****************************************************

Andrew Sullivan sideswipes Harper’s

For it now seems clear that it is not just Larry whose homework on the rationale of HIV?AIDS has been neglected in favor of partying, politicking, playwriting, appearing on television and on panels and performing rhetorically on the eternal theme “They all want to murder us”. Though very different in stance Sullivan’s political instincts have led him to make the same knee-jerk responses as Kramer when he hears that HIV is questioned.

Thus in his “Daily Dish” blog two weeks ago, ironically on April 1, he reveals that it goes without saying that HIV causes AIDS and to think otherwise is a superstition peddled by magazines “like Harper’s”, whatever that phrase means (Saturday, April 1, 2006 Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish – Elites and Medicine 1 Apr 2006 02:01 pm:

One of the most persistent sub-currents out there among people with HIV and AIDS is superstition, or the notion that all drugs are somehow poisonous, or that homeopathic quackery can replace actual science, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and so on. This is particularly widespread among some gays and African-Americans, some of the populations most at risk. You have magazines like Harper’s giving credence to “theories” that HIV is unrelated to AIDS – in 2006!

To this cheeky dismissal of his betters, one can only say, if Andrew is truly interested in demonstrating empirical skepticism perhaps he should make a supreme effort to heave himself out of his pundit’s armchair and hit PubMed on his desktop to find out the difference between superstition and “actual science” as peer-reviewed in leading journals, and the difference between “theories” and professional scientific reviews of those “theories”, if only for his own benefit, since he seems to be so cheerfully taking a standard range of HAART drugs known to have rather unpleasant effects on the body, though not in his case, he tells us.

I’ve been on the new meds for a couple of months now and after a week or so of torpor, have no side-effects that I can speak of. My viral load – i.e. the amount of virus in my bloodstream – went from 141,000 particles per cubic mililiter of blood in late May to 1500 after ten days on June 2 and has now come down to a grand total of 121. Still not good enough. We’re hoping for under 50 at the next count. My CD4 cell count – a sign of the strength of your immune system – has gone back into its normal range. Thank God for the evil pharmaceutical companies. One day, when the history of this period is written, I have a feeling we will look back with astonishment as we recognize that advances in medical science, particularly pharmaceuticals, were arguably one of the most significant developments of this era. And yet the people who pioneered these breakthroughs were … demonized and attacked. Baffling and bizarre. I’m merely grateful the attacks haven’t stopped the research progress.

Here’s the whole post:

All very impressive, with those specific numbers.

“My viral load – i.e. the amount of virus in my bloodstream – went from 141,000 particles per cubic milliliter of blood in late May to 1500 after ten days on June 2 and has now come down to a grand total of 121. Still not good enough. We’re hoping for under 50 at the next count. My CD4 cell count – a sign of the strength of your immune system – has gone back into its normal range.”

There is something very persuasive about quantitities one can measure so precisely. Gauging precisely with instruments is the essence of good science, after all. You get away from human speculation and nail down the facts with cold, objective measurement.

But maybe Andrew should read Peter Duesberg’s letter in Nature on May 19, 1995 (page 197) and mathematician Frank Bulanouckas’s even more damning letter that follows it and see that all these “virus particles” are not measured accurately by PCR (they cannot be, as Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel for inventing PCR, has said) and probably exceed by as much as 60,000 fold the real count of virus in his blood, so it is not as impressive as readers may think.

Plasma virus levels determined by QC-PCR correlated with, but exceeded by an average of 60,000-fold, virus titers measured by endpoint diln. culture.

That’s from the abstract of the 1993 paper Duesberg quoted in his letter to Nature, which letter read as follows – we quote it in full since it is a classic statement which illuminates the shell game perpetrated by the HIV wide boys with Maddox acting as the muscle:

“HIV an illusion”

Letter from Peter Duesberg and Harvey Bialy, Nature 375: 197, 18 May 1995

SIR-In an editorial in the 19 January issue of Nature, John Maddox invited “Duesberg and his associates” to comment on the “HIV-1 dynamics” papers published the previous week, indicating that these new results should prove an embarrassment to us. Although we do not think that a scientist should be embarrassed for pointing out inconsistencies and paradoxes in a hypothesis that have only been reportedly resolved 10 years later, we nonetheless prepared a fully referenced, approximately 2,000-word critique of the Ho et al.2 and Wei et al.3 papers that we believed met the criteria of “not being longer than it needs to be, and pertaining to the papers at hand” that Maddox set out in his widely read challenge.

Unfortunately, he did not share our view and agreed to publish only a radically shortened version, and only after he had personally “gone over it with a fine-tooth comb” to remove our perceived misrepresentations of the issues. We found these new conditions so totally at variance with the spirit of free and fair scientific debate that we could not agree to them.

Readers of Nature who are interested in these questions, and feel that they do not need to be protected by Maddox from our ill-conceived logic, can find the complete text of our commentary in the monograph supplement to the most recent issue of Genetica4. Here we would point out only that the central claim of the Ho et al.2 and Wei et al.3 papers-that 100,000 HIV virions per ml plasma can be detected in AIDS patients with various nucleic-acid amplification assays is misleading. The senior author of the Wei et al. paper has previously claimed that the PCR method they used overestimates by at least 60,000 times the real titer of infectious HIV5: 100,000/60,000 is 1.7 infectious HIVs per ml, hardly the “virological mayhem” alluded to by Wain-Hobson.6 Further, Ho and a different group of collaborators have just shown7 that more than 10,000 “plasma virions,” detected by the branched-DNA amplification assay used in their Nature paper, correspond to less than one (!) infectious virus per ml. And infectious units, after all, are the only clinically relevant criteria for a viral pathogen.

Finally, in view of Wain-Hobson’s statement6 that “the concordance of their [Wei and Ho's] data is remarkable,” note that Loveday et al.8 report the use of a PCR-based assay and find only 200 HIV “virion RNAs” per ml of serum of AIDS patients-1,000 times less than Ho and Wei. So much for the “remarkable concordance.”

Peter Duesberg. Harvey Bialy.

Here is the full abstract from Science in 2000:

Ask-John – the time saving modern approach to scientific fact checking

But it is probably hopeless to suggest further reading of any kind for Andrew. It is pretty clear from the results that his sources for a second medical opinion on his trusted doctor’s advice are the same as Larry’s. That is to say, Larry’s research method into whatever is really going on in HIV?AIDS, scientifically and medically, which consists of a) palling around with Tony Fauci of NIAID and b) forwarding copies of articles by Celia Farber to his well placed media and activist friends and asking what they think of them.

The main problem with this approach is that it is circular ie the friends and colleagues consulted typically follow the same research procedure themselves: when in doubt Ask John. Heck, why not? The Ask-John method is how most scientists double check their understanding of HIV?AIDS, according to our own interviewing. When they see that the cause of AIDS has been challenged by Peter Duesberg in a top peer reviewed journal such as Cancer Research or the Proceedings of the National Academy, they do not read the article concerned. Instead, they mention it to John, their colleague in the field of HIV?AIDS, and John reassures them that there is nothing in it.

*************************************************

“There is no scientific question which has been settled so completely as the question of the cause of AIDS, the Ask-John method reveals. ”

*************************************************The reliability of the Ask-John approach to resolving cognitive dissonance in science was officially recognized in print more than a decade ago by none other than John Maddox, the editor of Nature, when he was provoked by the London Sunday Times running a huge series of articles in 1992 by science editor Neville Hodgkinson over several weekends reporting evidence that Duesberg was right when he reasoned that the chances of HIV being the cause of AIDS were smaller than a 9 kilobase wisp of RNA.

Maddox reacted swiftly to this suggestion that Nature had printed page upon page of HIV?AIDS papers based on a false premise by telling his readers that they need not buy the Sunday Times and look into the matter, he would let them know if there was anything worthwhile in the articles concerned. In other words, no need to read anything, just Ask John.

What is most reassuring to those who use the Ask-John method is the typically supreme confidence with which those they consult tell them what they need to know, eg that HIV causes AIDS, there is overwhelming evidence, that Duesberg is on the wrong track and there is absolutely no question about it. None at all. There is no scientific question which has been settled so completely as the question of the cause of AIDS, the Ask-John method reveals.

For example, only yesterday we asked the charming ex-editor of Scientific American, Jonathan Piel, whom we happened to run into quite by chance at a burial, whether he was aware of the challenge to HIV as the cause of AIDS. **************************************************

“If there is a less appealing topic in the whole of science and medicine, it is difficult to think of it.”

*****************************************************

Having moved on from science to other topics – his green eyed wife Madeleine runs two cable shows, one on a community issue and the other where she interviews people in science and the arts, but he told us he helps out only as a producer – Jonathan seemed to struggle to recall it but eventually allowed that he had heard something of the kind, but there was nothing in it. Nothing at all. Wait, we assured him, this was not quite the case, there definitely was something to it, according to the scientific literature. He grimaced momentarily as a frisson of cognitive dissonance hit his left frontal cortex, but in a second it resolved. No, he said decisively, evidently drawing on the results of Ask-several-Johns, that was quite wrong. Definitely nothing to it. Absolutely not.

Why people prefer to Ask John about the miseries of HIV?AIDS

Of course there is also a particular reason why Ask-John is the preferred method of researching questions about HIV?AIDS and its cause. Let’s face it, no one really likes to think too much about the whole unattractive field if they can help it. If there is a less appealing topic in the whole of science and medicine, it is difficult to think of it. The aesthetic drawbacks simply put a lot of people off. Explaining the scientific questions surrounding of HIV?AIDS would be a fascinating topic – the whole world misled!? surely not! – if it didn’t demand imagining the goriest details of human sexual activity, and the grimmest path of decline into the grave.

Certainly we find the whole subject area unappetizing for the most part, and admit quite frankly our only reason for pursuing HIV?AIDS is that it is the best example extant of how science can go very, very provably wrong, and a very important health paradigm can escape serious peer review for two decades even in a life or death matter. We believe a big reason that HIV?AIDS eludes scrutiny so successfully – it is as slippery as a naked Indian house burglar greased to evade capture – is that it is simply not dinner party conversation.

Opinion leader Larry’s dereliction of duty

But Larry is a leader of his community. The Ask John approach is an abdication of responsibility if you are a respected leader of the gay community in this life or death matter, certainly if you are aware of the serious professional challenge to the HIV?AIDS paradigm, as Larry has been from the first, since he is known to have been sent on request a copy of at least one of Duesberg’s early papers, and he is known to have followed Celia Farber’s columns in SPIN.

It is thus hard to sympathize with his evident disinclination over many years, to do any serious reading himself into the peer-reviewed, two decade long scientific challenge to his key assumption, the one peddled by the activist-friendly scientists, official and reporters who so zealously purvey the standard line in HIV?AIDS to the general public, especially when his own health is at stake, let alone the health and lives of his followers. Like the sensitive, thoughtful and street level columns of Celia Farber the twenty or so popular books on the topic are all very accessible, after all. Has he read any of them, apart from The Band Played On? They should have been his bedside reading, even if he can’t handle the Duesberg papers.

But sadly, it seems that Larry has just assumed all along that the scientific dispute is beyond him, although he has by his own account become a master of the complexities of which pills to take when.

Thus his response to being sent the latest cannonade fired by Duesberg into the side of the good ship HIV=AIDS, a vessel so many years becalmed in the doldrums of no cure, no vaccine, no explanation and still no hope of eventually avoiding death, was not promising. As mentioned Duesberg recently emailed him a pdf of his 2003 Journal of Biosciences paper. Larry’s response was a faint “It’s not quite within my ken, but I’ll try”.

He should try. Come on Larry, read it. OK, we admit that the chances of you being able to get through all 270 pages of the best recent briefing on the topic are small. We mean the book by Harvey Bialy, the uncompromisingly accurate and scientifically and socially precise account of the way scientists have really thought and behaved in HIV?AIDS and cancer research, “Oncogenes, Aneuploidy an AIDS: The Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg” (North Atlantic Press 2004).

Bialy’s paperback is high quality, and parts are gossipy in a meaningful way, but it’s not for the science challenged. Larry tackling that might be too much like a tugboat trying to break through thick winter ice in Hudson Bay. Bialy’s clarity is as exact as Duesberg’s. But even with some familiarity with the scene it describes we had a hard time staying the course through every page of that scintillating but diamond hard jewel of science history and analysis, already saluted by some as a classic of its kind. A pity really since it is the one book that slows down the scientific shell game to slow motion for all to see.

But couldn’t lazy Larry have read and understood the gist of Peter Duesberg’s writings over the years, especially when his own life was at stake? Did he even try to? As an artist he would have appreciated the finesse and elegance of Duesberg’s texts, which we daresay are among the finest scientific papers extant in that regard. If truth and beauty are related, Duesberg’s historic papers persuade with style as much as substance, so even those readers who do not have time to pore over every sentence can be convinced that there is something to what he argues.

Angry and hysterical people who are alarmed at the idea that these papers overturn their world view accuse us of hero-worship when we compliment Dusberg for his work, but we challenge them to a) read his papers and b) suggest any in science that rival them in academic and even literary quality. We know of none. Certainly any effort by Robert Gallo or Anthony Fauci or David Baltimore to rival them in clarity, elegance and power of analysis will be a long time acoming.

It is that mastery of the topic that makes it quite easy for a patient lay reader to follow the points of Duesberg’s definitive latest paper, which sends the main pillars of the paradigm flying like pins in a bowling alley. This is the 2003 Journal of Biosciences paper, Duesberg, P., Koehnlein, C. and Rasnick, D. (2003) The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition.(J. Biosci. 28: 383-412), which can be downloaded as a pdf from that link, which is listed in the Scientific Papers page of Duesberg’s AIDS (non cancer) site. Anyone attentive can read the list of AIDS claims and facts which do not accord with established science or common sense and realize just how bereft of reason and evidence the current paradigm appears to be.

Not that there is anything new in it. The same points have been made for twenty years, with no good answers yet except evasion, obfuscation and ad hominem politics. Duesberg’s own very readable book, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Regnery, 1995) is still as valid as ever, and makes the political context clearer as well. Then there is a slew of other books, including one by Christine Maggiore, which can be understood by a child of twelve, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? There is really no excuse for anybody not to read this lay literature with attention, if they are diagnosed HIV positive.

Too late for Larry

But now, of course, it may be too late for Larry, who may well be on his last legs. After a liver transplant and years of deleterious drugs, it seems that Kramer is not in any shape to undertake such a challenge. That he didn’t do it in the past seems like wilful neglect, since he was after all the best known HIV?AIDS agitator in the gay community, which has lost so many lives, including many distinguished artists of all kinds. But now it seems that he has lost his grip completely, contradicting himself in his own account of whether he has taken drugs or not.

Certainly he misled Peter Duesberg in his recent attempt to get the lowdown from the scientist on his own particular case. As noted in the last post Larry told the distinguished Berkeley scientist that he had been diagnosed HIV positive in 1987 and had not taken any party drugs or anti-HIV drugs until the liver transplant he endured in 2001, when antiretrovirals were prescribed.

Here is what he actually wrote:

“would you explain something to me. i never used poppers. i never took drugs. i never had any chemo. i do not suffer and never have from malnutrition. i did not start taking anti-hiv drugs until 2001 when i got my liver transplant and they were required. i tested positive in 1987. you say these are the causes of hiv infection. i am hiv infected. i have and had many friends in the same boat, who simply do not fall into your criteria.”

As we pointed out this claim seemed rather inconsistent with his politics but he has said this before in public, for example, in his 2003 interview for the MIX Film Festival:

I never had to take any HIV drugs, until I got my liver. And the only reason I had to take it was because the transplant people insisted, to protect the liver. They wanted to keep HIV in check – whether it was out of check or not.- Larry Kramer Interview November 15, 2003, MIX -– The New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival Interview Number: 035 Interviewer: Sarah Schulman

Of course, this is perfectly possible, since there are other reasons why a liver can be so damaged that a transplant is undertaken, including alcoholism and Hepatitis B and C.

But in fact we don't have to look so far on the Web for the real causes of Larry's liver deterioration into what his surgeon called a "really disgusting" condition. In the first place, he had Hepatitis B. Secondly, he was taking liver damaging HIV drugs, including AZT, according to his own words. His mind is apparently so muddled that this "I took no drugs" assertion is not only contradicted by statements he has made in the past, but in this 2003 interview, he makes a new and conflicting statement within a few pages.

So, which HIV meds are you taking? LK: I took AZT when my liver started going bad, when my platelets went down. AZT, unknown to a lot of people, raises your platelets, so I took it for that. And then, I took Epivir, 3TC – whatever it’s called – for the Hep-B. And, that’s all I took for a number of years. And then since the transplant started, I’ve taken a bunch of them. I took Viracept, until I became resistant to it. I took Sustiva, which I loathed, until fortunately I became resistant to it, because it drove me nuts. And now, I’m on something which is an amazing drug, because it has absolutely no side effects – it’s like taking aspirin – it’s called Reyataz. Only now, they’ve just discovered – Steve Miles, the UCLA AIDS man has just discovered that Reyataz interacting with the other drugs I take is bad for Hepatitis-B. We know so much now, and I have so many doctors that I correspond with. I mean, talk about patient empowerment. I brought it to a new art. I have six doctors who I e-mail everything about me, and I pester them all to death, and I take advantage of everything that I possibly can, to get the information I need – just what we advocated everybody to do

So it certainly looks as if Larry is good at pestering doctors, at least, for information. Why doesn't he think of pestering scientists, or looking in the literature which is the ultimate source, or should be, of the doctor's pescriptions.

Anyhow, it is clear that before his liver transplant, he was taking AZT. How early? Apparently not much earlier, but he was certainly taking some drugs before 1996, $19,000 worth of them annually, in fact. For in 1996 Larry himself was the author of a piece in the New York Times Magazine on July 14 in which he wrote:

The cost of my current drugs, which do not include a protease, already amounts to about $19,000 a year; this does not include visits to my doctor or the batteries of blood tests that he, and this virus, routinely require. And I am what's called asymptomatic: I am not and have not been sick. A New York Times article earlier this year estimated that drugs for someone with full blown AIDS cost about $70,000 a year; in response, Tom Stoddard, New York University adjunct law professor and gay-rights advocate, wrote a letter to the editor saying that his cost $84,000 a year. Indeed, the seriously sick can find their annual drug cost exceeding $150,000."

This statement was quoted by Duesberg in a subsequent papers. Thus in "The AIDS dilemma: drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus" by Peter Duesberg & David Rasnick in Genetica 104: 85-132, 1998 Duesberg referred to his drug use as follows:

Some insiders have described how the medical establishment urges HIV-positives to take countless anti-HIV drugs and how these drugs affect their lives. In "Checking in, my chart" the HIV-positive playwright Larry Kramer describes his own polypharmacy of 19 drugs composed by several AIDS luminaries such as Anthony Fauci, David Ho, Joseph Sonnabend, Alvin Friedman-Kien, and others: AZT, acyclovir [for genital herpes], Zantac, colchicine [mitosis blocker], propranolol, spironolactone, myphyston [for liver cirrhosis and hepatitis], Eucerin, Moisturel, Retin-A, mycolog, flucinonide, sulfacet-r, Nizoral [fungal dermatitis], Hisminal and Humbid [bronchitis], and Shaklee vitamins, zinc, NAC and a ‘turquoise stone which a fortune teller, many years ago, advised’(Kramer, 1994) – for an annual price tag of $19,000 (Kramer, 1996).

Nor is Kramer unaware that HIV drugs cause liver disease. In an interview on January 7, 2000 now at WebMD Transcript/AIDS Decade in Review With Larry Kramer, Richard Marlink MD and Parnessa Seele he was able to inform his MD listener that

“We’re finding out, for instance, that 50 per cent of people who take certain drugs die from liver disease rather than AIDS, because the drugs are so harsh on the liver. Norvbir has now been discovered to cause liver cancer in so many of the people who take it. I said to a friend of mine, David Sanford, who’s editor of the Wall Street Journal, who has AIDS, and who just feels so awful from all of these drugs, and I said ‘why don’t you get out there and say I feel awful from all these drugs?’ And he said, “well, because I’m alive.”

Thus the Ask-John method of confirmation at work, and an extraordinary quote from a Wall Street Journal editor, for whom, it seems, everything follows from the assumption that HIV is the danger being kept at bay, so everything suffered in this overriding cause is worth it, even, it appears, liver transplants and death. In other words, one’s own experience counts for nothing if authority says otherwise.

Elsewhere in print, months before his liver transplant, Larry also admitted to taking HIV meds prior to the transplant, and said that one them, 3TC (Epivir), “caused…the liver disease than now is requiring a new liver.” In other words, he conceded Duesberg’s point: that HIV drugs can cause the liver disease seen in HIV positive patients.

Apparently for years now poor Larry has not been in good shape and can forget what he said only a few moments earlier. Fair enough. That is no crime for a man of 71 who has endured whatever attacks the drugs have made upon his system throughout the years, let alone more recently the mother of all organ operations. And let’s give him credit for avoiding crystal meth and antiviral drugs as best he could. But one thing is clear. Over two decades Kramer has not been well qualified to lead his community in this vexed and deadly issue because he has not met his responsibility to double check the science thoroughly.

In the end, does the fault belong to the shepherd or the sheep?

That all these supposedly alert people have followed the Pied Pipers of ACTUP and the NIH into drug hell and eventually decline and death, and agitated for the privilege of doing so, is something that can surely be blamed on the sheep as much as the shepherd. For there is no reason why any one of them should have ignored the many warnings sounded at such great personal cost by Peter Duesberg and by other scientists, academics, journalists, lawyers and independent minded laypeople such as Kary Mullis, Walter Gilbert, Harvey Bialy, Serge Lang, David Rasnick, Richard Strohman, Charles Geshekter, John Lauritsen, Celia Farber, Charles Ortleb, Katie Leishman, Anthony Liversidge, Jad Adams, Joan Shenton, Marco Mamone Capria, Gordon Stewart, Gordon Moran, Neville Hodgkinson, Robert Leppo, Etienne de Harven, Rian Malan, Anthony Brink, David Crowe, Liam Scheff, Christine Maggiore, Robin Scovill, Michael Ellner, David Steele, Frank Lusardi, Marcus Cohen, Robert Houston, James Hogan, Tom Bethell, Bryan Owen, Robert Laarhoven, Dean Esmay, Rebecca Culshaw, Mark Biernbaum and countless others in a list (to be extended) which is an honor roll as far as this blog is concerned.

The mental paralysis induced by medical and scientific authority is a phenomenon which has no excuse for intelligent, educated people, seems to us, even if they are unfamiliar with the details of science and medicine. We will always remember telling an HIV-positive writer for Vanity Fair at the San Franscisco AIDS Conference about Duesberg and the fact that he had reviewed the HIV paradigm with every intention of hopping on the funding bandwagon himself only to find there was nothing in it, and suggesting the writer look into it himself before taking any more AZT.

We even took round a long piece we had written for Harper’s on the subject (never published, as noted in an earlier post, because of Lewis Lapham’s unwillingness to get into bed, politically speaking, with the Heritage Foundation, which published Duesberg in Policy Review while our draft was being reviewed) to this poor fellow when we were both back in New York. He opened the door a crack and reached his hand through to take the paper and said he would let us know.

Two weeks later we called and exactly like Arthur Ashe in similar circumstances, he said, yes, it all looked very convincing, but he would just have to continue trusting his doctors. Five months later he was dead.

The activist playwright misleads us on his own experience

Having been called out of order for crucifying the increasingly bewildered playwright Larry Kramer by a distinguished comment writer to the last post, we feel rather guilty at having to drive the nails in further, but after all, the irresponsibility of leaders in science and politics exploiting the trust of the ignorant and vulnerable is the theme of this blog. (Click photos twice for maximum size)

At 71 Kramer is still the grand old activist hero of the gay community when it comes to HIV?AIDS, influential in media circles and a performer who can pack the great Cooper Union hall with hundreds of men so attentive that you can hear a condom packet drop as he declaims his poetically styled despair at their unwitting cooperation with the Bush administration in murdering each other with irresponsible partying.

Meanwhile Tony Fauci, that he once called a “murderer”, is now his savior and long time friend especially since he took a hand in arranging for Larry to receive proper care at the NIH in surviving liver damage long enough to be able to win a liver transplant in Pittsburgh.

All Larry’s crowd-swaying rhetoric and newfound fondness for Tony Fauci – not to mention his need for a liver transplant – is precariously predicated on one tragically questionable premise, however, and that is that the decline in gay men’s immunity to the impressive range of chemical and biological assaults on their bodies to which they are exposed in heavy partying is not due to the alien substances and internal flora and fauna themselves but to a negligible wisp of RNA whose genetic machinery is so limited that it cannot even reproduce without the help of a healthy cell.

That wisp is HIV, a 9 kilobase retrovirus, an otherwise inert entity belonging to a species of virus which has never been proven to cause any harm to any person (pace Robert Gallo and his not so leukemic HTLV-1 for which the US blood banks test blood for his profit and our supposed security, although most of the population in Japan in a certain large region have it in their veins with nil effect on their leukemia rate) despite billions being spent on testing them in the Nixon War on Cancer in the vain hope that such retroviruses might be a cause of human cancer, since one and only one of the species is able with a little encouragement to cause a tumor in chickens, which is hardly a cell killing activity.

So says the most tested scientific literature.

Faced with alien words like ‘retrovirus’, however, it’s possibly understandable that the artistic temperament of key players in HIV?AIDS gay politics such as Larry and the ebullient Brit Andrew Sullivan should be short circuited into a kind of mental paralysis which leaves them the passive recipients of whatever their more authoritative connections want to tell them.

Kramer has paid no attention even to members of ACT-UP the organization he founded when they changed their tune. A typically presumptuous 2000 piece by a reporter in POZ, always resolutely head-in-the-sand when it comes to HIV?AIDS, contains this quote:

But if the ((ACTUP/SF HIV rejecting)) members see themselves as unheeded, others see them as unhinged, and increasingly a public health menace. “To maintain that AIDS is not caused by HIV, to disrupt government and other official hearings to argue that money should not be voted for AIDS research and patient aid, to utilize vicious smear campaigns and to threaten legitimate activists with physical harm is beyond any intelligent comprehension,” said ACT UP founder Larry Kramer in a widely circulated e-mail in June. “Truly, in the face of our worldwide plague, such actions can only be construed as crazy”

Opinion leader Larry’s dereliction of duty

Most people can be forgiven for not wanting to go into the scientific literature, or even discuss HIV and AIDS in social situations. It is hardly dinner party conversation. But Larry is a leader of his community, and HIV positive since 1987. It is hardly good enough that his research method into whatever is really going on in HIV?AIDS, scientifically and medically, consists of a) palling around with Tony Fauci of NIAID and b) forwarding copies of articles by Celia Farber to his well placed media and activist friends and asking what they think of them.”

But this Ask John approach is an abdication of responsibility if you are a respected leader of the gay community in this life or death matter, certainly if you are aware of the serious professional challenge to the HIV?AIDS paradigm, as Larry has been from the first, since he is known to have been sent on request a copy of at least one of Duesberg’s early papers, and if he never followed Celia Farber’s columns in SPIN, which seems doubtful, he certainly read her piece in Gear in which she discussed the dangers of protease inhibitors.

It is thus hard to sympathize with his evident disinclination over many years, to do any serious reading himself into the peer-reviewed, two decade long scientific challenge to his key assumption, the one peddled by the activist-friendly scientists, official and reporters who so zealously purvey the standard line in HIV?AIDS to the general public, especially when his own health is at stake, let alone the health and lives of his followers. Like the thoughtful and thorough SPIN columns of Celia Farber, the twenty or so popular books on the topic are all very accessible, after all. Has he read any of them, apart from The Band Played On? They should have been his bedside reading, even if he can’t handle the Duesberg papers.

But sadly, it seems that Larry has just assumed all along that the scientific dispute is beyond him, although he has by his own account become a master of the complexities of which pills to take when.

Thus his response to being sent the latest cannonade fired by Duesberg into the side of the good ship HIV=AIDS, that vessel so many years becalmed in the doldrums of no cure, no vaccine, no explanation and still no hope of eventually avoiding death, was not promising. As mentioned Duesberg recently emailed him a pdf of his 2003 Journal of Biosciences paper. Larry’s response was a faint “It’s not quite within my ken, but I’ll try”.

He should try. Come on Larry, read it. OK, we admit that the chances of you being able to get through all 270 pages of the best recent briefing on the topic are small. We mean the book by Harvey Bialy, the uncompromisingly accurate and scientifically and socially precise account of the way scientists have really thought and behaved in HIV?AIDS and cancer research, “Oncogenes, Aneuploidy an AIDS: The Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg” (North Atlantic Press 2004).

Bialy’s paperback is high quality, and parts are gossipy in a meaningful way, but it’s not for the science challenged. Larry tackling that might be too much like a tugboat trying to break through thick winter ice in Hudson Bay. Bialy’s clarity is as exact as Duesberg’s. But even with some familiarity with the scene it describes we had a hard time staying the course through every page of that scintillating but diamond hard jewel of science history and analysis, already saluted by some as a classic of its kind. A pity really since it is the one book that slows down the scientific shell game to slow motion for all to see.

But couldn’t lazy Larry have read and understood the gist of Peter Duesberg’s writings over the years, especially when his own life was at stake? Did he even try to? As an artist he would have appreciated the finesse and elegance of Duesberg’s texts, which we daresay are among the finest scientific papers extant in that regard. If truth and beauty are related, Duesberg’s historic papers persuade with style as much as substance, so even those readers who do not have time to pore over every sentence can be convinced that there is something to what he argues.

Some people accuse us of hero-worship when we compliment Duesberg for his work, but we challenge them to a) read his papers and b) suggest any in science that rival them in academic and even literary quality. We know of none. Certainly any effort by Robert Gallo or Anthony Fauci or David Baltimore to rival them in clarity, elegance and power of analysis will be a long time acoming.

It is that mastery of the topic that makes it relatively easy for a patient lay reader to follow the points of Duesberg’s definitive latest paper, which sends the main pillars of the paradigm flying like pins in a bowling alley. This is the 2003 Journal of Biosciences paper, Duesberg, P., Koehnlein, C. and Rasnick, D. (2003) The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition.(J. Biosci. 28: 383-412), which can be downloaded as a pdf from that link, which is listed in the Scientific Papers page of Duesberg’s AIDS (non cancer) site. Anyone attentive can read the list of AIDS claims and facts which do not accord with established science or common sense and realize just how bereft of reason and evidence the current paradigm appears to be.

Not that there is anything new in it. The same points have been made for twenty years, with no good answers yet except evasion, obfuscation and ad hominem politics. Duesberg’s own very readable book, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Regnery, 1995) is still as valid as ever, and makes the political context clearer as well. Then there is a slew of other books, including one by Christine Maggiore, which can be understood by a child of twelve, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? There is really no excuse for anybody not to read this lay literature with attention, if they are diagnosed HIV positive.

Too late for Larry

But now, of course, it may be too late for Larry, who may well be on his last legs. After a liver transplant and years of deleterious drugs, it seems that Kramer is not in any shape to undertake such a challenge. That he didn’t do it in the past seems like wilful neglect, since he was after all the best known HIV?AIDS agitator in the gay community, which has lost so many lives, including many distinguished artists of all kinds. But now it seems that he has lost his grip completely, contradicting himself in his own account of whether he has taken drugs or not.

Certainly he misled Peter Duesberg in his recent attempt to get the lowdown from the scientist on his own particular case. As noted in the last post Larry told the distinguished Berkeley scientist that he had been diagnosed HIV positive in 1987 and had not taken any party drugs or anti-HIV drugs until the liver transplant he endured in 2001, when antiretrovirals were prescribed.

Here is what he actually wrote:

“would you explain something to me. i never used poppers. i never took drugs. i never had any chemo. i do not suffer and never have from malnutrition. i did not start taking anti-hiv drugs until 2001 when i got my liver transplant and they were required. i tested positive in 1987. you say these are the causes of hiv infection. i am hiv infected. i have and had many friends in the same boat, who simply do not fall into your criteria.”

As we pointed out this claim seemed rather inconsistent with his politics but he has said this before in public, for example, in his 2003 interview for the MIX Film Festival:

I never had to take any HIV drugs, until I got my liver. And the only reason I had to take it was because the transplant people insisted, to protect the liver. They wanted to keep HIV in check – whether it was out of check or not.- Larry Kramer Interview November 15, 2003, MIX -– The New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival Interview Number: 035 Interviewer: Sarah Schulman

Of course, this is perfectly possible, since there are other reasons why a liver can be so damaged that a transplant is undertaken, including alcoholism and Hepatitis B and C.

But in fact we don't have to look so far on the Web for the real causes of Larry's liver deterioration into what his surgeon called a "really disgusting" condition. In the first place, he had Hepatitis B. Secondly, he was taking liver damaging HIV drugs, including AZT, according to his own words. His mind is apparently so muddled that this "I took no drugs" assertion is not only contradicted by statements he has made in the past, but in this 2003 interview, he makes a new and conflicting statement within a few pages.

So, which HIV meds are you taking?

LK: I took AZT when my liver started going bad, when my platelets went down. AZT, unknown to a lot of people, raises your platelets, so I took it for that. And then, I took Epivir, 3TC – whatever it’s called – for the Hep-B. And, that’s all I took for a number of years. And then since the transplant started, I’ve taken a bunch of them. I took Viracept, until I became resistant to it. I took Sustiva, which I loathed, until fortunately I became resistant to it, because it drove me nuts. And now, I’m on something which is an amazing drug, because it has absolutely no side effects – it’s like taking aspirin – it’s called Reyataz. Only now, they’ve just discovered – Steve Miles, the UCLA AIDS man has just discovered that Reyataz interacting with the other drugs I take is bad for Hepatitis-B. We know so much now, and I have so many doctors that I correspond with. I mean, talk about patient empowerment. I brought it to a new art. I have six doctors who I e-mail everything about me, and I pester them all to death, and I take advantage of everything that I possibly can, to get the information I need – just what we advocated everybody to do

So it certainly looks as if Larry is good at pestering doctors, at least, for information. Why doesn't he think of pestering scientists, or looking in the literature which is the ultimate source, or should be, of the doctor's pescriptions.

Anyhow, it is clear that before his liver transplant, he was taking AZT. How early? Apparently much earlier. He was certainly taking some drugs before 1996, $19,000 worth of them annually, in fact, including AZT. For in 1996 Larry himself was the author of a piece in the New York Times Magazine on July 14 in which he wrote:

The cost of my current drugs, which do not include a protease, already amounts to about $19,000 a year; this does not include visits to my doctor or the batteries of blood tests that he, and this virus, routinely require. And I am what's called asymptomatic: I am not and have not been sick. A New York Times article earlier this year estimated that drugs for someone with full blown AIDS cost about $70,000 a year; in response, Tom Stoddard, New York University adjunct law professor and gay-rights advocate, wrote a letter to the editor saying that his cost $84,000 a year. Indeed, the seriously sick can find their annual drug cost exceeding $150,000."

This statement was quoted by Duesberg in a subsequent papers. Thus in "The AIDS dilemma: drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus" by Peter Duesberg & David Rasnick in Genetica 104: 85-132, 1998 Duesberg referred to his drug use as follows:

Some insiders have described how the medical establishment urges HIV-positives to take countless anti-HIV drugs and how these drugs affect their lives. In "Checking in, my chart" the HIV-positive playwright Larry Kramer describes his own polypharmacy of 19 drugs composed by several AIDS luminaries such as Anthony Fauci, David Ho, Joseph Sonnabend, Alvin Friedman-Kien, and others: AZT, acyclovir [for genital herpes], Zantac, colchicine [mitosis blocker], propranolol, spironolactone, myphyston [for liver cirrhosis and hepatitis], Eucerin, Moisturel, Retin-A, mycolog, flucinonide, sulfacet-r, Nizoral [fungal dermatitis], Hisminal and Humbid [bronchitis], and Shaklee vitamins, zinc, NAC and a ‘turquoise stone which a fortune teller, many years ago, advised’(Kramer, 1994) – for an annual price tag of $19,000 (Kramer, 1996).

Nor is Kramer unaware that HIV drugs cause liver disease. In an interview on January 7, 2000 now at WebMD Transcript/AIDS Decade in Review With Larry Kramer, Richard Marlink MD and Parnessa Seele he was able to inform his MD listener that

“We’re finding out, for instance, that 50 per cent of people who take certain drugs die from liver disease rather than AIDS, because the drugs are so harsh on the liver. Norvbir has now been discovered to cause liver cancer in so many of the people who take it. I said to a friend of mine, David Sanford, who’s editor of the Wall Street Journal, who has AIDS, and who just feels so awful from all of these drugs, and I said ‘why don’t you get out there and say I feel awful from all these drugs?’ And he said, “well, because I’m alive.”

Thus the Ask-John method of confirmation at work, and an extraordinary quote from a Wall Street Journal editor, for whom, it seems, everything follows from the assumption that HIV is the danger being kept at bay, so everything suffered in this overriding cause is worth it, even, it appears, liver transplants and death. In other words, one’s own experience counts for nothing if authority says otherwise.

Elsewhere in print, months before his liver transplant, Larry also admitted to taking HIV meds prior to the transplant, and said that one them, 3TC (Epivir), “caused…the liver disease than now is requiring a new liver.” In other words, he conceded Duesberg’s point: that HIV drugs can cause the liver disease seen in HIV positive patients.

Apparently for years now poor Larry has not been in good shape and can forget what he said only a few moments earlier. Fair enough. That is no crime for a man of 71 who has endured whatever attacks the drugs have made upon his system throughout the years, let alone more recently the mother of all organ operations. And let’s give him credit for avoiding crystal meth and antiviral drugs as best he could. But one thing is clear. Over two decades Kramer has not been well qualified to lead his community in this vexed and deadly issue because he has not met his responsibility to double check the science thoroughly.

In the end, does the fault belong to the shepherd or the sheep?

That all these supposedly alert people have followed the Pied Pipers of ACTUP and the NIH into drug hell and eventually decline and death, and agitated for the privilege of doing so, is something that can surely be blamed on the sheep as much as the shepherd. For there is no reason why any one of them should have ignored the many warnings sounded at such great personal cost by Peter Duesberg and by other scientists, academics, journalists, lawyers and independent minded laypeople such as Kary Mullis, Walter Gilbert, Harvey Bialy, Serge Lang, David Rasnick, Richard Strohman, Charles Geshekter, John Lauritsen, Celia Farber, Charles Ortleb, Katie Leishman, Anthony Liversidge, Jad Adams, Joan Shenton, Marco Mamone Capria, Gordon Stewart, Gordon Moran, Neville Hodgkinson, Robert Leppo, Etienne de Harven, Rian Malan, Anthony Brink, David Crowe, Liam Scheff, Christine Maggiore, Robin Scovill, Michael Ellner, David Steele, Frank Lusardi, Marcus Cohen, Robert Houston, James Hogan, Tom Bethell, Bryan Owen, Robert Laarhoven, Dean Esmay, Rebecca Culshaw, Mark Biernbaum and countless others in a list which is an honor roll of truth seeking as far as this blog is concerned.

The mental paralysis induced by medical and scientific authority is a phenomenon which has no excuse for intelligent, educated people, seems to us, even if they are unfamiliar with the details of science and medicine. We will always remember telling an HIV-positive writer for Vanity Fair at the San Franscisco AIDS Conference about Duesberg and the fact that he had reviewed the HIV paradigm with every intention of hopping on the funding bandwagon himself only to find there was nothing in it, and suggesting the writer look into it himself before taking any more AZT.

We even took round a long piece we had written for Harper’s on the subject (never published, as noted in an earlier post, because of Lewis Lapham’s unwillingness to get into bed, politically speaking, with the Heritage Foundation, which published Duesberg in Policy Review while our draft was being reviewed) to this poor fellow when we were both back in New York. He opened the door a crack and reached his hand through to take the paper and said he would let us know.

Two weeks later we called and exactly like Arthur Ashe in similar circumstances, he said, yes, it all looked very convincing, but he would just have to continue trusting his doctors. Five months later he was dead.

But playwrights don’t read science papers it seems

As mentioned in the last post, ACT UP founder and Bush whacker Larry Kramer, who feels that other officials in Washington have it in for the gay comunity, but that NIAID director Tony Fauci is his best buddy, was sufficiently disconcerted by the appearance of the Celia Farber Harper’s article damning HIV drugs and the whole theoretical foundation of HIV?AIDS, that he actually asked Peter Duesberg to clarify the scene for him.

Duesberg had sent him a copy of his 2003 paper for Biosciences, which gives every reason under the sun why HIV?AIDS is clearly the worst scientific hypothesis since Aristotle thought that women had fewer teeth than men (apparently like Larry with HIV it didn’t occur to him to check the evidence for himself). The paper, Larry weakly replied, was a bit beyond his capacity, though he would “try” to get through it.

***********************************************

“Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a mistake to which we are all prone.” – Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, Unpopular Essays,1950

*************************************************

Interestingly, however, Larry then informed Duesberg that his liver transplant wasn’t due to taking anti-HIV drugs, since he didn’t take any of these or any other drugs, including poppers, since being diagnosed HIV positive in 1987. He only started taking anti-HIV drugs after the liver transplant, he wrote, when they were required.

If this is the case, we hasten to say, then it appears that his liver transplant was not due to drug intake, recreational or medicinal, and we apologize to him for ever suspecting it was.

(There are other reasons of course to need a liver replacement; possible Larry drank too much, or contracted hepatitis B and C from the thousands of personal encounters he has owned up to, not to mention heavy doses of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory and other medicinal but non-anti-HIV drugs. But without suggesting that he is misleading us, it does seem oddly inconsistent not to avail himself of the very drugs that ACT UP, the group he founded, wrenched from the grasp of unwilling officials and researchers before they had time to clear them for safety, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of people if the scientific critique is correct.)

That is, we apologize if what he says is true, and not yet another example of the strange amnesia that seems to overtake so many HIV positive gay men who come down with AIDS symptoms of immune deficiency when asked if they have been in the habit of enjoying recreational drugs.

The confused statement he made to Duesberg is so clumsily phrased, however – he claims that Duesberg says that drugs are “the cause of HIV infection”, which is an amazing lack of understanding to show after twenty years of this discussion – that we suspect that he may have forgotten what he did take.

After all, the liver is what processes drugs like every other chemical adulteration in the bloodstream and it is the leading cause of death in “AIDS” patients in the last five years, even though it is not an AIDS symptom at all, according to the CDC. If Larry never took drugs of any kind it is an incredible coincidence that he had to have a liver transplant, which is hardly the most common operation among the non-drugtaking section of the population.

But who are we to question the word of a popular playwright? Here is what Duesberg, faced with this bafflingly inconsistent claim, politely wrote to set him straight.

Regarding the paper, “The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics ….”: This study describes evidence that all those AIDS defining diseases, e.g. Kaposi’s sarcoma, pneumonias, yeast infections, tuberculosis, dementia, weight loss, fever, diarrhea, etc, that have exceeded their long established backgrounds in the US and Europe since the 1980s can be reduced to the long-term use of recreational drugs and since 1987 also to prescriptions of DNA chain-terminators and other toxic chemicals as anti-HIV drugs. Indeed liver disease, which is not AIDS-defining and thus not (yet) attributed to HIV, is now the leading cause of death among AIDS patients. The liver is the primary target of chemicals, toxic or not. Yet, HIV is not (yet) said to infect the liver.

Thus the conclusion that AIDS is chemical, rather than viral, is restricted to what’s above established levels of old diseases and is now described as AIDS. Accordingly current AIDS includes a low percentage of AIDS defining diseases with long-established environmental, genetic and so-called idiopathic causes. Take for example the 50 cases of KS that were diagnosed annually in the US before AIDS, and the rare cases that Moritz Kaposi first described in Vienna over 1000 years ago….

I do not “say” that drugs “are the causes of infection. I say that drugs are the causes of AIDS-defining and other diseases, and that HIV is a harmless passenger virus. A passenger virus is defined as one that infects long before a disease occurs, that is neutralized by antibodies and is biochemically inactive and is therefore often undetectable during the course of a disease (Gallo’s nemesis!), and that is not necessary for any of the diseases its associated with. All this applies directly to HIV, is standard scientific knowledge and not my invention.

Perhaps even this muddle headed playwright who, as the founder of the most aggressive and disruptive activist group, ACT UP, is personally responsible for so much of the gay appetite for insufficiently tested HIV drugs and their consequences, will finally get the message, and instead of accusing the Bush administration of trying to kill off the gay population of the US will realize that his adored Tony Fauci has been with his help unwittingly or not trying to do that for the last two decades.

That is, of course, if everything Duesberg says is right. And given that he has maintained his impeccably argued and intensely peer reviewed critique of the HIV?AIDS theory as arrant nonsense in every respect for two decades without a whiff of refutation in the same peer reviewed high level journals, a critique which even a child could understand unless he or she were wearing HIV=AIDS spectacles like virtually all scientists, doctors, health workers, activists and officials in the field, we know of no reason whatsoever to doubt it.