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.

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

“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.”

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

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.

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

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

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

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 uni