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The TAC is barred by South African government from New York UN session
April 5th, 2006
Finally skeptics have the power to put activist barking dogs outside
We hear from South Africa that the pro-drug company, pro HIV Treatment Action Campaign has been prevented by the HIV-cautious South African government from participating in the upcoming UN session on AIDS, the UN general assembly’s Special Session on Aids (Ungassa), scheduled for May 31 to June 2 in New York.
Our correspondent writes rather disdainfully that “the TAC is pitching a hissy fit” in response. The news report is from the Sunday Independent, April 2, Sun:
The Ungassa organisers said they had submitted a list of organisations that would take part in the session to all national governments, but due to objections from South Africa’s department of health the TAC and ALP were excluded when the list of delegates was finalised on Monday.
Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy on HIV/Aids in Africa, said it was “absolutely outrageous” for the TAC to be excluded from the global gathering. “The TAC is the single most credible non-governmental Aids organisation in the world. It carries enormous credibility with NGOs and governments and enjoys credibility with everyone – apart from the South African government.”
Lewis said the decision was an error of judgment. “How do you keep the leading voice on Aids from the country with the highest infection rate in the world [from speaking]? It makes no sense,” Lewis said.
“It is a real loss to South Africa, Africa and the world. Zackie Achmat and the TAC will one day win the Nobel Prize: they belong in any meeting that discusses Aids.” Lewis said he hoped colleagues at the UN would discuss the exclusion in a general assembly and make it possible for the TAC to be included in the forum.
We applaud this action, even though it completely contravenes the principle of free speech which is one of the lynchpins of this blog.
In other words, because we believe the views of the TAC are so prejudiced and uninformed and predictable that they would just muddy the waters of any discussion without any compensating benefit, we support the censoring of the activist organization on the grounds of wilful misinformation.
This is the well known “Crying Fire! in a crowded theater” justification of censorship, for we compare the activities of the TAC to the crying of Fire! in a crowded theater when they should know that there is no fire, at least, if they were capable of reading the scientific literature for themselves, which it seems clear they are not.
Hard to be sure whether this justification for censoring them stands up to examination or not, though. After all, the TAC people presumably believe what they are saying when they fiercely promote AIDS drugs and attack the doubts of the HIV naysayers with the rhetorical equivalent of flamethrowers. Why shouldn’t they be allowed in? Don’t the HIV skeptics have as their chief complaint that they are not allowed to give their views on any major establishment platform? How can they then bar the TAC from UN deliberations?
It will be interesting to see if the South African government can make this stick. A lobbying campaign has already been started by the TAC.
The Larry Kramer syndrome
Meanwhile, we have to admit tha we hope that the barring is a first step to removing activist influence from all HIV?AIDS policy deliberations, particularly the issue of whether the paradigm should be reviewed by outside parties.
For it seems pretty clear that almost all activist influence since the beginning of HIV?AIDS twenty years ago has been anti-scientific, starting with the desperation of ACT-UP to wrench AZT and other dangerous drugs from the hands of those administering trials before they could be properly evaluated, to their current hostility to reevaluating HIV as a cause and their promotion of current drug regimens and their export to Africa regardless of significant indications that trials have not be properly done.
We pointed out to ACT UP founder Larry Kramer at the Montreal AIDS Conference years ago that if it made sense to him to challenge the goodwill and integrity of officials at the NIH dealing with drug trials, surely he should view the scientists promoting HIV with the same suspicion. All the playwright could say in response was “Oh you make me feel so ashamed!” and he wandered off to get some coffee, never to return.
Years later, he appeared on stage at Rockefeller University to discuss the state of HIV?AIDS and in the green room afterwards confided that his recent liver transplant had been paid for by others. “That’s because you are a national treasure, Larry!” we assured him, but we couldn’t help wondering to ourselves whether if he had read the scientific literature with more attention, and viewed science more cynically as internally subject to the manipulations of politics and human nature in the way we had recommended, he might not have had to endure a transplant at all.
Of course, this is an example of the odd tendency we all have of recognizing weaknesses in authority where we know a lot about the subject, and failing to see them when we know little. Everybody who reads the New York Times on a topic in which they are expert, for example, is often disconcerted by finding errors and misunderstanding in the coverage by the excellent and amiable reporters of the Newspaper of Record.
But do we remember this caveat when we read about subjects we do not know very much about? Rarely, we find. Instead we treat the reporting as gospel.
Knowing nothing about science, in fact being intellectually allergic to it in many cases, liberal activists and commentators on HIV?AIDS typically view scientists who promote the consensus view as authorities who with the backing of their huge institutions are as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica, and not as mere mortals who have all kinds of social and personal pressures to affect their judgement.
This unalloyed faith in experts who work in areas which are unfamiliar to us is a syndrome which can have dire consequences.
In their blind trust of the scientists in HIV?AIDS, partly driven of course by the politics of a cause of AIDS which absolved the hyperactive drug taking and night clubbing gay community from mainstream blame for their unconventional lifestyle, those who became casualties of HIV?AIDS in the US may have cooperated in their own victimization under a paradigm which was and is still scientifically unjustified and according to repeated scientific review, invalid.
This is one consideration that makes it horrendously difficult for so many of those involved in HIV?AIDS to even conceive of the possibility that they have made a mistake. The prospect is that when the history of HIV?AIDS is written, the leaders of the gay community will have to answer for ignoring the warnings they should read science’s literature fully for themselves, and in their anxiety to win public support and blame a harmless virus for the new plague, leading their own friends and family to their doom by acquiescing in a murderous scientific con game.
Small wonder that the responses of the activist community in HIV?AIDS suggests an underlying hysteria and fury that prevent any objective discussion of the situation.
Given that reality, it is all the more remarkable and creditable that Larry Kramer recently reached out to Peter Duesberg to help him in reassessing the situation in the wake of the Harper’s piece.
Fury as SA bars Aids lobbies from UN discussion
Sunday Independent
April 2, 2006
Fury as SA bars Aids lobbies from UN discussion
By Edwin Naidu
The ANC government has been strongly condemned for barring South Africa’s foremost Aids lobby group from participating in a major international United Nations Aids forum.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its affiliate, the Aids Law Project (ALP), were this week prevented by the government from attending the UN general assembly’s Special Session on Aids (Ungassa), scheduled for May 31 to June 2 in New York.
The Ungassa organisers said they had submitted a list of organisations that would take part in the session to all national governments, but due to objections from South Africa’s department of health the TAC and ALP were excluded when the list of delegates was finalised on Monday.
Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy on HIV/Aids in Africa, said it was “absolutely outrageous” for the TAC to be excluded from the global gathering. “The TAC is the single most credible non-governmental Aids organisation in the world. It carries enormous credibility with NGOs and governments and enjoys credibility with everyone – apart from the South African government.”
Lewis said the decision was an error of judgment. “How do you keep the leading voice on Aids from the country with the highest infection rate in the world [from speaking]? It makes no sense,” Lewis said.
“It is a real loss to South Africa, Africa and the world. Zackie Achmat and the TAC will one day win the Nobel Prize: they belong in any meeting that discusses Aids.” Lewis said he hoped colleagues at the UN would discuss the exclusion in a general assembly and make it possible for the TAC to be included in the forum.
Thami Mseleku, the director-general of health, told The Sunday Independent the department objected to the presence of the TAC and ALP at the global forum because they had on previous occasions used such platforms to vilify the government and, particularly, President Thabo Mbeki.
“We would like to present a united voice at the conference, but past experience has taught us that they use such platforms to rubbish what we are doing to tackle the problem,” he said.
In court papers for a case pending in the Cape high court over the government’s responsibility to act against false claims made about vitamins, Mseleku says the TAC wants to embarrass Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister, “at all times”.
“They have a democratic right to express their views, but it borders on anarchy when they call for the president to be tried for genocide in an international court,” he said.
“This is a government platform; we do not think they would contribute anything constructiveÃ…Â Their views are already known around the world.”
Mseleku said the department would rather resolve its differences with the TAC inside the country: “We are not opposed to them expressing their views as vigorously as they want, but we are not going there to talk to the TAC. We are going there to talk to the world.”
The decision had been made by the department without consulting the president’s office, Mseleku said.
Concerning its exclusion from the UN forum, Nathan Geffen, the TAC’s spokesperson, said: “We do not want to enter into a fight with the government, but they need to grow up. We live in a democracy, and the government has to accept that it will be criticised for some of its policies.”
Geffen said the TAC had never said Mbeki should be tried for genocide by an international court: “We never said that. That is a lie.”
The TAC had agreed with the government on common points. “The government is autocratic and intolerant without realising that this will lead to more adversity,” Geffen said.
Fatima Hassan, an attorney for the ALP and TAC, said there was a difference between vilification and constructive criticism.
“No civil society movement in the world would agree to take part in such a conference with conditions attached. That’s crazy,” she said. “We have never criticised the president personally, but the government’s policies.”
The TAC and ALP did not wish to be seen as obstructionist groups, because they had constructive input to offer. “But government is bent on blocking us,” Hassan said.
On Thursday the TAC said the exclusion was one of a number of intolerant actions by the health ministry. Another was the department submitting its country report on Aids to the session without consultation, which was against Ungassa policy. “The country report describes an inaccurate, rosy view of South Africa’s response to the HIV epidemic,” the TAC said.
Pragati Pascale, the spokesperson for the president of the UN general assembly, said the forum list of about 800 civil society representatives was drawn up according to instructions from member states.
“The government of South Africa sent a letter objecting to the inclusion of the TAC, Friends of Treatment Action Campaign and the Aids Law Project,” Pascale said.
Published on the web by HIV-Aids on April 2, 2006.
© HIV-Aids 2006. All rights reserved.
Wherever he is now, Bertrand Russell responded rapidly to our enquiry, appearing floating in front of us smiling from under bushy white eyebrows and with a pipe in his mouth and guiding us to his book of essays on the many follies of mankind, which has a most straightforward explanation of this seemingly irrational phenomenon, where people who claim to be sure of their view nonetheless choose to use bullying tactics to prevent discussion, rather than confidently take on all comers.
“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the Equator you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard, you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.” – Unpopular Essays: An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (1950).
“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.” 
“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this…..The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
“What I mean by intellectual integrity is the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.”
“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
“Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic hatred.”
“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.” 
“The forms of zest are innumerable. Sherlock Holmes, it may be remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the street. After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had come down in the world as the result of drink and that his wife was no longer so fond of him as she used to be. Life could never be boring to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest. Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the vegetation, another in the geology, another in the agriculture, and so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and, other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.”
An enlightened post to this effect appeared a week ago on 
Qualified outsiders and maverick insiders are very often right about the need to replace received wisdom in science and society. This noncommercial, disinterested, pro bono site exists to back the best of them in their uphill assault on the typically massively entrenched edifice of resistance to and prejudice against reviewing, let alone revising, ruling ideas. 
The overriding purpose is to combat group think and the political and social propaganda of government agencies and other large social systems, public and corporate, which induce conformist group think and unthinking social compliance, somewtimes with blatant error, by comparing current established beliefs and claims in science and elsewhere with the scholarly professional and research literature, and especially to defend the values of science and good scientists in the paradigm wars of HIV/AIDS, cancer, evolution, global warming, nutrition, particle physics, economics, religious belief and any other disputes over replacing doubtful ideas against conformity, prejudice, subjectivity and self-interest, standing up for free speech and publication against the tendency of the authorities to repress revolutionary ideas, and mining corrective truths buried in the professional journals and commonly overlooked by harried hacks. 
This is my battle with John Maddox [editor of Nature] and with people who are actually fabricating the data [Ascher et al in Nature, March 11, 1993]. They claim to have such a group that had not used any drugs. When I analyzed the data, it turned out that there was not a single person in their paper that was drug-free. I submitted a critique to Maddox, but his response was, I could no longer respond. I was censored. – Peter Duesberg (left), interview with Bob Guccione, Spin magazine, September, 1993.
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