Science Guardian

September 2006

Joanne McNeil

features

An Interview with Celia Farber

Normally, when someone researches and writes about a topic obsessively for over twenty-years, he or she is considered an expert. But Celia Farber’s “obsession” with AIDS has been unfairly characterized as an eccentricity by a more-dilettantish mainstream press.

Things changed when Lewis Lapham published her 15-page article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science,” in the March issue of Harper’s, his last as editor. Rodger Hodge, Lapham’s successor, told the New York Times, “The fact that she’s been covering this story does not make her a crackpot — it makes her a journalist. She’s a courageous journalist, I believe, because she’s covered the story at great personal cost.”

So what about her reporting would make anyone think she’s a “crackpot”? Well, where to begin? In the Harper’s feature alone she cites a high rate of HIV false-positives (as many as one in four) testing pregnant women, questions the effectiveness of antiretroviral drugs, suggests a pharmaceutical conspiracy comparable to The Constant Gardner, and interviews a doctor who believes HIV alone may not cause AIDS.

This summer, Melville House published a collection of her reports, Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. I talked to Farber by phone and asked her about the book and its unavoidable controversy.

You are constantly described as an AIDS dissident that does not believe HIV causes AIDS — but nowhere in your book is this explicitly stated. So how would you describe your views?

Thank you for noticing that critical detail. I have never written that HIV does not cause AIDS. I don’t think I’ve ever said that HIV does not cause AIDS. I took one semester of journalism in college. The first thing one is taught is to answer the question: what happened? What happened in 1987 was that a top virologist — Peter Duesberg — published a paper in which he argued that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. That was the news event that I reported on. It was my second column in Spin magazine. It came out in 1988. It immediately became clear to me that interviewing Peter Duesberg, who argued HIV does not cause AIDS could not and would not be distinguished from the writer saying HIV does not cause AIDS. Because the stance then and now of mass media was that to interview Duesberg, to describe what he was saying, was exactly tantamount to endorsing him and agreeing with him.

It is not for me to say as a journalist — as a nonscientist — what causes or doesn’t cause AIDS. But it is for me to say as a journalist what’s going on the landscape of AIDS dialectic. And this was a huge event on the landscape.

As someone without a science background are there times you feel overwhelmed by the data?

What I feel overwhelmed by is actually not the “science” so much as the politics of the science and the sociology of the science… Scientific data doesn’t come alive until the people who are fighting for it come into focus. I always relied very much on the old-fashion techniques of making sure I got into the room with the scientist or the doctor in question — so that I could hear the voice, see the face, see the facial expressions. Really pick up — with a receptive satellite dish — all the things going on — and what they really meant to say.

The nature of journalism is that you are reporting on a deadline and looking for good quotes. It is easy to see how science journalism can turn out like a game of telephone.

It is disembodied from the human, the emotional, the psychic and social context in which someone is speaking to you… It’s so sterile. As I look back on years and years of interviews, I remember the emotion. Of course the data is embodied in the emotions and vice versa — but when I read straight, respectable, kosher, approved science journalism, I can’t connect to it. I don’t know how the interviewer feels or the interviewee feels. It’s very gee-whiz: “Gee-whiz: scientists have discovered x, y, z.” Or a gene that causes this and causes that… In most cases, what it should say is X scientist, working for X interest, totally governed by X biases said to me on this date that X is true, but all of those are leaps that shouldn’t be taken quite so easily

Do you wish you had taken a different approach reporting? Is there anything you would have done differently?

That’s a good question. I am asked often, if I had known what the cost would be to my life and my career, would I nonetheless have done it? My quick answer is usually yes, of course. But it’s unanswerable… What I wish I had done differently, in retrospect, was to calculate the damage and the blight, both on myself and on my family and ask myself, “Is it fair to do to others?” Because what you actually do is you invite financial ruin.

I wish that I had found a way to keep the storm at bay — keep it from totally shattering the vessel that is my life, for I am also responsible for my son and making sure he has a sort of sane ordered life. He’s had a mother since he was three-months-old who is under extreme attack including a federal court trial that was very much about the AIDS column. Strictly for his sake, I’m almost prepared to say I wish I never got involved in any of it. But for the sake of the story itself, which absolutely had to be told, I’m very glad I did it and very proud to have been involved in it

[The federal court case was a sexual harassment trial against Farber’s then-employer Bob Guccione, Jr. at Spin Magazine (with whom she once had a relationship). Farber said in the interview, “I can exactly see why they would think that and why they would jump to those conclusions that that was how I got my job, but I dare say that if my work had not been covering the dissidents’ side of the AIDS debate, it wouldn’t have happened." She wrote about this experience in Salon, after a jury rejected the charges.]

As a non-gay male AIDS reporter and Westerner investigating Africa, did you have to deal with identity politics?

I never got that kind of guff from any Africans, [but] certainly from the gay community. Those that were opposed to what I was doing — that was one of the charges: that I wasn’t gay and how the hell could I know what I was doing and what right did I have to say anything? But that’s inconsistent with the core belief system, which is that AIDS is everybody’s disease, and everyone should react, and everyone should care, and everyone should have compassion. But we did! We cared like hell! Bob and I were alone in that. I remember Bob used to say AIDS was the Vietnam of our generation. We started the AIDS column because we felt it was our problem.

I wasn’t one of those intrepid dissidents who never wavered and never broke down. I was breaking down all of the time. I would go to AIDS conferences and go through an immense crisis each time, “Am I crazy or are they crazy?” And since there are far more of them I figured I was crazy. So then I would go back to the data and the story, and the interviews and just keep beating and beating and beating — in a way try to pull myself to a place where the story looked different: where the conclusions were different, where I could get across that bridge of respectability where they all were saying all that the evidence is overwhelming that HIV causes AIDS and so on.

When I was much younger I really wanted to get there. But I could only get there on a bridge built on evidence. And evidence included people, voices, and testimony. My bridge took me consistently to this other place. The real, uber-question is: do we as human beings only build these bridges out of material that will in some way vindicate what we already believe? And what we already staked our reputations on? I hope that’s not the case. I work really hard at seeing clearly. I can say categorically that I’ve lived through so many years that some of the huge questions we put out have since born out that we were correct and they just don’t talk about them any more

Could you give an example?

Chief among them is that there was going to be an explosion of heterosexual AIDS spread by unprotected sexual encounters.

In the book you compare that to Y2K.

Well, it’s as nonexistent. It did not happen as much as Y2K did not happen. It was a classic mass panic. There is nobody on the orthodox side who with a straight face can say, “Yes, our vision of heterosexual AIDS bore through.” If you notice what they said — Tony Fauci, Matilda Krim, Life magazine, Oprah Winfrey — this is just one statistic to give you a sense of the scale of what we are talking about: seventy million Americans were supposed to be dead from AIDS by 1990. The heterosexual spread we all agree did not happen.

[Another example is AZT.] At the time, the FDA agreed to approve it after only 17 weeks of testing [without any of the standard procedures that used to take up to 10 years]. And it flooded the community. Our side says AZT was a catastrophe; AZT killed a generation of AIDS patients. There are orthodox doctors who say that, there are gay activists who silently concede that… To be more concrete, I lived through and reported very carefully about that story and I have a few gay friends who were around then who are still alive today and simply put, they say, categorically, everybody who went on AZT in the early years died. It is the most toxic drug ever approved for human use. It is DNA-terminating chemotherapy that kills all categories of cells. And high doses especially were un-survivable — most people died around nine months, a max two years.

Of course [ACT UP and other activist groups] meant well! Of course they wanted to save their loved ones and brothers! Of course they didn’t know! But it was a disaster and we have to face it. The really weird thing about this whole thing is if you got on the phone with one of them, they would say people like me are responsible for mass deaths for planting the notion that HIV does not cause AIDS — which we discussed at the beginning — and for scaring people away from antiretrovirals. All I can say is only data speaks.

[Farber begins to read from an Aug. 5 Lancet article, “HIV treatment response and prognosis in Europe and North America in the first decade of highly active antiretroviral therapy: a collaborative analysis” (it looks at 20,000 patients in Europe and North America on cocktail therapy, also known as HAART therapy). “Virological response after starting HAART improved over calendar years, but such improvements has not translated into a decrease in mortality since 1996” (the year these drugs were launched).]

AIDS is immune deficiency. AIDS is immune collapse. There are many roads that lead to Rome; there are many roads that lead to immune collapse. What we were saying about AZT in the early years is that, for god’s sake, this is a chemotherapeutic agent — an old cancer drug from the ’60s that was shelved as too toxic for human use. Chemotherapy obliterates the immune system. AIDS is a disease described as obliteration of the immune system caused by a virus. Protease inhibitors are a different kettle of fish. While they also greatly undermine the immune system they also weren’t total killers like AZT. They didn’t just mass destroy the cells; they brought some benefit as well. They’re broad-spectrum microbials. They did clear up infections and they absolutely did bring people back from the precipice of death. But what I just told you about is a ten-year perspective study. And when they looked over those ten years the utopian dream did not pan out. Their HIV levels are going down, whoop-dee-doo, but they are not living longer. It’s a very strange position to be in. Those of us on the skeptical side have never been more right but we have never been more hated.

Are there any medicines you see as beneficial?

I always want to pull back so I don’t start sounding like a self-declared doctor… but if I had to commit to a causation camp, I would be some kind of multi-factorialist. What that means is AIDS is caused by an assault on the immune system over time from many sources, both chemical, nutritional, psychic, and social. It is always affected by the people pushed out into the margins of society — isolated and alienated.

I am most enthusiastic about the data I’ve seen — and this is mainstream data — about mass nutritional replenishment: limited antibiotic use and basically gradual rebuilding of the immune system. I know countless people for whom that has worked. Now, I don’t mean, you’re not eating your string beans. But if you are exposed to extreme toxic assaults on your body, you will cease to absorb nutrients properly. If we are absorbing nutrients properly, then our bodies are designed to fight infections and to live.

Nutritional answers excite me very much especially in Africa, where the idea drives most people insane. How we can have a world where the left is opposed to clean water, core nutrition and basic health care to poverty-stricken Africans? It just boggled my mind. If anything, it’s a traditionally left-wing position that people poor, marginalized, and starving are going to get sick — as they always have.

The cocktail era involves mixing and matching all these drugs in infinite combinations to infinitely unknowable results. So the best thing I can say about cocktail therapy is that I do concede it has worked to stop imminent death for those that are very far-gone.

What do you think about Jon Cohen characterizing your book, Sonia Shah’s The Body Hunters, and The Constant Gardner as “pharmanoia” in Slate?

Any journalist today who looks at the landscape including science journalism, conferences, the rigging of clinical trials, the cooking of data, the cover-up of deaths — all this stuff, for which there are just reams of evidence — to look at that and to declare fault on the part of those journalists, writers, and filmmakers who decry it: that is denialism. That’s pervasive and severe denialism.

Jon Cohen strikes me as a journalist who has so abjectly identified with the ideological agenda of mainstream medicine and the pharmaceutical industry that he can’t seem to distinguish from what they say and from what he thinks. He’s just the official parakeet.

[Later, Farber e-mails me a link to Jon Cohen’s “repugnant” article in the July 28 issue of Science magazine about recruitment for AIDS vaccine trials in Peru. Cohen reports on a “perplexing epidemiology — the epidemic is concentrated among men who have sex with men.” A “contentious” study will evaluate whether antiretroviral drugs can lower HIV transmission rates if uninfected people take them daily.]

Do you think The Constant Gardner was able to voice political dissent as it is shielded as fiction?

I would caution people against assuming that John le Carre is writing fiction. Let me make a generality: fiction writers today like John le Carre are doing journalism, and the journalists are writing fiction.

Who are the writers you most enjoy?

I love the South African journalist Rian Milan. Anthony Brink is a personal friend; I think he’s fantastic. He’s another South African. Totally putting aside the war, I do like a lot of what Christopher Hitchens writes. I used to read pretty much everything Hunter Thompson wrote, even at the end, even at his most confused. I read him for the originality of style and language.

[Among] writers who I feel have addressed what is actually the hell going on — Philip Roth. When he wrote Human Stain, I just went crazy. He became a writer of redress. And there was something enormous that needed to be redressed and punctured… And I think Tom Wolfe is nailing a lot of stuff that is important. But we think of these guys as fiction writers.

And John Strausbaugh has just written a book. It’s called Black Like You. Whatever he writes, I read it with interest and relish. I really like Armond White’s film criticism in the New York Press. I really like John Halpern’s theater criticism in the New York Observer. I rarely see movies or plays, I but I find their writing, raw and non-compromising.

You’ve listed a couple South African writers. Are they more open to dissenting opinions?

South African writers, of course, cut their teeth on apartheid. They cut their teeth on total evil and horror. They aren’t soft like American journalists tend to be… because we’ve never experienced true dictatorship — I mean, true dictatorship –we don’t really have a culture so much of investigate, threatening-to-power-structures journalism. There are so many writers that are clever and have great style, and are biting and witty; but what I look for are writers who are alarmed.

I remember you wrote some thoughtful pieces for Ironminds — one about the decline of courtship that I forwarded to all of my girlfriends — and you’ve interviewed O.J. Simpson. Do you ever wish you’d pursued lighter topics?

Yes, I do. The sad thing is that when I wrote about those other things I got a whiff of what it might be like to be heard and understood and not be in a gulag. I wish that I were not thought of as being obsessed with AIDS. I’d love to write about other things, but I’m not sure I can right now. The Harper’s article, and the phase we’re in — which includes The Constant Gardener — we’re in some kind of civil war and paradigm shift, and I’m caught up in this very powerful wave. There are a lot of things that still have not sorted out but there is a lot of rage and hysteria in the air.

I do wish that I could crawl away, quietly and turn up on some completely other part of the beach. I find it’s hard, because right now I’m so angry and my anger is keeping me from returning to that levity — the voice that I had. There wasn’t levity in the O.J. piece, but there was in that one you just cited — the courtship piece is overwhelmingly the most popular I ever wrote. And I’d like to write more about that but I don’t really know how to get back to that as an identity.

Actually the book that I’m imagining, that I’d like to write next is about very small things. I want to write kind of along the lines of that courtship piece: civility, grace, and manners, and decency — it sounds a bit pious, but I want to do it with variations of people and sort of funny stories over the years. I’m kind of obsessed with language and passive aggressiveness and rudeness — of course I live in New York City. And political correctness brought us to extreme lows of human language and behavior.

So yeah, I want to return to all that stuff, if I can just get off the meat hook here.

Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki

President of South Africa

President, ANC

Member, National Executive Committee, ANC

Member, National Working Committee, ANC

President of South Africa

People like to identify Thabo Mbeki as an independent and original thinker, but one who remains close to the more visible leadership. His profile as a policy shaper and mediator in the movement has been built up over a lifetime of involvement. “I was born into the struggle,” he says. His birth took place in Idutywa, Transkei, in June 1942.

Both his parents were teachers and activists. His father is a university graduate and there were many books in his home which Thabo read at an early age. Govan Mbeki was a leading figure in ANC activities in the Eastern Cape. Believing that sooner or later they would be arrested, Mbeki’s parents decided that family and friends would also be responsible for bringing up the children. Mbeki therefore spent long periods away from home.

He joined the Youth League at 14 and quickly became active in student politics. After his schooling at Lovedale was interrupted by a strike in 1959, he completed his studies at home. Thereafter he moved to Johannesburg where he came under the guidance of Walter Sisulu and Duma Nokwe.

While studying for his British A-levels he was elected secretary of the African Students’ Association (ASA). He went on to study economics as a correspondence student with London University. The ASA collapsed following the arrest of many of its members, at a time when political movements were coming under increasingly severe attack from the state. Mbeki’s father was arrested at Rivonia and sentenced to life imprisonment.

He left the country in 1962 under orders from the ANC. From Tanzania he moved to Britain where he completed a Masters degree in economics at Sussex University in 1966. Remaining active in student politics, he played a prominent role in building the youth and student sections of the ANC in exile.

Following his studies he worked at the London office with the late Oliver Tambo and Yusuf Dadoo before being sent to the Soviet Union in 1970 for military training. Later that year he arrived in Lusaka where he was soon appointed assistant secretary of the Revolutionary Council. In 1973-74 he was in Botswana holding discussions with the Botswana government about opening an ANC office there. In 1975 he was acting ANC representative in Swaziland. Appointed to the NEC in 1975, he served as ANC representative to Nigeria until 1978.

On his return to Lusaka he became political secretary in the office of Oliver Tambo, and then director of information. From this position he played a major role in turning the international media against apartheid. His other role in the ’70s was in building the ANC in Swaziland and underground structures inside the country.

During the ’80s Mbeki rose to head the department of information and publicity and co-ordinated diplomatic campaigns to involve more white South Africans in anti-apartheid activities. When delegations of sports, business and cultural representatives visited Lusaka for talks they all expressed surprise to meet a man deeply engaged in the issues they brought to the table.

From 1989 Mbeki headed the ANC Department of International Affairs, and was a key figure in the ANC’s negotiations with the former government.

Mbeki was hand-picked by Nelson Mandela after the April 1994 general election to be the first Deputy President of the new Government of National Unity.

At the 50th Conference of the ANC at Mafikeng, from 16-20 1997, Thabo Mbeki was elected as the new President of the African National Congress.

Thabo Mbeki was elected President of South Africa on 14 June 1999 and was inaugurated as President on 16 June 1999.

Profile of Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki

Personal

Date of birth: 18 June 1942, Idutywa, Queenstown, one of four children of Govan and Epainette Mbeki

Marital status: Married to Zanele Dlamini (1974)

Academic Qualifications

* Attended primary school in Idutywa and Butterworth

* Acquired high school education at Lovedale, Alice

* Expelled from school as a result of student strikes (1959) and forced to continue studies at home

* Sat for matriculation examinations at St John’s High School, Umtata (1959)

* Completed British “A” levels examinations (1960 and 1961)

* Undertook first year economics degree as an external student with the University of London (1961 – 1962)

* Master of Economics degree, University of Sussex (1966)

Career details

* Joined ANC Youth League (ANCYL) while a student at Lovedale Institute (1956)

* Involved in underground activities in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand area after the ANC was banned in 1960

* Involved in mobilising the students and youth in support of the ANC call for a stay at home in protest against the creation of a Republic (1961)

* Elected Secretary of the African Students Association (December 1961)

* Left South Africa together with other students on instructions of the ANC (1962). Went to the then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the then Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and the United Kingdom to study

* Continued with political activities as a university student in the UK, mobilising the international student community against apartheid

* Worked for the ANC office in London (1967 – 1970). Underwent military training in the then Soviet Union during this period

* Served as Assistant Secretary to the Revolutionary Council of the ANC in Lusaka (1971)

* Sent to Botswana (1973). He was among the first ANC leaders to have contact with exiled and visiting members of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). As a result of his contact and discussions with the BCM, some of the leading members of this organisation found their way into the ranks of the ANC

* The focus of his activities during this time was to consolidate the underground structures of the ANC and to mobilise the people inside South Africa

* Engaged the Botswana government in discussions to open an ANC office in that country. Left Botswana (1974)

* Sent to Swaziland as acting representative of the ANC. Part of his task was the internal mobilisation and the creation of underground structures

* Became a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC (1975)

* Sent to Nigeria (December 1976) as a representative of the ANC. Played a major role in assisting students from South Africa to relocate in an unfamiliar enviroment

* Left Nigeria and returned to Lusaka (February 1978)

* Political Secretary in the Office of the President of the ANC (1978)

* Director of the Department of Information and Publicity (1984 – 1989)

* Re-elected to the NEC (1985). Served as Director of Information and as Secretary for Presidential Affairs

* Member of the ANC ’s political and military council

* Member of the delegation that met South African business community led by the Chairman of Anglo American, Gavin Relly, at Mfuwe, Zambia (1985)

* Led a delegation of the ANC to Dakar, Senegal, where talks were held with a delegation from the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa (Idasa) (1987)

* Led the ANC delegation which held secret talks with the South African government from 1989 and which led to agreements about the unbanning of the ANC and the release of political prisoners

* Part of the delegation which engaged the government in “talks about talks”. He participated in the Groote Schuur and Pretoria deliberations, which resulted in the agreements which became known as the Groote Schuur and Pretoria Minutes (1990)

* Participated in all subsequent negotiations leading to the adoption of the interim Constitution for the new South Africa

* Elected chairperson of the ANC (1993). The election to this post meant succeeding the late former President and chairperson of the ANC, OR Tambo, with whom he had a close working relationship over the years

* Executive Deputy President of the South African Government of National Unity (May 1994 – June 1999)

* Elected President of the African National Congress, 18 December 1997

* Inaugurated as President of South Africa, 16 June 1999

Source: Office of the Deputy Executive President, 26 August 1994 (Confirmed, 13 September 1996)

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: September 9, 2006

Filed at 10:53 p.m. ET

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) — South Africa’s government scaled back the influence of its minister for AIDS policy, pilloried for questioning the effectiveness of anti-retroviral drug treatments and promoting beetroot, garlic and African potatoes as ways to fight AIDS.

A group of international scientists called for Health Minister Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, nicknamed ”Dr. Beetroot,” to be fired and they labeled South Africa’s program ”inefficient and immoral.”

Government spokesman Themba Maseko defended the minister, but said Friday the Cabinet had appointed a committee headed by Deputy President Phumzilie Mlambo-Ngcuka to oversee the implementation of the country’s AIDS program.

”We need to shift focus from saying the problem in the program is the minister of health,” Maseko said.

In an open letter to President Thabo Mbeki on Wednesday, 81 international AIDS scientists called the health minister an embarrassment to South Africa who has undermined HIV science and who has no international respect.

The scientists include American Nobel Laureate David Baltimore and Dr. Robert Gallo, a co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS and developer of the first HIV blood test. They called for an end to South Africa’s ”disastrous, pseudoscientific policies” and urged Mbeki to remove the health minister immediately.

With the letter the scientists joined mounting calls by AIDS activists and opposition parties for the president to fire Tshabalala-Msimang.

South Africa has an estimated 5.5 million people infected with HIV, a number second only to India and one that amounts to about an eighth of estimated cases worldwide. On average, more than 900 people die of the disease each day in South Africa. The government said Thursday that the adult death rate had climbed significantly over a seven-year period, largely because of AIDS.

Mbeki previously has expressed doubts about the connection between HIV and AIDS, and along with Tshabalala-Msimang has questioned the effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs in treating the disease.

Tshabalala-Msimang’s office said in a statement Friday that there was a campaign aimed at deliberately misrepresenting the government’s program to fight the disease.

Her statement and the Cabinet reacted not only to the scientists’ letter, but also to other attacks on its policies at the International AIDS conference in Toronto last month, including a scathing one by Stephen Lewis, the U.N. special envoy for AIDS in Africa.

”It is the only country in Africa … whose government is still obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out treatment,” Lewis said. ”It is the only country in Africa whose government continues to promote theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state.”

The scientists noted that at the AIDS conference, the South African exhibition featured garlic, lemons and African potatoes, ”with the implication that these dietary elements are alternative treatments.”

Maseko, the government spokesman, said the health minister had made it clear that South Africa’s program included anti-retrovirals and nutrition, but that she might have given the impression the focus was on nutrition and specific nutrients.

”Nutrition is not an alternative to anti-retrovirals or forms of treatment. This has always been the government approach on this matter,” Maseko said. ”Equally, the misconception that anti-retrovirals are a cure for AIDS is not only misleading but dangerous as it creates false hopes.”

The government, which did not provide AIDS drugs until forced to do so by a 2002 court ruling, said its AIDS program is now the largest in the world. It estimates it treats 140,000 people with anti-retroviral drugs.

However, that number is less than half of the target of 380,000 the government set in 2003 and well below the 500,000 South Africans that the scientists estimate now need the drugs to survive.

Who Are the Real AIDS Denialists? — Testing the “Moore Assertion”

by Darin Brown

LewRockwell.com

21 June 2006

A very interesting and instructive exchange between myself, Harvey Bialy and the New York Times-celebrated Op. Ed. author Prof. John P. Moore, self-appointed “Major General in the War on AIDS” and spokesperson for “The Scientific Community,” recently appeared on the AIDS Wiki. The exchange was prompted by an offer to Prof. Moore to participate in a moderated debate with Dr. Bialy, who wrote in part:

I propose a simple debate at the AIDS Wiki on the etiology of AIDS. I further propose it take the following form:

I will present one fully referenced (with PDF files that the moderator can hyperlink) challenge to your favorite and livelihood-sustaining hypothesis, and you can demolish my feeble arguments in the same fashion. We will continue this for one additional round, and then move on to the next challenge. I have maybe seven such challenges.

At the end, we will have produced the first fully documented, real scientific debate on the cause of AIDS. Interesting that after 25 years none has ever been held before, Bob Gallo’s promise in the PNAS in 1989 not withstanding.

Within the hour, Prof. Moore had replied to me by email:

Participating in any public forum with the likes of Bialy would give him a credibility that he does not merit. The science community does not ‘debate’ with the AIDS denialists, it treats them with the utter contempt that they deserve and exposes them for the charlatans that they are. Kindly do not send me any further communications on this or any related matter.

Despite Prof. Moore’s expressed wish to discontinue communication, he in fact continued conversation with Dr. Bialy and myself for several days thereafter. By the end of this exchange, Moore had produced (and “more” than thrice) what we now call “The Moore Assertion.” In the professor’s inimitable style,

… I’ll expand a very little…about why it’s not appropriate to ‘debate’ with HIV denialists who also happen to be scientists, by profession or self-proclaimed… The principal reason is that there’s nothing to debate… A secondary one is that there’s nobody worth debating with. One should only debate science with credible scientists, and no credible scientist could ever dispute the causative role of HIV infection in AIDS. I repeat, in case you have missed the point: Any scientist who claims that HIV does not cause AIDS (or that HIV does not exist) is simply not credible, essentially as a point of definition. The evidence is so overwhelming that a credible scientist could not fail to understand and accept it… Would astrophysicists and geologists debate with people who believed the moon was made of green cheese?

More succinctly, “The Assertion” denies that there is any scientific reason to doubt HIV as the cause of AIDS because a vaguely defined “scientific community” has already pronounced on the matter ad nauseum. This is vigorously defended by the ultra-orthodox AIDS cadres that Moore represents, even though the only semblance of a “real” debate in the literature occurred in the journal Science in 1988.

It ran under the logo of a “Policy Forum,” with Peter Duesberg arguing against, and William Blattner, Robert Gallo, and Howard Temin arguing for, the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. In his book Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS, Bialy gives an entertaining and accurate description of this “heavyweight science fight.” Here is the last paragraph of the linked excerpt

After the ‘Policy Forum’ appeared, Peter all but begged Dan to sanction another round, to no avail. And so just when it was getting good, the bout was declared a technical draw on an inexplicable and non-appealable decision of commissioner Koshland. There was never to be a rematch. The failure to extend the discussion in the pages of Science was significant. Most scientists have neither time nor inclination to follow specialist literature in fields outside their own. They depend, consequently, on journals like Science and Nature to tell them what is considered important. Having read, as best they could at the time, the arguments of the Policy Forum, and then seeing nothing more than vulgar anti-Duesberg editorials in the scientific press and worse in the popular media, even a partially persuaded non-specialist could and would eventually concur with the ‘overwhelming evidence’ of Team Virus, although it has become even less overwhelming now than it was in 1988.

The truth of the “Moore Assertion” is a key point of dispute between the two camps. Indeed, in the absence of a satisfactory resolution of its validity, it remains the principal impediment to ever discovering the real scientific merits of the virus-AIDS hypothesis that have nothing to do with the consensual basis of the claim. Until now, assertions of this type were like the Riemann hypothesis in number theory — important but impossible to resolve due to a lack of technical tools. With the ascendance of the internet, however, the “Moore Assertion” is readily testable as a scientific hypothesis. All that is required is to take an anonymous, electronic straw poll of the readership of Nature and Science, the world’s two most prominent science journals, asking whether they would support a series of debates, organized and held under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, between Peter Duesberg and David Baltimore (the two most prominent and best-credentialed spokespersons for the two sides) on the cause of AIDS.

The goal of such an electronic straw poll would not be to generate an actual debate between Duesberg and Baltimore, but to test the “Moore Assertion” that “there is nothing to debate and no-one worth debating with, and the issue has already been decided by ‘overwhelming evidence’ by the ‘scientific community.’”

To take this experiment out of the gedenken, we propose the following letter to the editors of Nature and Science:

“In the interests of once and forever ending the disquieting and possibly harmful pseudo-debate over the cause of AIDS that has been simmering at the margins of the journals and popular media for almost two decades, we urge you to use your good offices to take an electronic straw poll of your readers in which you simply ask them to respond to the following question. Would you support a series of debates between David Baltimore and Peter Duesberg, to be organized by, and held under the auspices of, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, on the etiology of AIDS?”

If you would like to see this experiment performed, you may meaningfully contribute by sending a joint email to Don Kennedy (scipak@aaas.org) and Philip Campbell (exec@nature.com), (the editors of Science and Nature respectively) expressing your agreement with the letter above (and carbon-copying me at darincbrown@yahoo.com) so we can, in the words of Prof. Moore, “keep at the maths…someone has to do it, after all.” (Please address them by name in your email.) In contradistinction to the “Moore Assertion,” we present the “Brown/Bialy Conjecture”:

“No matter how many emails are received by the editors of Science and Nature in support of the above experiment to test the ‘Moore Assertion,’ they will never allow such an experiment to take place.”

We speculate that the reason is because they know full well what the uncomfortable result would be.

© 2006 by Darin Brown

Letter to South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki

EXPRESSION OF CONCERN BY HIV SCIENTISTS

Mr Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki

President

Republic of South Africa

Union Buildings

West wing

2nd Floor

Government Avenue

Pretoria

4 September 2006

By fax: +27 12 323 8246 and +27 21 461 6456

Dear President Mbeki

EXPRESSION OF CONCERN BY HIV SCIENTISTS

We are members of the global scientific community working on HIV/AIDS who wish to express our deep concern at the response of the South African government to the HIV epidemic.

HIV causes AIDS. Antiretrovirals are the only medications currently available that alleviate the consequences of HIV infection. The evidence supporting these statements is overwhelming and beyond dispute. Much credit for the impressive advancement of HIV science belongs to scientists and clinicians based in South Africa and elsewhere on the African continent. Their expertise should play a critical role in alleviating the awful consequences HIV has caused to South African society. We are therefore deeply concerned at how HIV science has been undermined by the South African Minister of Health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

Before and during the XVI International AIDS Conference, Dr Tshabalala-Msimang expressed pseudo-scientific views about the management of HIV infection. Furthermore, the South African government exhibition at the Conference featured garlic, lemons and African potatoes, with the implication that these dietary elements are alternative treatments for HIV infection. There is no scientific evidence to support such views. Good nutrition is important for all people, including people with HIV, but garlic, lemons and potatoes are not alternatives to effective medications to treat a specific viral infection and its consequences on the human immune system. Over 5 million people live with HIV in South Africa. According to the best estimates of South African actuaries, over 500,000 people without access to antiretrovirals have reached the stage of HIV-disease when they now require these medicines to save their lives.

We commend the South African Department of Health’s Operational Plan for Comprehensive HIV and AIDS Care, Management and Treatment for South Africa released on 19 November 2003. This plan committed to treating over 380,000 people by this time in the public health sector. Unfortunately, fewer than half of that target number are currently receiving treatment in the public sector. Many people are therefore dying unnecessarily.

We are also deeply concerned by the proliferation of unproven remedies being marketed in South Africa, some of them with the implicit or even explicit support of the Minister of Health. Slick marketing practices cause people not to take proven medications, or at best to waste money on false hopes. We condemn all those who profit from this type of quackery, at the expense of the sick and dying.

We echo the words of Mr Stephen Lewis, special advisor to the UN Secretary General, that South Africa’s response to AIDS is “obtuse, dilatory and negligent”.

Dr Mark Wainberg, chairperson of the XVI International AIDS Conference, stated in his Closing Address:

“We went to the Durban meeting, expecting a South African government that would be on the same side as us. Instead, we found a denialist president who turned his back on us… and who began to convene committees that would articulate on his behalf that somehow it was in dispute whether or not HIV was truly the cause of AIDS … We were all completely taken aback, we were all insulted. … I for one am no longer prepared to take a back seat as a scientist and not express my personal concern that this situation seems to have continued unabated.”

We support and endorse Dr Wainberg’s words.

To deny that HIV causes AIDS is farcical in the face of the scientific evidence; to promote ineffective, immoral policies on HIV/AIDS endangers lives; to have as Health Minister a person who now has no international respect is an embarrassment to the South African government. We therefore call for the immediate removal of Dr Tshabalala-Msimang as Minister of Health, and for an end to the disastrous, pseudo-scientific policies that have characterised the South African Government’s response to HIV/AIDS.

Signed (in alphabetical order):

1. Abdool Karim, Quarraisha, Professor, Head, CAPRISA Women and AIDS Programme, University Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa

2. Anastasi, John, MD, Associate Professor, Director, Residency Training Program, University of Chicago, USA

3. Aubertin, Anne Marie, PhD, Directeur de recherche INSERM 778, Institut de Virologie, Université Louis Pasteur, France

4. Baltimore, David, President Emeritus, California Institute of Technology, USA

5. Bardeguez, Arlene, MD, MPH, Director, HIV Services, Department Obstetrics, Gynecology & Women’s Health, New Jersey Medical School, USA

6. Barin, Francis, Professor, Virology lab and National Reference Center for HIV, Université F Rabelais, France

7. Barnett, David, Dr , Consultant Clinical Scientist and Honorary Senior Lecturer, UK

8. Barnett, Tony, ESRC Professorial Research Fellow, London School of Economics, UK

9. Bartlett, John G., MD, Chief of Infectious Diseases, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA

10. Bellos, Nicholaos, MD , Southwest Infectious Disease Associates, USA

11. Berkman, Alan, MD, Associate Professor and Acting Chair Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, USA

12. Bomsel, Morgane, Research Director at CNRS, Mucosal entry of HIV and mucosal immunity, et Immunité muqueuse, Cell Biology dept, Cochin Institut, France

13. Bourne, David, School of Public Health, University of Cape Town

14. Burton, Dennis, Professor of Immunology, The Scripps Research Institute, USA

15. Campo, Rafael, MD, Professor of Clinical Medicine, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, USA

16. Carpenter, Charles, MD, Professor of Medicine, Brown University, USA

17. Cohen, Mardge, MD, Director of Women’s HIV Research, CORE Center, USA

18. Cohen, Robert L., M.D., USA

19. Colebunders, Robert, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Belgium

20. Coovadia, Hoosen, Professor, Co-Director Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking, lson Mandela School of medicine, University of Kwazulu/Natal, South Africa

21. Coutsoudis, Anna, Professor, Senior Research Scientist, Dept Paediatrics and Child Health, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

22. Crowe, Suzanne, Professor, Head, AIDS Pathogenesis and Clinical Research Program, NHMRC, Principal Research Fellow, Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health, Australia

23. Cu-Uvin, Susan, MD, Associate Professor, Obstetrics-Gynecology and Medicine, The Miriam Hospital Brown University

24. Cullen, Bryan R, James B Duke Professor and Director of the Center for Virology, Duke University Medical Center, USA

25. D’Aquila, Richard, MD, Director, Division of Infectious Diseases Director, Vanderbilt AIDS Center Professor of Medicine Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, USA

26. Danel, Isabella, MD MS, USA

27. Del Rio, Carlos , MD, Professor of Medicine Director of the Emory AITRP Grady Memorial Hospital Director for Clinical Sciences and International Research, Emory University, USA

28. Denny, Thomas N., MSc, Principal Investigator, NIH-NIAID-Division of AIDS, Immunology Quality Assessment Program, USA

29. Desrosiers, Ronald C., PhD, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School

30. Doms, Robert W., M.D., Ph.D., Chair, Department of Microbiology, University of Pennsylvania, USA

31. Elion, Richard, MD, George Washington University School of Medicine, USA

32. Gallo, Robert C., M.D., Professor and Director, Institute of Human Virology; Co-Discoverer of HIV as the cause of AIDS; Developer of the first HIV blood test. University of Maryland, USA

33. Gathe, Joseph, MD, Therapeutic Concepts, P.A., USA

34. Girard, Marc P Lyon, Professor, (retired and formerly of Pasteur Institute and Mérieux Foundation), France

35. Groenewald, Pam, Public Health Researcher, South Africa

36. Gulick, Roy M., MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Medicine, Director, Cornell HIV Clinical Trials Unit Division of International Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, USA

37. Harries, Anthony D, Professor, HIV Unit, Ministry of Health, Malawi

38. Helbert, Matthew, FRCP FRCPath PhD, Head of Service, Immunology, Manchester Royal Infirmary, UK

39. Holmes, Harvey, Dr, Division of Retrovirology, National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, UK

40. Hoxie, James A., University of Pennsylvania, USA

41. Hviid, Lars, Professor and Head of Research, Centre for Medical Parasitology, Department of Infectious Diseases, Rigshospitalet, Denmark

42. Jarlais, Don Des, Director of Research, Chemical Dependency Institute, Beth Israel Medical Center, USA

43. Johnson, Leigh, Senior Researcher, Centre for Actuarial Research, South Africa

44. Keeney, Michael, ART,FIMLS, Technical Specialist Hematology/Flow Cytometry, Associate Scientist Lawson Health Research Institute, London Health Sciences Centre, Canada

45. Kharsany, Ayesha BM, Dr, CAPRISA, Nelson R Mandela Medical School, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

46. Kiepiela, Photini PhD, Associate Professor, University of KwaZulu Natal, Faculty of Health Sciences, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, South Africa

47. Kourilsky, Philippe, Professor at the College de France, Member of the French Academy of Sciences, Honorary President of the Pasteur Institute

48. Kuritzkes, Dan, Director of AIDS Research, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Chair, HIV Medicine Association, USA

49. La Via, Mariano F., Professor Emeritus, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina

50. Lange, Joep, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine, Executive Director, Center for Poverty-related Communicable Diseases, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

51. Lawrence, Robert S., MD, Director, Center for a Livable Future, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA

52. Lederman, Michael M., MD, Scott R. Inkley Professor of Medicine, Director, Center for AIDS Research, Case Western Reserve University, USA

53. Lenkei, Rodica, MD, Ph.D, Capio Diagnostik/Calab Research, Flow Cytometry Laboratory, Stockholm, Sweden

54. Levine, Alexandra M., MD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Chief, Division of Hematology, University of Southern California, School of Medicine, Medical Director, USC/Norris Cancer Hospital, USA

55. Levy, Yves, Professeur, Service d’immunologie Clinique, Hôpital Henri Mondor, France

56. Malim, Mike, Professor and Head, Dept of Infectious Diseases, King’s College London School of Medicine, UK

57. Mayer, Kenneth MD, Professor of Medicine and Community Health, The Miriam Hospital, USA

58. Miller, Veronica, PhD, Director, Forum for Collaborative HIV Research, George Washington University, USA

59. Moore, John P., Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, USA

60. Nattrass, Nicoli, Professor, Director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit, University of Cape Town, South Africa

61. Nixon, Douglas F., MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine, Associate Chief, Division of Experimental Medicine

62. Powderly , William, MD , Head Professor of Medicine, UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science University Dublin, Ireland

63. Richman, Douglas D., M.D., Professor of Pathology and Medicine, University of California San Diego

64. Rosenfield, Allan, MD, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

65. Rybicki, Ed, Professor, PhD, PI, Subunit Vaccines Group, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine and Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, University of Cape Town, South Africa

66. Saag, Mike, MD, Director, UAB Center for AIDS Research Professor of Medicine, University of Alabama At Birmingham, USA

67. Schrager, Jeffrey A., M.D., Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, USA

68. Smith, Kimberly MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Medicine, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center, USA

69. Spear, Greg, Professor, Dept. Immunology/Microbiology, Rush University Medical Center, USA

70. Stetler-Stevenson, Maryalice, Chief, Flow Cytometry Unit, LP, NCI, NIH, USA

71. Stevenson, Mario, Ph.D, Professor, Program in Molecular Medicine, Director, Center for AIDS Research, Univeristy of Massachusetts Medical School, USA

72. Stone, Valerie, MD, MPH, Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Medical School, USA

73. Trigg, Bruce G., MD, USA

74. Vance, Carol S., Ph.D., M.P.H., Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, USA

75. Veazey, Ronald S., DVM, PhD, Professor and Chair, Division of Comparative Pathology, Tulane University School of Medicine

76. Volberding, Paul, MD, Professor and Vice Chair, UCSF Department of Medicine, Co-Director, UCSF-GIVI Center for AIDS Research

77. Watkins, David, Dr., University of Wisconsin, AIDS Vaccine Laboratory

78. Weiss, Robin A., Professor of Viral Oncology, Wohl Virion Centre, Division of Infection and Immunity, University College London

79. Whiteside, Alan W, Professor, D Econ, AIDS Researcher, South Africa

80. Whitman, Steven, Ph.D., Director Sinai Urban Health Institute, USA

81. Wilfert, Catherine, MD, Professor of Pediatrics and Microbiology, Duke University Medical Center, USA

82. Williams, Paul, DM FRCP FRCPath, Chairman, UK National Quality Assurance Advisory Panels in Immunology, Consultant Clinical Immunologist, Department of Medical Biochemistry & Immunology, University Hospital of Wales, UK

This website was developed in March, 2006, by Bob Funkhouser of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nathan Geffen of The Treatment Action Campaign, Dr. John P. Moore of Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Professor Nicoli Nattrass, Director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit, University of Cape Town, Richard Jeffrey of the Treatment Action Group, Jeanne Bergman of HealthGAP, Gregg Gonsalves of the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa, and Dr. Bette Korber of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

[TS interjects: Thanks, Mark, for the promise to use small words, since we are glad to see spectacularly bad math corrected, but find probability one of the deeper mysteries of life. But let's remember that even though the math may be wrong, perhaps because the phrasing is incorrect, the basic point, that sexual transmission is too rare to support an epidemic, may still stand. If it does, the error is not particularly important, though it may be imperfect math/stats. Duesberg is not a mathematician. However, it was presumably questioned and checked by his friendly colleagues and by the peer reviewers so you are certainly exposing a lot of people as having missed a "spectacular error".]

“If the odds of, say, winning the lottery are 1 in 1 million, that does not mean that if I won the lottery, that means I must have played it one million times. Nor does it mean that the average lottery winner played the lottery one million times. It means that out of every one million times anyone plays the lottery, one person will be expected to win.

[TS: Obviously correct, and well phrased. But is it a match for what Duesberg said?]

“To jump that back to Duesberg, what he’s saying is: if the transmission rate of HIV/AIDS is 1 in 1000, then the average infected person would need to have had sex with an infected partner 1000 times.

[TS: OK, but let's be clear. He is saying that on average an infected person must have been exposed 1000 times to an infected partner. Is that not true? Apparently you don't think so, so let's see.]

“Nope, that’s not how math works. Not even close.

Suppose we have 1000 people who are infected with HIV, and who are having unprotected sex. If we follow Duesberg’s lead, and assume that the transmission rate is a constant 0.1%, then what we would expect is that if each of those 1000 people had sex with one partner one time, we would see one new infected individual – and that individual would have had unprotected sex with the infected partner only one time.

This isn’t rocket science folks. This is damned simple, high-school level statistics. “

[TS: Certainly seems likely to be true. If 1000 people all screwed once with a positive partner, with a 1 in 1000 chance, one should become positive. Now is this meaningfully different from the above, or simply a variation on the way of looking at the problem? How long would it take for all the 1000 people to become positive? Presumably for ALL of them to become positive, it would take 1000 screws each, before the last one converted. Obviously if they stopped when they became positive, only the last one would need 1000 screws. But if they didn't know and just kept on screwing, wouldn't it take 1000 screws for all? And if the chances of their partner being positive was 1 in 250, wouldn't it take 250,000 screws in all?

Isn't that what Duesberg is saying? That for any number in the population to become positive, taken as a whole every one of them would have to screw 1000 times until the very last one was infected by a positive partner. And if there are Y positives in the population Z to start with, then it would need 1000 (Z/Y) screws - in this case, 250,000?]

Mark continues with an evisceration of TS’s evidently moronic try at refuting his friend Chris Noble:

“Where things get even sadder is looking at the discussion that followed when Chris posted something similar to the above explanation. Some of the ridiculous contortions that people go through in order to avoid admitting that the great Peter Duesberg said something stupid is just astounding. For example, consider this from a poster calling himself “Truthseeker”:

If Duesberg had said that, he would indeed be foolish. The foolishness, however, is yours, since you misintepret his reasoning. He said, as you note

Most, if not all, of these adolescents must have acquired HIV from perinatal infection for the following reasons: sexual transmission of HIV depends on an average of 1000 sexual contacts, and only 1 in 250 Americans carries HIV (Table 1). Thus, all positive teenagers would have had to achieve an absurd 1000 contacts with a positive partner, or an even more absurd 250,000 sexual contacts with random Americans to acquire HIV by sexual transmission.”

[TS: This states the average transmission requires 1000 contacts, not every transmission. With such a low transmission rate and with so few Americans positive - you have to engage with 250 partners on average to get an average certainty of 100% for transmission, if the transmission rate was 1. Since it is 1 in 1000, the number you have to get through on average is 250,000. Some might do it immediately, some might fail entirely even at 250,000. But the average indicates that all positive teenagers would have had to get through on average 250,000 partner-bouts.

But Mark evidently thinks this is wrong. Darned if we can see it!]

“Truthseeker is making exactly the same mistake as Duesberg. The difference is that he’s just had it explained to him using a simple metaphor, and he’s trying to spin a way around the fact that Duesberg screwed up.

[TS: This is disappointing, since we had hoped Mark was going to explain where we went wrong. Does it imply that we were right? Surely not. But he doesn't actually SAY we were wrong. Phew! We got off lightly, with not even a "moron" in the dismissal.

But were we right? He implies we are not. But what is wrong with what we said? That is what we need to know.

Perhaps Duesberg's "all" is wrong too, as in" Thus, all positive teenagers would have had to achieve an absurd 1000 contacts with a positive partner, or an even more absurd 250,000 sexual contacts with random Americans to acquire HIV by sexual transmission." Perhaps "all" should be "typical".

What would the correct statement have been, then? Mark doesn't say. The trouble is any way we look at it, it looks OK to us. We vaguely remember looking at this striking statement in the draft of Duesberg's article, and double checking to see if it was true, and deciding it was. Apparently this was an error, but we still cannot see why.

Surely it is true to say, "Thus, since there is a 1 in 1000 chance of transmission, any positive teenager would have had to achieve an absurd average 1000 contacts with a positive partner to acquire HIV by sexual transmission."

Isn't it then true to say, if there are only 1 in 250 in the population at large who are positive, "Or an even more absurd average 250,000 sexual contacts with random Americans to acquire HIV by sexual transmission.

Whatever, we cannot fathom the error, and nor can a consultant who is not a mathematician but pronounced the statement in his opinion "flawless".]

Mark continues: “But it gets even worse. A poster named Claus responded with this indignant response to Chris’s use of a metaphor about plane crashes:

CN,

You would fare so much better if you could just stay with the science points and refrain from your ad Duesbergs for more than 2 sentences at a time. You know there’s a proverb where I come from that says ‘thief thinks every man steals’. I’ve never seen anybody persisting the way you do in calling other people ‘liars’, ‘dishonest’ and the likes in spite of the fact that the only one shown to be repeatedly and wilfully dishonest here is you.

Unlike yourself Duesberg doesn’t deal with matters on a case-by-case only basis in order to illustrate his statistical points. precisely as TS says, this shows that you’re the one who’s not doing the statistics, only the misleading.

In statistics, for an illustration to have any meaning, one must assume that it’s representative of an in the context significant statistical average no? Or perphaps in CN’s esteemed opinion statistics is all about that once in a while when somebody does win in the lottery?

Mark says “Gotta interject here… Yeah, statistics is about that once in a while when someone wins the lottery, or when someone catches HIV, or when someone dies in a plane crash. It’s about measuring things by looking at aggregate numbers for a population. Any unlikely event follows the same pattern, whether it’s catching HIV, winning the lottery, or dying in a plane crash, and that’s one of the things that statistics is specifically designed to talk about: that fundamental probabilistic pattern.”

But never mind we’ll let CN have the point; the case in question was that odd one out, and Duesberg was guilty of the gambler’s fallacy. ok? You scored one on Duesberg, happy now? Good. So here’s the real statistical point abstracted, if you will, from the whole that’s made up by all single cases, then applied to the single case in question:

Thus, all positive teenagers would have had to achieve an absurd 1000 contacts with a positive partner, or an even more absurd 250,000 sexual contacts with random Americans to acquire HIV by sexual transmission.

This is the statistical truth, which is what everybody but CN is interested in.

Mark rejects this out of hand:

“Nope, this is not statistical truth. This is an elementary statistical error which even a moron should be able to recognize.”

Reminder: Whenever somebody shows a pattern of pedantically reverting to single cases and/or persons, insisting on interpreting them out of all context, it’s because they want to divert your attention from real issues and blind you to the overall picture.

Mark: “Reminder: whenever someone shows a pattern of pedantically reverting to a single statistic, insisting on interpreting it in an entirely invalid context, it’s because they want to divert your attention from real issues and blind you to the overall picture.

“The 250,000 average sexual contacts is a classic big-numbers thing: it’s so valuable to be able to come up with an absurd number that people will immediately reject, and assign it to your opponents argument. They can’t let this go, no matter how stupid it is, no matter how obviously wrong. Because it’s so important to them to be able to say “According to their own statistics, the HIV believers are saying that the average teenage army recruit has had sex 250,000 times!”. As long as they can keep up the pretense of a debate around the validity of that statistic, they can keep on using it. So no matter how stupid, they’ll keep defending the line.”

[TS: OK, Mark, but what is the correct statement and why?

The Comments don’t seem to reveal the answer so far:

One poster does say what everyone knowledgeable, such as Bialy or Brown, on our thread seemed to say, that a correct statement isn’t possible.

Well… Okay, then what would a valid analysis of the numbers indicate?

Assuming the articles sources weren’t afflicted by similar bad logic, we have that between 0.03% and 0.3% of the (presumably all healthy, as I doubt anyone with full-blown AIDS is applying to the USMC) applicants to the USMC present as HIV positive. Meanwhile, a stat. that is used (without background source) is that 0.4% of the population as a whole is HIV-positive. (the vast, vast majority of those without any symptoms)

So where does this lead us? Frankly, I don’t know. If we assume that prior to being tested, each teenager’s number of partners and number of unprotected intercourse occasions/partner followed a poisson distribution, then in theory one could come up with estimates for both the number of partners and number of encounters/partner. (Though the two estimates might depend on each other)

However, I don’t think I could. At this point I’d reach for the discrete computer simulation and just let it crunch.

Posted by: Daniel Martin

None of the “rethinkers” have really admitted to the mathematical mistake inherent in the Duesberg Fallacy. Most of them still insist that in some way Duesberg is still correct. The few that have sufficient mathematical training choose not to comment on this issue. They neither admit to the error nor attempt to refute anything that I stated. -Chris Noble

Also

But I was making an entirely different point – that 1 in 15 or 1 in 1000 makes a huge difference in whether the virus could account for a pandemic. Huge.”

———-

Really? Here’s some assumptions: 1 in 250 americans has HIV. 1 million people. If 1 in 10 of them has unprotected sex on a given day, that is 100,000 people. So, 100 people would get HIV every day, based on a 1/1000 infection rate. In 1000 days, you have 100,000 new cases, which is a lot. Is this end of the world stuff? No. A serious health problem? A good sized city getting a mortal disease every 3 years? Yeah. – Seth Manapio

But a “pandemic”? No. Even with those assumptions, giving you the complete benefit of the doubt…

35 million African AIDS cases… hmmmmmm. I’ll leave the facts about HIV causing AIDS to those who know the science. Just don’t try to sell me on the fact that what’s happening is primarily due to sexual transmission. Duesberg was COMPLETELY WRONG in his use of the statistics as Tara says. But the statistics STILL show that there is no AIDS pandemic caused primarily through sexual transmission. – End Times

The line of reasoning followed by Seth Manapio is interesting. There is apparently more potential for an epidemic that one might suppose. Using the same logic, in the US, supposing every one of the million positives engaged in one sex act with a negative. If as the mathematicians say, a chance of 1 in 1000 means that for every 1000 bouts, one transfer of HIV will take place, this means that a million would result in 1,000 more positives. Ignoring the fact that some of the million are in high risk groups, this might mean that at the rate of sex twice a week, you could get 2,000 a week, or 100,000 a year.

This offers the outside chance of an epidemic, it seems, although the assumptions are rather optimistic. For rethinkers to deny the possibility outright, it may be necessary to emphasize that Padian in fact found no transmission at all in more than a score of couples who took no methodical precautions over six years. The 1 in 1000 rate was purely a tipping of Nancy Padian’s hat to the paradigm, in the form of retrospective calculation of supposed HIV transfer earlier in couples included in the trials. The actual data showed no HIV transmission whatsoever.

None of the “rethinkers” have really admitted to the mathematical mistake inherent in the Duesberg Fallacy. Most of them still insist that in some way Duesberg is still correct. The few that have sufficient mathematical training choose not to comment on this issue. They neither admit to the error nor attempt to refute anything that I stated. -Chris Noble

But if you accept that it would take 1 in 1,000 sexual encounters with an HIV+ person in order to pass on HIV, while any ONE CASE would indeed only need come from ONE single sexual encounter, it would be mathematically improbable to have a wide-spread epidemic.

This isn’t rocket science either. You would need a thousand million incidents of HIV- persons having unprotected sex with HIV+ partners in order to have just a million new cases of HIV. Now think of the “35 million African AIDS cases” and see if the math works for sexual transmission at the root of the plague. – End Times

Additionally, the 1 in 1000 stat hasn’t been found in all studies. Others have found it to be much higher in Africa, as much as 1 in 80 encounters. Additionally, I’ve mentioned before that it can increase due to other factors as well, such as co-infection with herpes virus, which increases the odds by as much as a factor of 5.- Tara C. Smith

If you want to start claiming at the actual math in Africa is actually about 1 in 15 when you factor in herpes, then we have a whole different argument that would probably start with some pretty strong challeges to those numbers, but nonetheless is, again, a wholey different subject.

A world-wide epidemic based on 1 in 1000 is astronomically improbable.- End Times

I’m not arguing the actual numbers at all. It doesn’t matter what the actual figure is, whether it’s 1 in 15 or 1 in 1000. What matters is the way Duesberg applies that: that you’d have to actually go *through* 15 parters, or 1000 partners, in order to become infected. That is the problem with it. -Tara Smith

You are absolutely right if the only point you want to make is that Duesberg’s math was wrong.

But I was making an entirely different point – that 1 in 15 or 1 in 1000 makes a huge difference in whether the virus could account for a pandemic. Huge.

Steve’s well-taken insights about stats and evolution don’t apply to this. If it was 1 in thousand 20 years ago and is 1 in 1000 today, it has little chance of creating a pandemic. I can say this with confidence, even while fully accepting that anyone could have unprotected sex one time and contract HIV.

Posted by: End Times |

Duesberg also makes completely false assumptions. He assumes that all of the HIV+ 17-19 year old military recruits acquired HIV through heterosexual contacts. This is unlikely to be true. Other acts have much higher risks and would be likely to account for a large proportion of seroconversions. Duesberg also assumes that HIV prevalence is randomly distributed through the entire population. It isn’t. It is largely confined to specific risk groups such as men who have sex with men and injecting drug users. Teenagers that also belong to these risk groups are a) going to experience higher risks per contact and b) see a much higher prevalence of HIV than the ~1/250 national average.

Of course “rethinkers” will debate these issues but the totally damning thing in this case is that the maths in itself is totally and utterly wrong. There is no weasel room for “rethinkers”.

Posted by: Chris Noble

As Chris Noble points out, in the real world, people do not have sex with random samples of the general population. Truck drivers in Africa with untreated STDs who regularly have unprotected sex with truck-stop prostitutes, and a men who very frequently have unprotected receptive anal sex with numerous men in bath-houses, are at very high risk of infection. HIV infection does not spread randomly through the general population but is correlated with a number of other factors, such as those in my examples. Furthermore, as more people become infected the probability of transmission increases exponentially, and as more people receive treatment and live longer the more chance they have of spreading infection.

Posted by: DeanOr

But I was making an entirely different point – that 1 in 15 or 1 in 1000 makes a huge difference in whether the virus could account for a pandemic. Huge.”

———-

Really? Here’s some assumptions: 1 in 250 americans has HIV. 1 million people. If 1 in 10 of them has unprotected sex on a given day, that is 100,000 people. So, 100 people would get HIV every day, based on a 1/1000 infection rate. In 1000 days, you have 100,000 new cases, which is a lot. Is this end of the world stuff? No. A serious health problem? A good sized city getting a mortal disease every 3 years? Yeah. – Seth Manapio

But a “pandemic”? No. Even with those assumptions, giving you the complete benefit of the doubt…

35 million African AIDS cases… hmmmmmm. I’ll leave the facts about HIV causing AIDS to those who know the science. Just don’t try to sell me on the fact that what’s happening is primarily due to sexual transmission. Duesberg was COMPLETELY WRONG in his use of the statistics as Tara says. But the statistics STILL show that there is no AIDS pandemic caused primarily through sexual transmission. – End Times

I just had an amusing thought.

Perinatal transmission is 25-50% efficient. If as Duesberg claims the 17-19 year old military recruits all acquired HIV perinatally then they must have on average been born 2 to 4 times according to his “logic”. – Chris Noble

Just don’t try to sell me on the fact that what’s happening is primarily due to sexual transmission.

Well, that’s a rather separate topic. In fact, we know it’s not primarily sexually transmitted in some areas of the world. The maps here, for instance, emphasize that the epidemic in China and Russia is due largely to IV drug use, while in India and Africa it’s largely sexually transmitted. It’s difficult to make any generalizations about the epidemiology from one place to another.

Posted by: Tara C. Smith

Isn’t a “pandemic” just an outbreak of a disease that is new, infectious and capable of spreading sustainably throughout the population? If so, HIV/AIDS seems to qualify, even at 1/1000 transmission rates with infected people having one sexual encounter every 10 days… an absurdly low number, considering that 1/3 of americans have sex twice a week or more and we would expect a disproportianately high number of HIV positive people to fall within this group.

But yes, I would agree that if you see transmission rates far higher than expected from sexual transmission, it is probable that either there are other vectors at work or else there is a novel variant of the pathogen that is more easily transmitted. Is this a controversial point? – Seth Manapio

IF HIV is passed, genome to genome, then the relatively stable number of nationwide cases of HIV infection would be explainable based on a 25-50% rate with an average of about 3 births per mother (a little higher than the national average. About what you might expect in poorer families).

Just a thought for discussion. – End Times |

No, you need somewhere on average of around 3 daughters per mother all of whom live long enough to have children.

Men don’t give birth.

At 3 daughters per mother the population would triple every generation! – Chris Noble |

t is also rather ironic that the link that Bialy gives for this claim:

Retroviruses (of which HIV is a classic example) are normally transmitted in the wild through perinatal routes (that is from mother to child), making them endemic rather than epidemic microbes

contains this sentence:

Since the virus is not endemic in the U.S., it is transmitted more often by parenteral exposures associated with risk behavior (see below) than perinatally. – Chris Noble |