Science Guardian

Cornell microbicide researcher posts libel of NAR on his site

His “AIDS Truth” revealed as malleable, if his propaganda war requires it

A couple of days ago, New AIDS Review achieved the signal honor of recognition as a “conspiracy theorist” and “denialist” site by none other than John “Macaque” Moore, the Cornell researcher and paradigm promoter in HIV∫AIDS whose ruthless methods of operating behind the scenes to defeat paradigm critics are notorious, as well as his conducting full scale smear campaigns against them in public by calling them names such as “denialist” and claiming, for once quite rightly, that they are “dangerous” to the cause of supplying toxic drugs to the hapless AIDS patients of the world.

The honorary mention reads as follows:

For an example of an AIDS denialist/conspiracy theorist site that is influential in those circles, see:

* http://www.newaidsreview.org

Our bursting pride was short lived however. Further news reached us by email, in the form of a jibe delivered by Moore to Harvey Bialy, the editor of the razor sharp, fully informed, witty and devastatingly impolite group blog You Bet Your Life, now a must stop for those in the know in the field of HIV∫AIDS as a sort of morning entertainment with their coffee.

Probably the biggest amusements on the YBYL site are the email exchanges between the previous editor of the site, Hank Barnes, The Moore Follies 1, 2, 3 and 4, and similar email more recently between Moore and Bialy.

In each exchange both parties attempt to score points off each other with scorn and derision, but the whiplash wit of the two HB’s in our view makes mincemeat out of the unfortunate and somewhat slower Moore. Bialy in particular runs circles around the Cornell mastermind, reducing him to a baffled stooge. A prize specimen was run on Tuesday in Comments under the post Confessions of a Subversive Grad. Student: Subversive Is No Longer So Secret:

In anticipation of today’s SGS article, I sent (in lc provocative style) a note to John advising him of its imminent publication. What I expected to receive was a version of the previous one note lie about not bothering to look at the site “except on rare occasions”, etc. What actually arrived was so much wilder than that it qualifies as a theme and variation with an additional note thrown in for bad measure. As is my habit with these exchanges, I will refrain from interlinear remarks and allow these masterpieces of ‘crafted’, self-contradiction to speak for themselves…etc.

Inspecting the email that Moore sent Bialy immediately revealed the reason why the AIDSTruth goon squad leader was willing to quote this obscure and plodding site as representative of “AIDS denialism and conspiracy theorising”, and not the dangerously expert group blog YBYL, with its star array of lethal paradigm skewerers.

From: “John P. Moore, PhD”
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 2:02 PM
Subject: Fwd: IAS Newsletter on AIDS denialists - March 2007

Dear “retiree”,
I hope you find this recently published article to be of
interest and that you post it wherever you wish (I think you must have accidentally inverted the words in your last email when you said that you publish, but I post). I had thought of mentioning you in the article, but on reflection decided that you were not significant enough, even in denialist circles, to be worth the words. Why go after the monkey when there are plenty of organ grinders around? We do, however, provide a link on AIDStruth.org to Anthony Liversidge’s
NAR site as an example of an ‘influential” AIDS denialist site that AIDS professionals need to know about. Unfortunately, YBYL just isn’t well enough written to be worth looking at, so I guess your friend Tony will be getting all the clicks to monitor.
Enjoy!
John

Evidently Moore believed that a) it would annoy Bialy if the superior YBYL was left off the list b) directing HIV∫AIDS loyalists to the obscure NAR was harmless and c) he was afraid to quote YBYL for fear that he would be brought into disrepute by exposing his email exchanges with Harvey to the private derision of colleagues.

However, we thought that this false accolade might prove the basis of a friendly meeting with John P. Moore, where we could usefully get him to discuss what genuine arguments he had left, if any, to support his evidently religious belief in the HIV∫AIDS paradigm. We could also ask him to explain why, if the case of HIV in AIDS is so inarguable, he felt it necessary to attack paradigm critics with unscientific, and underhand moves, such as more than once calling their employers or partners to complain about them undermining his scientific religion.

Alas, the distinguished macaque microbicide researcher replied with an outright refusal to meet or even have an email dialogue with NAR on any basis, given that we are in his eyes the perfidious purveyors of doubt in regard to his favorite political and economic research framework.

So we were reduced to insisting for the second time that he at least revise his description of this site as an “AIDS denialist/conspiracy theorist site”. We had a pretty good idea that he was unlikely to accede to our request, but we waited, just in case. After all, the title of his site is “AIDSTruth”, and conspiracy theorists and ‘denialists’ we are not.

No conspiracy theorists, we

In fact, any discussion of conspiracy theories is relevant here in one respect only - to make sure that people know the difference between a conspiracy theory (World Trade Center etc) and a professional scientific review of the literature said to justify a paradigm (Duesberg, Bialy etc), which in the case of HIV∫AIDS condemns the paradigm as utterly wrong, a complete misinterpretation of the literature it has generated.

The paradigm review of a dozen papers or more dismissing HIV as the cause of AIDS has been carried in the highest scientific journals and intensely peer reviewed to ensure its accuracy in data and interpretation. We at this blog are merely going over this material to show it to the public, from which it has been withheld through the explicit censorship of Dr Anthony Fauci at NIAID who long ago put reporters on notice in print that if they raise the topic and wish to cover it with the cooperation of scientists at NIAID, they will be frozen out forever:

“We know reporters must consult more than a single source and make room for dissenting opinions. But many people consider what is in the media to be true by definition.
One striking example is Peter Duesberg’s theory that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. I laughed at that for a while, but it led to a lot of public concern that maybe HIV was a hoax. The theory has extraordinary credibility just on the basis of news coverage. My barometer of what the general public is really thinking is my sister Denise. My sister Denise is an intelligent woman who reads avidly, listens to the radio, and watches television, but she is not a scientist. When she calls me and questions my integrity as a scientist, there really is a problem. Denise has called me at least ten times about Peter Duesberg. She says “Anthony, - she is the only one who calls me Anthony - “are you sure he’s wrong?” That’s the power of putting someone on television or in the press, although there is virtually nothing in his argument that makes scientifc sense. People are especially confused when they see divergent reports about the same thing….
Journalists who make too many mistakes or who are too sloppy, are going to find their access to scientists may diminish.” - AAAS Observer, September 1, 1989.

By virtue of this unscientific edict, and the inexplicit but equally strong influence of HIV∫AIDS community politics, noone involved ever dares to raise the topic of revising the HIV∫AIDS paradigm in meetings or in public, unless to condemn the “denialists” in fiercely prejudicial terms, as our new friend John Moore, Mark Wainberg, Jeanne Bergman and other members of the HIV∫AIDS paradigm protection goon squad like to do, since they evidently lack good rejoinders to the accusations that they are peddling bad science that kills.

But we are not ‘denialists’, since we deny nothing factual in the mainstream literature of HIV∫AIDS, which is all we know of scientific reality in this field, though we know a good deal about its shameful politics.

The only thing we deny is the claim that the paradigm reflects the evidence of the mainstream scientific literature, since it does not: there is research inconsistency with every aspect of the paradigm, which is constantly contradicted by the literature and those who write it, mostly the mainstream researchers who publicly claim the paradigm is correct, even though more and more of the papers they write show quite plainly it is not.

That HIV∫AIDS researchers typically make obeisance to the paradigm in their first paragraphs makes the odd fact that their results so often disprove it all the more baffling a ‘conundrum’, which is the word the chief theorist of the paradigm, Zvi Grossman, recently used to describe the black mystery of how HIV could possible cause immune deficiency.

If John P. Moore knows the answer to this conundrum he hasn’t yet informed his fellow scientists or the general public.

If anything, the denialists in HIV∫AIDS are the mainstream researchers who deny the import of their own literature, beginning with the papers that Robert Gallo produced in 1984, which proved that the likelihood of HIV causing AIDS was approximately the same as one of John Moore’s macaques jumping over the Empire State building.

Even Dr. Gallo has conceded this in his recent testimony in the Adelaide court.

“I would say, of course, that in and of itself, 40% isolation of a new virus I wouldn’t say (proves it) is the cause.”

So John has been asked by NAR to remove the label “conspiracy theorist” site from the mention of New AIDS Review on his AIDSTruth site, as well as the prejudicial and inappropriate label “denialist”, and we wait to see if he will respond.

Moore’s deplorable tactics

This is not to say we don’t agree with Moore’s views in some respects, though for reasons he may not like. For instance, his rude dismissal in Nature of Edward Hooper’s book The River must almost by definition be correct, given the fact that HIV evidently does not cause AIDS, at least not according to the current literature of HIV∫AIDS.

What we object to is the record of how Moore has notoriously flamed his targets rather than maintained the civilities of debate and talked science instead of using smears and other prejudicial inaccuracies. What this indicates to us from outside the field is that he much prefers to win his arguments with politics rather than with science.

Given our final email exchange, our hopes that he will bother to correct his site mention of NAR seem likely to be dashed.

For what he last wrote to us rather rudely in his third email was his usual vow never to respond to

“individuals who promote the view that HIV either does not exist or does not cause AIDS, individuals that I and others choose to refer to as the “AIDS denialists”.”

Overlooking the fact that this site has never supported the view that HIV does not exist, we replied as follows:

Dear John,

That’s fine, we probably would avoid live discussion if we were in your position too, given the abject weakness of your position judged in the light of the study literature your side has created so extensively and expensively.

But for the second time kindly correct your reference to New AIDS Review as a “conspiracy theory” and a “denialist” site. We at NAR allege no AIDS “conspiracy”, since even the two decade policy of Anthony Fauci of blocking journalists interested in media coverage of HIV∫AIDS critics from using NIAID sources was explicitly stated as the Director’s policy, and is not a conspiracy. The group foolishness of HIV∫AIDS scientists is a matter of collective politics and individual mental paralysis, as far as we are concerned, even though policy and behavior is voluntarily coordinated.

The use of the word “denialist” is also wrongly prejudicial. This site stands by the mainstream scientific literature as the best measure of truth. You deny its import. So if anything you are a “denialist”. This site is not.

Otherwise, my dear chap, you must see that we will have to defend NAR against this public calumny by public complaint, and calling attention to this example of your low standards of “AIDS truth”, even when corrections are offered to you.

John, by not responding to our correction and erasing the misstatement on your site, you will only confirm that you merit no scientific standing in the HIV∫AIDS debate, since you will be showing in public that you do not care about accuracy and knowingly mislead people on the facts.

By the way, also, since you publicly and privately reject the idea of meeting with those who interpret the literature differently, you are making painfully clear that you prefer to exploit AIDS funding for your own ends, at the cost of other people’s health and lives, rather than risk examining your own ideas in live interview or public debate.

In fact, we can think of only one construction to put on your refusal to talk to opponents about your position: it is a most telling symptom of conscious (or, to be kind, unconscious) knowledge of being wrong, especially in such a prominent scientist.

Why otherwise would you be so intent on evading and escaping the logic and exposure of debate, the examination and discussion of your position, and the possible exposure of flaws in your remaining scientific arguments, if there are any?

We believe all the above is correct. Do you object to any of it, and have any reply? Whether you do or not, kindly amend your site.

Best

Anthony

With no response so far from Moore we can merely repeat that his activities in fighting what he has described to Michael Geiger of HEAL, San Diego as his “war” on the paradigm debunkers betray, in our judgement, just how unscientific is his love for the paradigm.

For by going outside the debate to attack them in a political and underhand manner, the AIDS Truth is clearly that Moore is much more than merely a scientist who genuinely believes that the HIV∫AIDS paradigm is writ in biblical stone, and that all who reexamine the literature and debunk it are heretics to the one true religion, and lives will be lost if they are followed.

For beyond that he is clearly a scientist who believes that the paradigm is sufficiently vulnerable that he must avoid live debate at all costs with naysayers, and he must use political and psychological means to maintain it. In this he is obviously right. The paradigm is so weak that it has lived for twenty two years on artificial life support, and any exposure to bright sunlight will undoubtedly kill it stone dead.

That is why Anthony Fauci and now John Moore see fit to censor debate as much as they possibly can. That is why John Moore will not meet with us to brief us on his position even over lunch, even when we are within thirty blocks of each other and he could easily do so. This is why he likes to call this site quite inaccurately and libelously conspiracy theorist and denialist.

Having examined the issue from outside with no axe of our own to grind, we see him as the obtuse handmaiden of error rolling along in a bandwagon he joined very early in his career which is now slowly changing to a tumbril carting him to his career doom, one approaching a funding guillotine which will eventually fall on his neck whenever the toppling dominoes of the paradigm defense league reach Cornell, perhaps via the nearby Rockefeller University where he once worked, the same Rockefeller University that once ejected David Baltimore for his unscientific behavior.

This we imagine may happen after the court cases questioning HIV∫AIDS lore reach a critical mass, beginning we predict, perhaps optimistically, with the imminent decision of Judge Sullan in Adelaide to let Parenzee’s appeal go forward, on the grounds that the questions raised against the paradigm in the case have produced a reasonable doubt that cannot be dismissed by a judge who lacks the scientific expertise to arbitrate the matter.

For an unproven paradigm presumably cannot be used as grounds for a criminal conviction if the legislation on which the conviction is based was prepared on the understanding that the science was undisputed, and then the science is on appeal revealed to be a matter of serious dispute, which it is if six members of the US National Academy dispute it (Duesberg, Lang, Margulis, Rubin, Strohman, Gilbert).

That would seem to us to be the logic of the grounds for appeal in this case, and in other cases bound to come in the US as well as in Canada. Given his unconvincing bluster in Adelaide we doubt that Gallo will be any more successful as a witness for the paradigm in the US.

In the courts, the bullying methods adopted by Gallo and Moore in trying to repress review of their stock in trade do not wash, and just possibly a Congressional hearing may be on the cards as the next dominoe at some point during the unfolding of Australian, Canadian and US court hearings.

However, with the notHIV scientific truth something that if accepted will make twenty two year old monkeys out of a large swathe of top scientists and officials throughout the world, and bring science into huge disrepute, perhaps nothing like that will ever happen as long as their generation is alive. Their defense is bound to be as ruthless as John Moore’s, even if less honestly admitted.

Let’s see if we are correct in our rash Adelaide prediction, which flouts these eternal verities. Meanwhile, we await John’s correction.

List of flaws in fact and implication makes lovely AIDS piece look holey

Manhattan media’s enduring “AIDS denialism” is root cause of problems

Lynn Margulis chimes in, stunning Tara Smith

Perhaps the last two posts seem overkill in chastising Michael Specter for his reporting sins in producing his HIV∫AIDS masterwork, “Annals of Science: The Denialists: AIDS mavericks and the damage they do”, the deft but inaccurate and biased rundown on current HIV∫AIDS science politics in this week’s (March 12) New Yorker, circulation 940,000.

After all the piece is well shaped and nicely done, aside from its parade of error when parroting the paradigm promoters. But the otherwise affable Specter’s journalistic failure in this respect is so massive, and the propaganda value to the paradigm defenders so great, that the piece cannot be ignored with disdain, as John Strausbaugh has wittily done in John Strausbaugh: The New Yorker to South Africa: Shut Up and Take It this morning (Mon Mar 12) at You Bet Your Life, with the ex editor of the New York Press judging it merely as an obligatory move in the provincial politics of Manhattan media:

I read somewhere online that David Remnick’s New Yorker had finally ridden to the aid of liberal magazine media. It had given Roger Hodge’s Harper’s the thrashing it so long and richly deserved for running that dangerous AIDS article by that horrid Celia Farber last spring. The New Yorker article, boldly entitled “The Denialists,” was said to be a thorough rebuttal to Farber’s wild-hair rantings. Hodge’s Folly, the gaffe of all gaffes, had been redressed. It had taken a year, but order and balance were now restored to print media. Glossy liberal thumbsuckers were safe to read again. No received knowledge or consensus opinions will ever again be challenged. Sorry for the disruption. You can all go back to sleep now. Nothing to see here.

In this world weary response he is joined by Peter Duesberg, who in a letter to Harvey Bialy, editor of You Bet Your Life, which Bialy posts in his Comments, informs him reasonably that he did not think it worth writing a letter to the New Yorker correcting the reporting of Michael Specter, because it would inevitably be cut down, and then replied to by Specter in the usual manner where authors of misleading reports are allowed to defend themselves with further error as the last word with no recourse.

Celia Farber has adopted the same energy conserving approach of confining herself, in a brief letter posted in YBYL Comments to David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, to merely making a witty but cutting observation characterizing the piece, or rather the role of the New Yorker, as a belated “morning after pill” taken a year later in response to her piece in Harpers, which evidently still has Specter and others worried enough to cook up a reply lacking in both accuracy and conviction.

But working on a less celestial plane we wonder how many outsiders will recognize that crack journalist Specter is merely reaffirming an ignorant but deadly social bias that has spread throughout the world, courtesy of the propaganda and censorship perpetrated by NIAID under the guiding hand of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who from the beginning 22 years ago, has taken upon his well tailored shoulders the responsibility of preserving the paradigm from the “dangerous” efforts of critics?

How many otherwise well informed people even know that Fauci has gone to such lengths to head off any effort to undermine the total acceptance of the paradigm by the universe of scientists, officials, politicians, reporters, doctors, social workers, and charity donors who steer by its light, not to mention the patients and populations throughout the world who are willing to take expensive toxic drugs to ward off illnesses which they also take for granted are caused exclusively by the effects of HIV, once they test positive?

Hardly any, obviously. To most influential people reading the New Yorker piece, or as is often the case, just the cover headline (The AIDS Denialists) and subhead (Michael Specter on Bad Science that Kills), it will seem as authoritative a counter punch to the Farber as John Moore could possibly wish. Not to mention the other 939,850 subscribers.

This is especially true since over the past year, despite the copious exposure of the weakness of the paradigm on the Web at this blog and in scathing, expert and penetrating posts at You Bet Your Life, the pile driver group blog that Barnesworld/Barnesville has turned into under the expert hand of Harvey Bialy, not a single major magazine has had the sense and the guts to follow Harpers’ lead and open up this can of scientific and political worms to public view.

As Strausbaugh says, instead of an intelligent response to the Harpers piece, the world of Manhattan based media has spent the past year trying to quietly absorb and digest the pearl produced by Celia Farber in an effort to avoid upsetting the status quo and its shared conventional wisdom, perhaps because like the scientific and political community it is so invested in the idea of HIV∫AIDS after all these years of reporting that a turnaround would be as gutwrenchingly impossible as reverse powering the Titanic from hitting its iceberg.

Thus the brilliant and strong minded new young editor of Harpers, Roger Hodge, whose outstanding performance, right out of the starting gate, in publishing “Out of Control AIDS and the corruption of medical science” a year ago will eventually be recognized, we are sure, as one of his greatest and most daring coups, has apparently been slowly coopted by Pulitzer prizes for other Harpers achievements and other nudges into a tactical retreat from his social gaffe.

At least, we were sorry to hear Hodge at the Small Press Center, in a talk in November on his first year at Harpers, slipping in the phrase “Peter Duesberg is probably wrong but –” in a reply to a question on the journalistic justification of printing Celia Farber’s masterwork, whose mention of Duesberg’s ideas over several pages he suggested was only intended to stir debate, not as any kind of endorsement. Given the vapidity of most of the reactions to the piece, one can sympathise with him. Here is a prize specimen we came across today.

But lives are at stake here, not to mention a large amount of public money and the health of millions. So having made all these claims about Specter—™s article containing both unusually helpful and positive material but a large number of false paradigm claims pronounced from on high by Specter without references, we feel it is incumbent on us to slog through a few examples for the uninitiated.

Specter’s missteps

So herewith a short list of the scientific errors and other blunders and missteps in Specter’s piece, errors to which Specter “does not intend to respond”, he has informed HEAL San Diego board member Michael Geiger, even though they are easily debunked by the very mainstream literature which he has, apparently with the guidance of John Moore, trustingly assumed is in line with the claims of the paradigm, when in fact it is consistently at odds with it. We add the embarrassing corrections needed in every case - embarrassing, that is, to a magazine once renowned for its fact checking.

1) Misleading and prejudicial titles

Specter and/or the New Yorker editors mistake: The article is titled “Annals of Science: The Denialists: The dangerous attacks on the consensus about HIV and AIDS”, with a different subhead in the front index - “AIDS mavericks and the damage they do” - and another on the Cover ad flap on the newstands - “Michael Specter on AIDS science that kills.”

Embarrassing correction: The incessant use of the word “denialist” is a political and mind jamming smear which unjustifiably associates paradigm critics with the intellectually and socially disreputable Holocaust denialists who assembled in Teheran recently. Contrary to the implication that the “denialists” - read “paradigm critics” - include no one of any great stature, they include elite scientists Peter Duesberg, Serge Lang and Lynn Margulis, who is currently stating her support on a scienceblog, Pharyngula as follows:

What is an HIV/AIDS denier? Or HIV/AIDS denialist? Peter Duesberg is a fine scientist, I have read his book and examined some of the scientific papers upon which it is based. From the CDC (Center for Disease Control) in Atlanta I have requested the scientific papers that prove the causal relationship between the HIV retrovirus and the IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME commonly known as AIDS. They have never sent even references to the peer-reviewed primary scientific literature that establishes the causal relationship because they can’t. Such papers do not exist.

I have seen all four of the films made by Coleman Jones and colleagues in Toronto. Film #3 in the series is most telling. Although no strong evidence exists for any simple causal relationship what is clear is that the HIV claim is erroneous by the standards of microbiology and virology.

When I saw the glowing review of George Miklos, a colleague and a fiercely honest scientist, of Harvey Bialy’s book on the scientific life of Peter Duesberg I bought and read Harvey’s book. I have also read Celia Farber’s superb article in the Lewis Lapham “swansong” issue of Harper’s magazine, last March, I believe. Rebecca Culshaw’s paper on why she quit AIDS statistical research and Dr. Charles Geshekter’s unpublished ms about African AIDS, accepted by the editor and then rejected both substantiated my reluctance to accept the glib “HIV/AIDS” term. I found all of these readings far more convincing than any literature proported to show a HIV-AIDS causal connection.

I heard a talk by a “medical scientist” from the Harvard Medical School at a meeting at Roger Williams Univ in Rhode Island from a supposed expert who attempts to design an HIV vaccine. He claimed the HIV virus mutates a billion times in 48 hours. It became clear that the HIV virus has no clear identity. The HIV tests, nearly always positive for pregnant women, that vary significantly in the US, Europe and Australia are particularly disturbing. My son-in-law, James di Properzio spent several months researching this story for the Common Review (the Great Books Foundation in Chicago). His findings were consistent with Celia Farber’s and after encouragement from the editor the board reviewed and rejected his draft.

“Science is the search for truth” said David Bohm, “whether we like it [the truth] or not. From my readings, discussions with knowledgable scientists close to the story, I simply conclude, as does Kary Mullis, the Nobel Lauriate who wrote a foreword to Duesberg’s classical work that there is no evidence that “HIV causes AIDS”. I have no special expertise. I simply seek the evidence for scientific claims, especially when they have dire consequences for the science itself and the treatment..not just medical..of so many people.

I have observed that the closer one comes to the study of humans the shoddier the quality of the scientific evidence. Maybe that is one of the reasons that I work with bacteria and protoctists (the eukaryotic microorganisms and their immediate descendants exclusive of plants, animals and fungi). The vast majority of these are harmless to human health.

Although I have written about the natural history of the anthrax bacterium, Beethoven’s and Nietzsche’s syphilis and the work of Hentry Taylor Ricketts with insect-borne pathgens (eg.g, ticks carrying Rocky Mt Spotted fever), in general I avoid the last 3 million years of evolution and any other studies that require detailed knowledge of mammalian, including human, biology. Why? Because political bias, hearsay and gossip are inevitable whereas in the first part of the evolution story (from 3800 until 3 million years ago) politics intervenes far less obtrusively. In pursuit of the story of life and its effects on planet Earth one can be more honest if the earliest atages of evolution are the objects of study.

And this way I can lay low and not be “name-called” (i.e., “denialist”) because I ask hard questions and require solid evidence before I embrace a particular causal hypothesis. Indeed, is not my attitude of inquiry exactly what science is about?

This typically forthright statement sparked a related comment thread at Tara Smith’s Aetiology, where the stunned blogger, still fetching in what looks like a bathing suit, calls it “incredible”.

Paradigm critics also include Nobel prize winners (Walter Gilbert and Kary Mullis), and a raft of academics, journalists and authors of intellectual and moral distinction (David Rasnick, Harvey Bialy, Rebecca Culshaw, George Miklos, Robert Root-Bernstein, Richard Strohman, Charles Geshekter, Roberto Giraldo, Etienne de Harven, Gordon Stewart, Claus Koehnlein, Andrew Maniotis, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Valendar Turner, Rodney Richards, Mae Wan Ho, John Papadimitriou, Anthony Brink, Celia Farber, Michael Geiger, Stephen Davis, Jim Hogan, Liam Scheff, Elizabeth Ely, Jon Rappoport, Darin Brown, Jeffrey Dach, Robert Houston, David Crowe, Joan Shenton, Henry Bauer, Christine Maggiore, Neville Hodgkinson, Janine Roberts, Lee Evans, Dean Esmay, Claus Jensen and Anthony Liversidge amongst innumerable others).

Nor is the implication that it is proper to uphold the scientific consensus justified in the slightest. Consensus can and has been very wrong in the history of science, in several famous instances mistaking the toxicity of chemicals or bad diet causing illness for a disease caused by infection (Vitamin C deficiency causing scurvy, niacin deficiency causing pellagra, clioquinol or drug toxicity causing SMON syndrome in Japan). That this is what is happening again in AIDS is well argued in Duesberg’s book, “Inventing the AIDS Virus” (1996), with which no doubt Specter is still largely unfamiliar, but which is still completely current in its points.

2) Zeblon Gwala and his ‘rhino’ herbal potion

Specter reports: A hundred people a day are coming to the truck driver’s storefront clinic in downtown Durban, where he dispenses litres of herbal potion to cure AIDS, and reports that “people who were on the edge of death go back to work. It makes them feel better, and it gives them life.” Officials support the remedy, and the mayor of Durban buys it for a hospice, but Specter describes it as “untested”, and also disparages the beetroot, olive oil, garlic, lemons, and African potatoes advocated by Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, without stating, however, that they cause any harm.

Embarrassing correction: A very extensive literature shows that natural remedies are helpful to the immune system, whose weakness is the hallmark of AIDS, and to the liver, which is attacked by AIDS drug toxicity, often causing death. Herbs and the vegetables promoted by Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the Health Minister that Specter mocks, are a real source of the vitamins and minerals, as well as the fibres, oils and fatty acids, that benefit the immune system, especially the phytochemicals in plants whose health benefits have been demonstrated in the lab, animal and human studies (see “Nutrition and AIDS” (2nd ed.), edited by Ronald Watson, Chapter 5: “Use of herbs and non-nutritive supplements in HIV positive and AIDS patients” (by “non nutritive supplements” Watson means hormones such as DHEA).

3) South African officials criticise ARVs as toxic

Specter states without a source that ARVs have “proved to be the only successful treatment for the millions of people infected with HIV,” as if that was so well known that it doesn’t need a reference, and afterwards adds that “for years, Vilakazi, Mbeki, and Tshabalala-Msimang have used words like “damaging”, “toxic”, and “poison to decsribe ARVs”", as if this was fallacious.

Embarrassing correction: The orthodoxy claims AIDS drugs are a great success, and the patients are typically initially enthusiastic, though their welcome wears off and drug holidays are often prescribed, and eventually half the AIDS patients who die die of drug effects, not AIDS symptoms. The initial good impression is because ARVs do have an initial impact which feels beneficial, and this is naturally assumed to prove that reducing the presence of the virus to low or non existent levels counters its alleged decimation of the immune system. In fact, last summer’s JAMA (as we explained here previously) showed this was not so - the immune system of an individual does not respond to changes in the level of viral load to any great degree (4-5%). There was also the notorious report in the Lancet that the HAART drugs haven’t improved in life saving effect in the ten years since they were introduced, when their initial favorable results were likely the effect of reducing the dose of AZT by three times, since AZT is now acknowledged to be a most damaging medication.

The felt benefit of the drugs appears to be (no one has officially researched this, of course, because the irrational assumption of how they work only through reducing HIV is taken for granted) because they are toxic and bactericidal ie act as antibiotics poisonous to parasites which handicap digestion, restore proper levels of zinc, selenium and other trace elements vital to the immune system, and have an antioxidant effect, at least in the case of lamavudine (see Jean Chamoix ck Crowe’s site . Meanwhile, toxic drug effects (liver and kidney rot) account for half the deaths of AIDS patients who die in the US, not so-called AIDS symptoms.

All that aside, the remarkable thing about Specter’s omniscient and unsourced reporting is that he provides much anecdotal evidence that the nutrition approach does a world of good, even though the paradigm cannot explain why.

Meanwhile the South Africans’ description of ARVs as “damaging”, “toxic” and “poisonous” is perfectly accurate, according to the Physicians Desk Reference and the labelling and inserts of the drugs, as well as numerous studies (eg . J. Dieleman et al. Determinants of recurrent toxicity-driven switches of highly active antiretroviral therapy. AIDS 16:737-745, 2002.) Sigma Chemicals, the manufacturer of AZT, adds a dire warning (”wear suitable protective clothing”) and a skull and cross bones on the bottle, for instance, reproduced in Duesberg’s 2003 Biosciences paper.

There is no more convincing suggestion of the madness of dosing patients with AIDS drugs without being deadly certain that HIV causes immune damage than to read through papers, such as Strategies of HIV management - when to switch,discussing the reaction of patients to drugs and the attempts they make to escape them.

4) The Australian is unlikely to have infected his partners

Specter reports blandly that “A thirty five year old man who had unprotected sex with three women—”and infected one” was convicted in Australia , as if the fact that he infected the partner who discovered she was HIV positive was a given.

Correction: This is the claim of the prosecution of course, and Specter cannot be blamed for parroting it. But the fact remains that the biggest study of hundreds of discordant heterosexual couples (one positive, one negative in HIV tests) over six years with many (47) making no effort to prevent transmission, carried out by the mainstream HIV researcher and official Nancy Padian in San Francisco, recorded no transmissions whatsoever. The scientific likelihood of the one transmission claimed in this case is thus low to non existent.

5)Exaggerated, over the top AIDS estimates

Specter reports: “Five and a half million of the country’s 48 million people are infected with HIV (in South Africa) and …nearly a thousand people die of AIDS every day, and nearly twice that many are infected.”

Embarrassing correction: The statistics for South African AIDS have long been incredible, as critics have long pointed out. These HIV infection figures are prima facie extraordinarily suspect. The original figures for South Africa were drawn from maternity clinics where mothers-to-be tend to score positive for HIV at a four or even ten times times higher rate than the general population, and were unreasonably extrapolated to males and to the entire sub-Sahara. The incidence of HIV positives among prisoners in South Africa is less than 3 per cent, while in the prenatal clinics it is about 12% - the opposite comparative levels than would be expected. Recent figures for prenatal clinics from this avert.org page show the rate of 30 or even 40% in some areas, prima facie evidence of the tendency of pregnancy to trigger positive test results

Meanwhile there are great questions about whether the figure for AIDS deaths is accurate. Certainly a death rate of an additional 350,000 a year for AIDS in South Africa, which would erase a significant chunk of the 46 million population in short order, would be visible, if it was a genuine addition to the normal rate of deaths from the usual spectrum of African diseases, including TB, malaria, dengue fever and severely unhealthy conditions. The invisibility of the epidemic, which conflicts with sensational reports in the New York Times and elsewhere which have not held up when checked by investigators, suggests that the “AIDS epidemic” in South Africa and in the entire sub-Sahara is produced entirely by moving patients from one disease label, eg TB, to another, AIDS.

Certainly the figure of 1000 deaths a day claimed by Specter is entirely contradicted by official statistics. The South African government’s statistics, analyzed here at avert.org records that in 2004, there were 46 million people living in South Africa, but only 13,590 died from “HIV-related disease”. Even if the claim of the Medical Research Council are credited that this number is underestimated by 61% because HIV infection related deaths are not always reported as AIDS, the figure is clearly quite wrong. As to 2000 a day being infected, in a supposedly heterosexual pandemic, the Nancy Padian study of transmission and others conflict with this statement so powerfully as to render it obvious fantasy.

A writer of the sophistication, not to mention the powerful professional affiliation, of Michael Spector, has little excuse for not knowing about the questionability of African statistics for AIDS, or for not knowing about this stunning anomaly, and instead, merely passing along the incredible assertions of his friends among the paradigm promoters, without any reference or source, as if he was empowered by the New Yorker to pull claims from heaven.

A second post will continue this list of Specter’s sins of omission and commission.

Specter attended AMFAR forum, but was never conscious paradigm is wrong then or since

Dismisses notification of flaws in piece as unworthy of response

Critics puzzle over soft punch of New Yorker scribe: is he closet doubter?

In company with other paradigm critics Michael Geiger, board member of HEAL San Diego, has deluged Michael Specter at the New Yorker in the past few days with email strongly objecting to his piece this week, “The Denialists: The dangerous attacks on the consensus about HIV and AIDS”, energetically pointing out bias and factual errors.
(Cartoon by Andrew Dyson from theage.com)

Specter finally replied to Geiger yesterday afternoon (Thu Mar with this revealing note, perhaps prompted by the fact that Geiger’s email to him was copied to as many departments at the New Yorker as possible:

(Michael_Specter@newyorker.com, themail@newyorker.com, newsbreaks@newyorker.com, fiction@newyorker.com; talkofthetown@newyorker.com, WebComments@newyorker.com; themail@newyorker.com, shouts@newyorker.com)

From: Michael Specter
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 3:43 PM
Subject: Truth

Dear Mr. Geiger:

Thanks for your interest. I do not intend to respond to the letters you and so many of your colleagues in the denialist universe have written. But I do want to say this: No editor ever suggested to me that I write this (or any other AIDS) story. I have been thinking about this issue for twenty years, ever since I encountered Peter Duesberg at that AMFAR Forum in Washington. Until recently I always felt, on balance, it is better to ignore you people than to give you publicity. But after Harpers inexplicably published a
lengthy and irresponsible piece last year I realized I was wrong. In any case, nobody from the AIDS research world suggested the story. Nor did an editor. It was my idea, my reporting and I am totally willing to let people think or say anything they want about it.

Sincerely,

Michael Specter
Staff Writer
The New Yorker

This letter goes far towards explaining how it is that a prominent magazine, with a fact checking department once renowned for its dedication to getting every word right, could have printed such a cheekily uninformed piece, scientifically speaking.

Clearly after twenty years of “thinking” Specter is still so naively confident in the authority of Anthony Fauci, Robert Gallo, John Moore and the many institutions that they lead or that cooperate with these paradigm promoters, that he has never perceived the blatant unsustainability of the HIV∫AIDS ideology, even though he attended the AMFAR forum in the spring of 1988, and was alerted like the rest of us privileged hacks present at this backroom tournament, where Peter Duesberg took on the chief paradigm defenders at the time, to the fact that the claims of the paradigm defense team were so hollow that one of the graphs they presented was revealed then and there to be entirely fictional.

Apparently there is some kind of unconscious conflict going on in Michael Specter, although on the surface he is a stout defender of the HIV∫AIDS faith immune to the doubts he reports on so niftily and has mulled so long. The attitude that Gallo’s and Fauci’s critics must be wrong so permeates Specter’s psyche that he by his own account has never suspected then or since that there is anything at all to Duesberg’s incessant exposure of the paradigm’s lack of credible evidence and blatant scientific unreason, despite the dozen high level, exhaustive, peer reviewed articles Duesberg has written or co-authored before and since, and the flood of some twenty five critical books from scientists and laymen devoted to the problem, including Duesberg’s flagship “Inventing the AIDS Virus”, culminating in Harvey Bialy’s 2004 razor sharp exposure of the incriminating science politics of the field, and Rebecca Culshaw’s short but lethal treatment of its unreason in her book this January.

Specter’s scientific literacy

Obviously Specter hasn’t read these works, or if he has, the AIDS meme resident in his brain has fought off infiltration of the alternative view of HIV∫AIDS as the grandest boondoggle and most lethal caper in the history of biology. Specter’s blithe and scientifically shallow confidence in his prejudice, and his lack of credit or investigation of the claims of the alternative view (clear from his piece and from the dismissive tone of this letter), suggests that he is a highly literate man who is paradoxically unread in this particular science.

He apparently remains as averse as his mentor Anthony Fauci (see earlier NAR posts regarding Vitamin A and the bird flu flap) to perusing the medical and scientific literature through the data base Pub Med and its 16 million papers and studies, currently available to any member of the public courtesy of the NIH, literature which is the basis of this obscure blog and which would soon apprise him of the rank inconsistencies of more and ever more study results in the field with the claims of the politically driven scientific ideology of HIV∫AIDS, and its mismatch with science and sense.

For Specter shows no sign of having read for himself with any depth of understanding either the mainstream literature or any of the critics and their works, instead treating the issue in his letter as a kind of belligerent propaganda war against “you people”, whom he views even now as a bunch of “denialists” who have been effectively dealt with in the past by ignoring their points, as he himself has proudly done, he says. He only now felt it necessary to recognize them in order to condemn them in the wake of the Harpers piece last March, which he nervously calls “inexplicable and irresponsible”, a very odd opinion for a science opinion maker, as Specter now reveals himself to be, rather than an objective reporter.

That exemplary article (“Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science“) by Celia Farber, years in the making, which Specter has the effrontery to call “irresponsible”, was, in fact, fact checked to such a level of reliability that the only provable error discovered in it after publication involved an unfamiliarity with the works of cuckoo clocks, which Farber at one point used as a metaphor, unlike the Specter piece, whose six pages of major errors, scientific and political, are a sad commentary on the current state of education of New Yorker fact checking, if the hapless Michael Peed, whose work in this instance shows an acquaintance with the literature of HIV∫AIDS as remote as Michael Specter’s, is typical. Peed cannot even get the name of the journal Cancer Research correct (it is not Perspectives of Cancer Research).

All in all, all the surface signs are that the very literate New Yorker magazine appears to achieved the signal feat of publishing a piece by a science writer largely unread in the science of the issue he treats, one dispensing his ex cathedra judgments on a scientific question purely on the basis of crediting his friends on one side of the debate, using not even the mainstream literature as research and reference but their second hand information and claims as his source, and ignoring the challengers—™ critique of the literature and their references, other than repeating a few of them without assessment, and where the few scientific assertions made by the author are not only unreferenced but wrong, that is, contradicted by critics and the mainstream scientific and medical literature he ignores in what he appears to think is a propaganda war.

Why we stopped fuming

On that basis, taking what he writes at face value, we were initially tempted to fume that his piece is a social and scientific outrage, given what is involved here, that is to say, the lives and happiness of large numbers of people who, if the paradigm is as wrong as its own literature indicates it is, are all too likely to take severely toxic and ultimately often lethal drugs on the advice of their doctors.

We were about to fulminate that it is heinously irresponsible of the New Yorker editors, in the context of the health and duration of so many lives at risk in this issue, where so many people are taking toxic drugs at the behest of the paradigm faithful, to print a piece written, fact checked and headlined with prejudice against one side of this very serious scientific dispute, when the author, and evidently the fact checkers and the editors of the magazine, are so clearly underresearched in the science of the matter, and have no respect whatsoever for the critics of the paradigm, especially the scientists involved, despite even quoting Duesberg’s unmatched credentials, and thus show a most naive unfamiliarity with the nature of science as practice and profession, wherein a common characteristic of progress is the initial vehement rejection and disdain by the powers that be of any paradigm challenge which eventually displaces the status quo.

However, on extended contemplation of Michael’s remarkable piece we are inclined to wonder just what is going on here, for along with some astute observers in Comments we have noticed a strange tendency in the piece for Specter to pull his punches, and give the supposedly rascally “denialists” full credit for their fine credentials, at least in the case of Duesberg, and a platform for their views without specifically quarreling with their points, and specifically to mention a prime source of a thousand pages of ‘denialism” for anyone interested to explore (virusmyth.com), and to give a general impression that the overall accusation of the article, in its prejudicial title and subhead framing, that the denialists are “dangerous” and risking people’s lives with their advice to prefer nutrients over drugs as prophylactics against immune dysfunction, actually lacks quotable evidence that they have done any harm, even by dispensing rhinoceros potion.

In fact if we hadn’t read Specter’s note above to Michael Geiger we would have thought that the piece was in many places rather supportive of review of the paradigm, and surmised that John Moore must be very disappointed in Specter’s take on the scene, which instead of being an over the top hatchet job on a par with Moore’s Op Ed piece in the Times last summer, Deadly Quackery, is instead a partially hospitable platform for the denialists, where the rude headlines and subheads, and the smattering of unreferenced and inaccurate paradigm claims, flatly stated as biblical certainties, are all that John Moore can crow about, for at the same time Specter has provided copious coverage of paradigm challengers without any real rebuttal of their position, at least without making any specific scientific points against what they say other beyond speciously implying they are all, including Nobelists and members of the National Academy, the equivalent of witchdoctors.

A case study in self deception?

Perhaps the piece gained a momentum of its own, and just came out that way despite the conscious intentions of its author. It is conceivable that Specter is here giving a live demonstration of self-deception, or what MRI brain research has been showing us over the past decade, which is that the brain can compartmentalize ideas and process data in two different frames at the same time, so that data in conflict with one frame is merely moved to another for storage, in a process that is familiar to many spouses in conflict with their loved ones.

It seems possible on the evidence of the conflicted tone and thrust of the