Science Guardian

Remarkable movie shows how AIDS story falls apart under questioning

Leading luminaries confess flaws, confirming critics’ concerns

Clarity and entertainment value may gain wide audience for documentary

But John Moore and his squad are on the job to sink it if possible

House of Numbers premiered last night at the Quad in New York City, and contrary to the uninformed review by Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times (see previous post), the documentary is a winner on every level – clarity of exposition, entertainment value, and unexpected revelation. Small wonder it has started garnering prizes at festivals (six so far).

Brent Leung adopts the Boy Scout approach of innocent inquiry, and travels the world in search of answers to the huge questions that HIV/AIDS ideology raises in every inquiring mind. He ends up gaining remarkable admissions from some leading lights in the field.

Web of inconsistency

The impression left as the credits roll is that every time he pokes at the supposedly solid science of HIV/AIDS he finds he meets no resistance, and his finger tears another hole is what seems like a cobweb of false claims, one that needs sweeping away before it catches another million hapless “HIV positives” to feed killer drugs to and, the film implies, shorten their lives for no good purpose except to preserve the careers and salaries of all in the vast economy of this statistically exaggerated and medically misread disease.

The film makes all the major points that the much vilified (by HIV defenders) “denialists” have made over the years, starting with Peter Duesberg’s brilliant and unrefuted reviews of the late 1980s, which have been censored from public attention ever since by Anthony Fauci of NIAID and the editors of the New York Times. But none of these McCarthy-ite internal politics are touched on in the film, which keeps it all very simple.

Conjuring the statistics

Can electron microscope images of the AIDS virus be produced? A leading expert in the technique shows Leung all the pictures produced by Gallo and by others since, but confirms they are only “probably” HIV. Do any tests provably confirm the presence of HIV or even HIV antibodies in the blood of “HIV positives”? No they don’t, other experts admit.

As the scientists quarrel on camera about which combination of tests might be definitive, it emerges that all tests, even PCR tests, have package disclaimers saying that in themselves they confirm nothing about the HIV status of the individual. Meanwhile, test interpretation varies by country, and by the information you have given the tester (are you gay? are you poor?). Rapid tests, used widely now in South Africa, are unreliable and prove nothing, it turns out, though Brent takes one on camera. Many Africans are still judged to be AIDS victims without any testing at all (the Bangui definition is still widely used, he discovers, for symptoms as simple as diarrhea and fever, no testing required).

James Chin, who was chief epidemiologist for WHO for five years, says he warned headquarters how flimsy the statistics were but no one paid any attention. Now he predicts that their “house of numbers” will collapse as the true situation emerges, and indeed huge downward adjustments have been made by the UN for the total of HIV “positives” in the world. (Kevin De Cock, the WHO official who stated a couple of years ago, that heterosexuals have never in reality been threatened by AIDS is not mentioned.)

With Brent and his audience thus instructed how a positive status doesn’t necessarily mean they are infected or have ever been infected by HIV, he is then shown how damaging and even lethal the drugs administered are. Reducing the dosage of the dreaded AZT in the nineties by substituting David Ho’s cocktail of protease inhibitors slowed patients’ decline, reprieving them from the early death guaranteed by full dose AZT before the mid nineties. Everyone lasted longer, so the triumph of protease inhibitors was applauded and the cause of AIDS spuriously confirmed. But deaths have continued at the same rate in the US since (about 17,000 a year). Meanwhile the definition of AIDS was expanded so that a decline was turned into a doubling of cases.

Applause during the film

By the time the film contemplates the experience of Steve and Sherrill Nagel the audience is ready to be horrified. The Nagels adopted a baby from Romania who tested positive in the US, and dutifully fed her AZT while doctors predicted she would barely last till age two. Her leg pains, loss of coordination, and mental disruption are disturbing to watch, and the parents finally decide that even by the measure of standard AIDS ideology it is not worth harming the child any further with AZT. There was a burst of applause at the premiere when it is announced that the child is now 19 and perfectly healthy.

The film doesn’t leave room for any official rebuttal of this or other anecdotes, but on the core points of the science and its politics well known figures such as Anthony Fauci of NIAID are given time to rebut the cynics. When they contradict themselves this is shown clearly. But what is most surprising is that Martin Delaney, who turned from being a skeptic to a staunch advocate of AIDS drugs when his San Francisco group Project Inform gained drug company funding, expresses a lot of world weary doubts about their usefulness and even notes that the companies have no financial motivation to think up a better way to go.

Montagnier’s stunning statement

In its final phase Brent Leung maps AIDS worldwide and shows how it matches poverty and how lack of good food and hygiene gives rise to exactly the same symptoms that are laid at the door of HIV. Is it possible, he asks, that much of global AIDS is sickness from poverty, and would be cured by pouring money into clean water and decent food rather than damaging drugs? That the drugs are damaging is earlier highlighted by photos of buffalo humps and by the death of Joyce Hafford after only 39 days in a test of nevirapine, with grotesque skin symptoms.

The establishment in HIV/AIDS has practiced answers to all this, to be sure, though none of them bear examination, as we have found in writing this blog. So perhaps Brent Leung can be forgiven for not including them, although they are undoubtedly among the 300 hours of film he has recorded. What he has produced is a vivid documentation of unanswered – in fact, confirmed – doubts about the scientific rationale peddled in HIV/AIDS, conflicting claims by experts, and real people examples of ignorance and suffering. He has shown how AIDS drugs could equally be causing the same and worse symptoms and deaths as HIV is supposedly causing.

The climax of the film comes with Luc Montagnier assuring him that “a good immune system” can rid the body of HIV in a few weeks. Leung gets him to repeat this unexpected statement and then asks if it applies to poor Africans. If their immune systems are restored with adequate nutrition, would their bodies conquer HIV too? The soon to be Nobelist Montagnier says “I would think so.”

Montagnier also emphasizes as he has done over the years (he was barred from the San Francisco AIDS Conference for it) that a co-factor is always necessary for HIV to do its deadly work, which opens the possibility that HIV itself is not actually involved. Presumably now that he alone won the Nobel last year for discovering HIV “the cause of AIDS” he will now be less frank in public. But here he is on film. The cat is out of the bag.

Will the doc be stopped?

This is the kind of paradigm threatening conclusion that a huge array of vested interests cannot abide, ranging from the emotions of patients who have committed themselves to taking the drugs to the vast array of career and financial interests that need to keep the 25 year old HIV/AIDS ideology in play, including now George Bush and Bill Clinton, who have both sought redemption through AIDS funding.

John Moore of Cornell, the HIV scientist most hostile in public and behind the scenes to outside review, has vowed in email to them that the filmmakers will, as the Hollywood phrase has it, ‘never eat lunch in this town again.’ Yet his efforts haven’t been able to stop their momentum so far, despite his supporters at the Times, which itself now has a huge, 25 year investment in the status quo.

With the politics so intense the censors of AIDS review may still succeed, but on behalf of the public Leung has fired the loudest shot yet across the bows of the great ship of fools, SS HIV Science. It is hard to imagine that, as has already happened, thoughtful people completely unaware of the real situation before they take their seats won’t leave the cinema skeptical of and even hostile to those that want to shut off public debate.

And the irony is that Leung has done nothing but document the tale that HIV scientists tell against themselves. The confusion he records looks amusingly like the Mad Hatters tea party from Alice in Wonderland. Could it be that they have led the world through a looking glass for 25 years?

Entertainment plus important revelation. All in all, a stunning achievement.

At AIDS panel, future Nobelist Fauci revealed way forward

Add HIV to boost T-cells, eliminate drugs

Long run danger remedied by normal health measures

As we were saying, we welcome the Lasker prize which Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID has won, because we already recognized a year ago the extraordinary contribution that the well tailored director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases had earlier made quietly to the final solution of the world wide AIDS panic, at a New School panel in June last year.

For some reason, perhaps personal modesty, Dr Fauci had not informed the general public previously of his breakthrough in understanding, but merely communicated it to the Proceedings of the National Academy and included it in a chapter on the Immunology of AIDS he wrote for the textbook “Fundamental Immunology”, edited by William E. Paul MD and published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins in 2003 (p. 1295):

What Fauci confirmed to the few graduate students and working scientists who perused this book was that the result of HIV arriving in the human body was to touch off and maintain proliferation of T-cells, rather than killing them off.

What happens is that for a 56 fold (5600 per cent) gain in HIV early on CD4 T-cells drop maybe 6% but CD8 T-cells rise 20 per cent. The net increase is there until drugs are provided, in which case this beneficial effect is wiped out. If the drugs are stopped, then the benefit is once again felt.

The total outcome is hidden in the complexity of the immune system – there are other major factors involved in the standard and rather misleading T-cell count, such as rate of production, redistribution, longevity of cells, level of apoptosis and activation induced cell death – but these trends are clear, Fauci pointed out:

“Several investigators have demonstrated that there is an increase in CD4+ T-cell proliferation in both HIV and SIV infection. In certain studies, the enhanced T-cell proliferation that was observed during active disease was significantly decreased following the initiation of anti-retroviral therapy, and proliferation increased again in parallel with plasma viremia following the cessation of treatment in these individuals.

Read the Proceedings for genuine AIDS truths

Fauci’s reference is a paper by Lempicki R. A. et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (97:13778-83, 2000). The Proceedings is the place where all those seriously interested in what is really going on in science should go, perhaps. It is after all, the place where Peter Duesberg’s definitive review and rejection of HIV as the cause of AIDS took place nearly two decades ago, a beautifully written and argued exposition with 200 footnoted references from mainstream literature which oddly enough has never been answered in the same journal, though the HIV=AIDS paradigm author Bob Gallo promised the editors he would do so.

Apparently Gallo preferred to do so from the safe bunker of the last chapters of Virus Hunting, his 1991 book three years later which was happily not subject to peer review, nor did it have to provide references, unlike Duesberg’s masterpiece, which was afterwards cited in Nobel prize winning biologist Walter Gilbert’s graduate class at Harvard as an exemplary paradigm challenge. But we digress, as usual for the benefit of newcomers to this issue.

Fauci explains what kills T cells

Returning to Dr Fauci’s brave and perspicacious statement drawing the attention of insiders to the efficacy of HIV in stimulating the immune system, and the negative impact of drugs, this seemed at such odds with the general assumption in HIV∫AIDS that HIV kills T-cells rather than adds to them, and that drugs are needed to defeat the virus at whatever cost, that when Dr Fauci and Mathilde Krim mounted the stage at the New School with Larry Kramer to celebrate 25 years of HIV∫AIDS a year ago June 19th, Robert Houston took the opportunity to ask Dr Fauci about it.

The question came as a rowdy audience of middle aged gays calmed down after upsetting Larry Kramer so much with their objections to him telling the representative of the New York Times that the Times didn’t cover the issue of HIV∫AIDS enough that he stalked off the stage.

His departure was a pity, for his long time friend Dr Fauci gave an extremely informative reply which heralded the final solution of the AIDS puzzle, suggesting both its cause and its cure.

Fauci’s Final Solution in AIDS

Here’s how it went. Houston asked his question as follows, both flattering the two exceptional scientists and armed with the reference to the Fauci written statement if for some reason the great man saw fit to deny it.

Houston: We have two of the most distinguished scientists in the world on AIDS on this panel and I would like to ask a basic scientific question. How does HIV cause AIDS? Does it do so by directly killing T-cells, as the New York Times science writers seem to tell us, or do you think it does it in the opposite way: by causing T-cells to multiply – and by overactivating the immune system?

And this is how Dr Fauci explained how HIV boosted the immune system, rather than crippled it, having identified drugs as the real cause of T-cell decline in his written review earlier:

Fauci: Well… It does it in both ways. I don’t want to waffle with you on that but it is very, very clear that HIV is related to a very aberrant turning on and activation of T-cells. When T-cells are sustained in their activation – because every time anybody in this room gets an immune response to a benign virus or bacteria your immune system activates (he draws line going up in air with his hand) and then it goes down again (draws line in the air going down again) to the base line.

We like the Freudian slip here in calling HIV a ‘benign” virus, but we may have misheard Fauci – readers can check for themselves when we put the video up on YouTube shortly for the admiration of all.

Here Fauci has confirmed that when HIV is responded to by the immune system, the T-cells are activated to drive it out, and indeed, reference to the Lempicki paper will, as Robert Houston has shown here in the last comment attached to our earlier post nominating Fauci for the Nobel, for a 56-fold rise in HIV viral load between early and intermediate levels of infection, CD4 T-cells decline not very much (around 6% in the chart), while CD8 T-cells rise 20 per cent, for a combined rise of 11%. Now Fauci continued:

When you have a high level of viremia with a lot of activation you just drive the immune system to an aberrant form of activation that leads to the death of a cell, even cells which don’t directly get infected with HIV. They die by a process called apoptosis, meaning essentially they die a suicidal type death.

Here the director of NIAID for 23 years is bringing in cell suicide as a means of explaining how T-cells do die in the face of HIV. Apoptosis is indeed the last refuge of HIV∫AIDS paradigm promoters in their anxiety to explain how it is that HIV might be causing immune collapse by killing T-cells, when there is no discernible biological activity along these lines detected by any researcher in the 23 years of exceptionally well funded HIV∫AIDS research.

The problem is that until Dr Fauci in this reply confirmed that this was the case, doubters had wondered what the evidence was that there was any more cell suicide than normal when the body is aiming for homeostasis, ie returning to the normal balance in the proportions of the constituents of the blood. Cell suicide is a normal process here, and with the levels being maintained, as Dr Fauci confirms, it is hard to see how it is killing off so many T-cells that the immune system collapses.

The difficulty that conjuring up cell suicide is intended to solve is that there is no evidence of any mechanism by which HIV directly kills T-cells, which was the original premise of Robert Gallo’s theory that HIV was the cause of the immune collapse of AIDS. The evidence is that HIV does not kill T-Cells, so enthusiasts for the well funded paradigm had to come up with indirect ways it might get rid of T-cells.

Apoptosis is the best they could come up with, which didn’t present any great difficulty to the army of officials, politicians, activists, health workers, journeyman scientists and dying AIDS patients who were told of this solution perhaps because none of them had heard of Ptolemy the Egyptian, who managed to work out elliptical orbits that could predict the movements of the planets even though he assumed that the Sun went around the Earth, rather than vice versa. The indirect mechanisms by which HIV is said to work its fatal effects on T-cells are the elliptical trajectories of the HIV∫AIDS explanation of AIDS.

Now, however, the director of NIAID sums it all up in one beautiful breakthrough concept which accounts, finally, for the ultimate decline and fall of the human immune system after years of responding to HIV by making T-cells which effectively drive out the virus in a matter of weeks, reducing it to minimal levels of as little as one to five active virions per milliliter, impossible to detect without PCR.

Why does it all change? Steam is key

The puzzle has always been, why does the immune system collapse in five ten or even twenty years, if it has got rid of virtually all virus within six weeks. Fauci now ‘explains’:

You can wind up depleting your T-cells by direct infection and those cells dying or just a burst of aberrant activation and also some elimination by the immune system of infected cells. So it’s not a unified concept; there’s multifactorial ways in which you drain your T-cells and then after a few years you just run out of steam.

In other words, Dr Fauci is prepared to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the mix. Those who say that HIV doesn’t kill T-cells are wrong, it does kill them by “direct infection” somehow. Then you have more killed by cell suicide after a “burst of aberrant activation”. Finally – here is the key at last – the immune system just “runs out of steam”.

Dr Fauci’s Solution to AIDS

Robert Houston confesses that he failed to follow up his question because he was prepared only for Fauci to deny that T-cells proliferated when faced with HIV. What we wish he had done is congratulate Fauci for a conceptual framework which tells us how to defeat AIDS.
Unless we misunderstand him, here is his solution to HIV∫AIDS:

1. With even a dramatic leap in viral load, the T-cells divide faster in response. The end result is that CD 8 T-cell count goes up substantially, with no significant decline in CD 4 T-cell count.

2. So if there is any concern that the immune system is weak, simply add more HIV.

3. Remove ARV drugs, and T-cells will multiply and return to excess levels again.

4. After defeating HIV is a matter of weeks and then maintaining this success for up to twenty years, somehow the immune system might run of steam.

5. But as Dr Fauci’s choice of phrase implies this loss of steam can surely be prevented with proper exercise, nutrition, fresh air, travel and all other general health stimulants, including the renewed optimism that comes from knowing there is a solution – the Fauci Solution to AIDS.

But since the Lasker winner didn’t actually mention this last point explicitly perhaps we can check with him at the lunch where he will accept his prize, surrounded by the members of the medical and economic establishment, of which he has long been a fully paid up member.

So after years of the whole world left confused and supporting antiretroviral drugs as the only defense against the deadly effect of HIV, we have Dr Fauci to thank for telling us that on the contrary, it is HIV rather than drugs which benefit the immune system.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that both Robert Gallo, and two years later Peter Duesberg, were the first to point out that HIV was harmlessly involved in AIDS. But neither of them detected the fact that it was actually beneficial to AIDS patients.

Gallo, of course, proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS with his 1984 papers showing it was occurring in only one third of sick AIDS patients, with pre-AIDS patients having it more often, suggesting it was a possible antidote. Now Anthony Fauci has found why – HIV stimulates the immune system – and he has also noticed that drugs have a negative impact.

Considering that the drug companies involved in HIV∫AIDS have a considerable interest in this revision of the paradigm, we feel that Anthony Fauci is showing considerable moral fortitude in revealing these insights in public in front of gay activists, who were already a noisy crowd and most of them funded by the drug companies.

Luckily, however, none of them noticed.