Qualified outsiders and maverick insiders are very often right about the need to replace received wisdom in science and society. This site exists to back the best of them in their uphill assault on the massively entrenched edifice of resistance to and prejudice against reviewing, let alone revising, ruling ideas. 
Oprah’s incredible Xmas journey
December 25th, 2006
Replay of South African trip rekindles joy in hearts of audience
But does “AIDS” mean only one treatment?
Oprah visited South Africa about two years ago, and celebrated Christmas by rerunning the segment this Christmas Day.
She gave clothes to poor children there, who were quite transformed by the simple gifts, which were the only decent costume they had had for quite a while, if ever. The joy that broke out in the hall was ecstatic. Children ran to hug Oprah and say “I love you Oprah”. “I love you too”, Oprah replied. She also handed out each child a box with packaged food for a month. Afterwards she broke out in loud sobs, as she walked away from the event.
((Click pics twice for maximum enlargement)).
She then visited the home of a (soon to be) AIDS orphan and then went with her to the mother lying in the hospital, hollow eyed, one eye grotesquely larger than the other, with “AIDS”, although the public hospital had no drugs to treat her, because the government had not provided any, the black doctor explained to Oprah.
Oprah broke down at this and cried in public, sobbing “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it.” When she finished sobbing, she hugged the child for a long moment that the cameras caught in full.
Later, she tells us that she has now discovered her purpose in life, and the reason why she has never married. It is to use her voice to rescue the children of South Africa from the rural sex orgy spreading HIV among their parents.
Now, she reports from stage today, the government has agreed to supply drugs. She wants you to find the same joy in giving by doing something for these people, whose country has more people with AIDS than any other. You can contribute to her “Angel Network” which presumably will send more drugs.
Question: If the woman was not treated for AIDS, was she treated for anything else? The doctor told Oprah she was treated for her symptoms, but the response seemed to be only acquiescence to Oprah’s question in this regard. So evidently what was meant was any symptoms were alleviated as far as possible.
The mother subsequently died. If she died of TB, was she treated for TB, or not? Presumably not effectively. Why not? is there a shortage of antibiotics or whatever cures TB, or is African TB too lethal in poor people? It certainly is rampant in Africa, and a new strain is said to be causing new problems.
Bottom line: Does the diagnosis of supposed AIDS mean that they don’t bother to give a mother any antibiotics? Surely not.
But one suspects that this is a possibility. Once “AIDS” is the diagnosis, the assumption of everybody involved is that only Western drugs can save the patient.
Certainly this is the assumption of all viewers of this segment, which follows a repeat of Oprah’s “Buy Red with Bono” show a couple of weeks ago.
At this rate Dr Anthony Fauci is probably in love with Oprah, who has become the largest propaganda spokesman for the standard wisdom in AIDS short of WHO.
Audience: 7 million or more.
This blog is designed to be a guide to better science and social perspective in public policy through a continuing series of posts highlighting error and clarifying confusion in certain scientific fields where paradigms are sustained beyond their shelf life and supported only by politics and propaganda, such as cancer and HIV/AIDS, and it includes a set of links to relevant other sites, which blogroll is lower down in the sidebar on the right. 
The overriding purpose is to combat group think and the political and social propaganda of government agencies and other large social systems, public and corporate, which induce conformist group think and unthinking social compliance, somewtimes with blatant error, by comparing current established beliefs and claims in science and elsewhere with the scholarly professional and research literature, and especially to defend the values of science and good scientists in the paradigm wars of HIV/AIDS, cancer, evolution, global warming, nutrition, particle physics, economics, religious belief and any other disputes over replacing doubtful ideas against conformity, prejudice, subjectivity and self-interest, standing up for free speech and publication against the tendency of the authorities to repress revolutionary ideas, and mining corrective truths buried in the professional journals and commonly overlooked by harried hacks. 
This is my battle with John Maddox [editor of Nature] and with people who are actually fabricating the data [Ascher et al in Nature, March 11, 1993]. They claim to have such a group that had not used any drugs. When I analyzed the data, it turned out that there was not a single person in their paper that was drug-free. I submitted a critique to Maddox, but his response was, I could no longer respond. I was censored. – Peter Duesberg (left), interview with Bob Guccione, Spin magazine, September, 1993.
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