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. 
Companies back down on HIV∫AIDS claim
October 20th, 2006
Astonishing revelation on Barnes blog by Culshaw
Elite critics reach critical mass on expanded blog
In an extraordinary development, companies making HIV tests are backing down on their claim that HIV is the undisputed cause of AIDS.
Mathematician Rebecca Culshaw has just posted a very important note on the blog Barnesworld, now renamed “You Bet Your Life”, at Dear Dr. Culshaw: “Well, What About Those Tests?”.
Culshaw has discovered that the inserts with AIDS tests show that the companies that make them have been backing down over the past year or two in the firmness of their statements that HIV is the cause of AIDS. She writes:
I doubt even more that the majority of medical practitioners are aware of the subtle but significant shift in the language used in HIV test kits since the beginning of the AIDS era. For example, from 1984 until the very recent past, test kit inserts contained the unambiguous statement “AIDS is caused by HIVâ€. In 2002, the OraSure toned down that statement to say: “AIDS, AIDS-related complex and pre-AIDS are thought to be caused by HIV.â€But just this year, in a remarkable – and potentially significant – shift in thinking, the trend seems to be toward making an even less committal statement. For example, Abbott Diagnostic’s ELISA test insert contains the following sentence: “Epidemiologic data suggest that the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is caused by at least two types of human immunodeficiency viruses, collectively known as HIV.â€
Vironostika appears to be even less willing to support a true causal role, as their 2006 test kit insert says: “Published data indicate a strong correlation between the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and a retrovirus referred to as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).â€
This remarkable shift in corporate conviction is as yet unexplained, but we suspect it has a lot to do with the appearance on the Web over the last two years of a copious amount of intelligent material undermining the sanctity of the paradigm, now increasingly crippled by mainstream papers removing the pillars of evidence supporting it.
Barnesworld heats up
One blog which has mercilessly tweaked the noses of the poobahs of paradigm power who act as the priesthood preserving the HIV∫AIDS claim from media and scientific review is of course Barnesworld, now retitled ‘Hank’s “You Bet Your Life”‘, which is run by a West Coast lawyer under the pseudonym of Hank Barnes, who among other credits has mercilessly gone after John Moore of Cornell for his sins in misleading the public with his pretence that the scientific review of the HIV∫AIDS paradigm by its critics is not worth answering.
Recently the site has become more of a must read as it has expanded its offerings to include posts which are reprints of key material offered by the best HIV∫AIDS critics over the years, prepared by a new young partner, Otis, as well as original posts by the same elite group.
A couple of days ago a notable excerpt from science writer, editor and professor Harvey Bialy’s seminal book Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg, Harvey Bialy: “I Remember Maddox” detailed a similar backing down by Nature editor John Maddox from an adamant hostility to Peter Duesberg’s critique of HIV∫AIDS nonsense to an acknowledgement of its merit, and an opening of its pages to his latest critique, a surrender that unfortunately didn’t last very long (the volatile Bialy is pictured here with his peacable pet parrot Attila):
The years since 1995 have been much kinder to the points raised above, and that Peter and I elaborated in the remainder of the Genetica essay, than they have to David Ho and his fanciful notions of what constituted viral and cellular dynamics in an AIDS patient and how to measure them — ideas that have been thoroughly repudiated in the scientific literature. This is a fact of such common knowledge that stating it requires no reference.But as with so much else in AIDS there is an enormous disconnect between what is told to the media to tell to the public and what is really so as acknowledged now even in the best journals, like JAMA.
Although the waffle language is closer to what is found in difficult to negotiate UN resolutions than the prose expected of esteemed journals only a few short decades ago, the students in PH253 and the rest of the attentive audience will not miss the inescapable, and only proper scientific conclusion after 20+ years of assuming HIV was appropriately named*. And that conclusion is?
It’s not the virus. Our bad.
Another post this week republished part of science journalist and author (AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, Fourth Estate, UK, 1996) Neville Hodgkinson’s review of how Uganda has failed to realize the dire predictions of AIDS doomsayers that 30 per cent of its population would be dead by now of AIDS. That is at Neville Hodgkinson on AIDS in Uganda.
Over the next 15 years, prestigious newspapers and magazines across the globe repeatedly published similar reports; the consensus was that a devastating proportion of the Ugandan population was doomed by Aids to premature death, with all the consequences on families and the society as a whole. Their predictions announced the practically inevitable collapse of the country in which the worldwide epidemic supposedly originated.The data seemed authoritative. By mid-1991, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was estimating that 1.5m Ugandans, nearly a tenth of the general population and a fifth of those sexually active, had the HIV infection. WHO predicted that in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, child deaths in the 1990s could increase by as much as 30% because of Aids. In November 1996, the agency reported that more than three million children were already feeling the direct impact of Aids in Uganda alone.
Today the public prints and airwaves are still full about the African “Aids crisisâ€. But you will read little about Aids in Uganda. The reason: all prophecies have proved false, as the results of a 10-year census published last year has shown. Uganda’s population grew at an average annual rate of 3.4% between 1991 and 2002, one of the highest growth rates in the world, due to persistently high fertility levels (about seven children per woman) and a decline in infant and childhood mortality rates. Economic development has also shown constant growth over the same period reflecting the energy and determination of Ugandans to improve their living conditions. Fewer people are testing HIV-positive and nationally, the figure is now put at around 5%.
Further down is a replay of Peter Duesberg’s analysis of the same topic, Peter Duesberg on AIDS in Africa, presented to the South African AIDS Advisory Panel convened by President Thabo Mbeki in 2001, just before the Durban AIDS Conference.
Thus African AIDS is certainly not one of the historical microbial epidemics described by Camus and Anderson (see above). Since no immunity has emerged in over a decade the restriction of African AIDS to a relatively small fraction of the large reservoir of susceptible people indicates non-contagious risk factors that are limited to certain subsets of the African population.In view of the very small share (0.6%) that the African AIDS epidemic seems to hold on Africa’s total mortality, the question arises whether the mortality claimed for AIDS is in fact new and can be distinguished from conventional mortality, or whether it is a minor fraction of conventional mortality under a new name.
In its mix of new and old contributions by elite HIV∫AIDS critics, Barnesworld is now asserting itself as the leading group blog attacking the HIV∫AIDS paradigm on the Web.
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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