Science Guardian

Anthony Fauci may spill his coffee when he read “Out of Control”, everyman’s guide to the HIV?AIDS scam

Duesberg gets his due as the whistleblower of the Enron of science

The red and white cover flap of the new Harpers that will appears on news stands Tuesday (and is already in some mailboxes) will surprise many with one of its headlined stories, and we are not referring to the most obvious bombshell.

The immediate attention getter will be the white headline that shouts IMPEACH HIM in giant capitals, a demand which is Lewis Lapham’s climactic swansong as editor. The urbane long time editor and social critic is leaving the helm of the influential journal this month, and his cover essay, “The Case For Impeachment: Why We Can No Longer Afford George Bush” is a nine page indictment of our friendly President as a outlaw and a “thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use”:

The Conyers report doesn’t return to the President’s focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleeza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.”…

Footnote 13: As of January 17, 2006, the rap sheet listed 2,229 American military dead in Iraq together with an unknown number of Iraqi civilians; what looks to be the sum of $1 trillion, by some estimates $2 trillion, already committed to The Project for the American Century’s real estate development in the Mesopotamian desert.

This manifesto (which we haven’t had time to read properly yet) will be followed by a public forum titled more politely “Is There a Case for Impeachment?” at Town Hall on March 2, featuring Lapham, Rep. John Conyers, Michael Ratner, and Elizabeth Holtzman, with Sam Seder as moderator.

What this loud Parthian shot into the White House from Lapham should only initially upstage in reader’s minds, however, is a much more unexpected indictment of skulduggery in Washington listed second on the ad flap and the cover: “The AIDS Machine: Celia Farber on HIV Drugs and the Corruption of Science”.

The article, which otherwise has the title “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science” on the actual white cover and inside the magazine, takes up 15 center pages without a break.

As a literary work, “Out of Control” can be crudely but fairly described as an armor penetrating, morally fueled missile aimed at the heart of the HIV?AIDS medical-scientific-pharmaceutical complex, the corrupt administrative headquarters of the many hundreds of ongoing, illfounded and lethal (to some participants) HIV?AIDS drug trials at NIAID.

It will grip the ordinary reader with its beginning. The article starts off with the chilling story of the obviously needless death of Joyce Ann Hafford, a pregnant single mother, from nevirapine, the toxic drug which supposedly stops HIV transferring to a newborn. The trial did not even have a placebo group, because it was simply intended to compare the known unpleasant if not deadly impact of nevirapine with the equally nasty medication AZT. This black 33 year old, otherwise in perfect health, whose AIDS diagnosis was based one questionable HIV antibody test, soon suffered monstrous symptoms, but was not taken off the drug until just before she gave birth and then died.

“Her health started to deteriorate from the moment she went on the drugs,” said (her older sister) King….She said to me, ‘Nell’_that’s what she called me-’I have to get through this. I can’t let my baby get that virus.’”…By this time all she could keep down was cans of Ensure. Her blood was drawn for lab tests, but she was not taken off the study drugs… She was admitted to the hospial’s ICU with “acute and sub-acute necrosis of the liver, secondary to drug toxicity, acute renal failure, anemia, septicemia, premature separation of the placenta”, and threatened “premature labor.” She was finally taken off the drugs but was already losing consciousness…. Hafford’s last words were a request to be put on a breathing tube.

Following this story to make strong men weep, the relentless Farber demolishes the credibility of all nevirapine work at NIAID and calls into question the ethics and the scientific control of the entire DAIDS operation.

One can imagine NIAIDS director Anthony Fauci having difficulty breathing as he reads this work. Long and judiciously phrased, the finely polished piece seems irrefutable as it exposes the horrors of HIV?AIDS drug trials at NIAID as little more than knowing medical murder in one case, and then shows how the vicious corruption and antiscience they embody has been enabled and protected by the religious doctrine of HIV=AIDS, a paradigm which has been thrown like a protective mantle over everything that vast federal funds have been spent on in this area.

That the fabric of this theoretical mantle is threadbare to the point of disintegration is convincingly suggested by a final section describing the ideas and activities of Peter Duesberg, fairly presented as the one scientist with the intellect, the expertise, the public spirit and the sense of scientific honor to review the HIV claim objectively when it was first made, and when he found that it was worthless, to stick to his guns through twenty years of funding strangulation and professional ostracism.

The section on Duesberg completes the piece in a way which should leave very little doubt in the reader’s mind that he is right, and that the calumny heaped upon his reputation and the refusal to listen to his critique is political, sociological, and emotional in nature, and without scientific merit. The clincher in the final paragraphs is a brief account of how the promising results of his research into the source of cancer have won him renewed respect and attention from his peers at the NIH and other leading institutes, whose public relations people are now striving in the service of NIAIDS director Fauci to prevent this spilling over into a second look at Duesberg’s sustained HIV?AIDS critique.

Farber’s contribution is by no means over with this seminal piece. For as noted on the first page of “Out of Control”, she is writing a book on her years of AIDS reporting for Melville House, a young but already distinguished publisher in New York City.

The title is “Serious Adverse Events”, the euphemism used in the NIAID drug trials for death. As this reminds us, the consequences of maintaining a false paradigm in HIV?AIDS over two decades, which is what all the signs point to, have been deadly for thousands of individuals.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.