Science Guardian

One of the qualifications of the blog host that allows him to treat the HIV∫AIDS issue with more decisiveness than other science reporters is that he has been investigating it for thirty years, a record matched by no mainstream reporters (none of these have explored the justifcation for the paradigm with any enthusiasm,) and few others (John Lauritsen and Celia Farber being noble exceptions).

Perhaps the most shameful aspect of the paradigm battle is that the original two interviews he did with the paradigm inventor himself, Robert Gallo, in the first few years of the era of HIV∫AIDS still stand as well as any later coverage in revealing just how lacking in justification the paradigm claim was and is. Not only did they amount to a virtual confession by Robert Gallo that his position was entirely self serving and without any scientific basis, but the holes they exposed are the same holes that are showing in the flimsy fabric of HIV∫AIDS theory today, although in some cases they are bigger and also there are more of them.

Here is the first interview, conducted over the phone with Dr Gallo who picked up the phone in his office after his secretary had left, and although impatient with every challenge raised by Peter Duesberg to his thinking was somehow induced to stay in the line for a very thorough quiz.

INTERVIEW ROBERT GALLO (1)

By Anthony Liversidge

Published in Spin Feb. 1988

Introduction (by columnist Celia Farber and the staff of SPIN):
Dr. Robert Gallo, the codiscoverer of HIV, the “AIDS virus,” finally responds to Dr. Peter Duesberg’s charges that we are fighting the wrong cause of AIDS.

Gallo has refused to answer questions about the HIV controversy, even declining to make appearances unless guaranteed that no questions will be asked regarding Duesberg and his critique of HIV. For the first time, however, in this exclusive interview with Anthony Liversidge, Robert Gallo responds.

AL: What do you think of Peter Duesberg’s thesis that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS? Should one keep an open mind on the question?

RG: No, I don’t think anybody needs to keep an open mind on that. It is silly, OK?

AL: Is there any flaw in his logic that is easy for you to point out?

RG: No. He’s a good fellow. It’s a useless interchange. Really totally useless. He’s an organic chemist. I would never argue with him about the electron spin resonance in a molecule of organic compound.

Peter doesn’t understand the biology of what he is talking about. Period. Simple as that. He doesn’t know what it means to prove something causes something or to demonstrate it. As anybody in the business knows who works in it, there is more evidence that this virus causes AIDS than you have with the vast majority of diseases you long ago have accepted. There’s no story. I am not going to say any more. I am not going to be drawn into nonsense.

AL: But isn’t Cancer Research, where Peter Duesberg published his survey of the evidence in March 1987, a respected journal?

RG: Yeah. He is a legitimate molecular biologist. He can publish reviews and opinions if he wants to. But I don’t think anyone at Cancer Research would buy that that virus doesn’t cause the disease if they know anything about AIDS. I’am on the editorial board. Or at least I was for many years until a few years ago. It [Duesberg’s survey] is irrelevant. Any scientist can publish a hypothesis on something silly. The article is damaging mostly to Peter.

AL: Well, is someone going to reply to it?

RG: You can reply to it if you wish. I am certainly not going to! It’s ludicrous. If I saw a man get hit by a truck and run over and you asked, “Did you get the proof? Did the truck do it?” OK, it comes to something like that. Silly.

AL: But Duesberg points out that only very low levels of viral RNA have been detected in AIDS antibody-positive blood samples, and that sick AIDS patients have no measurable amount of virus in the blood?

RG: Low levels? He does not know what he is talking about. He is quoting our data that the virus doesn’t infect a number of cells. Cock and horse shit. Baloney. He misinterprets the experiments we published. The virus doesn’t infect only a small number of cells. It infects a lot of cells. It is only expressed at one time in a small number of cells. [This is] so silly it defies belief. It’s a waste of time. You can keep it going in the popular press and such nonsense can go on forever. Doesn’t make any sense to respond to it. No thinking scientist involved in the problem knows anything else but that there is one single cause of AIDS, period. I said it in 1983 almost, early 1984, publicly in the spring, and there is no need to say it again. The proof is there.

Furthermore, hasn’t Duesberg ever understood indirect mechanisms in cell killing? There are immune responses to the virus that destroy the proliferation of the T cell. That’s crystal clear now. It is not just a matter of the virus going in and killing the cell directly. Does that take a genius?

AL: Are you going to publish anything in the near future that will act as an additional weight of evidence that the HIV virus is truly the cause?

RG: There is no need for additional evidence. Let me explain something to you. Robert Koch never satisfied his own postulates [Koch’s postulates, the criteria that need to be satisfied before a microorganism is counted as the cause of a disease]. It is almost impossible to do so completely in medicine. He found the cause of TB and of cholera without fulfilling his own postulates in either case. But everyone knows that caused the disease. Now we have come close to Koch’s Postulates because of accidents, the blood transfusions that took place before the blood test existed. Every single blood donor and every single recipient of blood who wasn’t in a risk group who got AIDS, we blindly tested. That’s published a long time ago. With 28 people, blood was sent to us blind, we got AIDS for no known risk groups. Every one of them had the virus and the majority of them had no other detectable pathogen known to man. More importantly, when you checked the blood each one got, at least one of the donors was positive in the donor group at a time when there was hardly any virus in America. That’s back in 1983 or 1982.

On top of that, the vast majority of the people who donated the blood are now dead with AIDS. That’s just one small point. You don’t have the luxury with most other organisms. But I wouldn’t need that to say this virus is the cause of AIDS. In every country in the world where this has been studied, and it now includes the majority, there was no AIDS until this virus arrived. Then there is AIDS two years later.

AL: How about the fact that there is no explanation yet of the mechanism by which the virus becomes active after a long period of dormancy - three to five years or longer?

RG: Peter Duesberg doesn’t understand latency. He works with chicken viruses which cause cancer in two weeks. Do you think you get cancer in two weeks in nature? You know as a layperson when you some cigarettes you don’t get cancer the next day. With HTLV-I, the 1978 leukemia virus we discovered, you don’t get cancer for 20 years. He doesn’t understand latency. It takes time for retroviruses in nature to cause disease.

Arguing with Peter is like you arguing with me. The same level. Peter is an organic chemist. He is an excellent molecular biologist and excellent organic chemist. But he knows less than most people about the biology of the system - medicine and about epidemiology.

AL: How do you explain the ten percent of sick AIDS patients who don’t have antibodies to the virus, and the study that found that the virus cannot be isolated from 50 percent of them?

RG: They have the virus. In isolation you don’t have it. Look, you read in the paper about a person infected in a lab outside NIH. That person has the opposite - he had antibody and no virus… until the tenth attempt at culture. Then they isolated the virus three times in a row by slightly altering conditions. Because the virus tropism was more to macrophage than to the target T4 lymphocyte.

You don’t have antibodies in people till a long time after disease occurs. Look, they have monkey models right now for Christ’s sake. So-called SIV retrovirus produces AIDS in monkeys and about 25 percent of the monkeys don’t give antibodies at all.

This is just so trite that it is a waste of my goddamn time. I’m busy. Peter can do a lot of disservice. He has now indicated to people that they can go out and fuck around and get infected by this virus and not worry. That’s the part where I am mad at Peter. Peter is joking about very serious matters that are going to alter some people’s behaviour. Even if it is only one percent of the population who think they can go around doing what they want. The whole world has ignored Duesberg, including scientists who want to come into the field afresh flashing their Nobel prizes, right? No one challenges the cause of the disease! I mean, what an I going to say? He really and truthfully is a close friend of mine, would you believe it?

AL: In his acknowledgement to his Cancer Research article, Duesberg thanks you for your discussions during its preparation. You failed to persuade him, it seems.

RG: Oh, I never tried to persuade Peter. I never sent him anything. Discussions, I mean, you know, it’s like you laugh at him. What are you going to say to him? I don’t get into any discussions; you can’t. I mean, do you know him? There’s the problem. You have got to know him. It’s hard to explain to somebody because it sounds like you don’t want to talk bad about your colleagues and you’re friends. Peter is a wonderful person in many respects and he is brilliant in some respects, but he has certain ways of behaving different from most people. If you knew him you would know what I mean. I am not going to say any more.

AL: But the picture he presents, that the virus doesn’t appear in substantial amounts at any stage…?

RG: Look, it’s utter nonsense, destructive nonsense, it can boomerang not only in his face, but in the lives of people. Dangerous nonsense. The evidence is overwhelming that this is the cause of the disease. We have more evidence that this virus causes AIDS than we have for virtually any other disease known to man, save that which we have prevented with a vaccine. Hit by a truck is the analogy I like to use.

No country escapes this disease once this virus is introduced. No country has AIDS that doesn’t have the virus and vice versa. That’s one of Koch’s postulates, of course. Another is that we have to relate the animal with the disease; well we not only have the animal with the related virus almost the same in a monkey, causing AIDS, but you have this virus causing disease by accident through inoculation into people through the blood transfusions in the old days before our blood tests came along. What has our blood test done for the blood supply? Doesn’t that tell you something? It has taken away blood transfusions for AIDS all over the world. Jesus Christ, whaddaya want?

AL: Duesberg believes the simian [monkey] model for AIDS is not satisfactory - are you saying he is out of date?

RG: No, you have to know the man. I don’t know how to make it clear without sounding like a son of a bitch. Peter is a funny guy. You’ll have to get to know him. Once you know him you’ll know what I mean.

AL: Much is at stake for many scientists, including yourself, in terms of prestige and funding, which are tied to the accepted theory. Is there any scientist in the field who wouldn’t be accused of having an ax to grind? Who can speak from the sideline?

RG: There’s no ax to grind. The whole world… everyone is working on the problem of this virus causing AIDS. There is nobody that doesn’t work on this virus causing AIDS. Nobody! Every virologist on earth will tell you the same thing. This is the cause of AIDS. I don’t know a single person that debates that. There is always somebody that can pull up to make some trouble! I mean the virus is created in my lab. Or even though we predicted that a virus like this couldn’t cause it, OK, well, it has caused it, but maybe the French found it first. I mean, it is one goddamn event after another. It’s like a no-win situation. Everyone knows this is the cause of AIDS. Except maybe two people. There is no debate. Call 5,000 scientists and ask. Anyone who reads and understands infectious diseases, virology, and cancer. Or any aspect of it.

AL: So you don’t subscribe to the idea of any cofactor at all that, in combination with HIV, causes AIDS?

RG: HIV would cause AIDS in Clark Kent, given the right dose and the right strain of the virus. Given the right dose and right route of administration and the right time in someone’s life. Alone in and of itself. No doubt in my mind.

However, that doesn’t mean cofactors can’t make things more likely. The biggest cofactor is the virus itself - the dose - that’s a chance. The dose you get is critical like in all biology. People don’t seem to let that sink into their heads. Dose is important. One man’s dose is not another man’s dose.

Route of infection is also important. Low dose, infection by some routes and you are going to ward off infection. But walloping dose, intravenously, it is unlikely you can escape the devastating effects of the virus.

The next cofactor is variants. One causes the disease, the others may not. We know that from animal models and related retroviruses. Now having said that, how much more efficient do you want than almost 50 percent already? How many agents that cause disease have that rate? How many people get TB that are infected with the organism?

AL: But Duesberg points out that there is so little virus found in the blood, far fewer cells are infected in two days that the blood normally regenerates.

RG: That’s nonsense. He knows the total number of infected people now. But the total number of infected people in time - it has a long latency. Know what I mean?

AL: Yes, but these low titers [measures of the virus] he is talking about…

RG: What low titers? That’s the low number of cells that express the virus at any one time, not the number of cells that contain viral genomes. And the virus moves from cell to cell so that it may be in 0.1, one or two percent of the T4 cells at one time, but then it kills those cells and moves to another one or two percent. And the point is that it also works by indirect mechanisms. Suppressor proteins block T cell proliferation. You know when you deplete a population by a virus, it is not always a matter of direct virus infects cells and kills cells. That’s only a small part of the pathogenesis of this virus. It also kills people by going to the brain. We showed that in 1984. Four years ago we demonstrated that.

AL: So your basic theoretical framework is quite different from his, in fact?

RG: The difference in my theoretical framework is that I understand biology and something of medicine and Peter doesn’t understand either and that’s a fact.

AL: He has said that he wouldn’t be unwilling to be injected by the virus in otherwise uncontaminated solution. Would you feel he was committing suicide?

RG: I have no doubt he would be committing suicide with pathogenic strains of the virus, not the attenuated lab strains. You already have that evidence. Kids who get the virus from their mothers die rapidly. The rate is such that a good 40 to 50 percent die with this virus fast. No virus that I know of, save rabies and smallpox, has any greater efficiency. Do you know any?

Are you positive for the TB test? Most people are. The majority of the human population ten years ago was positive for TB. That means they got infected. How many got clinical TB? Are the majority of Americans running around with clinical TB?

AL: You mean that they create immunity?

RG: That’s the whole point. A great number of them don’t get the disease, right? Or it becomes a ve