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A Virus Fixation

Although not a lot is said publicly, a growing number of scientific and medical professionals are becoming skeptical of the received dogma but tend, especially in times of uncertainty over careers and funding, to keep a low profile. When you see what happened to Duesberg, you can see why. Maybe after his derailing of the previous gravy train by showing cancers were not virally induced, nobody was going to let him loose on this one. He was subjected to ridicule and vilification, abused at conferences, and his funding cut off to the point that by the end of the eighties he could no longer afford a secretary. In two years, he had seventeen applications for funding for research on alternative AIDS hypotheses turned down. Graduate students were advised to shun his classes or risk adverse consequences to their careers. Publication in the mainstream scientific literature was denied—even the right of reply to personal attacks carried in the journal Nature, violating the most fundamental of scientific ethical traditions. His scheduled appearances on talk shows were repeatedly canceled at the last moment upon intervention by officials from the NIH and CDC.

Duesberg has been accused of irresponsibility on the grounds that his views threaten confidence in public health-care programs based on the HIV dogma. But scientific truth doesn't depend on perceived consequences. Public policy should follow science. Attempting to impose the reverse becomes Lysenkoism. And in any case, what have those programs achieved that should command any confidence? After all these years they have failed to save a life or produce a vaccine. (And if they did, to whom would it be given? The function of a vaccine is to stimulate the production of antibodies. By definition, HIV-positive individuals have them already. If they are given the HIV negatives and they work, then everyone will presumably become an AIDS case. So, finally, the prediction of a global pandemic will have come true.) No believable mechanism has been put forward as to how HIV kills T-cells. And billions of dollars continue to be spent every year on trying to unravel the mysteries of how HIV can make you sick without being present, and how an antibody can neutralize the virus but not suppress the disease. Scientific principles that have stood well for a hundred years are arbitrarily discarded to enable what's offered as logic to hang together at all, and the best that can be done at the end of it all is to prescribe a treatment that's lethal even if the disease is not. Yet no looking into alternatives is permitted; all dissenting views are repressed. This is not the way of science, but of a fanatical religion putting down heresy.

The real victim, perhaps not terminally ill but looking somewhat jaded at the moment, is intellectual honesty and scientific rigor. Maybe in its growth from infancy, science too has to learn how to make antibodies to protect itself from opportunistic infection and dogmatism. There was a time when any questioning of Ptolemy's geocentric model of the cosmos was greeted with the same outrage and fury. Perhaps one day Peter Duesberg will be celebrated as the biological Copernicus who challenged late-twentieth-century medical science's viricentered model of the universe. Just take viruses away from being the center around which everyone is trying to make everything revolve, let the other parts fall naturally into place, and suddenly the whole picture makes sense.

 

 

Section Notes

224 Oprah Winfrey Show, February 18, 1987

225 Duesberg, 1996, p. 210

226 Duesberg, 1996, Chapters 4, 5

227 See Duesberg, 1992 for a full account of the theory

228 Root-Bernstein, 1993

229 Maggiore, 2000, p. 46

230 Thomas, 1993

231 Thomas et al., 1994

232 Duesberg, 1996, pp. 174–186

233 Papudopulos et al, 1993

234 Science 224: pp. 497–500; 503–505; 506–508

235 Duesberg, 1992, p. 210

236 Ibid., p. 222

237 Papudopulos et al., 1996; Lanka, 1995

238 De Harven, 1998

239 Lanka, 1995

240 Ransom and Day, 2000, p. 71; Maggiore, 2000, p. 11

241 Shenton, 1998, p. 164

242 Papadopulos-Eluopulos et al., 1993

243 Turner and McIntire, 1999

244 Philpott and Johnson, 1996

245 Craddock, 1995 and 1996

246 See Malan, 2002, for the story of a journalist true-believer who became an apostate.

247 Geshekter, 1998

248 Quoted in Hodgkinson, 1993

249 Papadopulos-Eluopulos et al., 1995

250 Johnson, 2001

251 Johnson, 1994, cites health care costs in Nigeria falling from $10–20 per person in 1974 to 3 cents in 1994

252 Shenton, 1998

253 Geshekter, 1998

254 For example, Lauritsen, 1990

255 Darby et al., 1989

256 Maggiore, 2000, p. 34

257 Rasnick, 1996

 

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