In the cuckoo land of HIV "science" anything becomes possible. To combat the effects of an agent declared soon after its discovery as being inevitably lethal after a dormancy of ten to fifteen years (now, how could that be known?), HIV positives, sick and symptom-free alike, were put on the drug AZT, which was billed as "antiviral." AZT was developed in the 1960s as a chemotherapy for leukemia but never released because of its toxicity. It's known as a "nucleoside analog" drug, or DNA chain terminator, which means it stops the molecule from copying. It kills cells that try to reproduce. The idea for cancer treatment is that a short, shock program of maybe two or three weeks will kill the tumor while only half-killing the patient, and then you get him off it as quickly as possible. You can't take something like that four times a day indefinitely and expect to live. (Although some people don't metabolize it but pass it straight through; hence the few long-term AZT survivors that are pointed at to show how benign it is).
Chemotherapies are notoriously immunosuppressive. The "side effects" look just like AIDS. Officially acknowledged effects of nucleoside analog drugs include diarrhea, dementia, lymphoma (cancer), muscle wasting, and T-cell depletion, which are also AIDS-defining conditions. Christine Maggiore, director of the West Coast-based organization Alive & Well, who, after being given a positive diagnosis and sternly delivered death-sentence that turned out to be false, went on to research the entire subject exhaustively and became an activist to share her findings. In her highly informative book, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? (2000) she describes these medications superbly as "AIDS by Prescription."
Yet this is the treatment of choice. Nobody says it actually cures or stops AIDS, but the recipients have been told that they're due to die anywaywhich could possibly be one of the most ghastly self-fulfilling prophecies in modern medical history. The claim is that it brings some temporary respite, based on results of a few trials in which the augurs of biochemistry saw signs of short-term improvementalthough bad data were knowingly included, and other commentators have dismissed the trials as worthless. 254 In any case, it is known that a body subjected to this kind of toxic assault can mobilize last-ditch emergency defenses for a while, even when terminal. A sick chicken might run around the yard for a few seconds when you cut its head off, but that isn't a sign that the treatment has done it any good.
In the fifteen years or so up to the late eighties, the life expectancy of hemophiliacs doubled. This was because improved clotting factorthe substance they can't make for themselvesmeant fewer transfusions. The cumulative burden of constantly infused foreign proteins eventually wears down an immune system and opens the way for infections. Many also acquired HIV, but the death rates of those testing positive and negative were about the same. Then, from around the late eighties, the mortality of the HIV positives from conditions diagnosed as AIDS rose significantly, and a widely publicized study cited this as proof that their AIDS was due to HIV. 255 What it didn't take into account, however, was that only the HIV positives were put on AZT. Nobody was giving AZT to the HIV negatives. Peter Duesberg believes that AZT and other "antivirals" are responsible for over half the AIDS being reported today.
The AZT story of hastily rushing into print to claim miracle cures based on selective anecdotal reporting and uncompleted trials performed without controls seems to have been repeated with the new drug "cocktails" based on protease inhibitors (PIs). The theory that's proclaimed is similar to that of nucleoside analogs in that the aim is to disrupt the replication of HIV, but this time by inhibiting the protease enzyme crucial to assembling the virus. However, despite their "antiviral" labeling, these drugs have no way of distinguishing between HIV protease and the human proteases that are essential to the digestive process, resulting in a list of ill effects every bit as daunting as that pertaining to AZT, including kidney and liver failure, strokes, heart attacks, and gross deformities. 256
Researchers who have worked with PIs all their professional lives state flatly that they are incapable of doing what the highly publicized claims say they do. 257 The efficacy of the drugs is assessed by measuring the reduction of the number designated "viral load," which has never been shown to correspond to anything defining sickness in the real, physical world. As a "control," the viral load of those given cocktails is compared with the former level when they received AZT. A decrease in the number is taken as meaning that the cocktails have reduced sickness. To me this sounds a bit like saying that beer cures hangovers because the headache you wake up with isn't as bad as the one you get from whiskey.
One thing the cocktail drugs can be credited with without doubt is the resurgence to even greater heights of extravaganza of drug-company advertising, following a growing disenchantment with AZT. PIs are hyped as working the "miracle" of reducing AIDS mortality by 50 percent as reflected in the figures reported since the mid nineties. A closer look at them, however, shows the story not to be quite that straightforward. The greatest reductions occurred in 1995, which was before PIs had been approved for general use, and in 1996, by which time somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of HIV positive cases had been issued prescriptions for them. As mentioned above, in 1993 the definition of AIDS was expanded by the Centers for Disease Control, causing a large increase in the number of people qualifying as AIDS patients. One of the new diagnostic conditions was having a CD4 T-cell count of 200 or less at some point during a given year, no HIV positive condition being necessary. From 1993 forward, the majority of declared new AIDS cases were individuals with no clinical illness. When the size of a population hitherto consisting for the most part of people who are sick in one way or another is suddenly increased by the addition of large numbers of people who are illness-free, this must result in an increased survival rate for the overall population. It has to do with the restructuring and labeling of statistical groups, not with the effects of any treatment.