"Gos" began:

SUBJ: Straight from the headlines

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2004039427_uwresearch28m.html

Now, I want to say that this one example doesn't prove by itself that the whole AIDS research industry is corrupt, and it is not my intention to attempt to prove such.

However, the article cites Denny Liggitt, chairman of the UW's Department of Comparative Medicine, as saying that this incident was a result of heavy competition for funding, a condition which is ubiquitous throughout the world of AIDS research.

Now, it stands to reason that if the fiecre competition for funding corrupted this one researcher, it has corrupted others as well.

You and I may disagree as to the extent of the corruption in the AID$ industry, but if you deny that said corruption exists, which one of us is the denialist?

--- Gos

"BioLad" replied:

Gos,
Unfortunately, anywhere there are people there will end up being corruption of one sort or another. Sadly that seems to be a common attribute in many people. At least they are exposing his actions and taking care of it. Say what one will about the AIDS research and money ect... but when the scientific community realized something was wrong they tried to correct him publicly, not cover it up as many conspiracy theories would predict.

This is a lesser version of the stem cell incident in Korea. Yes, there are and will always be in any field people who try to get ahead through less than noble means. That is why scientific papers are peer reviewed and why, in the end, they have more to lose by falsifying data, than they gain. BTW, I am not saying this guy truly did alter his data. It looks like a pretty open and shut case but I stop short or saying he definitely did until all the data comes in. Still working on your e-mail; I've been busy so far this week.

-JM


"Gos" replied:

It may be true that the scientific community has addressed this one case. However, you yourself have acknowledged Gallo's "less than noble" actions, which have never been corrected. And as for peer review, what peer review occurred between his announcement at that press conference and about 5 seconds later when the whole scientific community accepted his claim as fact without a shred of proof?

This recent incident may be a lesser version of the Hwang Woo Suk incident, but the Gallo incident is a much greater version, and Gallo has gotten away with it about 10 times longer than Hwang Woo Suk did, and the scientific community has done nothing to address it, instead they have aggressively covered it up.

The corruption goes all the way to the top.

--- Gos

"BioLad" replied:

Gos,
Peer review was when his peers read his paper and determined something was amiss.

I have said that I believe Gallo is likely to have stolen a sample of the virus, yes (and as always, I admit could be wrong). That does not mean that the conclusions of many many other researchers were false, nor does it mean that he (Gallo) was incorrect in deducing its role in AIDS. IF he did in fact steal a sample of HIV and claim it as his own, I think it would be more likely that he realized its importance as the cause of AIDS and wanted the credit than a story of him making up HIV and pretending that the nonexistent organism caused AIDS.

This would require not only that he were a fraud but also that every other scientist who ever worked on HIV be either a fraud or too stupid to realize that everything they have done in their labs is completely impossible. If you were saying that this was the case then I wouldn't really see any point in debating any more as conspiracy theorists who hold this view can rarely if ever be swayed.

But, I don't think that is what you are saying so I shall go on. In terms of branding a position based on the actions one of founders, this is a slippery slope that leaves the dissident/denialist movement with problems, too. I do not like the idea of bringing up accusations against people but in this case it may be warranted since we are on such a topic.

If we need to address whether Gallo stole a sample of HIV (and as I said this would not really have an impact on any of the subsequent studies that have shown his assertion that HIV is the cause of AIDS to be correct) then we must also address the issue of Duesberg's (since he really promoted the nitrates-causes-AIDS idea) behaviour. I'm sure I don't have to go into detail about the story of Raphael Lombardo; his letter to Duesberg is still on the virusmyth site, I believe. Do you recall Duesberg's response to this situation?

If Gallo's behavior is enough to nix out 2 decades or research by independent labs throughout the world, then I would think that Duesberg's behavior should likewise be enough to nix the nitrates cause AIDS idea.

But then, I don't really believe that attacks on people are all that productive compared to data. The data has already shown that HIV and not drugs were the single defining factor in predicting the development of AIDS. We haven't reached this point in our debate/discussion yet though so I will stop there.

Just remember, no one is perfect. We cannot judge the validity of thousands of independent experiments based on the flaws of one man.

-JM


"Gos" replied:

Jean-Marc wrote: "Peer review was when his peers read his paper and determined something was amiss."

I'm assuming that you mean Brodie. I'm referring to Gallo's April 23, 1984 press conference, two weeks before his first paper on HIV was published for peer review. When did anyone have a chance to read his paper and determine whether something might be amiss? I mean, the USA Patriot Act was passed with more review, and most or all of the Congress had never read the thing before voting on it.

Jean-Marc wrote: "I have said that I believe Gallo is likely to have stolen a sample of the virus, yes ... That does not mean that the conclusions of many many other researchers were false, nor does it mean that he (Gallo) was incorrect in deducing its role in AIDS."

There are two things that you're not seeing here:

1) This is much larger than the mere theft of a viral sample -- Gallo was not out to steal a virus; he was out to steal what he thought would be a major discovery, and having stolen it, was thus committed to the notion that it was exactly the great discovery he believed it might be. Now, how many people do you know who aren't above stealing, but they'd never tell a lie? A guy's moral compass would have to be spinning like a windmill in a hurricane, to be a theif but not a liar.

2) Most importantly, the fact that he stole Montagnier's sample establishes a chain of evidence leading to a gay Frenchman who didn't have AIDS, he merely had swollen lymph nodes, and because he was gay and had swollen lymph nodes, he was considered to be in a "risk group" (and again with the diagnosis by prejudice -- it really does permeate the whole HIV/AID$ industry like the smell of rotten eggs.) I have attempted to ascertain what became of that man, but have been unable to do so. If you can find any documentation for me concerning whatever happened to him, I would appreciate a copy, because I've looked and I can't find a word, other than unconfirmed rumors that he is still alive. (And I really don't place much stock in those myself.)

At any rate, the odds were actually pretty long against him actually having HIV to begin with, when you consider that AIDS patients make up only a fraction of a percent of the total number of people with swollen lymph nodes in any given population in any given year, and even in countries where the gay community has been the hardest hit (especially the US,) HIV-negative gay males still outnumber HIV-positives -- and this was back in 1983, when HIV would have only had a few years to spread, in a country whose overall HIV seroprevalence has remained substantially lower than that of the US throughout the epidemic. So, just because he was gay and had swollen lymph nodes means nothing -- the odds were still actually pretty long against him actually having HIV to begin with, and as far as I can ascertain, he was never diagnosed as having AIDS.

So, it's not where Gallo got HIV that's relevant here, it's where Montagnier got it, and Montagnier got it from someone whose only documented common tie to US AIDS patients was being gay and having swollen lymph nodes, and who, so far as I can tell, never developed AIDS himself.

If HIV were a putative murder weapon in a court case, the chain of evidence would actually lead away from the scene of the crime rather than towards it. How do you isolate the virus that causes AIDS from someone who doesn't have the virus that causes AIDS?

Montagnier himself wasn't sure that this was what he'd discovered -- he thought it well might be, but he wasn't fully convinced, and so he sought a second opinion on it from Gallo, who subsequently stole it.

Now, from what I am able to gather from the bulk of documentation I've read on this chain of events, Gallo was unable to grow Montagnier's sample in his own lab (at least this is what Gallo claims -- hell, maybe he's lying about that too, for all I know anymore when it comes to what comes out of his mouth.) So what he did was to invent a "co-culture" process, whereby he placed cells from a bunch of different persons believed to have AIDS or pre-AIDS into a culture with some leukemia cells he'd specially bred for the purpose, shock them with a bunch of chemical goodies, wave his hands over it, spin around three times and say the magic words, "Hocus pocus, mirrors and smokus," and POOF, he could mass-produce quantities of these "viral" particles.

Now, I will admit that I myself do not fully understand some of the higher points of the debate between Duesberg and some other dissidents on the existence of HIV, and this is one reason that I remain for the most part agnostic on the existence issue, and it is on other grounds that I lean towards non-existence of HIV. In short, I don't claim to know whether or not the particles produced in Gallo's lab actually exist in the blood of AIDS patients as viral particles, however, I do see a rather strong possibility that what Gallo discovered wasn't a virus at all, it was a reproducible lab artefact.

At this point, I want to return to the subject of "science by press conference". According to Wikipedia, the term "science by press conference", refers to "people promoting scientific 'findings' of questionable scientific merit who turn to the media for attention when they are unlikely to win the approval of the professional scientific community."

Science by press conference has been used by the most notorious crooks in the scientific community -- more than once by human cloning interests since the turn of the millennium already, (one of them being Hwang Woo-Suk and another being Clonaid,) not to mention the "Cold Fusion", "Global Cooling", and "Nuclear Winter" fiascos of the 20th Century.

I once read an article about Suk in which a scientist was asked why he was able to fool the entire scientific community for more than two years, and the reply was, "We wanted to believe."

When a scientist holds a press conference to announce unpublished findings that everyone in the world wants to believe before he opens his mouth, look out, 'cause chances are you've just been had.

What Gallo had, as of the day he held his press conference, was a reproducible lab artefact and a lie everyone wanted to believe: That he'd discovered the cause of AIDS, that there would shortly be a test to determine, essentially with 100% accuracy, who had AIDS and who didn't, and that there would be a vaccine for it within two years. Two weeks later, when he published for the first time, it turned out that he hadn't been able to culture HIV at all from two out of three AIDS patients, but by this time, the bandwagon was rolling and it had already become a juggernaut from the weight of all the people jumping on.

You may counter by saying that Suk was eventually found out, but bear in mind that it took over two years before this happened -- in history, many hucksters have gotten away with worse for much longer. Gallo has been found out, and his checkered scientific history is well-documented by people like Duesberg (who, incidentally, is on a first-name basis with Gallo), John Crewsdon, and a whole host of others -- the only problem is, nobody (and most especially not the professional AIDS researchers, activists, and others whose very livelihoods are based on Gallo's lie) wants to disbelieve Gallo's lie, because if they did, the next words out of their mouths would be "You want fries with that?" You know, sorta like Dr. Peter Duesberg?

This being a sidebar and not part of the debate itself, there's one more tangent I want to take you on before I put this email to bed.

There's a very simple way that you can verify the falsehood inherent in the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and it can be summed up in a single phrase: "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS."

Now, how often do you see an article or an advertisement or a news story or whatever that mentions HIV, that doesn't include this phrase?

Let's have some fun:

Google search for exact phrase:

"HIV, the virus that causes AIDS" - 208,000 hits

"Clinton, the 42nd President" - 989 hits

"Clinton, the forty-second President" - 216 hits

"Mars, the 4th Planet" - 92 hits

"Mars, the fourth planet" - 1530 hits

"Washington, the 1st President" - 345 hits

"Washington, the first President" - 20,400 hits

"Bush, the forty-first president" - 465 hits

"Bush, the 41st President" - 796 hits

"Venus, the 2nd planet" - 44 hits

"Venus, the second planet" - 1430 hits

"Mars, the red planet" - 50,100 hits

208,000 / 74607 = 2.79 times more mentions on the web for the exact phrase "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS", than for the first President of the United States, the past three presidents, and Earth's two nearest planets combined.

After about a quarter century or so, why do the people need this constant reminder? Don't they already know that HIV is the cause of AIDS? Have you ever wondered about that?

There's a reason it must be repeated, over and over again, like a mantra -- it's the only way to make it true.

Josef Goebbels once said that if you told a big enough lie and repeated it often enough, people would believe it unquestioningly. Repitition has been the #1 tool of propagandists since the dawn of the mass media age.

Now, at this point I'm sure you're about ready to dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist, so let me just say that I don't believe in conspiracies as a rule, I believe in headless conspiracies -- things that me, you, and everyone around us whip up amongst ourselves and agree to forget that it's one big lie. If you've never seen the movie "Cube", then I'd highly recommend it -- not only is it an entertaining movie, but it's an excellent analogue of what I call the "headless conspiracy" principle. The premise for the movie is a giant forgotten perpetual Public Works project that got out of hand and became this giant mechanical death maze whose own engineers weren't aware of what it was because they'd each only worked on a small part of the whole machine.

You and I and everyone around as are part of a headless conspiracy called "HIV/AIDS". Many of us are aware, on a subconscious level, that it is a lie, and more and more are becoming consciously aware of it every day. (Well actually, I'm not part of it anymore, but I used to be, and even then I think I always knew, deep down, that a few things didn't seem to add up, even though I continued to believe the bulk of it.) In order to daily convince ourselves that the lie is true, we must repeat, over and over and over again, the mantra, "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS...HIV, the virus that causes AIDS..."

I suspect that, deep down, maybe you suspect it's a lie too, and that in seeking out this debate, your intention is to test it, more than to try to convince me or yourself one way or the other. If you thought you were going to convert me to belief in HIV/AIDS, you'd have given up long ago, and if you thought I might convince you to abandon your beliefs, you wouldn't be debating with an admitted high-school dropout, you'd be seeking a debate with Duesberg or Culshaw or Rasnick (I can actually get you contact info for some much more qualified dissidents who'd love to debate with you, if you'd prefer to have this debate with someone with some letters behind their names. I certainly wouldn't mind standing down and letting you debate with someone who doesn't occasionally need an article explained to him.)

--- Gos

--- gos@nerosopeningact.com

"Nobody here but us heretics..."

"BioLad" replied:

Gos,

I didn’t want this e-mail to lead to too long on a tangent but I figured I should respond to a few things. I will post them in the order I feel they are most important. Also, I really wish I could get Yahoo mail's formatting to be more readable and I apologize for that.

First:

You wrote:

“Now, how many people do you know who aren't above stealing, but they'd never tell a lie? A guy's moral compass would have to be spinning like a windmill in a hurricane, to be a thief but not a liar”

Since we are on the topic of people’s moral compass, perhaps you would give me your assessment of the Lombardo case I referred to earlier. I believe this is rather relevant now since you have brought up this topic. Tied to this I will ask the following question: If a person’s moral compass allows him to bring baseless accusations against someone simply because doing so is the only way to support his claims (especially after publishing Lombardo’s letter in his book), would his moral compass allow this in other cases as well?

Related to this:

You wrote:

“Gallo has been found out, and his checkered scientific history is well-documented by people like Duesberg (who, incidentally, is on a first-name basis with Gallo)…”

If you wish to go this route, perhaps you should check up on Duesberg’s past as well. Again, I prefer to stay away from personal attacks.

Second:

You wrote:

“So what he did was to invent a "co-culture" process, whereby he placed cells from a bunch of different persons believed to have AIDS or pre-AIDS into a culture with some leukemia cells he'd specially bred for the purpose, shock them with a bunch of chemical goodies, wave his hands over it, spin around three times and say the magic words, "Hocus pocus, mirrors and smokus," and POOF, he could mass-produce quantities of these "viral" particles.”

I'm not sure that Gallo actually invented the co-culturing method although he did design the one using immortalized cells for HIV propagation. Did he specially breed them for this purpose?

Perhaps you could cite this for me because I would be interested in reading that paper.

Could you describe the “chemical goodies” he used? Perhaps you can explain their function and why they were NOT necessary?

Now related to this:

What better way to show that a particle is replicating and infectious than through co-culturing? Can you suggest a more appropriate method?

Thirdly:

You wrote:

“There's a very simple way that you can verify the falsehood inherent in the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and it can be summed up in a single phrase: ‘HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.’”

This is not a very good way to verify a falsehood. If the number of times something is said correlates with how false it is then:

1) The possibility that Jenna Jameson is a porn star (73,600 hits) is less than the possibility that Mars truly is the red planet (50,100 hits) and much less likely than the possibility that Clinton was the 42^nd President (989 hits).

2) God (as defined by Judeo-Christian beliefs) exists and is an alien (538 hits, this makes it more real than Mars being the fourth planet)

3) Joe Montana the football player sadly needs to give all his paychecks back with 988,000 hits, making him a complete and utter fraud.

4) And finally AIDS is called a myth in about 1,900,000 sites making it really, really false.

You wrote:

“After about a quarter century or so, why do the people need this constant reminder? Don't they already know that HIV is the cause of AIDS? Have you ever wondered about that? There's a reason it must be repeated, over and over again, like a mantra -- it's the only way to make it true.”

Or, and this is less conspiratorial, it is simply that there are many articles and resources aimed at educating people about AIDS that starts with the assumption that people have confusions on the issue and that it is always best to start at square one. This is not at all a bad thing to do.

Related to this,

You wrote:

“The only problem is, nobody (and most especially not the professional AIDS researchers, activists, and others whose very livelihoods are based on Gallo's lie) wants to disbelieve Gallo's lie, because if they did, the next words out of their mouths would be ‘You want fries with that?’”

If we are going to go into wild speculation I will turn this argument around and say that Duesberg and others who profit from telling people that AIDS is a myth would like nothing more than for it to be true, knowing full well that if their supporters realize that HIV does cause AIDS, the next thing out of their (Deuserg, ect…) mouths will also be “would you like fries with that?”. It seems, since we are speculating, that at this point Duesberg has nothing to lose from continuing to claim that HIV/AIDS is a myth. He has already lost his credibility in the scientific community and, were he to admit that HIV does cause AIDS, he would lose it in the denialist/dissident camp as well. But again, we are both speculating here.

Fourth:

You wrote:

“So, it's not where Gallo got HIV that's relevant here, it's where Montagnier got it, and Montagnier got it from someone whose only documented common tie to US AIDS patients was being gay and having swollen lymph nodes, and who, so far as I can tell, never developed AIDS himself… How do you isolate the virus that causes AIDS from someone who doesn't have the virus that causes AIDS?”

“who, so far as I can tell, never developed AIDS himself”
How far did you look for whether or not he developed AIDS? This seems more like an assumption to me, but correct me if I’m wrong. I wouldn’t think that Montagnier would publish the donor’s name due to privacy issues but perhaps you can prove me wrong and show me he (the donor) is still alive?
Now about the “only documented tie to AIDS”, sadly I don’t have access to Montagnier’s paper but from looking at the abstract (assuming I have the correct paper) found here he states:

"A retrovirus belonging to the family of recently discovered human T-cell leukemia viruses (HTLV), but clearly distinct from each previous isolate, has been isolated from a Caucasian patient with signs and symptoms that often precede the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)."

Now, as I said, I don’t have access to the article but the words SIGNS and SYMPTOMS are both plural form, indicating to me that he had more than just lymphadenopathy. I could be wrong of course, and if you want to pay the $10 for the article, feel free to pass me along a copy!

And Lastly:

You wrote:

“I suspect that, deep down, maybe you suspect it's a lie too…”

I’ll tell you in all honesty that this is an incorrect suspicion.

-BioLad

(PS. Also I did not know you were a high school dropout. I don’t think this ever came up before and if it did I missed it. I also am not naïve enough to think that I will “convert” you or anyone else.)

"Gos" replied:

Jean-Marc wrote: "Since we are on the topic of people’s moral compass, perhaps you would give me your assessment of the Lombardo case I referred to earlier. I believe this is rather relevant now since you have brought up this topic."

I must confess that I cannot give you such an assessment, as I have not read all of the documentation of the particular allegation against Duesberg concerning Lombardo. I have read the Lombardo letter that Duesberg published in his book, and I have read what Duesberg's critics have said about what he supposedly said about Lombardo after his death, but I have yet to find a copy of the whole letter, nor have I read Duesberg's answer to his critics on this subject, nor have I looked very deeply into what specific ailment Lombardo is said to have died from (KS, if the rumor mill has it right). If the allegations are true, then I will say that I've never considered Duesberg to be perfect, he's a human being and prone to make mistakes just like the rest of us, and if they're not true, then I would say that it's an example of Duesberg being slandered.

Which leads me to the question: Have you actually read the documentation in question, or are you merely regurgitating something you read at aidstruth.org? Can you send me a copy of the complete letter in which Duesberg said what he is accused of having said? And if you haven't read it in its entirety, then who is leveling baseless allegations here?

It is telling that instead of defending Gallo's honor (which you know you can't do because you yourself know that his reputation for honor is nonexistent,) you choose to attack the reputation of another scientist whom you apparently think is some kind of a God to me.

First of all, I myself consider Duesberg to be not only human, but I believe him to be wrong on several points, and secondly, if the best you can throw up against legitimate charges of thievery and lying against Gallo is to point to Duesberg's critics' allegations that he speaks ill of the dead, then it would not only be noble of you to keep this discussion out of the mud, but more importantly, it would be prudent, as that would be one area where you'd end up hoist by your own petard. I'd wager Duesberg's worst reputation for honesty against Gallo's best reputation and take your lunch money any day of the week ending in "y". In fact, we could take every allegation made by Duesberg's harshest critics as stone cold fact and only believe Gallo's critics where we could find independent corroboration in triplicate, and Duesberg would still come out smelling like a rose next to Gallo.

Furthermore, I've read every word I could get my hands on of what Duesberg's critics have said about him -- they've called him a holocaust denier, a homophobe, they say he's intransigent, obstinate, in denial, there are even those who call him a psychopath, and openly wish for his incarceration, but one thing not even his harshest critic has ever alleged is that Peter Duesberg has ever opened his mouth to speak something that he did not believe to be true, so if you're looking to compare Duesberg's credibility to Gallo's, you'll find that there are a lot more people on your side of this argument who'd call Gallo a thief and/or a liar than there are on all sides who'd say the same about Duesberg.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- it's not uncivil nor is it slanderous to call a thief a thief and a liar a liar. It's especially not uncivil when you yourself have acknowledged personal knowledge of Gallo attempting to steal the work of a colleague of yours, and personal belief that he actually did steal Montagnier's sample. Were you slandering Gallo when you did so, or were you merely telling the truth as you saw it?

And I'm not just muckraking for the sake of muckraking here -- in considering the truth or falsehood of a statement, one must consider the source, and Gallo is the original source of the claim that HIV causes AIDS. As to the relevance of Gallo's character to this sidebar discussion, if Gallo was lying about the significance of the viral sample he'd stolen from Montagnier, and we have no reason to believe that Montagnier even got it from an AIDS patient, then we don't even need to return to the main debate, because it's already over, because the fundamental assumption that HIV causes AIDS is revealed to be just another one of Gallo's lies.

Now, of course at this point I'm sure you would say, "Gallo may be a liar, but that doesn't mean that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. What about all the researchers after Gallo, and all the hundreds of thousands of papers published on the subject?" What about it? For two centuries, the overwhelming scientific consensus was that masturbation caused blindness, and there were scads of papers published on that. The myth of female hysteria lasted from the time of Hippocrates to the mid 20th Century, with papers published up the yinyang (including papers by the likes of Freud.) For centuries, the existence of vampires was a matter of overwhelming scientific consensus, and reputable physicians claimed to have examined vampires, and they published and published and published all of this overwhelming "evidence" of vampirism. Do any of these concepts have any objective validity?

This proves what? I think that what this proves is best said in the words of John P. A. Ioannidis: "History of science teaches us that scientific endeavor has often in the past wasted effort in fields with absolutely no yield of true scientific information, at least based on our current understanding." If the underlying premise of the whole HIV research field is a falsehood to begin with, then it doesn't matter how many papers have been published since then or how many professionals have been paid to write them, except to the extent that as taxpayers you and I should probably demand our money back, because all the money that's been spent on HIV research has been pissed away, and all you got out of it was a job in a laboratory running "boring" ELISA tests, and all I got was nearly killed.

Jean-Marc wrote: "This is not a very good way to verify a falsehood. If the number of times something is said correlates with how false it is then:

1) The possibility that Jenna Jameson ...etc."

You're missing the point. First of all, I'm not trying to say that the more something is said, the less likely it is to be true (reductio ad absurdum on your part, I believe that's called,) and secondly, I'm not even sure if the Google searches you ran were for exact phrases or what strings you searched for or what (which is the reason I included links in my email -- I find that the numbers don't match exactly when the link is clicked each time, but they stay within a pretty close range, and so you can verify that I'm not making the numbers up.) The point being that the exact phrase, "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS" is one of the most ubiquitous phrases in our media, and it's that way specifically for the purpose of propaganda. No one has to say "Jenna Jameson, the porn star" over and over again in order for people to get that she's a porn star (and incidentally, I ran the search for that exact phrase, and I only got 2,300 hits, so I don't know what search you ran to get 73,600 hits. The same goes for "AIDS is a myth", which got 5,610, not the 1.9 million you're claiming -- Oh, wait, I ran the search again, using just the words "AIDS" and "myth" with no quotes, and I got exactly 1.9 million hits. Nice try, but you'll get nowhere in an argument with me by comparing apples to lead zeppelins.) The point being (and still standing, despite your attempt to obfuscate,) that nobody has to be reminded, over and over again, that Mars is the red planet, or that Clinton was the 42nd President -- we get it already. Why do we need the constant reminder, over and over and over again, that HIV is the cause of AIDS, if the evidence before each and every one of us is really so overwhelming that it is undeniable?

Jean-Marc wrote: "Or, and this is less conspiratorial, it is simply that there are many articles and resources aimed at educating people about AIDS that starts with the assumption that people have confusions on the issue and that it is always best to start at square one. This is not at all a bad thing to do."

Do you consider George Orwell to have been a conspiracy theorist? Because in the book 1984, he used as a plot device, a government program aimed at eradicating sexual pleasure, called the "Junior Anti-Sex League". Orwell wasn't making this up -- as governments move towards totalitarianism, they almost always try to control the sexuality of the masses (another good read: Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, by Hans Peter Bleuel.) Orwell presumed (and I agree with him) that the suppression of some basic human need or instinct is essential to control of the masses, and since the masses in an industrialized society can't be deprived of food, water, sanitation or other essentials feasibly and/or without rendering them useless as slaves, suppressing human sexuality is the best way to get control over a large population. Suppression of sexuality also has an added benefit to the State: It makes for a lot of angry men with unresolved sexual aggressions among the populace, perfect for use as cannon fodder in the war machine.

This is accomplished primarily by making the populace afraid of sex. For centuries, this was done through means of religion -- convincing them that sex was sinful (even in marriage, in many cases,) and that they would burn in hell for eternity if they allowed themselves to enjoy a moment's sexual pleasure without a lifetime of guilt. This is why Christianity has always found favor with governments -- because it's such an effective tool of mass control (I don't think that the kings of the day understood quite why Christian citizens were easier to dominate, but I do think that they recognized its powerful effect as an opiate of the masses, beginning with Constantine himself.)

You really should read that book about Nazi Germany that I linked to above, and if you haven't read 1984, you really should -- there are a lot of insights on how a totalitarian government uses sex as a tool of coercion, and these insights are invaluable in any discussion of AIDS.

Conspiracy theory? No, political theory. Sound political theory, tried-and-true and practiced by governments throughout history. Which is more "conspiratorial" -- to suggest something that has happened over and over again for thousands of years (such as a government using fear of sex to control the masses,) or something which has never happened before (such as a rapidly-mutating species that never mutates into anything else and never exhausts itself through excessive production of non-viable strains, and seems somehow specifically designed for stealth attacks against the human immune system)?

Jean-Marc wrote: "If we are going to go into wild speculation I will turn this argument around and say that Duesberg and others who profit from telling people that AIDS is a myth..."

C'mon now, really? Did Duesberg buy himself a yacht using the royalties from his books, or was it all the research grants he got that bought it? Oh, wait, Duesberg hasn't bought any yachts -- I doubt he could afford one, though he most certainly might be able to afford it if he'd played ball instead of going against the grain -- I don't see his former colleague Gallo or Fauci going broke. You really think you can argue that Duesberg has taken the stand he has for money? Oh, yeah, there's a real get-rich-quick scheme: "How to become independently wealthy by throwing your career down the toilet." Sorry for the sarcasm, but that's just plain disingenuous of you, and I think you already know it. That's like saying that someone jumped into the ocean to dry off.

Jean-Marc wrote: "How far did you look for whether or not [Montagnier's patient] developed AIDS? This seems more like an assumption to me, but correct me if I’m wrong."

I searched the internet myself for more than a week solid, and put the word out to everyone I know who researches that sort of thing that I wanted to see any documentation of what eventually happened to Montagnier's patient. I read the original Montagnier paper (I think I still have a copy of it somewhere, but I can't seem to find it at the moment,) and all it said about his clinical signs, to the best of my recollection, was that he had lymphadenopathy, which at the time was considered (and still is) a possible early sign of AIDS. I had a great deal of interest in verifying the details of this particular case, and I did pursue it quite hard, but as yet I've turned up very little info about him at all, and none of it tells me what happened to him in the decade or so after Montagnier published, much less where he might or might not be today. As I said before, all I've been able to scare up is unconfirmed rumors, and I place zero stock in unconfirmed rumors, especially if it's a rumor that I would otherwise like to believe, because that's just a real good way to end up looking like a buffoon.

As an assumption, though, it's a safer assumption than to assume that he actually did have AIDS, since the virus doesn't seem to have spread very far or fast at all in France, compared to the US, and in that day there were likely no more than a handful of people in the entire country -- perhaps in all of Europe -- that could possibly have been harboring the virus -- meanwhile, both homosexuality and lymphadenopathy are fairly common conditions in HIV-negatives as well. Thus, the odds were actually pretty long, if not astronomical, against picking a homosexual with swollen lymph nodes out of a French clinic and finding HIV in him in 1983. Without further evidence, it's a far bigger leap of logic to assume that he had AIDS than to assume that he did not. Thus, unless you can provide documentation saying otherwise, Ockham's Razor says he probably didn't have AIDS. (Though I won't hold you to it, this sidebar not being a part of our debate.)

Jean-Marc wrote: "Also I did not know you were a high school dropout. I don’t think this ever came up before and if it did I missed it...."

I've mentioned it a couple of times, actually, but in all honesty, it was at a point in the conversation when I didn't seem to have your complete attention, and there was much that I was saying that you didn't seem to be reading at all. Bygones, not worth dwelling on...

--- Gos

--- gos@nerosopeningact.com

"Nobody here but us heretics..."

"Gos" continued:

Jean-Marc,

Notwithstanding what I said in my previous email, your point is well made that even if Gallo is nine kinds of a scoundrel, that doesn't necessarily negate the whole of HIV research. I think it does call the whole underlying premise into serious doubt, but you're right in saying that by itself, Gallo's character (or lack thereof) does not negate the hundreds of thousands of papers that have been written on HIV.

I have found, however, that papers on HIV can pretty much be counted on to negate themselves, especially if you stack two or three of them side-by-side and begin to compare what they're saying.

The single strongest thing, to my mind (though far from the only thing I've managed to find seriously amiss in HIV research,) which appears to my eye to negate virtually 100% of all HIV research is what I call the Ioannidis Null Field Principle (or INFP), after its author, John P. A. Ioannidis.

In his paper, "Why Most Published Research Findings are False", Ioannidis breifly touches on the subject of what he calls a "null field" -- a field of scientific research in which there are no possible true findings. He reminds us that scientific history is liberally peppered with examples of scientists wasting decades or centuries on scientific principles with no objective validity (and I would remind you too, of the examples I cited earlier, of spermatorrhea, female hysteria, and vampirism.)

In such a null field, Ioannidis postulates that all of the following three things will be true:

1) Data produced by studies will tend to vary around the null by chance in the absence of bias.

2) The varied data will be selectively interpreted/reported in such a way as to support the prevailing bias.

3) That in such a field, the reported findings will be little or nothing more than a pure measure of the prevailing bias.

Now, it is impossible for you or me to read every article on the subject of HIV in one lifetime, so we can't attempt to apply the INFP to the whole of HIV research, and I'm not about to take up hours of your time taking you through a dozen or so papers to show you the pattern. What I can do in this email is to demonstrate the principle in the conflict between two papers, both of which I know where you can get the full complete text with free registration.

As to the selection of these two papers, they were not selected by me in the first place, they were selected by someone who chose to cite them against me in a debate, as proof that HIV is sexually transmissible. These were the first two of a long list, and so by selecting them, I'm more or less allowing a former debate opponent pick the studies for me. (Though another reason I selected these specific two studies is that the demonstration of the INFP on them can be done fairly quickly and unambiguously.)

Here are the two studies:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/331/6/341 (herein referred to as Vincenzi et al,)

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/342/13/921 (herein referred to as Quinn et al,)

Now, let's look specifically at what the studies say about condom use -- there are loads of other things I can find wrong with both studies, particularly the Vincenzi, but we're only here for a demonstration of the INFP, so I'm gonna skip the diatribe and go for the gusto.

According to Vincenzi, condom use appeared to virtually eliminate 100% of the risk of HIV transmission, while Quinn reports "no significant differences" between transmission/acquisition rates in bivariate comparison between condom users and non-users.

Now, if we look at the numbers, they tell us a very different story. Vincenzi's numbers do appear (on the surface) to support what she's saying about the effectiveness of condoms, (though the transmission rate in the non-consistent users/non-users group is still only a paltry 4.8%/py.)

When you look at Quinn's numbers, though, what you see is that condoms appear to virtually double the transmission/acquisition risk. Among HIV-negative partners, acquisition risk rose 40% with condom use, from 11.5%/py to 16.2%/py. Among HIV-positive partners, condom use appeared to increase transmission risk by a whopping 116% from 11.2%/py to 24.2%/py. "No significant differences" indeed.

Results varying around the null: Two studies, side-by-side, whose numbers say the exact opposite things: In one, condoms reduce transmission rates by 100%, in the other, condoms significantly increase the risk, up to more than double. It's almost as if they're varying around the null -- almost, one might say, as if by chance.

Selective reporting to avoid conflict with prevailing bias: Vincenzi reports that condoms made a significant reduction in transmission rates, and her numbers would appear to support that. Quinn reports that condoms made no significant difference, even though it would appear by the numbers that condoms significantly increased the risk. What if the numbers were reversed, and instead of appearing to double the risk, condoms had appeared to half it instead? Do you think Quinn would have reported that as "no significant difference"? No, I'd be willing to bet that both the abstract and the text of the Quinn paper would have included the news that condoms cut transmission risk in half.

A pure measure of the prevailing bias: On the subject of condom effectiveness, the data in these two papers effectively cancel each other out, leaving us to subtract the researchers' pre-existing bias from their statements about condom effectiveness. One says they're effective, the other says they don't make a difference, which leaves the preponderance of opinion among these papers being that condom use will at least reduce HIV transmission risk. Now, select from that the bias of both researchers that condoms will at least reduce transmission risk, and you have a big fat null, as in a null field, and ultimately a null hypothesis.

Of course, these two studies prove nothing by themselves. Try it out, though -- get a bunch of HIV studies together that all deal on one or more points with common subjects, and crunch the numbers in the data and see if you don't begin to see a pattern of numerical results that vary around the null as if by chance, and selective reporting of the findings, particularly if the actual numbers in one or more of the studies show something contrary to the prevailing bias (or as I like to call it, "bee-ess".) This is the real reason, above all, that I tend to lean towards HIV's total nonexistence -- because when I crunch the numbers, all I get is nulls, statistically insignificant findings, findings near the lower limit of detection, and a pure measure of the researcher bias. It's as if the whole HIV/AIDS hypothesis is one huge demonstration of the Ioannidis Null Field Principle.

--- Gos

--- gos@nerosopeningact.com

"Nobody here but us heretics..."

"Gos" continued:

Jean-Marc wrote: "Gos wrote: 'I suspect that, deep down, maybe you suspect it's a lie too…'

I’ll tell you in all honesty that this is an incorrect suspicion."

That's too bad, because I would have considered that the most noble reason possible for engaging in such a debate. In fact, that's exactly why I engage in such debates.

I'll tell you a little secret about me: There isn't a day that goes by that I don't have my doubts about my beliefs -- not just about AIDS, but about a lot of things. The subject of AIDS, in particular, is far too important for us not to entertain our doubts to the fullest. After all, if I am wrong, I may well lead others to their deaths, and if I am right, then those on your side of the debate have already led millions to their deaths. This is not an area where we can afford there to be no room for doubt.

I engage in these debates because the only way to address my doubts honestly is to allow them to be explored by persons intent on proving me wrong; thus my participation in debates at every opportunity. Sure, I could simply think about the things I have doubts about, but no one can honestly say they're truly objective about their own opinions, and I'm no different. An opponent in a debate will be relentless against any weakness in my arguments, where I might otherwise be inclined to go light on myself.

Doubt is a good thing, especially in science, where doubt is the only thing that truly separates science from religion. Absence of doubt is not a measure of correctness, it is a measure of faith, and faith is the substance of religious hogwash, and the evidence of pseudoscientific garbage. In short, faith has no place within science, and thus a person with true scientific objectivity will never experience the comfort of a single moment's absolute certainty, but will always be prone to doubt even the things he feels pretty sure about.

I hope that you didn't take my speculation on doubts you might or might not have as an accusation, for the only thing I was truly "accusing" you of is exhibiting possible signs of scientific objectivity. If my "accusation" missed the mark, then consider it withdrawn.

--- Gos

--- gos@nerosopeningact.com

"Nobody here but us heretics..."

"BioLad" replied:

Gos,

Still waiting on your thoughts on the Lombardo case. As for your e-mail here are my thoughts.

You wrote:

“The single strongest thing, to my mind (though far from the only thing I've managed to find seriously amiss in HIV research,) which appears to my eye to negate virtually 100% of all HIV research is what I call the Ioannidis Null Field Principle (or INFP), after its author, John P. A. Ioannidis.”

There are of course at least 3 major problems with this that I can find.

1) This is an opinion piece, not a peer reviewed paper. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume he is mostly correct.

2) This paper, being based on the author’s opinion must then also be based on the author’s bias and subject to his own observations. This then becomes similar to trying to make sense of the statement “I always lie” or “This statement isn’t true”. Are his observations correct or are they also skewed due to his own starting hypothesis that scientific data is unreliable?

3) If this is true, then it must also apply to the Duesberg hypothesis that Nitrates cause AIDS since it conforms to the denialist/dissident prevailing belief that HIV does not cause AIDS..

Thus, if this is correct, we must assume that either ALL researchers on the AIDS “orthodox” side are communally altering their data to support the HIV causes AIDS idea OR Duesberg was altering his data to support his “HIV does not cause AIDS” hypothesis. Now, realistically, do you think it is more likely that thousands of researchers all doctored their data or that one person did?

If we apply the 3 observations you predict from this hypothesis, then the same could be applied to the idea that the earth is round. Thus:

1) Data on the shape of the earth will vary around it being not round in the absence of bias

2) All data/observations on the shape of the earth is simply due to popular support for the idea

3) All data indicating the earth is in fact round is nothing more than a measure of the opinion that it is so.

You see why it would be silly to apply this kind of idea to anything we disagree with? Anyone could use this to prove anything they dislike as a fabrication. This type of reasoning can be seen used by ID people to “disprove” evolution as well as those who declare that the holocaust never happened and that bombs must have been placed in the WTC for it to collapse.

You wrote:

“He reminds us that scientific history is liberally peppered with examples of scientists wasting decades or centuries on scientific principles with no objective validity”

No one will claim that a certain group of people is somehow magically immune from the human flaws. However, this gets harder to do in the age when papers are widely available via the internet and are peer reviewed. Comparing scientists of the past centuries with scientists today is like comparing apples and oranges. Conspiracy theorists (using the term loosely and not labeling you as one) have also been around for centuries with everything from “the world is going to end this month and the government doesn’t want you to know” to “the US is trying to force us to stop circumcising women in order to make us more susceptible to western influences”.

You wrote:

“I have found, however, that papers on HIV can pretty much be counted on to negate themselves, especially if you stack two or three of them side-by-side and begin to compare what they're saying.”

I would disagree on this but if, for the sake of argument, you were correct that they all contradict each other (and I am not saying this is true at all) wouldn’t this disagree with the hypothesis you brought forth that scientists would tend to bias their papers to agree with others to perpetuate their funding?

Another very important thing to consider; when comparing two papers, is that one must make sure they are comparing two COMPARABLE things. Let’s take these two papers as a case in point.

Paper 1 (Vincenzi):

Vincenzi compares consistent use, inconsistent use, and lack of condom use on the spread of HIV. They conclude that CONSISTENT condom use prevented the spread of HIV.

Paper 2 (Quinn):

The Quinn paper discuses the effects of condom use or non-use, among other things, on HIV spread. However, nowhere do they imply that use=consistent use. To assume this would result in the apples/oranges comparison. Comparing with the inconsistent users in Vincenzi paper would be a bit more appropriate, although still tricky since “inconsistent” in the Vincenzi paper can mean anything from “forgot once” to “only used it once”.

You wrote:

“What if the numbers were reversed, and instead of appearing to double the risk, condoms had appeared to half it instead? Do you think Quinn would have reported that as "no significant difference"? No, I'd be willing to bet that both the abstract and the text of the Quinn paper would have included the news that condoms cut transmission risk in half.”

While you are of course free to have your own opinion, this is pure speculation on your part. I would speculate that they would report it the same way they did in the paper because they are reporting significance in terms of the results of their bivariate analysis, not as their opinions. My stats are nowhere close to where they used to be when I was in college but I would guess that whether or not it is significant depends in part on the sample size (n=55 for users and n=356 for non users). Like I said though, my stats aren’t great at this point so I could be wrong. I can see if a Biostats person can enlighten both of us if need be.

-JM

"BioLad" continued:

Gos,
"If my "accusation" missed the mark, then consider it withdrawn."

No problem, I understand what you mean although it did miss the mark a bit. Don't get me wrong; I am always open to changing my position on something if there is convincing proof. In the course of our current exchanges I have learned things that I had previously not known or on which I had erred (see my error in "accuracy" as an example). This would not be so if I were not able to question my own beliefs. However, since everything I have seen supports my position that HIV causes AIDS, I have no reason to "suspect it is a lie". Open to changing my mind if need be, yes, but I suppose if I suspected/thought it were a lie then I would have switched to the denialist/dissident camp.

-JM


"Gos" replied:

Jean-Marc wrote: "Now, realistically, do you think it is more likely that thousands of researchers all doctored their data or that one person did?"

Personally, I think everyone does it, up to and including Duesberg and Ioannidis. There's no conspiracy, other than a conspiracy of human nature. You really have to subtract researcher bias from any and all published articles, because all published articles are authored by fallible human beings who, to a man, has his own interests vested in his own hypothesis, and "peer review" only means that it gets reviewed by other equally fallible/corruptible people.

Jean-Marc wrote: "If we apply the 3 observations you predict from this hypothesis, then the same could be applied to the idea that the earth is round. Thus:

1) Data on the shape of the earth will vary around it being not round in the absence of bias

2) All data/observations on the shape of the earth is simply due to popular support for the idea

3) All data indicating the earth is in fact round is nothing more than a measure of the opinion that it is so."

ROFLMFAOPIMP -- is that a poorly-veiled attempt to compare me to a flat-earther? How amusing!

Now, here's where your analogy falls flat:

1) "Data on the shape of the earth will vary around it being not round in the absence of bias" The earth is not round, it is generally spherical. Thus, measurements of the earth will tend to vary depending on what's being measured and where it is being measured. True, but it's not the fact that the measurement varies that proves it legitimate or otherwise, it's whether or not it varies around the null in the absence of bias. When we measure, for example, the circumference of Earth, we'll get varying measurements, but they vary around the actual circumference of our planet, they don't vary around zero.

Look at the Quinn numbers a bit closer, they might have easily come from a random-number generator. Consider, for example, the question of whether either partner traveled outside the district. If the HIV-negative partner traveled outside the district, it cut the acquisition rate nearly in half (from 20.0%/py to 11.3%/py), but if the HIV-positive partner traveled outside the district, the transmission rate to the non-index partner was more than doubled (from 5.9%/py to 12.3%/py.) What kind of sense does that make, other than nonsense? Furthermore, the fact that the highest figure is more than 300% of the lowest (referring strictly to the travel-related statistics,) screams out loud that the entire study has an extremely high statistical noise floor. Indeed, all of the numbers appear to represent random noise in the statistical noise floor, which are in turn selectively interpreted to "prove" the author's premise (in this case, that viral load is the chief predictor of transmission.)

It's not that a measurement varies, it's what it varies around. In the case of the Earth, it varies around the actual circumference (which, incidentally, was measured long before the birth of Christ by Eratosthenes,) and in the case of HIV studies, it varies around a big fat cipher.

2) " All data/observations on the shape of the earth is simply due to popular support for the idea"

OK, I realize that historically, supporters of orthodox fallacies (such as spermatorrhea, vampirism, SARS, global cooling [that's right, I said 'cooling' -- look it up], nuclear winter, female hysteria, avian flu, the flat world theory, and HIV/AIDS) seem utterly color-blind in the spectrum between overwhelming evidence and overwhelming opinion, so thanks for allowing me the opportunity to point out this obvious difference: There is overwhelming proof that the Earth is round, despite a prior orthodoxy's claims that it is flat. Unlike with HIV, when we measure any given feature of the Earth, we get fairly consistent results that don't vary around a null -- if we measure the peak of Mount Everest 10 times using the same methods, we'll get 10 different results, but they'll be slightly different results that vary around the actual height of a rock-solid mountain that we know is there, and the raw data will be purely random by no means. We certainly won't get high results that are a multiple of the low results.

3) " All data/observations on the shape of the earth is simply due to popular support for the idea"

Re-read the above paragraph. It bears repeating.

Jean-Marc wrote: "You see why it would be silly to apply this kind of idea to anything we disagree with?"

The only silly thing I see is a rather absurd stretch for reductio ad absurdum, by someone making a clumsy attempt to compare a current dissident position with a prior orthodox position, in what appears to be ignorance of the history of the flat-world theory.

The math never lies, though, and in the words of Maynard James Keenan, "I've done the math enough to know the dangers of our second-guessing."

Jean-Marc wrote: "Comparing scientists of the past centuries with scientists today is like comparing apples and oranges."

"Alright, mistakes were made. But one can hardly hold the current incarnation of Holy Mother Church responsible for oversights of old." -- George Carlin as "Cardinal Glick" in Dogma

Jean-Marc wrote: "Paper 1 (Vincenzi):

Vincenzi compares consistent use, inconsistent use, and lack of condom use on the spread of HIV. They conclude that CONSISTENT condom use prevented the spread of HIV.

Paper 2 (Quinn):

The Quinn paper discuses the effects of condom use or non-use, among other things, on HIV spread. However, nowhere do they imply that use=consistent use. To assume this would result in the apples/oranges comparison. Comparing with the inconsistent users in Vincenzi paper would be a bit more appropriate, although still tricky since 'inconsistent' in the Vincenzi paper can mean anything from 'forgot once' to 'only used it once'."

You are correct in pointing out the inconsistencies between the two studies that reduce the validity of the comparison between them, but I doubt that it's enough to make more of a difference than the fact that all of the subjects in both studies (and indeed in virtually all HIV transmissibility studies,) were, in effect, systematically coached to lie, in the form of safe-sex counseling.

It's human nature, when one senses an oncoming sermon (particularly if it's a sermon on an uncomfortable subject), to lie to avoid it -- we learn it as kids when we learn to lie to our parents. I've had two prior girlfriends who lied to doctors and safe-sex counselors for that very reason, and I don't know nor have I inquired as to what my current girlfriend tells her doctor about her sex practices or the HIV status of her regular partner, so she may well be lying to her doctor as well, but even if not, as they say "two out of three ain't bad".

Not only do people lie to avoid or shorten a sermon, but they lie until and unless they are "caught" by a seroconversion, and then they suddenly remember that they came home drunk one night and had unprotected sex with their infected partner, "but it was only that one time, I swear", and at that point, they get moved from the "consistent users" to the "inconsistent users" column in the study, while a dozen others who didn't thus "get caught" who maintain the lie, thus padding the figures to make it appear that condoms make a difference, when in reality the only difference is in reported condom use, not actual condom use, and unless there's a way that one can be protected by lying about condom use, one is hard pressed to explain why those who lie about condom use otherwise seem to enjoy the same protection as those who actually use condoms consistently.

So, on the one hand, you have a point that a Quinn/de Vincenzi comparison is like apples and oranges, and I'd go further and say that with such a high statistical noise-floor as one or both studies demonstrably have, and considering that the study environment creates an atmosphere conducive if not compulsive to deliberate fabrication on the part of subjects concerning their sexual practices, it's more like comparing dragons to Wookies.

Jean-Marc wrote: "Still waiting on your thoughts on the Lombardo case."

Hmmm...you must have missed the email. Check your inbox and your bulk folder, and if you can't find it, I'll re-send it.

What I said at the time was that I didn't want to comment one way or the other without more information than I had at the time, and I asked you to forward to me whatever material you had on the subject, particularly if you had read the actual Duesberg letter in question, and if you could send me a copy.

Since then, however, I've done more research into the incident, and I'm ready to comment on it.

The letter in question was addressed to a certain Richard Jefferys as a response to an inquiry (or more appropriately, an attempted provocation) by Jefferys, concerning Lombardo, which Jefferys subsequently posted all over the internet.

In case you haven't read the letter, I have included it here:

Duesberg (quoted by Jefferys) wrote:

"Hi Richard,

I think you are right - the Raphael Lombardo, who wrote to me, and the one on the 'quilt' are the same.

In hindsight, I think his letter was almost too good to be true. I am afraid now, he described the man he wanted to be and his Italian family expected him to be, but not the one he really was. I think he died from Kaposi’s.

Did you know Hugh(sic) Christie? Also a gay friend of mine from London, filmmaker and editor of the very popular British gay-interested journal, Continuum. Christie campaigned actively against the health and AIDS hazards of poppers in Continuum. Like me, he was invited by Mbeki, to discuss the causes of AIDS in Africa in 2000. And a year or two later he passed away with Kaposi’s, from long-term over-use/addiction to poppers!

Regards,

Peter D."

Now, as to whether Duesberg is guilty of interpreting Lombardo's death through his own narrow hypothesis of AIDS, I would say that he is probably guilty as charged. However, in my opinion, this merely illustrates why Duesberg's model of AIDS is nearly as inadequate as the common HIV/AIDS model. Nitrite inhalants aren't the only possible cause of AIDS or KS, nor are they the only way a person might be exposed to toxic levels of nitrates and/or nitrites. For all we know, Duesberg may have been right about Lombardo, or alternately Lombardo might have had a secret addiction to gardening and a bad habit of not washing his hands after handling particularly potent fertilizers, or maybe it wasn't any sort of nitrate or nitrite exposure that caused Lombardo's KS at all. Does this prove that it was HIV that killed him? Not really.

As to whether nitrite inhalants cause illness attributable to AIDS, did I ever tell you what I was doing the very night before I came down with that "flu" that lasted more than two years and nearly killed me with "AIDS-related pneumonia"?

(At this point, I must apologize in advance for what I am about to divulge, which may be more than you want to know about me.)

The night before I got sick, I went on a bender. I mentioned earlier in a sidebar that I'd recently been through a breakup, and as many people do in such a situation, I went out and indulged in excesses of sex and drugs one night.

Now, as for the sex, it was all false starts. In the sorts of places where men meet for anonymous sex, it is an unwritten rule that at any point either party may zip up his pants and walk out, no harm, no foul. This happened to me over and over that night for some reason, and as a result, I had a lot of false starts in which I huffed poppers without really having anything much resembling sex (certainly at least in terms of viral transmission risk in either direction.)

Now, after you've huffed a certain amount of poppers, you reach a point where you can't get aroused without it, so each subsequent false start results in almost compulsive huffing, just to get an erection.

Then comes the point when you can't get aroused even with it, at which point I made the dumbass move of desperately double- and triple-hitting the bottle, resulting, at the end of the night, in a situation in which I'd probably done more poppers in a single night than I'd previously ever done in a week or maybe even a month.

Before I left, I already had a sore throat, a pounding headache, and body aches, and the rest of the "flu" symptoms arrived by the time I'd been home for an hour. (Remember that at the time I was living with friends who had 24 cats in a moldy environment.)

Did overuse of poppers cause my "AIDS"? Not completely -- there were too many other factors as well that contributed. However, I am 100% convinced that it was the anvil that broke the camel's back, in terms of the multiple assaults on my immune system at the time, which resulted in my "seroconversion" to false-positive status and subsequent progression to near-death of "AIDS-related pneumonia".

Might I have developed the same "flu" and subsequent illness in the absence of nitrite abuse? Quite possibly, considering all the other factors I've mentioned, and I haven't even mentioned that the "flu" may well have included an actual flu, since it was flu season and a particularly bad one that year. So it's possible that I might have developed most or all of the same illnesses if I'd never used poppers, but from what I've researched of the studies which supposedly "proved" that nitrites don't cause AIDS, juxtaposed against the claims of those who maintain that poppers can cause AIDS, and viewed in the context of my own health experience with poppers, HIV, and AIDS, I have little or no doubt that Duesberg is at minimum correct in pointing out that nitrite abuse is one of several or many possible AIDS co-factors.

This is one of many areas, however, where I am critical of Duesberg, as I see his model of AIDS as being too limited, and thus too exclusive of many other possible AIDS co-factors, many of which are as widely recognized by those with orthodox views as they are by dissidents. In other words, while Duesberg is correct in pointing out that drug use, malnutrition, poverty, and certain other non-infectious causes can cause AIDS, he fails to acknowledge that there are still cases of AIDS (including possibly Lombardo), that occur in the absence of all factors included in the Duesberg model of AIDS.

Still, to err is human, but to compare Duesberg to Gallo is asinine. I've said it before and I'll say it again, and without pretense that Duesberg is perfect: I'll wager Duesberg's reputation for honesty against Gallo's and take your lunch money on any day of the week ending in "y".

However, I'll say it again, that I raise the issue of Gallo's honesty not merely to dredge up mud, but to point out that the chain of evidence for the original HIV/AIDS hypothesis leads back to a Frenchman whom no one seems to be able to document having actually had AIDS or subsequently developing it, beyond being gay and having swollen lymph nodes.

Beyond that, I have to question why your best defense against what you perceive as an attack against Gallo is to attack Duesberg. Since you've already acknowledged your own belief that Gallo probably did steal Montagnier's sample and that his moral reputation among scientists is less than sterling (even if that is a stretch for euphemism,) it can only mean that you know yourself that Gallo's reputation is indefensible without impugning the reputations of others.

Jean-Marc wrote: "Don't get me wrong; I am always open to changing my position on something if there is convincing proof. In the course of our current exchanges I have learned things that I had previously not known or on which I had erred (see my error in 'accuracy' as an example). This would not be so if I were not able to question my own beliefs."

Don't throw out your shoulder patting yourself on the back. According to my archive of this debate, two days and nearly a dozen email exchanges elapsed between the time I pointed out the error in your use of 'accuracy' and the point where you finally conceded that point. In the meantime, you went through several distinct phases of denial before finally re-examining the evidence I was presenting.

Now, having said that, in all fairness it was an equal amount of time before I re-examined my own position on that particular point as well, so I cannot claim to be less stubborn than you. In this particular instance, I think it is fair to say that we were both examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

However, it is of note that when I mathematically re-examined the claims of "accuracy" for HIV tests, I learned something new that proved me more right on that particular point than I'd previously known, while your re-examination of your views taught you something new about how the term "accuracy", being based almost entirely on true-negatives, is used to falsely imply that an HIV-positive diagnosis is highly accurate when the facts are otherwise, and that this fools not only laymen, but also educated professionals such as yourself.

And lest I unwittingly imply that you are not to be credited for your open-mindedness, it is to your credit that you re-examined your views on this matter at all. In a similar situation, Richard Jefferys (yes, the same Richard Jefferys -- incidentally, also the same person who cited the de Vincenzi and Quinn studies against me,) could only resort to the "fuzzy math" argument (a la George W. Bush in the 2000 Presidential debates), by accusing me of using "silly computations", without any explanation of what was so silly about them.

Indeed, you are the first person with whom I've debated this subject who has actually re-examined anything I've pointed out, so to at least that degree let it not be said that you are not at least more open to critical re-examination of your own views than many others I've seen.

Our disagreements notwithstanding, all the more reason I'm glad to have met ya. :)

--- Gos

--- gos@nerosopeningact.com

"Nobody here but us heretics..."

"BioLad" replied:

Gos,
Hey, its going to take me a bit to read all the way through what with the holiday and all. I know we aren't rushing this or anything but just giving you a heads up. I did skim through it quickly when it was printing but I did want to comment on 2 things so you get to know a bit about who I am as a person:

1) "ROFLMFAOPIMP -- is that a poorly-veiled attempt to compare me to a flat-earther? How amusing!"

Nah, like I said I don't like insulting people. If I do it is plainly obvious. I can see how it would appear that way and I apologize if it was taken the wrong way. No, no if it appears I am going for veiled insults just give me the benefit of the doubt that it isn't. Like I said, I don't particularly enjoy insults as part of debates or otherwise.

2) "At this point, I must apologize in advance for what I am about to divulge, which may be more than you want to know about me"

When I was deployed in the army we were told we were going to Iraq (our mission got turned over to another unit though and we never went to Iraq thankfully). Before we were told that we weren't going one of the guys in our company (who was on guard duty at the time, not a friend of mine or anything though) put the barrel of his rifle in his mouth and shot himself. A medic, a squad leader and I (I was trained as a combat lifesaver; kinda like a higher version of first aid for combat situations) tried to keep him alive long enough for the ambulance to get there. I got to try to keep a guy alive when parts of his brain and skull were on the back of the guard tower we were in. Moral of the story: not too much makes me uncomfortable now so no need to worry about that (the other moral is obviously to not shoot yourself in the head).

Have a great Christmas!
-JM


"Gos" replied:

Jean-Marc,

Recently, in a sidebar, the issue arose over whether it is safer to assume that Montagnier's gay patient had HIV/AIDS, than to assume that he did not. I am now prepared to demonstrate mathematically that at the very least, the odds were against him having HIV by a large order of magnitude.

According to WHO, the cumulative total number of HIV cases reported in France since the epidemic began was roughly 69,000 in 2005, up from roughly 58,000 two years earlier. Thus, between 2003 and 2005, there were 11,000 new HIV diagnoses in France; an average of about 5,500 per year.

I am trying to get an estimate of how many HIV cases there might have been in France in the early 1980s, but reliable estimates are hard to come by, and the current figures are not much help, for if we project that 5,500/year average backwards, what we find is that HIV couldn't have even found its way into France earlier than 1992.

And, of course, we both know that according to Farr's Law, viral epidemics do not follow linear patterns -- new viral epidemics tend to spread exponentially in a susceptible population, then they begin to taper off as it becomes more and more difficult for the virus to locate susceptible hosts who haven't already been infected, after which they tend to fade out even more quickly than they arrived. Thus, if we are to assume that HIV was present in France in 1983, we must also assume that at some point between, HIV was spreading much more slowly in France than it is today. Thus, it seems safe to assume that the most recent spread of HIV in France has only been going on for only a few years, and that it hardly spread at all throughout the 1990s. (Incidentally, this is still inconsistent with Farr's Law, in addition to being inconsistent with findings in 1990 that HIV had obeyed Farr's Law in the US -- findings which, incidentally, should have meant that the epidemic in the US was already more or less over by then, and should by now have ended more than 10 years ago. However, there is no other way to explain how HIV is currently spreading in France at a rate of new infections per year equivalent to 1/12th of the total number of new infections in 25 years.)

Just for the sake of example, we'll assume that the most current (ie 2003-2005) trend in France doesn't go back any further than 2000, and that from 1990-1999, not a single new HIV infection occurred in France. (This is done to push as many of the new infections back into the 1980s as possible, so that we don't end up with an epidemic that can only be projected as far back as 1992, and which fails to follow the natural curve of new viral epidemics described by Farr's Law. At least this way, we can say that HIV was spreading faster in the '80s than it is today, which is what we would expect of a viral epidemic that was new in the '80s -- even if it is a bit of a stretch to say that it spread for 10 years, then stopped for 10 years, then started again. I'm doing this so that I can find even one possible HIV case in France before 1990, and it's quite a stretch to do so at that, so bear with me.)

That would mean that between 2000 and 2005, approximately 27,500 new HIV infections occurred in France. Subtract that from the cumulative total circa 2005, and you get 41,500 infections that occurred prior. Now, because we're assuming that no one in France got HIV during the 1990s, that means that as of 1990, 41,500 people in France had contracted HIV.

Now, given that new viral epidemics spread most quickly at first, (and to further inflate the number of HIV-positives who might have existed in France in 1983,) we'll say that HIV first entered France in 1980, and that 3/4 of the new infections of the 80s occurred before 1985. This leaves about 31,125 who were infected between 1980 and 1985.

Now, I want to remind you at this point that I'm systematically inflating the number of possible HIV-positives in France in the early '80s, and that if the number were lower, it would only mean even lower odds that this particular Frenchman could possibly have had HIV. In other words, I'm fudging the numbers against myself -- in reality, the numbers have already shown that there could not possibly have been one HIV-infected person in France prior to 1992 -- I'm just stretching the numbers to make it so that there's a halfway decent chance in hell that you'd find even one infected person in France in 1983.

Now, assuming that these first 31,125 infections occurred at a semi-consistent rate, that averages out to 6,225 new infections per year. Thus, by 1983, let's say (just for the sake of this argument) that there were 18,675 HIV-infected individuals in France in 1983. (Bear in mind that this is more than a quarter of the total number of new infections reported in that country since the beginning of the epidemic. In reality, the actual number was probably lower, assuming that HIV is actually an infectious virus spreading around France in the early 1980s at all.)

Now, in 1983, the population of France was about 56 million. (Source: US Census Database -- use the IDB table access to get the statistic.) That means that approximately 1 out of every 3,000 French citizens were infected at that point.

Now, much is made of the fact that the patient was gay and had generalized lymphoadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes). So let's break that figure down a bit more. Let's say that a quarter of the French population is gay; an eighth being gay males, and that 100% of the HIV-positives in France were gay males (not a safe assumption, but again, I'm being deliberately generous in order to project the maximum statistical probability that this subject could possibly have had HIV, and if I didn't do so, the probability would have dropped to zero long ago). That would mean that one out of every 375 gay males in France was infected with HIV in 1983.

Now, lymphoadenopathy is common among AIDS patients, but it is also common among the HIV-negative population, and in fact, reported cases of lymphoadenopathy in HIV-negatives outnumber such cases among HIV-positives by a rather wide margin (mostly due to the fact that HIV-negatives outnumber HIV-positives by a wide margin in most places), so there's only a fractional probability that any given person with lymphoadenopathy has HIV, even today, after the virus has had decades to spread. In a population in which only 1 out of 375 have HIV, the odds that any given person with swollen lymph nodes actually has HIV would only be slightly better than 1 out of 375. However, because I'm in such a generous mood today, I'm going to say that the lymphoadenopathy in this particular patient more than doubled his chances of actually having HIV, even though I know damn well that couldn't be true, and that I'm only being so generous in order to further maximize the chances that this particular individual actually had HIV/AIDS.

So far, we've established that the very highest possible probability we can assign to this guy having HIV/AIDS is no better than roughly 1 out of 180, and that's only if we fudge the figures repeatedly in order to arrive at the highest possible probability. So for every 1 chance that he actually had HIV, there were at least 180 chances that he did not. In reality, however, even that dismal probability is the product of outrageous exaggeration on my part, in order to give as high a probability as possible in the end. Thus, the true odds of this particular person having HIV were likely much worse by an order of magnitude.

Thus, the assumption that this particular individual actually had AIDS conflicts strongly with statistical probability, and the fact that such an assumption was made of such a statistically unlikely premise shouts out loud that the assumption was based not on objective analysis of the known facts, but purely on prejudice; he was gay and had swollen lymph nodes in 1983, therefore whatever Montagnier found in his lymph nodes had to be the viral cause of AIDS. Montagnier himself wasn't convinced enough to say out loud that he'd discivered the "AIDS virus" at that early date, but Gallo was convinced enough that he stole it and passed it off as his own discovery of the "AIDS virus".

My earlier remarks about Gallo were in no way intended as an attack on his reputation, but were for the purpose of demonstrating a chain of evidence leading to a man who, in all probability, didn't have HIV or AIDS. HIV was therefore originally "discovered" in a man who, in all statistical likelihood, didn't have HIV to begin with.

The question being not one of Gallo's reputation, but a question of "How the hell do you isolate the virus that causes AIDS from someone who doesn't have the virus that causes AIDS?"

--- Gos
--- gos@nerosopeningact.com
"Nobody here but us heretics..."

"BioLad" replied:

Gos,

You start your estimates seemingly based on the population as a whole.  Remember that thus far, and even more so in the early 80s, homosexuals have a much higher incidence of AIDS (and thus HIV) than the rest of the population.  As such, attempting to extrapolate the odds of the subject having HIV based on the rate of the population as a whole would be extremely misleading. 

More importantly, you also seem to be assuming that the individual tested was chosen solely based on being gay and having common lymphadenopathy, having stated:

 “Now, much is made of the fact that the patient was gay and had generalized lymphoadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes).”

and

 “Thus…purely on prejudice; he was gay and had swollen lymph nodes in 1983, therefore whatever Montagnier found in his lymph nodes had to be the viral cause of AIDS.”

This is also incorrect.  I can’t blame you for this, however, since we both had access only to the freely available abstract, although even it stated the patient had “signs and symptoms” in the plural form.  I have purchased the full article (although I will not be making a habit of this for financial reasons) in order to get a better picture of the criteria for his selection.  (The paper is attached to this e-mail)

The patient did not in fact just have general lymphadenopathy but multiple lymphadenopathies as well as CMV and having other symptoms including muscle weakness indicative of ARC.  The patient also stated having had more than 50 different sexual partners per year and having traveled to New York (last trip was in 1979) and North Africa , among other places putting him at a statistically much higher chance of contracting HIV than the general populace.  Also, his multiple previous treatments for STDs indicate that, at best, he did not consistently use protection and in a worse case scenario, rarely if ever did.

The patient also fit very closely with a CDC description published in May 1982 (link here: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001096.htm) and thus would have made a logical candidate for testing.  Hopefully by looking at the patient’s symptoms and sexual history you can now see why the above statement on “pure prejudice” is incorrect. 

As for why Montagnier did not say he had isolated the “AIDS virus”; this was the first time this virus was detected.  It would have been premature of him to say this without further evidence.  He and 9 other researchers proceeded to find the virus in 3 other patients showing signs of AIDS (Montagnier’ patient had symptoms of ARC but did not develop full blown AIDS at the time the samples were taken) to confirm his hypothesis.  Of these other three of which only 1 was homosexual.

“..but Gallo was convinced enough that he stole it and passed it off as his own discovery of the "AIDS virus”

Unless I recall incorrectly, Gallo, believing his own theory correct, actually continued on his research with HTLVs for a while and it was only after failing to link HTLVs to AIDS and the growing support from other scientists for the link between LAV (Montagnier’s virus) and AIDS that Gallo went back to the LAV samples he had obtained before.  So no, I would say that Montagnier’s paper alone had not been enough to convince Gallo.

“The question being not one of Gallo's reputation, but a question of "How the hell do you isolate the virus that causes AIDS from someone who didn't have the virus that causes AIDS?"”

You can’t.  But hopefully you now have your answer as to how it was isolated from someone who did.  Earlier on in the sidebar, we wondered what ever happened to this patient.  I admitted that, like you, I did not know the identity of the individual in question or whether he ever developed AIDS.  After further searching I did indeed find references to his identity.  The patient was revealed by reporters as being a French man named Frederic Brugiere and unfortunately yes, he did in fact die of AIDS in 1988.

            Now does this paper in and of itself prove that HIV causes AIDS?  Of course not.  Even Montagnier said as much when he published it.  Does this paper disprove your drugs/AIDS hypothesis?  Again, no.  What it did was show that a retrovirus distinct from HTLV 1 and 2 was isolated from this individual who had symptoms of ARC and who later progressed to and died from AIDS.  It showed that the viral RT was detected only in cells cocultivated with those from the patient and not from identically treated control donor cells.  It showed a virus budding from lymphocytes of infected cells under the electron microscope as a c-type virus.  Finally, it showed that, unlike the HTLVs, this particular virus did not appear to transform (make cancerous) T-lymphocytes but rather killed them.  Did this paper alone prove LAV/HIV caused AIDS?  No, but then it wasn’t meant to.

-JM

“BioLad”, continued:

Starting now I am going to number references and cite them at the bottom of each e-mail.  I think this will make it easier to read than to have long links within the texts.  I looked into what you had said about the LAI contamination.  Here is my reply to it.  I am still working on the List and it may take a while for various reasons.

>Gos wrote

1)  How did HIV cause AIDS in Frederic Brugiere, by cross-contaminating his culture in Montagnier's lab?  That's a rather astounding feat for a virus -- to leap from one culture to another, then back to the source of that culture, then travel back in time to cause lymphadenopathy in that patient before the sample was taken for that culture.  And yet, the Pasteur Institute officially acknowledged in 1991 that LAV(Bru) did not come from Frederic Brugiere at all -- indeed, Brugiere's culture hadn't grown anything at all until it was accidentally cross-contaminated in the lab by a virus from another AIDS patient named Christophe Lailler.

>Answer

Actually, Dr. Montagnier did not, as you claim, say that the BRU strain never grew in culture.  What he said was that it never grew in cultures with IMMORTAL CELL lines.  He did get them to grow on primary cells, as is described in his original paper [1] (the experiments were performed and the paper seems to have been written BEFORE he even received the LAI strain), and recounted in his short essay “A History of HIV Discovery” [2].  He further stated in an interview that this is typical of HIV strains in asymptomatic patients.  When the strains convert from non-syncitia- to syncitia-inducing, they grow quite well in immortal cells.  These are the ones seen in people who have begun to exhibit full blown AIDS as was the case with patient LAI [3].  Further, tests done on archival samples showed that the contamination in Montagnier’s sample occurred between 20 July and 3 August 1983, after Montagnier had first isolated BRU and after his first paper related to BRU had already been published [4].  Gallo’s stocks were contaminated by this strain between October 1983 and early 1984 [5].

So to recap:

1. A strain of HIV was isolated from BRU, a patient who at the time did not have full blown AIDS.

2. The strain did grow in culture with primary cells (even before LAI was obtained) but not with immortal cells.

3. As would be predicted by the presence of the virus, the patient BRU unfortunately did progress to full blown AIDS and die.

4. The contamination occurred after the experiments on BRU, after the first paper was written (and published) and both strains, not just LAI, were passed to Gallo and other labs, although the rapid rate of replication for LAI did allow it to out-compete BRU in the contaminated cultures.

5. BRU still exists in archival stocks uncontaminated with LAI.

6. No time traveling was necessary and the space-time continuum is safe another day.

-JM

1. Luc Montagnier “Isolation of a T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus from a Patient at Risk for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)” Science vol. 220, May 20, 1983

2. Luc Montagnier. “Historical Essay: A History of HIV Discovery “ http://aidscience.org/science/298(5599)1727.html”

3. Duncan S. Callaway, Ruy M. Ribeiro, Martin A. Nowak. “Virus Phenotype Switching and Disease Progression in HIV-1 Infection”. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol. 266, No. 1437 (Dec. 22, 1999), pp. 2523-2530

4. Wain-Hobson S, et al. "LAV revisited: origins of the early HIV-1 isolates from Institut Pasteur". Science. 1991 May 17;252(5008):961-5.

5. Sheng-Yung P. Chang, Barbara H. Bowman, Judith B. Weiss, Rebeca E. Garcia & Thomas J. White “The origin of HIV-1 isolate HTLV-IIIB”.  Nature 363, 466 - 469 (03 June 1993); doi:10.1038/363466a0

“Gos” replied:

Real quick:  You're making a fatal assumption concerning the BRU cross-contamination, and it's gonna be the undoing of your whole argument on this particular issue.  Can you guess what it is?

--- Gos

“BioLad” replied:

No clue on the assumption.  Please do tell!

“Gos” replied:

[T]he assumption I alluded to earlier was in reference to the "cross contamination" of the LAV(Bru) culture.

The reason I put "cross contamination" in quotes is that it may well not have been a cross-contamination at all, but merely a contamination.  In other words, it may not have been LAV(Lai) -> LAV(Bru), it may have been X -> LAV(Lai) and X -> LAV(Bru) or X -> LAV(Bru) -> LAV(Lai) or some other scenario.

There are a few things that make this alternate scenario eminently plausible.

First of all, out of 5 different cultures of this particular virus [Popovic, Weiss, Levy, and Montagnier's LAV(Lai) and LAV(Bru),] all alleged to be "independent isolations" at the time, all but one turned out later to be contaminations.  If 4 out of 5 are contaminations, then the chances would seem pretty sporting that so is the 5th [LAV(Lai)].

There are only two ways that such widespread contaminations can occur:  1)  All of the scientists involved have to be incompetent; or 2)  The virus in question must be well-adapted to laboratory culture conditions, and to evading a scientist's best efforts to eliminate cross-contamination of his cultures.  I find it extremely hard to believe that all of these scientists were bunglers -- it's not nearly so easy as to believe that the process of natural selection would tend to make the laboratory a natural breeding ground for viruses that thrive in laboratories and have an affinity for cross-contaminating viral cultures, and that one or more such viruses would crop up during the course of scientific study of viruses.

It becomes quite apparent that LAV/HTLV-3B/HIV is just such a virus, considering that it has been demonstrated to have cross-contaminated viral cultures in at least 4 out of 5 of these early "independent isolations", and to have (to my understanding) grown like wildfire under laboratory conditions in most or all of these cases.

The assumption that the "cross-contamination" [LAV(Lai) -> LAV(Bru)] occurred in the Summer of 1983 is based entirely on the assumption that the source of the contamination was LAV(Lai).  That is simply the earliest date at which it could have occurred, if we are to assume that the origin was the Laillier sample.

However, there is no way of proving that LAV(Lai) was not itself contaminated with this same virus, in the very same laboratory in which LAV(Bru) was contaminated.

There is, in fact, ample reason to suspect that LAV(Bru) was contaminated at an earlier date, by a virus which later also infected the LAV(Lai) culture.

First, there are the conditions under which LAV(Bru) was cultured, and second, there is the apparent growth rate in each culture, and a very important way in which they differed.

The Bru culture did not show any sign of growth at all for nearly 3 weeks.  In the meantime, it was delivered into the care of a trusted colleague while Montagnier went on vacation, and was moved into a laundry room at the Institut Pasteur, since there was no room in her lab for it.  (Nope -- no chance for any sort of contamination of the sample there.)  Then, after weeks of no activity, suddenly the RT readings start to rise, potentially indicating the presence of a retrovirus.  (The word "potentially" is used with caution here, as there appears to be no scientific consensus on whether RT is specific to retroviruses.)

Right around Day 23, the RT activity peaks and begins to decline, resulting in an emergency meeting at the Pasteur to determine how to save the culture before it dies out completely.  It was decided that it must be transferred into a continuous cell line, but this would take too much time, and by the time they'd acquired the necessary cells, there would be nothing left to culture.  In desperation, it was therefore decided to feed fresh cells into the culture, in order to keep it going until continuous cell lines could be obtained.  The first such cells came from a Spanish donor, with little or no screening having been done of the blood to determine what contaminants it may have carried.  (Nope, couldn't have happened then.  And actually I'm not being quite as sarcastic this time, because if we assume that there was a virus growing in the sample before these cells were fed in, then the only way that the Spaniard could have been the source of LAV(Bru) is if the initial virus were a different virus entirely -- not impossible, but Ockham's Razor suggests that it probably wasn't the Spaniard.)

Then, after they ran out of the Spaniard's cells, they started feeding cord blood into the sample, then they transferred it into an immortal cell line.  At any point in this chain of events, one or more cross-contaminations could have occurred.  Personally, I think it was likely the laundry room -- a laundry room would surely be a beast to keep clean, given the dust that accumulates and the static charges generated therein.  In a laundry room, any number of contaminants from just about any room in the building could have sneaked in, and found its way into the sample.  I'm sure that measures were taken to prevent contamination, but the Law of Entropy states that all systems break down, and common sense dictates that even the best systems will break down at critical points under less-than-optimal conditions.  We therefore cannot exclude the very likely possibility that LAV(Bru) was a contaminant from the start, rather than having been contaminated much later.

One thing that I find particularly interesting is how quickly the LAV(Lai) sample grew, despite the fact that the LAV(Bru) sample took weeks to show any activity at all.  In a matter of days, the RT activity of the Lai culture soared well above the peak level observed in the Bru sample.  This suggests that if both samples were contaminated from a common source in the laboratory, the contamination didn't occur in the Bru sample for at least two weeks, but in the Lai sample, the contamination was almost immediate -- something which might well happen if this very virus with an affinity for overgrowing lab cultures had been already cultured in the very same laboratory, perhaps even on the very same equipment, to the extent that it was present in greater quantities in the environment than it had been when the initial Bru contamination occurred.

BUT!  If both cultures were contaminants from the lab itself, then neither Brugiere nor Laillier had the virus in his blood.  So why are both men dead?

I can think of at least two obvious causes of death, independent of HIV itself, either or both of which might apply to either or both cases.

I cannot speak much to the conditions of Laillier's death, because I've learned less about him in my recent research than I have about Brugiere.  I do find some interesting facts about Brugiere, though.

The most interesting of these is that Brugiere persisted in not getting AIDS (though he continued to have persistent lymphadenopathy,) for several years, but then suddenly developed AIDS and died.  Indeed, in the mid-1980s, Gallo was using Brugiere's continued survival to suggest that Montagnier's virus didn't cause AIDS and that he, Gallo, was the discoverer of the true virus that causes AIDS.

In August 2003, I parted company with the aforementioned ex (the crack addict,) who immediately moved in with her "new" boyfriend ("new" in quotes here because they'd had an on-again-off-again affair for 6 years by this point.)

About 3 months later, an unusually severe flu pandemic swept across North America, filling hospitals beyond capacity for weeks throughout the US.  I, my ex, and her new boyfriend all contracted this flu.  I was hospitalized with pneumonia and made a speedy recovery, but neither my ex or her boyfriend seemed able to recover from it -- It was as if something had just shut their immune systems down.  He, in particular, was hospitalized on no fewer than three separate occasions with relapses into pneumonia.

By the third time, she tells me that he was all but openly accusing her of having given him AIDS (my HIV status being well-known to both of them.)  He told her, "I've never been this sick in my life.  What have you done to me?"  Indeed, he'd always been the picture of health as long as I'd known him (6 years,) with an athlete's physique and the strength of a pissed-off ox.  But suddenly, somehow, he was entirely unable to shake a simple flu, and having recurrent pneumonia and multiple hospitalizations and the whole 9 yards, just as you might well expect of an AIDS patient.

They both became so convinced that they had AIDS that they got tested for HIV.  When the test came back negative, their "AIDS" simply vanished.  He recovered fully from the flu, and went on to add a thick layer of fat to his already-thick layer of muscle, despite the fact that within a year they were both doing crack cocaine heavily (and may well have been using at the time they became sick -- I'm not sure when they started, I just know that they eventually ended up in dire straits due to their shared addiction.  However, if crack cocaine were a contributing factor in their illness -- and it might well have been -- then that would tend to support Duesberg.)

However, I'm more convinced, due to the speed at which they both recovered when they found out they were HIV-negative, that what they both had was a good old-fashioned case of AfrAIDS.  They were so scared that they had HIV that they developed immunosuppression characteristic of AIDS.

Getting back to Brugiere, another interesting fact is that according to Montagnier, Brugiere wasn't told that LAV had been isolated from his culture -- or at least he wasn't told for several years.  Apparently someone showed him an article about it before he died, and according to John Crewsdon, he commented on the article, saying that it sounded like someone else entirely, and not himself at all.

So Brugiere was never told that he had this virus that everyone was talking about which was blamed for causing AIDS, and he (for some reason) never progressed to AIDS, despite showing definite, persistent signs of ARC (AIDS-Related Complex).  Then shortly after he finds out that HIV had been initially isolated from his own blood, he suddenly dies.

Coincidence?  Sure, it could be, but there's a strong suggestion that it is not.

The evidence that one's state of mind can directly affect one's state of health, and in particular the immune system, dates back literally for centuries, to the White Man's first encounter with the Voodoo-practicing natives of the New World, whose medicine men were reputed to be able to kill by simply pointing a bone at their intended victim, and within days or weeks that person would die.  The method appeared to be quite deadly when the victim was a villager, but had no effect whatever on the white men, who did not believe in voodoo.  Thus, the suggestive power of a strong religious or quasi-religious belief is demonstrably capable of causing anything up to and including death.

Near the end of the 19th Century, French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot demonstrated that morbid ideas could produce physical disorders, and since that time, others have similarly demonstrated the influence of psychological factors on the course of physical disease, including a group of Japanese researchers in 1962 who experimented on 57 school boys, to demonstrate the power of suggestion in producing specific symptoms, and also to prevent symptoms that otherwise should occur.  The way they did this was to brush one of the boys' arms with harmless chestnut leaves, and the other with the leaves of a particular Japanese tree with effects similar to poison ivy.  However, the boys were told the reverse, that the one arm had been brushed with the poisonous leaves, and the other with the harmless leaves.  Within minutes the placebo arm in many cases broke out in a rash of blisters, and the researchers also noted, to their suprise, that many of the control arms were free of blisters, despite having had contact with the poisonous leaves.

A more recent study of college students demonstrated markers of immunosuppression (specifically, suppression of CD4 counts,) coincident with impending tests, particularly if they were very important tests.

Proponents of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis are fond of saying that the evidence is "overwhelming" that HIV causes AIDS, but there truly is overwhelming evidence of the existence of psychosomatic disease, including stress-related autoimmune disease, and there is quite a bit of evidence that the fear of AIDS can cause symptoms indistinguishable from AIDS, even in the absence of HIV.

In the context of this discussion, the strongest authority I can cite on this phenomenon is Luc Montagnier himself, who said, "AIDS does not inevitably lead to death...It is very important to tell this to people. Psychological factors are critical in supporting immune function. If you suppress this psychological support by telling someone he is condemned to die, your words alone will have condemned him."

Modern laymen view doctors and scientists with the same sort of reverence and quasi-religious faith with which primitives view their medicine men.  Because of this, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that doctors can inadvertently condemn healthy patients to death with a simple misdiagnosis of a fatal disease, much as Voodoo practitioners were able to cause fatal psychosomatic illness in believers.

There is also evidence of the power of suggestion to cause AIDS, in the very three lab workers whose deaths are to this day cited as proof that HIV fulfills Koch's Postulates, because of the fact that all three died rather quickly, none of them surviving more than a decent fraction of a decade after initial "infection".  At the time, it was believed that HIV would kill quickly, but today it is widely accepted that it is not atypical at all for HIV infection to take years to cause illness and decades to cause death.  Why, then, would these three previously-healthy individuals who lived on the cutting edge of AIDS research and therefore probably had access to the very latest and greatest advances in AIDS treatment, all die so quickly?  This is not consistent at all with what we've come to expect of a typical HIV infection, but it is absolutely consistent with all three having died purely from the power of the belief that HIV would kill them quickly.

Another factor which certainly played into a lot of "AIDS" deaths, particularly in the 1980s, and may well certainly have played a role in Brugiere's and/or Laillier's deaths is iatrogenic disease (for those laymen who may read this, iatrogenic disease is disease caused by doctors or by medicine.)  It is widely acknowledged, even by the most avid supporter of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, that many of the deaths in the 1980s were caused not by HIV, but by the highly experimental treatments that were being used on AIDS patients at that time.  I personally have interviewed a pioneer of AIDS activism (Ray Hill, co-founder of the KS/AIDS Foundation, which later became the AIDS Foundation Houston, who himself strongly believes that HIV is the cause of AIDS,) who went so far as to concede that in those days, more people were killed by these experimental medications -- AZT in particular -- than were killed by HIV itself.  I do not know whether or not Brugiere or Laillier might have taken any experimental drug regimens prior to their deaths, but it would not be surprising at all, and if so, iatrogenic disease makes for another likely suspect in their deaths.

The fatal assumption that you're making, therefore, is the entirely unsupportable assumption that the virus cultured in Montagnier's lab actually existed in either Brugiere or Laillier, rather than having been a laboratory contaminant in both cases.  The facts very strongly suggest the possibility -- or even dare I to say a strong probability -- that both cultures were in fact nothing more than laboratory contaminations, whose virus did not exist in the blood of either patient.

Furthermore, the fact that both men died, apparently from AIDS, suggests -- no, dictates -- that something other than HIV caused their AIDS, if they did not have HIV to begin with, and both psychosomatic and iatrogenic disease are suggested as likely suspects, though there might certainly be other possible factors as well.

--- Gos

--- gos@nerosopeningact.com

"Nobody here but us heretics..."

“BioLad” replied:

Gos,

Regarding the topic of whether BRU and LAI were contaminated by another, common source.

You had stated: 

The fatal assumption that you're making, therefore, is the entirely unsupportable assumption that the virus cultured in Montagnier's lab actually existed in either Brugiere or Laillier, rather than having been a laboratory contaminant in both cases.  The facts very strongly suggest the possibility -- or even dare I to say a strong probability -- that both cultures were in fact nothing more than laboratory contaminations, whose virus did not exist in the blood of either patient.

 The hypothesis you present is interesting although lacking any real evidence to support it.  The saying “If ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts…there would be a lot of people with nut allergies who would be really hosed right now” comes to mind for several reasons.  The points you make actually illustrate why BRU and LAI are in fact not contaminants from an outside source but entities present in patients’ blood (although LAI did later contaminate a stock of BRU).  Allow me to explain. 

You stated that you believed the hypothetical contamination may have occurred in the laundry room and that prior to said contamination there would thus be no virus in patient BRU’s serum or cells (hence the 15-day lag time prior to RT detection).  Here is the problem.  Prior to co-culturing, the original BRU strain took 15 days to give a readable RT signal.  You have hypothesized that the lack of RT prior to day 15 indicates that there was no virus and that the contamination occurred some time after the cells from BRU were placed in culture, however, the data from the paper published on these experiments say differently [1].  Lymphocytes from the original BRU culture were taken and co-cultured with lymphocytes from a healthy donor (as you had stated).  This culture took another 15 days to give an RT signal, exactly as the original had!  Control cells from the same healthy donor that were not co-cultured gave no RT signal even after culturing them in the exact same conditions for upwards of 6 weeks.  From this we can see why the contamination you allege could not have happened.  If the first BRU cell culture were contaminated and the lag time prior to RT detection indicated that there was no virus, then the 15-day period observed  in co-culture would be expected to be either much shorter or non-existent (since it would contain the contaminating virus from day 1).  However, the lag time in co-culture was exactly the same, meaning that the RT producing entity from patient BRU was the same as that in the co-culture and had not been introduced after the cells from BRU had been placed in culture alone.

So the question remains, could something have contaminated both BRU and LAI?  Honestly, the answer is logical and “no”.  LAI is a syncita-inducing (SI) strain that grows rapidly while BRU is a non-SI strain that grows very slowly.  If, as you proposed, “X -> LAV(Lai) and X -> LAV(Bru)” or ““X -> LAV(Bru) -> LAV(Lai)” then LAI would have, in both cases, out-competed BRU and been the predominant strain (as was observed in the Pasteur contaminated samples as well as Gallo’s samples.  And yet, Montagnier’s lab still has stocks of the original BRU uncontaminated with LAI.  This would not be the case were both tainted from a common contaminant.

            Further, if, as you proposed, the conditions of the laundry room were dusty, ect…, could this lead to contamination with HIV?  This would be highly unlikely.  At best, cultures would get contaminated with molds or bacteria.  However, HIV is not a very sturdy virus when it isn’t in the correct environment.  Exposure to dry air kills it within minutes.  The idea that the condition of the laundry room, even if it weren’t well maintained, could cause retroviral contamination is, as I said, highly unlikely at best and realistically, nigh impossible.  Not only that but the cells would be grown in an incubator in said room, not just left out on a table or bench as they require specific temperatures and CO₂ concentration to thrive.

            You had stated yourself that you found it “extremely hard to believe that all of these scientists were bunglers” and yet for your contamination hypothesis to be even remotely possible this would have to be the case.  For your hypothesis that BRU and LAI were merely contaminants would mean that the scientists

1. somehow contaminated Patient BRU’s cells with a virus from a mystery source before the cells even went into primary culture (not co-culture and not the laundry room),

2. later contaminated LAI with a different virus from a different mystery source than BRU’s contaminant, then

3. finally contaminated BRU with LAI just for good measure (this last one occurred in sample M2T/B but not in all BRU samples). 

 All this incompetence, however, mysteriously did not affect the control cells which, even after 6 weeks, never showed any RT activity.  Not only that, the mystery sources of viruses must both have viruses from the same and only known human lentiviral group.  Also as a twist of luck, the LAV(BRU) strain is identified later (after the contamination had been discovered) to be the expected non-SI type and LAI’s strain (who was full-blown AIDS with KS at the time he donated) was the expected SI type.  In another twist of improbability, patient LAI (who likely never even learned his HIV status due to the time of his death) died of AIDS.  Later, and as would be predicted, so does BRU.

But the incompetence wouldn’t end there.  Remember that Dr. Montagnier went further and isolated the same lentivirus sequences from at least 4 other individuals.  In each case, since, unlike LAV(LAI) and HTLV III, these viral sequences were not similar enough to be the same strain and since they didn’t, as far as I know, contain sequences from LAI, BRU, or each other, it would mean that these scientists, whom you stated yourself are unlikely to all be incompetent, somehow managed to contaminate more unrelated cultures with more mystery viruses from at least 4 more different mystery sources.  All done?  Not even close!  Other labs around the world unrelated to that of Dr. Montagnier repeated his procedures (likely without laundry room incubators) and likewise isolated similar lentiviral sequences (many of these are available online in Genebank).  All of these sequences then not only share the same genes, sequences, and organization, but also similarity to other known lentiviruses, some of which share similar or identical symptoms and tropisms to those associated with AIDS in their appropriate hosts.  The human sequences would then, by sequence and organization, be shown to be most closely related to the simian lentivirus, as would be expected.  I could go on and on but I think you get the point.  You had mentioned earlier Occam's razor.  Unfortunately for your hypothesis to be correct, one must toss Occam out the window and go for the most complex and improbable explanation possible. 

In summary, the evidence shows that:

1. The original BRU strain must have in fact been from the patient BRU

2. The hypothesis of a contaminant infecting both BRU and LAI cultures goes against observed reality and predictions made were it the case.

3. If one wished to use contamination to explain BRU and LAI, it would have to be recurring event that happened in every one of Montagnier’s patients as well in those of other labs around the world and continues to this day.

About the Assumptions:

Now you stated in a previous e-mail that I had made a fatal assumption about BRU which would be the downfall of the whole “BRU had HIV” idea.  I have shown above why this was not the case.  I will also list below your assumptions and why they are incorrect and fatal to your hypothesis.

 Assumption 1:

“The assumption that the "cross-contamination" [LAV(Lai) -> LAV(Bru)] occurred in the Summer of 1983 is based entirely on the assumption that the source of the contamination was LAV(Lai).  That is simply the earliest date at which it could have occurred, if we are to assume that the origin was the Laillier sample.”

 Why it is incorrect:

LAI is understood to be the contaminant to BRU because sequencing of archived stocks reveal that BRU (which was the first strain in the lab and the first cultured) can be found in uncontaminated stocks.  If LAI and BRU came from a common contaminant this would not be the case as LAI is by far the faster replicating strain.

Assumption 2:

The Bru culture did not show any sign of growth at all for nearly 3 weeks... The first such cells came from a Spanish donor, with little or no screening having been done of the blood to determine what contaminants it may have carried…One thing that I find particularly interesting is how quickly the LAV(Lai) sample grew, despite the fact that the LAV(Bru) sample took weeks to show any activity at all.  In a matter of days, the RT activity of the Lai culture soared well above the peak level observed in the Bru sample.  This suggests that if both samples were contaminated from a common source in the laboratory, the contamination didn't occur in the Bru sample for at least two weeks, but in the Lai sample, the contamination was almost immediate -- something which might well happen if this very virus with an affinity for overgrowing lab cultures had been already cultured in the very same laboratory, perhaps even on the very same equipment, to the extent that it was present in greater quantities in the environment than it had been when the initial Bru contamination occurred.

Why this is incorrect:

First, the RT activity was detected 15 days, not 3 weeks after beginning the co-culture.  That said, this does not indicate that “the contamination didn't occur in the BRU sample for at least two weeks, but in the LAI sample, the contamination was almost immediate” at all since the co-culture took the exact same time as the primary culture from patient BRU.  As I had stated above, this actually run contrary to your claim.  It clearly shows that the BRU strain was a slow-growing strain devoid of accompanying fast growing strains which refutes the idea that both originated from the same source.

Your question:

“BUT!  If both cultures were contaminants from the lab itself, then neither Brugiere nor Laillier had the virus in his blood.  So why are both men dead?”

 Answer:

As shown above, this was not the case.  The facts, when looked at carefully, actually refute your hypothesis and supports Montagnier’s completely.  Thus, the sad fact that both men died from AIDS is not surprising and was predictable.

Assumption:

“The most interesting of these is that Brugiere persisted in not getting AIDS (though he continued to have persistent lymphadenopathy,) for several years, but then suddenly developed AIDS and died.  Indeed, in the mid-1980s, Gallo was using Brugiere's continued survival to suggest that Montagnier's virus didn't cause AIDS and that he, Gallo, was the discoverer of the true virus that causes AIDS… So Brugiere was never told that he had this virus that everyone was talking about which was blamed for causing AIDS, and he (for some reason) never progressed to AIDS, despite showing definite, persistent signs of ARC (AIDS-Related Complex).  Then shortly after he finds out that HIV had been initially isolated from his own blood, he suddenly dies.

Coincidence?  Sure, it could be, but there's a strong suggestion that it is not.”

 Why this is incorrect:

While the timing is coincidental, it would not be unexpected.  As stated, BRU had non-SI strains and that had not yet converted to SI.  If they had, there would have been fast growing cultures as observed with LAI.  As such, it is not surprising that he remained healthy for years.  This is observed in many HIV patients.  The idea that fear caused his death would be inaccurate although the idea that it may have contributed somewhat is not completely without some merit.  Stressors on the immune system can cause activation of inactive T-cells.  In people infected with HIV this can trigger a surge in viral production since infected T-cells need to be active for viral replication.  This is also why certain co-factors can accelerate the progression to full blown AIDS.

However, patient LAI hadn’t even donated his cells at the time he progressed to full blown AIDS.  From the time of his death, it is unlikely he ever even learned his status as HIV+.  Fear also wouldn’t explain away the deaths of countless other HIV infected individuals who died before HIV was revealed as the cause.  It also fails to explain the deaths and symptoms of people who do not find out they are HIV+ until they have already developed symptoms.

Related to this:

“A more recent study of college students demonstrated markers of immunosuppression (specifically, suppression of CD4 counts,) coincident with impending tests, particularly if they were very important tests.”

Answer:

To this I would ask the exact magnitude of T-cell reduction.  It is known that stress releases corticosteroids which in turn repress some immune function but I have never read anywhere that it would result in anything even remotely similar to the suppression in patients with full blown AIDS.  Perhaps you can provide this?

Assumption:

There is also evidence of the power of suggestion to cause AIDS, in the very three labworkers whose deaths are to this day cited as proof that HIV fulfills Koch's Postulates, because of the fact that all three died rather quickly, none of them surviving more than a decent fraction of a decade after initial "infection"…This is not consistent at all with what we've come to expect of a typical HIV infection, but it is absolutely consistent with all three having died purely from the power of the belief that HIV would kill them quickly.

 Why this is incorrect:

Actually it is quite consistent.  Different strains of HIV manifest symptoms at different rates.  If they were studying a specific strain it would probably be because it exhibits an interesting feature such as high cytotoxicity, high replication rates, or even the opposite.  However this is assumption on my part so if you truly wish to present this as a case please indicate which strains of HIV they were working with and what you mean by “rather quickly”.  It would be helpful.

References:

1. Montagnier, L.  “Isolation of a T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus from a Patient at Risk for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)”. Science vol. 220, 20 May 1983

-JM

“Gos” replied:

Jean-Marc wrote:  "The hypothesis you present is interesting although lacking any real evidence to support it."

The same could be said for the hypothesis that BRU was contaminated when it is said to have become contaminated, from the source (LAI) from which it was said to be contaminated.

The thing is, we know for a fact that at least four out of five of these initial "independent isolations" of HIV were, in fact, laboratory contaminants.  On the other hand, we still can't be sure that we know how or when these contaminations occurred -- such is the nature of after-the-fact evidence, there being no such thing as time travel to enable us to physically retrace our steps.  In the case of the putative LAI->BRU cross-contamination, the best answer we have as to the when is a range of dates, and as to how, there's only a big question mark, for if we don't know exactly when it occurred, we can't say for sure exactly how it occurred, can we?

That being the case, there is no hypothesis for how and when the alleged LAI->BRU contamination might have occurred, which would be exempt from your above statement, as worded.

Jean-Marc wrote:  "You stated that you believed the hypothetical contamination may have occurred in the laundry room."

I stated no belief.  Quite frankly, I'm not sure what to believe, when it comes to the contamination of the BRU sample.  It may have occurred in the laundry room, whether by the means I suggested, or by other means that I could not possibly predict, or it might have occurred at another time and place entirely, by any number of other means.  The chain of evidence forks at so many points, each of which represents a potential for one or more cross-contaminations to occur, that if I said I "believed" anything, I would be lying.  It might be more accurate to describe my statement as an off-the-cuff layman's hunch and leave it at that.

In any case, I find it quite amusing that you insist that a contamination which is documented to have occurred on no fewer than four separate occasions in four separate laboratories (including the very lab which produced the LAI culture,) could not possibly have happened five, six, seven or even more times.  How many contaminations have to occur in how many different laboratories before you will concede even the remotest possibility that additional contaminations may have occurred which we do not necessarily even know about?

Quite frankly, what we do know for fact is incriminating enough to cast doubt on what we think we know, but could well be wrong about, so you might as well concede the very real possibility that more as-yet-unknown contaminations might well have occurred, lest you unwittingly make further embarrassing public display of irrational intransigence.

Jean-Marc wrote:  "You have hypothesized that the lack of RT prior to day 15 indicates that there was no virus and that the contamination occurred some time after the cells from BRU were placed in culture, however, the data from the paper published on these experiments say differently [1]."  (Reference to citation in original)

Can you provide me with a copy of that article, or at least a quote from it which supports your statement?  I had those original 4 papers on HIV somewhere on my computer, but I cannot seem to find them now, and I'd like to re-read it.

It might interest you to know, BTW, that the reviewer and unofficial co-author, editor, and (lets face it) redactor of that article was none other than Robert Charles Gallo.  Montagnier himself has disavowed it in its published form. [1]

Basically, what happened is that Gallo was slated to review the paper for Science, and so he talked Montagnier into sending the article directly to him rather than submitting it directly to Science, supposedly so that he could fast-track it.

And fast-track it he did, but not before making substantial rewrites and revisions to the manuscript, including writing an abstract from whole cloth, which stated that Montagnier's virus was a "retrovirus belonging to the family of recently discovered human T-cell leukemia viruses (HTLV)..." [2]

Then, having mangled the original document, he switches hats and in his role as reviewer, recommends it to Science for publication [1] -- a clear conflict of interest if there ever was one -- in what reputable publication are the reviewer and co-author ever allowed to be the same person?

Jean-Marc wrote:  "Montagnier’s lab still has stocks of the original BRU uncontaminated with LAI.  This would not be the case were both tainted from a common contaminant."

That would be quite interesting, if true, because it would call into question why Barre, Chermann, and Montagnier would be so desperate to save the culture as to risk multiple contaminations by infusing it with cells from multiple unscreened sources, rather than simply allowing the culture to die and starting a fresh culture, using said remaining stocks, once they'd thawed or otherwise obtained a continuous cell line in which to properly culture it. [1]  Indeed, if they'd done so, they would have thus immediately proven the phenomenon to be reproducible -- a highly desirable outcome of experimentation in all branches of scientific research.

It could not possibly be that they wanted to preserve what little stock they had, if, as you say, they still have some of the original sample, 25 years later.  If they had enough to last 25 years (presuming the actual presence of culturable virus which could be mass-produced without touching the original sample,) then certainly they could have spared enough to do one more culture using virgin immortal cell lines, rather than ruining the whole experiment by introducing cells from multiple unscreened sources.

Jean-Marc wrote:  "Further, if, as you proposed, the conditions of the laundry room were dusty, ect…, could this lead to contamination with HIV?  This would be highly unlikely.  At best, cultures would get contaminated with molds or bacteria."

I would agree with the above statement, since a dry, dusty environent would theoretically be fatal to HIV, if we are to accept what we're told about HIV.  (Incidentally, this is the same reason that Ryan White could not possibly have gotten HIV from contaminated Factor VIII, but I digress.)

It's interesting that you should mention mold or bacterial contamination, though, because as it turns out, Gallo's stocks of HIV were, in fact, contaminated with mold [3] (not to mention the fact that they were overgrown by Montagnier's LAV)[1].

Jean-Marc wrote:  "You had stated yourself that you found it 'extremely hard to believe that all of these scientists were bunglers'"

Earlier, I was being simultaneously polite and (I must admit) a bit cheeky in expressing an opinion that these scientists could not all have been bunglers.  The fact is, that's not necessarily true.  We have evidence that at least four out of five "isolations" of HIV were nothing more than contaminations, one of them occurring in the very same lab where the only allegedly genuine isolation of the five was conducted.  We have evidence that in at least one of these laboratories, contamination with mold was present.

I will say this about the scientists in question:  Be they bunglers or competent, each and every one of them, to a man, was human, and therefore prone to human fallibility, including prejudice.

Earlier, when I used the word "prejudice", you bristled at the word, and I think this may be because you misconstrued my meaning in the use of that particular word.

To clarify, when I use the word "prejudice", I am not using it strictly according to the newfangled, politically-correct definition of "hatred based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc."  That is a form of prejudice, but the original definition of the word is much broader, and includes forms of prejudice that involve no hatred whatsoever.

It helps to remember the etymology of the word:  "Pre" = "before"; "judice" = "judgement".  Therefore, the literal meaning of the word "prejudice" is merely "the rendering of judgement before judgement may be rendered."

I will revisit the broader subject of racial prejudice at a later time, but for now, suffice to say that the specific form of prejudice I find to be in abundance among all of the researchers in question is a form common to scientists, known as "confirmation bias".

It is said that "When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail."  Where confirmation bias occurs in science (and that's plenty,) this means that if you're a retrovirologist in 1982, the cause of AIDS is a retrovirus, regardless of what its actual cause is, and if Gallo et al were all chiropractors instead, you and I would be currently debating whether AIDS is caused by spinal misalignment.

Earlier, in your response to the canine study that showed that more than half of dogs have antibodies to one or more of the antigens on a Western Blot, you showed your own confirmation bias in this regard, by inferring that this indicated the presence of a retrovirus antigenically similar to HIV, entirely without evidence other than the presence of one or more antibodies, none of which are specific to any virus.  You even went so far as to say that to the best of your knowledge, no one had followed up by isolating this hypothetical virus, but nonetheless you were sure this hypothetical "Canine Immunodeficiency Virus" (though it may not cause immonodeficiency in dogs) must exist, because the antibodies were there.  (Incidentally, your Canine Immonodeficiency Virus hypothesis is interesting to put it mildly, but hardly fulfills your burden of proof that HIV antibody tests correlate to actual HIV infection, in that these antibodies can be found in persons -- or even animals -- without HIV.)

This is not very different from inferring the presence of a retroviral entity from RT activity, when there is no scientific consensus to say that RT activity is specific to retroviruses at all.  So yes, it is still every bit possible that a certain set of phenomena, possibly including multiple cross-contaminations, filtered through the confirmation biases of multiple scientists (many of whom presided over the contaminations that are known to have occurred,) would have the appearance of being evidence for the existence of HIV as a retroviral entity, without that being the case in fact.  "Bunglers"?  Perhaps that word is a bit harsh -- let's just call them "human", and therefore eminently fallible, and leave it at that.

Similarly, you have exposed your prejudice in regards to Brugiere and Lailler, and compounded this by attempting to introduce more prejudicial (not to mention circumstantial) "evidence" into the discussion, by way of mentioning Brugiere's promiscuity and the fact that he'd traveled in Africa (though you don't mention whether he'd actually had sex in Africa or merely visited there, nor do you attempt to explain how he picked up HIV-1 in an area of the world where HIV-2 is said to predominate).  Few things are more amazing to me than how people attempt to defend their prejudices by compounding them -- it's like saying, "There's nothing racist about calling him a terrorist -- not only is he Arabic, but he's also a Muslim, AND he's vacationed several times in Afghanistan."

Jean-Marc wrote:  "...the sad fact that both men died from AIDS is not surprising and was predictable."

Of course it's a sad fact and of course it's not surprising and of course it is extremely predictable!  Quite frankly, if both of them had stepped in front of a bus, they would both have still died of "AIDS" and it would not be surprising and it would be predictable, just the same way Ryan White died of "AIDS" (massive internal hemorrhage), and no one was surprised, and the same way that Arthur Ashe, Rock Hudson, Liberace, and Kimberly Bergalis died of "AIDS" (iatrogenic causes), and no one was surprised -- even by the unlikely assertion that Bergalis got AIDS from her dentist -- and the same way my friend Matthew died a few years ago from "AIDS" (liver failure caused by ARVs), and no one was surprised -- even by the fact that his widow remained HIV-negative after years of unprotected sex with him -- and the same way that my friend Christine Maggiore's daughter died of "AIDS" (adverse reaction to amoxicillin,) merely for being Christine Maggiore's daughter, and no one was surprised, even when the LA County coroner's office was later unwilling to produce the lab results from little EJ's antibody tests, presumably because they were unable to produce a positive test[12].  Indeed, you may not know it, but in some areas of the US, including the State of Massachusetts, every death of an HIV-positive person is considered an AIDS death, even if it is the result of suicide, murder, drowning, car accident, or whatever,[3] and no one seems surprised at all that HIV can now cause car crashes and drownings, suicides and murders.  Not surprising at all.  Very predictable, in fact, from an "epidemic" whose basis is more rooted in prejudice than in science.

In 1982, a young, previously healthy patient whom I knew very well was diagnosed with toxoplasmosis.  Given the hysteria at the time concerning AIDS, the patient's family members openly asked the doctors whether the patient might have AIDS, and they were told that the answer was definitely "no", because the patient in question happened to be my 11-year-old kid sister, and not a member of any risk group, being White, of American birth, a virgin, and not a hemophiliac or IV drug user.

On the flip side of this same coin, I have a personal friend named Fred Cline, who is a semi-famous "denialist" activist, who was diagnosed as an "AIDS patient" in the early 1980s, purely on the "evidence" that he was sick and gay -- a diagnosis which was later reversed when he proved to be HIV-negative.  As of the last time I spoke with him on the phone (about two weeks ago), Mr. Cline has lived to a ripe old age, and survives to this day.

Now, let me ask you something:  In 1982, only a year after the first cases were even documented, how did doctors know when it was or wasn't AIDS?  Do doctors practice black magic while we're not looking, so that they can prognosticate even things that have not yet been scientifically documented?  Let me ask you something else:  If my sister been a hemophiliac, or sexually active, or for whatever reason had fallen within a "risk group" (as Fred Cline did), would they or would they not have said it definitely was AIDS?

The other night, I watched a movie called "The Holiday", starring Cameron Diaz.  In one scene, Diaz's character punches her live-in lover in the nose in a jealous rage, in a manner which seemed calculated to draw cheers from females in the audience (and which, I'm sure, did exactly that in theatres all over the country.)  This is not the first such instance I have noted (see the horror movie "Urban Legend"), of filmmakers using female-on-male violence to solicit cheers from female audience members who otherwise would consider it in very bad taste to cheer at the on-screen portrayal of blatant domestic or inter-gender violence.

Let's say, instead, that Diaz's character had been played by a male actor, and the boyfriend by a female, and the gender references in the script reversed (thus turning phrases like "Did you sleep with her?" into "Did you sleep with him?")  Do you think the audience would have interpreted the scene quite the same way?  No, because if the roles had been reversed, they would have seen domestic violence, but as the scene was presented, they most emphatically did not see domestic violence.  (Even though that's exactly what it was.)

The point being that domestic violence, in the subjective perception of the average American moviegoer, is a phenomenon of definition whose definition includes the stipulation that it must be male-on-female violence in order to qualify as domestic violence, and when it is female-on-male violence, not only is it emphatically not domestic violence, it is actually something to cheer about.

AIDS is similarly a disease of definition, and has always been, from the day that Michael Gottlieb first went looking specifically for homosexuals with immunosuppression [3].

By 1982, only a year later -- far too soon for proper scientific study (and thus in every sense consistent with the literal definition of the word "prejudice" as described above) -- it was already subjectively inferred that it was to be called "AIDS" only when it happened among those who were perceived as belonging to "risk groups" (including Fred Cline), and most emphatically was not AIDS when it happened outside these groups (including my little sister.)

Bear in mind that this was all well before there was any real objective reason to believe that this phenomenon was infectious.  Of course, there was the fact that they'd found similar disease in hemophiliacs, Hatian immigrants, and IV drug users, but this is rendered subjective and therefore meaningless by the fact that when similar disease was found outside these "risk groups", (including the case of my little sister,) those who found it did not see AIDS, no matter how compelling the similarities, specifically because the patients did not fall into preconceived "risk groups".

Thus, AIDS is a disease of definition, of prejudice, of selective interpretation of facts, and of circular logic ("It's AIDS when we call it AIDS because we call it AIDS when it's AIDS and when we say it's not AIDS then it's not AIDS because we say that AIDS can't happen outside a risk group,") and this fact predates the discovery of HIV by several years.  The same methods could be used to "prove" that masturbation causes blindness, homosexuality, or worse, and in fact this has about 150 years' worth of precedent in scientific history. [4,5,6]

Should we be surprised that both Brugiere and Lailler, two gay men, are said to have died of a syndrome whose definition included being gay, and which would most emphatically have not been defined as "AIDS" if they hadn't been gay?  I would at least agree with you to the extent of saying that it's not surprising at all -- indeed, it is -- exactly as you say -- as predictable as night following day.

However, prejudice is as prejudice does, and prejudice can only disguise itself for so long before the white hood comes off and the swastika underneath is exposed for all to see, and this has already happened in the case of AIDS.

According to the CDC [7], the average Black person in 2004 was 9.28 times more likely to die of what the report called "HIV disease" than the average White person, and according to JAMA [8], even though Blacks only account for 13% of the American population, they account for 51% of all HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the US.  This is actually slightly better than it was in 2002, when I first began investigating this particular matter -- back then, the latest CDC figures were for 2000, and Blacks were fully 10x more likely than Whites to die of AIDS[9].

One thing struck me back then as now:  There is no verifiable explanation for this that does not simply reek of prejudice at the diagnostic level.

We are led to assume that Blacks are more prone to HIV infection because they are more promiscuous, and/or they are more likely to abuse IV drugs.  If this were so, then there should be a raging epidemic of viral hepatitis in the Black population, and yet, according to the CDC, in 2004, Blacks were only 1.45X more likely to die of viral hepatitis than Whites[7] -- NOT 10x, and not even nearly 10x -- Certainly not enough to correlate to Blacks' being 10x more likely to die of AIDS.  Another hypothesis holds that Black men are picking up HIV in prison and bringing it home to their wives upon their release, but a US Government study done in Georgia's prison system and published in the MMWR, conclusively refutes that assumption, by proving that the vast majority of HIV-positive inmates acquire the virus before entering prison, and that only a scant few actually seroconvert while in prison [10].

The researchers credit the use of improvised condoms made from things like gloves and sandwich baggies, but having actually held in my hands the sandwich baggies and other similar objects distributed to prisoners in the US, I can tell you that I would not trust them to protect me from HIV infection for one simple reason:  They are very weak -- they have to be, or inmates would be making ropes and weapons with them.  The sandwich baggies distributed to prisoners with their lunches, for example, can only be used to make a very weak pair of shoelaces -- so weak that one cannot tie one's shoes very tightly, or they will break (again, I have actually used such a pair of makeshift shoelaces more than once in my life as an inmate in several jurisdictions here in Texas, and thus I speak from experience.)  Such material could not be used to fashion a reasonably reliable condom.

And given the fact that only a third of the inmates reported using any sort of condom, makeshift or otherwise, it would seem very surprising indeed if the use of makeshift condoms by a third of the prison population were to be credited for the protection of the other two-thirds of inmates who do not use them.

So we have three hypotheses which attempt to explain why Blacks might be 10 times more likely than Whites to contract HIV and/or to subsequently die of AIDS:  1)  Blacks abuse more IV drugs [refuted by the lack of a corresponding epidemic of viral hepatitis among Blacks]; 2)  Blacks are acquiring HIV in prison [refuted by the above-mentioned Federal study]; or 3)  Blacks are more promiscuous.

If one were to listen to enough Rap and R&B music, (and if one were racist enough to believe that these are any more representative of Afro-American lifestyle than C&W music represents the lifestyle of the average White person,) one might be tempted to assume that promiscuity among Blacks must be the answer, especially after we've eliminated IV drug abuse and inmate acquisition of HIV.

I've got four words that directly refute that whole argument:  "The Larry Craig factor".

Perhaps you remember when, not long ago, Senator Craig was arrested for disorderly conduct, after soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in an airport restroom.  What you probably don't know is that the stories about Craig offer nothing more than a tiny glimpse into a much, much larger phenomenon in the US, of White Christian conservatives who are also closeted homosexuals.

Now, I'm not saying that White Christian conservatives are more likely to be gay, but what I am saying is that for every 1% of the overall population that is gay, there is a corresponding 1% of the Christian conservative population that is also gay; the difference being that while there are more openly-gay individuals in the general population, the majority of WCC gays are closeted.

Now, those who have never themselves been closeted gay/bi males will not understand why being closeted dictates promiscuity, so I must explain the logistics, (from my own personal experience,) thus:  If no one that you know can know that you are gay, then you cannot have sex with anyone you know.  Therefore you must have sex with strangers.  In order to have sex with strangers, you must frequent places such as public restrooms or parks, glory-holes, or bathhouses, where men go to have sex with strangers.  Since every man at that place is equally promiscuous, then not only is a closeted individual highly promiscuous, so are most or all of the sex partners with whom he will copulate.

Consider how many sex partners Larry Craig must have had in his long life as a closeted bisexual man.  I can tell you from my own eight years' experience as a closeted adult bisexual that in that relatively short period of time I had sex with somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 partners, most or all of whom I have to assume were equally promiscuous.  Extrapolate that over the life of a much older man who has been in the closet his whole life -- and who was caught red-handed soliciting sex from strangers in a public restroom, no less --  and it becomes extremely reasonable to surmise that Craig may well have had thousands of partners, all of them as promiscuous as himself.

Craig is but the tip of the iceberg.  There are, in fact, legions of closeted gay/bi WCCs just like him (hell, I've had sex with more than a few hundred of them myself, I'm sure.)

And yet, where is the exploding epidemic of White Christian Conservative gay males being outed by diagnoses of HIV/AIDS?  If Black promiscuity is the reason for Blacks seroconverting at 10 times the rate of Whites, then this particular subset of White Christian Conservatives, being by far the most promiscuous group of people in our entire society, should be so riddled with AIDS that one is forced to wonder why they do not outrank Blacks and open gays combined hands-down for this dubious distinction.  Quite frankly, what many Whites do in the closet makes a 2 Live Crew album look pretty tame by comparison -- you'd really have to be there, as I once was, to fully appreciate this.

Now, consider this:  How many times do you think Larry Craig has been tested for HIV in his entire life?  ...And if he was, and tested "reactive" with a doctor who was unaware that he was a closeted bisexual, what are the chances that it would have been considered a "false positive", as opposed to the "true positive" verdict his doctor would surely render if his sexual proclivities were known?  Hell, I'd be willing to bet that I've been tested more times since I first tested positive 9 years ago, than Larry Craig and Mark Foley's combined lifetime totals, and I could count that number on the fingers of one hand.

And while members of this subset of whites are almost never tested, and are always assumed to be false positive in the highly unlikely event that they should test positive, gays and blacks are tested regularly, and each and every positive is considered to be a true positive in these groups, specifically on the basis of prejudiced assumptions concerning their perceived risk of HIV infection.

In the US, it is noted that Blacks are 10 times more likely than Whites to be convicted of a felony, but it is widely presumed that prejudice plays more of a role in this statistic, than the rather implausible idea that they actually commit 10 times more felonies than Whites.  Maybe there are some who would contend that Blacks actually do commit more felonies, but almost no one would contend that they commit 10 times more felonies than Whites, and whatever the perceived disparity, it is almost universally accepted that the disparity in conviction statistics is explained as a result of racial prejudice inherent in the process that produces criminal convictions.

By the same token, however, Blacks are also 10 times more likely than Whites to be diagnosed as having HIV/AIDS, and also 10 times more likely, should they die, to have their death ruled an AIDS death.  And yet, no one seems to consider the likely possibility that racial prejudice plays a role in the process that produces HIV/AIDS diagnoses, both in terms of frequency of testing (higher frequency yields more false-positives, according to statistical law,) and also in terms of the interpretation of any "reactive" result, vs the interpretation of a similar result in a White person.

Does wearing a white lab coat over his white skin make a White man immune to the temptation to think like a White Supremacist?  I could show you some scientific experiments and studies from Tuskeegee to Auschwitz that say otherwise.

And given the fact that I can provide ample historical precedent for racial and other forms of prejudice among scientists, I challenge you to name for me one actual virus in history that has ever picked its victims based on race -- just one.  I myself can only think of one, and it's not a virus that infects cells; it's a virus that infects minds, and its name is "prejudice".  So you can protest all you want that it's unfair of me to speak of prejudice within the medical and scientific community (as if they have some Godlike natural immunity to this human weakness, and are thus somehow above the accusation,) but I say to you that if the white hood and swastika armband fit, then you should wear them.  If the history of science is any indication, they go just as well with a white labcoat as with any other garment ever worn by humans.

And if you can't name even one virus that has ever picked its victims based on race, then I challenge you -- nay, I dare you --  to justify why HIV should be any different in this regard from every other virus in history, without resorting to making unsubstantiated and/or discredited statements that could only be believed by a racist, and which are certainly beneath the dignity of someone who prides himself on his scientific objectivity.

Am I surprised that Brugiere and Lailler died of "AIDS"?  No more surprised than I am by the fact that "HIV/AIDS" seems to pick the very same victims (immigrants, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, Africans) that have traditionally been targeted by eugenicists and ethnic-cleansers throughout history.  Now, if I thought for a nanosecond that AIDS was caused by an actual, honest-to-God virus, THEN these facts would surprise me.

These CDC statistics are so bizarre, in fact, that Alan Cantwell, Boyd Graves, and other conspiracy theorists have based upon them the conclusion that HIV was developed secretly by the US Government, specifically to target gays and ethnic minorities[11,19].  (Some of them, indeed, charge that Peter Duesberg and/or Robert Gallo were in on the conspiracy.)  And while I find their assertions as laughable as I'm sure you do, one cannot blame them for their apparent paranoia, as the facts documented by the CDC are, quite frankly, so bizarre as to be considerably stranger than any imaginable fiction, and one therefore need not wonder how conspiracy theorists might base such bizarre theories on them.

...But am I surprised?  Is this not predictable?  "No" and "hell no" -- these are the predictable results of a paradigm that is based upon prejudice to its very core, and has been so literally from the very beginning, without a shred of redeeming objective scientific validity.

Jean-Marc wrote:  "From the time of [Lailler's] death, it is unlikely he ever even learned his status as HIV+."

Upon what do you base this?

My memory could be misleading me on this, but didn't it come up earlier in this conversation that Lailler died in the 1990s?

And even if he didn't live that long, are you telling me that his AIDS was allowed to progress to the point of death, without him being told of his diagnosis or offered treatment for it?  Wasn't it established at Tuskeegee that this is scientifically unethical and morally repulsive?  ...Or does that rule only apply when we're experimenting on Blacks, but not on gays?

So I want to know how you judge it to be unlikely that he was told of his HIV status.  You certainly cannot possibly speak from certain knowledge, or you wouldn't be using words like "unlikely" -- instead, you'd be offering certainty and proof, not your opinion that it is unlikely.

...Until and unless you can back up that statement, it sounds an awful lot like someone's desperately in denial of certain facts, and this time, it ain't me that stands accused.

Jean-Marc wrote:  "Fear also wouldn’t explain away the deaths of countless other HIV infected individuals who died before HIV was revealed as the cause.  It also fails to explain the deaths and symptoms of people who do not find out they are HIV+ until they have already developed symptoms."

Isn't that a bit specious?

I mean, think about it:  The same line of argument could be used to defend the well-discredited contention that smoking doesn't cause cardiovascular disease, since smoking by itself cannot explain all the people who die of cardiovascular disease in any given year, who have never smoked a cigarette in their lives.

I can certainly say that I could attempt to make the same argument concerning whether HIV causes AIDS, and I could even cite a certain Duesberg paper which documented over 4,500 cases of HIV-free AIDS from the pages of pre-existing medical literature to support that contention, but I know damn well that you would not allow me to get away with such specious argument, so I will not allow it for you.

Suffice to say that it flies in the face of more than a century of overwhelming scientific evidence, to contend that fear, by itself, could not possibly cause autoimmune and other disease consistent with AIDS, even in the demonstrated absence of HIV.

Jean-Marc wrote:  "To this I would ask the exact magnitude of T-cell reduction.  It is known that stress releases corticosteroids which in turn repress some immune function but I have never read anywhere that it would result in anything even remotely similar to the suppression in patients with full blown AIDS."

Hmm...so much cannon fodder, so little time....

Is the magnitude of T-cell reduction significant, considering the magnitude of stress experienced by a college student for three days before a major exam, as compared to the mortal terror induced by an HIV or AIDS diagnosis?  (A terror which you have not experienced, but I have -- call it my "honorary Master's degree" in the pathogenesis of terror.)

To me, it would seem logical that if a few days' worth of pre-exam jitters can produce a small amount of immune suppression, that the years of mortal terror that follow an HIV or AIDS diagnosis could certainly suppress the immune system enough to produce conditions much like AIDS, perhaps indistinguishably so.

But don't take my word for it.  Read, once again, the words of Montagnier:  "Psychological factors are critical in supporting immune function. If you suppress this psychological support by telling someone he's condemned to die, your words alone will have condemned him."

Personally, I think Montagnier probably learned this from watching Brugiere and/or Lailler die, but don't quote that back at me as my "belief", because it is nothing resembling a belief, just a strong suspicion.

Indeed, while simple stress can induce the production of immunosuppressing corticosteroids, outright terror -- the sort resulting in presentation of a "fight or flight" reflex -- induces this plus the production of adrenaline, cortisol, and a host of other stress-related chemicals, which may be relatively harmless over the short term, but which over the long term (as might be produced by prolonged terror) can produce any or all of the classic symptoms of AIDS, up to and including CD4+ depletion, opportunistic infection, and even death. [13,14,15,16,17]

I have personally seen firsthand evidence that the fear of AIDS -- perhaps by itself, perhaps combined with crack cocaine abuse, but in no case combined with HIV infection -- can cause immunosuppression sufficient to render a previously-healthy patient incapable of fighting off a simple flu (a flu which I myself, as an AIDS patient, recovered from in a matter of days,) resulting in repeated hospitalizations with recurrent pneumonia, and that this condition resolved immediately upon the patient's learning that he was HIV-negative (thus removing his fear.)  If that were not enough, the literature concerning the pathogenic effects of fear, stress, and other negative emotions -- particularly relating to the immune system itself -- is so voluminous that I could literally spend the rest of my day looking up citations like the five cited above -- those five citations represent a fractions of the listings I found on just one trip to Virusmyth; I could certainly have found much more if I'd broadened my search to include the entire internet, and expanded it further beyond the scope of the context of AIDS.

Again, which one of us is in denial of facts for which there is overwhelming scientific evidence?

Jean-Marc wrote:  "If [the labworkers] were studying a specific strain it would probably be because it exhibits an interesting feature such as high cytotoxicity, high replication rates, or even the opposite.  However this is assumption on my part so if you truly wish to present this as a case please indicate which strains of HIV they were working with and what you mean by 'rather quickly'.  It would be helpful."

My source [18] doesn't specify what strain they might have been working with, but as to the definition of "rather quickly", Cohen states that the labworkers developed AIDS in the range of no more than 25-83 months (2-7 years).  The figures given, when averaged, return an average of just under 5 years (58.67 months,) and the median is 4.5 years.  Montagnier, on the other hand, has pointed out that "We are seeing people HIV infected for 9,10 years or more, 12 years, and they are still in good shape; their immune system is still good, and it is unlikely that those people will come down with AIDS later."

...You were saying earlier, about how fear by itself couldn't cause AIDS?  Considering the reams of evidence to the contrary I've already presented (not to mention Montagnier's testimonials), how is fear a less likely candidate than HIV in the swift progression to AIDS of these three previously-healthy labworkers who believed that a slow-acting virus would kill them swiftly?

--- Gos

--- gos@nerosopeningact.com

"Nobody here but us heretics..."

[1] Science Fictions:  A scientific mystery, a massive cover-up, and the dark legacy of Robert Gallo, John Crewsdon, 2002, Little, Brown and Co.

[2]  Montagnier, L.  “Isolation of a T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus from a Patient at Risk for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)”. Science vol. 220, 20 May 1983

[3] Science Sold Out:  Does HIV Really Cause AIDS?, Rebecca V. Culshaw, PhD, 2007, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatorrhea

[5]  Pathologizing Male Sexuality:  Lallemand, Spermatorrhea, and the Rise of Circumcision R. Darby, Oxford Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2005 60(3):283-319; doi:10.1093/jhmas/jri042 (abstract)

[6] http://www.gayhistory.com/rev2/events/1760.htm

[7] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr55/nvsr55_19.pdf

[8] http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/295/13/1508

[9] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr50/nvsr50_15.pdf

[10] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/21/MNG04ICP7A1.DTL&type=health

[11] http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=132&contentid=4206&page=1

[12] http://www.justiceforej.com

[13] Pathogenesis of human suppression in hypercatabolic diseases:
AIDS, septicaemia, toxic shock syndrome and protein calorie malnutrition,

A. Hässig, H. Kremer, Liang Wen-Xi and K. Stampfli, Continuum, June/July 1997 [full text]

[14]  Reappraisal of the depletion of circulating CD4+ lymphocytes in HIV-carriers in transition to AIDS, Prof. Alfred Hässig, Prof. Liang Wen-Xi and Dr. Kurt Stampfli, Continuum Jan/Feb 1996 [full text]

[15] Stress-induced suppression of the cellular immune reactions.
A contribution on the neuroendocrine control of the immune system. A. HASSIG, LIANG WEN-XI AND K. STAMPFLI,  Medical Hypothesis (1996) 46: 551-555 [full text]

[16] LOW CD4+ T LYMPHOCYTE COUNTS:  A variety of causes and their implications to a multifactorial model of AIDS, Matt Irwin MD (2001) [full text]

[17] HIV DOES NOT CAUSE AIDS:  Contribution of Corticosteroids, Illicit Drugs, and Malnutrition to the Pathogenesis of AIDS, Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati, PhD, DABT, DABVT (2001) [full text]

[18] The Duesberg Phenomenon:  Fulfilling Koch's Postulates, Jon Cohen, Science, December 1994 [full text]

[19] http://www.boydgraves.com