Inventing the AIDS Virus

Having read Peter Duesberg's book, I'm far more informed now than I used to be about the supposed link between HIV and AIDS. Like most people during the 80s and 90s, I just accepted what I read in the mainstream media at the time. The story was that  HIV=AIDS and if you were infected with HIV then it was a slow death sentence.

With the start of the new millennium, AIDS faded from prominence and was thanks to the miracle of anti-retroviral drugs like AZT. AIDS remained a problem in Africa and certain third world countries but in developed countries, HIV was on the back foot.  Thanks to these drugs, HIV-positive celebrities like Magic Johnson have survived for decades. At least that was my impression.

Now it would seem that Magic Johnson has survived by NOT taking AZT, even though publicly he claims to still be taking his anti-retroviral medication. Peter Duesberg makes it clear that people who take AZT or similar drugs do not survive for decades. He claims it is the drug treatment that kills them and not HIV. I'm inclined to agree.

In WhatsApp, I wrote a message to a friend in which I attempted to convey to him the core message of the book. I've reproduced it here:

Government money for research is much sought after and in the United States this amounts to billions of dollars. It was only with the polio virus that virologists managed to attract large grants from governments. After that, they were desperate to keep the funds flowing and so “the war on cancer” was rolled out in the 60s and the improbable search for a cancer virus was launched. The search for such a non-existent virus fizzled out in the 70s and virologists were in a real panic. They needed a new virus and for a time the swine flu fiasco during Ford’s presidency looked like it might fit the bill. Pandemic fears were stoked by the mass media and vaccinations were rushed out that killed some and sickened many. It was much ado about nothing however, and things were looking very bad for the virus hunters. Soon they would be using their own money, not the taxpayers’, for their hunting. HIV changed all that. HIV, a harmless passenger virus, was promoted as the latest scourge of humanity and grim predictions were made of massive death tolls as the virus spread into the heterosexual population and triggered an AIDS pandemic. Suddenly the virologists were awash with Government funds, HIV PCR testing became rampant and toxic drugs like AZT were rushed to market. This was the great scam of the 80s and 90s but the anticipated AIDS pandemic failed to materialise and again the virus hunters needed new viruses. Ebola and bird flu were briefly trialed but with Covid-19 the virologists really hit the jackpot. The money is pouring forth once again but only to researchers who tow the party line. My point is that the virologists and especially the retro-virologists have cleverly managed to attract the lion’s share to research funds over the past few decades and they want that to continue. The money has meant that any pretence of good science has been abandoned and most scientists whose careers rely on research funding have enough sense not to go against the flow. Any scientists that do, and there are a few, will be shunned by their colleagues and barred from publishing to any of the major scientific journals. Hence my contempt for journals like The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and their ilk. It’s all about money and has nothing to do with health. While most scientists are well-meaning, they have no control over the direction of their research. The administrators of various labs decide this and the money will stop if they sanction studies that conflict with the agreed narrative. 

On page 123 of the book, he writes about the papilloma virus before the most-maligned vaccine on the planet, Gardasil, was shamelessly unleashed upon adolescent girls in 2006:

Nevertheless, the virus hunters continue to push for the virus-cervical cancer hypothesis, which today remains one of the most popular and widely accepted among scientists. To help rationalise away some of the paradoxes, they have even revived herpes simplex virus-2 as a cofactor for the papilloma virus-two zeroes that hardly add up. Yet the biotechnology company Digene Diagnostics, based in Maryland, has won government endorsement for its papilloma virus test. Already widely in use, the test is now recommended by medical research authorities for some seven million American women each year, although only thirteen thousand cervical cancers appear each year in this country. The test costs $30 to $150 per person. Given that a woman who tests negative today may become infected tomorrow, there is no upper limit to testing. Many research laboratories are also kept in business with NIH grants to study endlessly every detail of the papilloma virus, and thus scientists would be the last to reevaluate this virus hypothesis. Unfortunately for tens of thousands of women each year, the ongoing media publicity and the tests can have devastating psychological consequences, not to mention the damage from preventive treatments for women who may have little more than harmless warts. 

To quote from the source of all wisdom, Wikipedia states that: 

The vaccine was approved for medical use in the United States in 2006,[19][20] initially for use in females aged 9–26. In 2007, the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) recommended gardasil for routine vaccination of girls aged 11 and 12 years. As of August 2009, vaccination was recommended for both males and females before adolescence and the beginning of potential sexual activity. By 2011, the vaccine had been approved in 120 other countries. In 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a nine-valent version, Gardasil 9, to protect against infection with the strains covered by the first generation of Gardasil as well as five other HPV strains responsible for 20% of cervical cancers (types 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58). In 2018, the FDA approved expanded use of Gardasil 9 for individuals aged 27 through 45 years old. 

Shockingly, the use of Gardasil has only expanded since its introduction and can now be given to males and females aged 9 to 45 but the adolescents are especially targeted despite the tragic damage it is causing to adolescent girls.

On page 145 of the book, the swine flu debacle is summarised and serves as a reminder of what is happening today:

The swine flu program, on the other hand, collapsed and could not be salvaged. Millions of people received the vaccine starting in October, although many were not told of the possible side effects. Soon, reports of hundreds of cases of paralysis began pouring in, ultimately including at least six hundred cases and seventy-four deaths. The CDC attempted to classify the victims as having died of other diseases. Ultimately, the vaccine's side effects could no longer be hidden, and the expensive scandal cost David Spencer his job as CDC chief. Ironically, the swine flu epidemic itself never materialised; only the CDC's immunisation program caused sick- ness and death.

On page 211, he writes on the statistical chicanery regarding the reporting of AIDS cases and once again the parallels to the present day situation are clear:

The increasing numbers of new AIDS cases until 1993 have largely been products of the artificial AIDS definitions. Each alteration in that definition has added, not subtracted, diseases to the diagnostic list. Every time the CDC needs higher rates of new AIDS cases, it expands that definition once again, and more diseases are reclassified into the syndrome. With the stroke of a pen an illusion of the spread of AIDS is created, prominent officials explain the revisions as products of our growing scientific knowledge, and the lay public feels reassured that federal efforts are justified or perhaps even a little too slow.

One might ask how a doctor would distinguish between an AIDS-related tuberculosis and a traditional one. Clinically, the symptoms are identical, so the CDC has stipulated in its current definition that the tuberculosis must be renamed "AIDS" if anti-bodies against HIV are also found in the patient. In the absence of previous HIV infection, the disease is classified under its old name, in this case "tuberculosis," and treated accordingly. AIDS, therefore, can never be found apart from HIV infection-entirely by definition!

The book is essential reading for anyone who is trying to make sense of what is happening as regards COVID-19. 

ADDENDUM: it seems that new antiretroviral treatments are still being peddled to HIV positive individuals as this recent post from the FDA on January 21st 2021 attests:

FDA Approves First Extended-Release, Injectable Drug

 Regimen for Adults Living with HIV

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Cabenuva (cabotegravir and rilpivirine, injectable formulation) as a complete regimen for the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection in adults to replace a current antiretroviral regimen in those who are virologically suppressed on a stable antiretroviral regimen with no history of treatment failure and with no known or suspected resistance to either cabotegravir or rilpivirine. This is the first FDA-approved injectable, complete regimen for HIV-infected adults that is administered once a month. 

The FDA also approved Vocabria (cabotegravir, tablet formulation), which should be taken in combination with oral rilpivirine (Edurant) for one month prior to starting treatment with Cabenuva to ensure the medications are well-tolerated before switching to the extended-release injectable formulation.

“Currently, the standard of care for patients with HIV includes patients taking daily pills to adequately manage their condition. This approval will allow some patients the option of receiving once-monthly injections in lieu of a daily oral treatment regimen,” said John Farley, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Office of Infectious Diseases in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Having this treatment available for some patients provides an alternative for managing this chronic condition.”

The safety and efficacy of Cabenuva were established through two randomized, open-label, controlled clinical trials in 1,182 HIV-infected adults who were virologically suppressed (HIV-1 RNA less than 50 copies/milliliter) before initiation of treatment with Cabenuva. Patients in both trials continued to show virologic suppression at the conclusion of each study, and no clinically relevant change from baseline in CD4+ cell counts was observed. 

The most common adverse reactions with Cabenuva were injection site reactions, fever (pyrexia), fatigue, headache, musculoskeletal pain, nausea, sleep disorders, dizziness and rash. Cabenuva should not be used if there is a known previous hypersensitivity reaction to cabotegravir or rilpivirine, or in patients who are not virally suppressed (HIV-1 RNA greater than 50 copies/milliliter).

Cabenuva and Vocabria were granted Fast Track and Priority Review designation by the FDA. The FDA granted the approval of Cabenuva and Vocabria to ViiV Healthcare.

The FDA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, protects the public health by assuring the safety, effectiveness, and security of human and veterinary drugs, vaccines and other biological products for human use, and medical devices. The agency also is responsible for the safety and security of our nation’s food supply, cosmetics, dietary supplements, products that give off electronic radiation, and for regulating tobacco products.

HIV and AIDS

I was fortunate enough to come across a Kary Mullis autobiography titled "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field". It was a short (157 page) read but very interesting. I'm going to say more about in subsequent posts but for the moment I'll focus on what he had to say about the link between HIV and AIDS. 

Kary Mullis is the inventor of the PCR test that is all the rage now in the battle against the invisible monster of Covid-19. He received the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1993 but had developed the technique about ten years earlier. In the mid-1980s, this test was being used to identify HIV in blood samples. 

He writes:

When I first heard in 1984 that Luc Montagnier of France’s Pasteur Institute and Robert Gallo of America’s National Institutes of Health had independently discovered that the retrovirus HIV—Human Immunodeficiency Virus—caused AIDS, I accepted it as just another scientific fact. It was a little out of my field of biochemistry, and these men were specialists in retroviruses.

Four years later I was working as a consultant at Specialty Labs in Santa Monica. Specialty was trying to develop a means of using PCR to detect retroviruses in the thousands of blood donations received per day by the Red Cross. I was writing a report on our progress for the project sponsor, and I began by stating, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.”

I asked a virologist at Specialty where I could find the reference for HIV being the cause of AIDS.

“You don’t need a reference,” he told me. “Everybody knows it.”

“I’d like to quote a reference.” I felt a little funny about not knowing the source of such an important discovery. Everyone else seemed to.

Thus began his doubts about the link between HIV and AIDS. He never found a reference. He goes on:

I was hesitant to write “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS” until I found published evidence that would support it. Mine was the most minimal statement possible. In my grant request I wasn’t trying to say that it absolutely did cause AIDS, I was just trying to say that it was likely to cause it for some known reasons. Tens of thousands of scientists and researchers were spending billions of dollars a year doing research based on this idea. The reason had to be there somewhere, otherwise these people would not have allowed their research to settle into one narrow channel of investigation.

I lectured about PCR at innumerable meetings. Always there were people there talking about HIV. I asked them how it was that we knew that HIV was the cause of AIDS. Everyone said something. Everyone had the answer at home in the office in some drawer. They all knew and they would send me the papers as soon as they got back. But I never got any papers. Nobody ever sent me the news about how AIDS was caused by HIV.

 Kary goes on to compare the then current situation with conditions in the time of Galileo:

In 1634 Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for the last eight years of his life for writing that the Earth is not the center of the universe but rather moves around the sun. Because he insisted that scientific statements should not be a matter of religious faith, he was accused of heresy. Years from now, people looking back at us will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find the leaders who excommunicated Galileo. Science as it is practiced today in the world is largely not science at all. What people call science is probably very similar to what was called science in 1634. Galileo was told to recant his beliefs or be excommunicated. People who refuse to accept the commandments of the AIDS establishment are basically told the same thing. “If you don’t accept what we say, you’re out.”

Cut to 2021 and it's pretty much the same situation. Exchange HIV for Covid-19. Anybody in the medical establishment today faces the same problem regarding Covid-19. “If you don’t accept what we say, you’re out.” Shifting back to HIV however, the question that Kary Mullis was often asked was: "If HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS, then what is?” He replied:

The answer to that is that I don’t know the answer to that ... Knowing that there is no evidence that HIV causes it does not make me an authority on what does. It is indisputable that if an individual has extremely close contacts with a lot of people, the number of infectious organisms that this individual’s immune system is going to have to deal with will be high. If a person has three hundred sexual contacts a year—with people who themselves are each having three hundred contacts a year—that’s ninety thousand times more opportunity for infections than a person involved in an exclusive relationship.

The obvious counter to this is to ask what about those people who received HIV via a blood transfusion? These people had not necessarily been sexually promiscuous and certainly not in the case where a mother passed it on her baby at birth. The following video gives the conventional view of how HIV and AIDS are linked:

As the video explains, HIV is what is called a retrovirus and Kary Mullis says this about them in his book:

We live with an uncountable number of retroviruses. They’re everywhere—and they probably have been here as long as the human race. We have them in our genome. We get some of them from our mothers in the form of new viruses—infectious viral particles that can move from mother to foetus. We get others from both parents along with our genes. We have resident sequences in our genome that are retroviral. That means that we can and do make our own retroviral particles some of the time. Some of them may look like HIV. No one has shown that they’ve ever killed anyone before.

There’s got to be a purpose for them; a sizeable fraction of our genome is comprised of human endogenous retroviral sequences. There are those who claim that we carry useless DNA, but they’re wrong. If there is something in our genes, there’s a reason for it. We don’t let things grow on us. I have tried to put irrelevant gene sequences into things as simple as bacteria. If it doesn’t serve some purpose, the bacteria get rid of it right away. I assume that my body is at least as smart as bacteria when it comes to things like DNA.

HIV didn’t suddenly pop out of the rain forest or Haiti. It just popped into Bob Gallo’s hands at a time when he needed a new career. It has been here all along.

Once you stop looking for it only on the streets of big cities, you notice that it is thinly distributed everywhere.

If HIV has been here all along and it can be passed from mother to child, wouldn’t it make sense to test for the antibodies in the mothers of anyone who is positive to HIV, especially if that individual is not showing any signs of disease?

Picture a kid in the heartland of America. His lifelong goal has been to join the Air Force when he graduates and become a jet pilot. He’s never used drugs and he’s had the same sweet girlfriend, whom he plans to marry, all through high school. Unbeknownst to him, or anyone else, he also has antibodies to HIV, which he inherited from his mother, who is still alive, when he was in her womb.

He’s a healthy kid, it doesn’t bother him in any way, but when he is routinely tested for HIV by the Air Force, his hopes and dreams are destroyed. Not only is he barred from the Air Force, but he has a death sentence over his head.

The CDC has defined AIDS as one of more than thirty diseases accompanied by a positive result on a test that detects antibodies to HIV. But those same diseases are not defined as AIDS cases when the antibodies are not detected. 

If an HIV-positive woman develops uterine cancer, for example, she is considered to have AIDS. If she is not HIV-positive, she simply has uterine cancer. An HIV-positive man with tuberculosis has AIDS; if he tests negative he simply has tuberculosis. If he lives in Kenya or Colombia, where the test for HIV antibodies is too expensive, he is simply presumed to have the antibodies and therefore AIDS, and therefore he can be treated in the World Health Organization’s clinic.

It’s the only medical help available in some places. And it’s free, because the countries that support the WHO are worried about AIDS. From the point of view of spreading medical facilities into areas where poor people live, AIDS has been a boon. We don’t poison them with AZT like we do our own people because it’s too expensive. We supply dressings for the machete cut on their left knee and call it AIDS.

The CDC continues to add new diseases to the grand AIDS definition. The CDC has virtually doctored the books to make it appear as if the disease continues to spread. In 1993, for example, the CDC enormously broadened its AIDS definition. This was happily accepted by county health authorities, who receive $2,500 from the feds per year under the Ryan White Act for every reported AIDS case.

What I've highlighted in bold seems to be the crux of the matter and is worth repeating:

The CDC has defined AIDS as one of more than thirty diseases accompanied by a positive result on a test that detects antibodies to HIV. But those same diseases are not defined as AIDS cases when the antibodies are not detected.

The CDC continues to add new diseases to the grand AIDS definition. In the video linked to in this post, it's stated that HIV has a latency period of up to eight years. Anybody who has tested positive for HIV and who dies of one of the thirty certain diseases during that time is said to have died of AIDS. This is no different to the situation at the moment where someone who dies of some illness, after having being tested positive for Covid-19, is said to have died from the virus. It all comes down to how deaths are recorded.

The other issue is the anti-retroviral drugs like AZT that are used to treat HIV. I came across an interesting article about Magic Johnson who was diagnosed with HIV in 1991. He apparently has been taking these drugs for many years which is given as the reason for his continued survival:

The answer to Johnson's survival is far from "magic." According to reports, he takes the same kinds of drugs that are available to other HIV patients in the developed world, and increasingly in impoverished nations in Africa and Asia, where the disease still runs rampant. Many people have lived with HIV even longer than Johnson.

"There is nothing unique about Magic," said Spencer Lieb, senior epidemiologist and HIV/AIDS research coordinator for the Florida Consortium for HIV/AIDS Research. "There are still people alive and kicking and doing very well 20 and 30 years after infection." [Does Circumcision Prevent HIV?]

Lieb said that in the state of Florida alone, hundreds of patients have hung on since becoming infected with HIV in the early 1980s, when the first confirmed AIDS cases turned up in the United States. But Johnson and these people are still in the minority: According to research and estimates by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.2 million Americans have HIV, and 20 percent of them are undiagnosed. Approximately 50,000 people become infected each year, and more than 18,000 die annually.

Hmmm, "research and estimates by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". Intriguingly, the article goes on to say this:

Yet even without modern drugs, in rare instances an HIV-positive person can manage on their own to keep AIDS at bay. These "long-term nonprogressors" or "elite controllers," estimated at as few as one in 500, have lived for decades with HIV, despite not being on antiretroviral therapy.

So about 0.02% are "long-term nonprogressors" or "elite controllers" if we believe these statistics. The remaining 99.98% go on to die if they don't get treatment. Some "victims" have chosen not to accept this death sentence. Christine Maggiore was one such person. She wrote a best-selling book called "What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?" after being diagnosed with HIV in 1992. She died at age 52 in 2008 with what Wikipedia described as AIDS-like symptoms but more controversially her three year old daughter died of pneumonia after having been breastfed as an infant.

There is a video from around 2002 on BitChute in which Christine Maggiore makes an appearance along with Kary Mullis and Peter Duesberg. In his autobiography, Kary Mullis says that it was after listening to a radio interview featuring Peter Duesberg that he understood why there was no evidence supporting the link between HIV and AIDS. The term for people who refuse to accept the link is AIDS denialist. Peter Duesberg is still alive and aged 84 at the time of this post.

I've managed to locate a copy of Peter Duesberg's 1996 "Inventing The AIDS Virus" with a foreward by Kary Mullis. It should be an informative read. AIDS denialism is branded as pseudoscience and yet the views of distinguished scientists like Mullis and Duesberg are an embarrassment to the scientific establishment.