In his open letter to SAfm talk-show host Tim Modise (Mail & Guardian, May 28 to June 2) about the controversial issue of HIV and Aids, Donald G McNeil seems to be saying, “Don’t you worry your woolly little head, I’ll do the thinking. I’ve looked at this issue and it’s not worth debating.”
McNeil’s patronising letter is in response to a talk show discussion on some of the strange anomalies in the theory that HIV causes Aids. The debate was prompted by the latest instalment of an ongoing series on the subject currently appearing in noseWeek. While the suggestion that HIV is not the cause of Aids seems at first preposterous, investigation has convinced us that the matter is certainly open to discussion.
In his attempt to stifle any debate McNeil quickly resorts to the usual Aids showstopper- “people are dying”- implying that it is therefore irresponsible to insist on caution when it comes to answering the question: “Why are they dying?” He also deploys other quick-and- dirty smokescreens that have regrettably become a feature of any discussion on the subject. HIV dissidents are, he implies, homophobic and are encouraging unsafe sex.
It’s worth pointing out that people diagnosed HIV-positive have committed suicide, avoided intimacy and avoided having children. Marriages and careers have been destroyed. People have resorted to deadly chemotherapies.
Rape victims have been burdened with severe additional trauma. In Africa, people have been ostracised and killed for testing HIV- positive, precious government health resources have been diverted and investment decisions with significant economic impact have been negatively affected. It is absurd to suggest that the theory giving rise to this incalculable amount of suffering should be beyond sincere question.
Broadly speaking those questions would include: Are people dying in unprecedented numbers? If so, is it because of a sexually transmitted virus? What is Aids – and does it have one cause worldwide? How is it possible to test positive for a virus that doesn’t exist?
In the noseWeek series, we are sincerely attempting to address these questions. We will also examine the dangerous world of AZT.
The debate does not lack for emotion, which McNeil seems willing to exploit while being unable to contribute a cool head. He obscures rather than enlightens when he lumps together rapists who believe that sex with a five-year-old virgin cures Aids, and United States academics like Dr Walter Gilbert – Nobel prize-winning biologist – who says: “I would not be surprised if there were another cause of Aids and that HIV is not involved.”
There are, in fact, hundreds of academics, physicians, researchers and activists who doubt that HIV is the cause of Aids. They are organising in groups like the “The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/Aids Hypothesis” – signatories to an open letter to the scientific community saying, in part, “Many biochemical scientists now question this hypothesis [HIV] … We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group.”
Another important group is Health Education Aids Liaison (Heal), originally conceived as a vehicle to help people living with Aids. After 18 years of working with Aids, Heal’s manifesto states in part “Heal is of the opinion that the whole thrust of Aids `testing’, research, and treatment urgently needs to be reconsidered.”
A notable characteristic of all the HIV sceptical groups is that they support the call for an open, independently adjudicated debate on the issue of HIV/Aids.
In the developed world the predicted heterosexual Aids holocaust has totally failed to materialise. This failure cannot be ascribed to safe sex since there has been no slowing in the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. There are many scientific studies to support what this indicates – that Aids is not caused by a virus spread by sexual contact. But McNeil doesn’t understand the dissident position that he so blithely dismisses. He concludes that the cause of Aids in Africa must be sexual because he doesn’t believe that the “lifestyle of rural Africans is substantially identical to that of white homosexuals in San Francisco”, whose kamikaze-style approach to drugs and sex – HIV dissidents suggest – was the true cause of their exceptional vulnerability to disease.
The point is that just as there are various possible causes, other than HIV, of Aids among homosexuals in San Francisco, so are there possible causes, unique to Africa, of what we know as Aids. The HIV dissidents quite reasonably draw attention to some of the most obvious of these: continuous and repeated exposure to dire tropical diseases, such as malaria, without recourse to health care, together with various other factors that place the body under severe stress such as malnutrition and prolonged anxiety, both results of civil war and social disruption.
One of the criticisms of HIV dissidents is that the announcement in 1984 of the alleged discovery of HIV prematurely put a halt to research into other possible causes of Aids.
McNeil declares authoritatively “The virus exists. People who don’t have it in their blood don’t get Aids”. But the latest US Centers for Disease Control definition includes instances where Aids can be diagnosed “in the presence of negative results for HIV infection”, and there are many cases of severe immune suppression where the victims do not test HIV-positive.
On the other hand, even Luc Montagnier, credited as the co-discoverer of HIV, announced in 1990 that he no longer believed that HIV was a sufficient cause of Aids. One of his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute, Simon Wain-Hobson, said in an interview published in Nature in 1995, “… an intrinsic cytopathic effect of HIV is no longer credible”.
This is still a long way from the position of the Aids dissenters, but it is even further from the orthodox view so ardently parroted by McNeil.
McNeil’s tone of outraged hysteria is typical of the Aids establishment’s response to any challenge. As Kary Mullis – another Nobel laureate Aids dissenting biologist – says, “If you ask for the scientific documents that demonstrate that HIV causes Aids, you don’t get an answer, you get fury.”
In a recent article, ABC News medical columnist Nicholas Regush poses the following scenario: “Let’s say you are a medical scientist who has wondered, from time to time, whether HIV is really the cause of Aids or whether Aids is as simple as one virus. It’s a reasonable question … But do you really want to express this opinion? Or merely raise the question? If you do, then the new Gestapo will likely pay you a visit. Forget about that government grant.
“Forget about the raise. You will find yourself marginalised, your reputation smeared and you’ll probably be out on the street … If you want a chance at big-time success in medicine, then toe the line and protect the profession against all infidels. That’s the simple recipe that will buy you the dream house.
“The mercenary approach is so locked in now, thanks to huge industry control of medical science financing, that the captured rats in the cage, the spokespeople for this enterprise appear to have lost sight of the maze’s entry point.”
Aids journalist Celia Farber calls the Aids establishment “a totalitarian system that seeks to enforce its domination by methodically obstructing any ideas that run counter to it”. Farber relates how, at the annual International Aids Conferences, pharmaceutical company representatives lay out envelopes addressed to reporters from all the major newspapers.
“You see them open the envelopes, walk over to a laptop and start typing,” she writes.
McNeil’s letter reads like propaganda. It is misleading and inaccurate. The Aids dissenters are authoritative and credible. The evidence they cite is compelling. At the very least they deserve the open debate that the Aids establishment seems so determined to stifle.
Marten du Plessis is the managing editor of noseWeek