Jaspreet Kindra
The lobbyist widely believed to have shaped President Thabo Mbeki’s off-beat views on HIV/Aids has now attached herself to another senior African National Congress Aids dissident MP Peter Mokaba.
It emerged this week that Anita Allen, a former journalist at The Star, has been corresponding with Mokaba and sending him dissident literature.
Mokaba believes that there is no human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and that anti-retroviral drugs are poisonous and do not work.
A letter from Allen is included in a package of dissident literature being distributed by Mokaba to ANC MPs and party branches in an attempt to lobby them against the use of anti-retrovirals.
In her letter, Allen alludes to a Washington Post interview with Mbeki in which the president was asked why he opposed the anti- retroviral AZT.
“The president replied that there was the tryphosphorylation [sic] problem [a dissident view that AZT cannot chemically act against HIV]. In the subsequent disparaging article the journalist wrote that the president mumbled something about ‘trying the phosphor relation’. That’s The Washington Post!”
The correct spelling is of the word is triphosphorylation.
Allen then comments that news-papers in South Africa are not the only ones that are “scientifically challenged”.
In the letter she also boasts of her “triumph” over Appeal Court Judge Edwin Cameron on SABC’s Tim Modise Show, where she asked him if he was aware that AZT could not “tryphosphorylate”.
“Cameron said he was not a scientist. I said: ‘Well then, why are you doing your best imitation of the drug PRO?'”
Cameron has publicly said that he is only alive today because of the antiretroviral cocktails he has been taking since 1996. His regime includes AZT.
Contacted by the Mail & Guardian, Allen denied that she had ever written to Mokaba.
When the letter was read out to her, she claimed she could not hear and the phone went dead.