The AIDS War Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical- Industrial Complex

 INTRODUCTION

The perils of telling the truth became known to me at the age of six. Just before Christmas I asked my parents if there were really a Santa Claus. They told me, and a few days later I told my play- mates, who before that had been at least skeptical. Then the flak began. My mother received calls from bitter, sobbing women: their Christmas had been ruined by me! She listened patiently. That evening my father held a frank family discussion. I had done nothing wrong, he counseled, and it was always right to tell the truth — but it was also good to be cautious, for others were not so rational as we.

I do not regret telling the truth about “AIDS”.' I have taken my share of blows for so doing, and I have also given a few — and I have survived, in good health and spirits. The AIDS epidemic is an epidemic of lies, through which hundreds of thousands of people have died and are dying unnecessarily, billions of dollars have gone down the drain, the Public Health Service has disgraced itself, and Science has plunged into whoredom.

The official AIDS paradigm — including the preposterous notion that a biochemically inactive microbe, the so-called “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV-1), causes the (at last count) 29 AIDS-indicator diseases — represents the most colossal blunder in medical history. But it is more than a blunder. In the course of this book it will become plain why I have employed the metaphor of war: the terrible suffering and loss of life, propaganda, censorship, rumors, hysteria, profiteering, espionage, and sabotage.

This book has been written in the shadow of censorship, which is unofficial, but all-pervasive. Though I might have found a mainstream publisher with the courage to publish it, I have chosen to use my own press. This way I am my own master. No editor has imposed political correctness on me, or stylebook punctuation.

The disadvantage is that I have had to do most of the work myself, including proofreading, which means that inevitably there are mistakes. I apologize for these, and would be grateful to readers who let me know about them — anything from mistakes of fact to dangling participles or faulty verb sequences.

In a way, The AIDS War is the second volume to my first AIDS book, Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story. It is a collection of my major writings on “AIDS”, going back to February 1985: dispatches from the front. I want them to stand for the record, so that no one, when the truth finally prevails, can pretend there were no AIDS- critics, or that we didn’t speak out.

A number of chapters were written especially for this book, and their placement in it is somewhat arbitrary. The most important are Chapter IX: “The Risk-AIDS Hypothesis”, in which I discuss the nature and causes of “AIDS”; and Chapter XX: “Recovery From AIDS”, in which I put forward a comprehensive program of recovery for those with a diagnosis of “AIDS”.

I began researching “AIDS” in early 1983. Initially I was shocked by the incompetence with which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) conducted survey research, my own profession since 1966.

Later I would be shocked by the dishonesty, venality, and ruthless- ness of the AIDS Establishment. It became apparent, after a few years, that I could not do AIDS research and hold down a very demanding job at the same time, so I became a full-time writer, which is what I had always wanted to be.

For a decade of my life I have been fighting on the front lines of the AIDS War, and not alone. Many of my comrades appear as the heroes and heroines of this book. A great many more people have helped me, and I wish I could acknowledge them all — though if I tried, I would probably forget a few. My thanks to all of you.

I am most grateful to Charles Ortleb, publisher of the New York Native and Christopher Street, in whose pages most of my articles originally appeared. While we don’t agree on everything, he has always supported my right to think for myself. My thanks also to L. Craig Schoonmaker and Jan Young, who criticized important chapters and provided practical assistance.

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The “AIDS epidemic” is, among other things, an epidemic of information overload. AIDS technobabble is dumped on us every day by the media: T-cell ratios, CD-4 receptors, DNA, RNA, latency periods, TAT genes, ELISA test, Western Blot test, p-24 antigen test, polymerase chain reaction test, angiogenesis, nucleoside analogues, AZT, ddI, ddC, d4T, macrophages, lentiviruses, reverse transcriptase, apoptosis, and all the rest of it. Over 60,000 papers on “AIDS” have been published to date — untold millions of words. Nearly all are the intellectual equivalent of toxic waste, which is to say, both useless and dangerous.

At base “AIDS” is really very simple, and yet, paradoxically, it is an uphill struggle to convey that simplicity. I'll do my best.
According to the official paradigm, “AIDS” is new and consti- tutes a coherent, single disease entity — despite the fact that “AIDS” itself has neither symptoms nor diagnostic criteria that are peculiar to itself. Other diseases, such as mumps, measles, polio, chicken pox, rabies, gonorrhea, malaria, salmonella, the common cold, or bubonic plague, can all readily be described and diagnosed. This is not the case with “AIDS”, which is defined entirely in terms of other, old diseases, in conjunction with dubious test results? and even more dubious assumptions. Although people are undeniably sick, “AIDS” itself does not really exist; it is a phoney construct.

“AIDS” is officially defined as the presence of one or more indicator diseases or conditions, none of which is new, plus the tendentiously named “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV).
INDICATOR DISEASE + HIV = AIDS. Originally there were two indicator diseases: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). With the latest change in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) surveillance definition, in 1992, the list of indicator diseases has grown to almost 30; at the same time, there is now talk of dropping KS from the list, as KS not infrequently occurs in individuals — typical members of “risk groups” — in whom there is no evidence of either past or present infection with HIV. The definition is of course a tautology: by requiring the presence of HIV for a diagnosis of “AIDS”, the CDC has given the retrovirus a causal role as an artefact of the definition.

According to the official paradigm, the indicator diseases in an “AIDS” patient are caused by an underlying condition of “immune deficiency”, which is caused by HIV. In fact, everything about the paradigm is wrong. The presumed condition of immune deficiency is not present in all “AIDS” patients; the tests used to diagnose immune deficiency are new, highly inaccurate, and without adequate benchmarks; many of the extremely heterogenous indicator diseases
are not even caused by immune deficiency; and the hypothesized microbial culprit, HIV, is harmless. The AIDS/HIV mythology as a whole represents the biggest blunder in the history of medicine.

The purpose of this chapter is not to refute the HIV-AIDS hypothesis; that was sufficiently done by molecular biologist Peter Duesberg six years ago. Rather, my aim is to present an alternative paradigm, another way of looking at things. I’ll put forward hypotheses as to the real nature of “AIDS” and what its causes might be in different risk groups and in isolated individuals.‘ First, however, let’s clear the slate from all the HIV-related gobbledygook that has prevented clear thinking on the subject.

Two false hypotheses The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is the first false one. It was a foolish hypothesis from the very beginning, and has persisted for over eight years only owing to the cowardice and stupidity of the media and the ruthlessness of the vested interests that comprise the burgeoning HIV-AIDS industry.

HIV cannot be the cause of serious illness, AIDS or otherwise, for reasons of molecular biology. HIV is consistently inactive from a biochemical standpoint, even in patients who are dying from “AIDS”. This argument alone is a devastating and sufficient refutation of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. A biochemically inactive microbe cannot cause illness, any more than the reader of this book could rob a bank at the same time he was in a coma. HIV is a “profoundly conventional retrovirus”, and it is in the nature of retroviruses to coexist peacefully with their hosts.

HIV fails all of Koch’s Postulates, the standard criteria for establishing a causal relationship between a particular microbe and a particular disease. The first postulate, which amounts to good common sense, stipulates that the suspected microbial culprit should be found in all cases of the disease, and especially in tumors associated with the disease. In fact, disregarding for a moment the tautology of the AIDS definition, HIV cannot be detected in a substantial number of AIDS patients, even using the most sensitive, space age techniques. HIV cannot be found in KS lesions. In terms of the virus itself (as opposed to merely viral antibodies or signals), it is impossible to isolate HIV from at least 10 to 20 percent of “AIDS” patients. When a microbe flunks the first postulate, the other three become irrelevant; the microbe cannot be the cause.° The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is also refuted by the epidemiology of the epidemic. Infectious diseases spread, yet “AIDS” has not. For over a decade it has remained rigidly compartmentalized, confined almost entirely to two main risk groups: intravenous drug users and gay men. “AIDS” affects nine times as many males as females, whereas no truly infectious disease would be so gender-selective.

The great bulk of “AIDS” cases fall into the age range of 30 to 45 years, exactly the age group that normally would have the greatest bodily resistance to infectious diseases.‘

The AIDS hypothesis is more fundamental: the hypothesis that “AIDS” exists in any rationally definable way. “AIDS” was from the very beginning a phoney construct, the product of muddled thinking and hidden agendas. Under the obfuscatory rubric of “AIDS” lies the reality of people who are sick in diverse ways and for diverse reasons. The first cases were identified among gay men. (It was then called “GRID”, which stood for “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency”.) The CDC trumpeted forth the message that the gay men with “AIDS” had been incredibly promiscuous. Indeed, some of them had been, in terms of annual numbers of sexual partners.
But in order to understand something like this statistically, it is necessary to see the entire distribution. CDC “analysts” presented only the mean, which is merely one way of expressing the average.

In evaluating “promiscuity” as a risk factor, it is also important to know whether some gay male PWAs had little sex or none at all. Deliberately or not, the CDC researchers omitted this information from their published statistics.
Originally “AIDS” stood for “Auto-Immune Deficiency Syn- drome”. When the folks in the CDC realized that this particular construct would not fly, but the acronym had caught on, they changed it to “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’.

In 1982 the CDC came across ten Haitians who had PCP, toxo- plasmosis, cryptococcus, candidiasis and tuberculosis — which are common in Haiti, though not in the U.S. Simply because the CDC people were unfamiliar with them, they attributed these very heterogeneous diseases (caused by funguses and mycobacteria) to “AIDS”, which, according to their own belief system, the world had never seen before. Through accretions of nonsense like this, the AIDS definition grew into the monstrosity we see at present.

The Risk-AIDS hypothesis

The phrase, “Risk-AIDS hypothesis”, was coined by Peter Duesberg as an alternative to the prevailing HIV-AIDS hypothesis. He and molecular biology graduate student Bryan Ellison have defined it in the following terms:
The alternative views of AIDS can be grouped together as the “risk hypothesis” of AIDS — that the AIDS diseases are entirely separate conditions caused by a variety of factors, most of which have in common only that they involve risk behavior. This view does not see AIDS as being a transmissible condition at all.’

More specifically Duesberg has defined the Risk-AIDS hypothesis as follows:

The risk-AIDS hypothesis suggests that AIDS is caused primarily by non-infectious agents. These include psychoactive drugs, over-medication with antibiotics, and above all AZT, a chain terminator of DNA synthesis administered to treat HIV infection since 1987.

The basic idea here is that different “risk groups” and different individuals are getting sick in different ways and for different reasons. We need to find out what risks have affected their health in ways that caused them to develop one or more of the 30 old illnesses that qualify for a diagnosis of “AIDS”.

With regard to any specific risk group, the question is not, “Why have these people developed AIDS?”, but rather, “Why are these people sick?”. I shall attempt to answer this question, one risk group at a time, in the rest of this chapter.

First, however, it is necessary to address the issue of “blaming the victim”. For several years Peter Duesberg and I and other AIDS dissidents have been subjected to an international slander campaign, the gist of which is that, by challenging the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, we are “blaming the victims”. We have been accused of harboring all kinds of bigotry, including “homophobia” and “drugophobia”.’ I have no desire to point the finger of blame at those who are sick, or to increase their suffering, but I refuse to tell lies under the guise of sensitivity. Lives are at stake, and there is no way to formulate rational risk-reduction or treatment guidelines without telling the truth about etiology. To pretend that the behavior of PWAs has nothing to do with their being sick, is to kill with a false kindness.

Why are IV drug users sick?

Intravenous drug users ([VDUs) represent 29% of the total “AIDS” cases.’° There are three possible hypotheses on why they are getting sick: One, because of shared needles; two, because of the drugs; or three, both. Although the first hypothesis now prevails, it falsely assumes that the drugs themselves are innocuous and play no role in making people sick. Therefore, only the second and third hypotheses are tenable.

To my knowledge no study has ever been conducted to determine whether all, or even most, IVDUs with “AIDS” ever did share needles, although such research would be simple, straightforward, and inexpensive. I’ve spoken to many public health officials who believed that such research existed, but none has ever been able to provide a reference. I have spoken to many I[VDUs — some with “AIDS” and some not, some still using drugs and some “clean and dry”. When I asked them if they had ever shared needles, the overwhelming response has been: “Share needles? Are you crazy? What would I do that for?”

In an interview, the novelist William Burroughs, a man with many decades of knowledge about drugs, expressed skepticism regarding the needles allegedly shared by all IVDUs with “AIDS”:

They say junkies share needles, and that they can’t afford to buy needles. If someone can get up fifty dollars a day for any sort of habit, he can pay two dollars for needles. For an outfit. Now the outfits, a plastic syringe and needle, are sold right in the drug drop for two dollars. There’s no reason for them to share needles — unless some of them are ignorant beyond belief. They know about the danger of serum hepatitis. You can get serum hepatitis, malaria, and syphilis from sharing needles. Serum hepatitis is a very serious condition. So I wonder to what extent they are sharing needles.”

In Italy, 1VDUs comprise the great bulk (about 80%) of “AIDS” cases, and yet needle-sharing is almost unknown. Needles are sold legally in Italy, and anyone can walk into a drug store and buy one.

To anyone who has eyes to see, it is obvious that IVDUs are getting sick now for the same reasons and in the same ways that they were getting sick long before the advent of “AIDS”. Most IVDUs are dying of lung disease, just as they were dying of lung disease 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Dr. Polly Thomas, of the New York City Health Department, has stated publicly that an IVDU with pneumonia or tuberculosis and HIV antibodies would be counted as an “AIDS” case, under the assumption that HIV was the sole cause — however, if the same IVDU had pneumonia but no HIV antibodies, it would be assumed that the drugs were the cause.” He would be just one more junkie with lung disease.

AnIVDU with TB and HIV has “AIDS”; an IVDU with TB but no HIV has TB! This kind of logic belongs in Alice in Wonderland. The reality is that no one has ever observed the slightest difference in clinical profile between patients with any of the indicator diseases plus HIV and those with the same diseases minus HIV. If HIV plays no role in making such patients sicker, or even in altering their clinical profiles, why should anyone assume that HIV is pathogenic at all?

According to British epidemiologist Gordon Stewart, the classic profile of an IVDU and the profile of an “AIDS” patient are one and the same: emaciation and lung disease.’? From 1968 to 1971 — more than a decade before the appearance of “AIDS” — he studied drug addicts in the United States, about whom his team made the following observations:

They were often extremely emaciated, suffering from wasting diseases, various weird blood-borne infections with skin bacteria, Candida and Cryptococci, which would not ordinarily be regarded as pathogenic in their own right... We didn’t find Kaposi’s sarcoma and we didn’t find Pneumocystis (carinii pneumonia) but, then, we weren’t looking for it.”

In his paper, “The role of drugs in the origin of AIDS”, Peter Duesberg cites over a dozen medical references which indicate:

“From as early as 1909 evidence has accumulated that addiction to psychoactive drugs leads to immune suppression and clinical abnormalities similar to AIDS.”

The toxic consequences of drug abuse have been common knowledge for a long, long time. A popular home medical guide cites the following chronic toxicities for heroin and other opiates: “increasing tolerance for the drug, psychological and physical addiction manifested in an intense craving, and a host of physical ailments including liver dysfunctions, pneumonia, lung abscesses, and brain disorders.””*

On a personal note: nothing in the entire AIDS mythology is more unreal to me than the mentality of the AIDS experts regarding IVDUs with “AIDS”. Given their belief in the infectious disease paradigm, I can understand their willingness to believe that all IVDUs with “AIDS” have shared needles, unlikely though that assumption appears to be. But I cannot comprehend their intransi- gent blindness regarding the adverse physical consequences of drug abuse.

I have lived in New York City’s Lower East Side for two and a half decades, and I have observed what drugs do to people. I have seen healthy young guys arrive on the scene in the spring, and then later in the year I have seen the same people standing on the corner and begging — feeble, wizened old men. I have seen dead bodies propped up against walls or sprawled across sidewalks, waiting for EMS units to haul them away. I have watched a person die of a drug overdose.
(It was a late summer afternoon in the glass-roofed back room of a bar. I had spoken a few words to an affable fellow from Latin America, and later observed him lying on a bench. Then all of a sudden he was down on the floor, large amounts of pinkish froth coming out of his mouth and nostrils. People tried to help him. His body jerked a couple of times and he died.) Drugs make people sick. Drug users are getting sick from using drugs. Is it possible for anything to be more obvious?

The AIDS War
Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical- Industrial Complex
John Lauritsen