Why Question HIV?

By Robert Johnston
Co-founder of the HEAL Toronto

An error can never become true however many times you repeat it.
The truth can never be wrong, even if no one hears it.
Mahatma Gandhi

Most people are unaware that there is any reason to question the idea that HIV causes AIDS or that AIDS is a fatal condition. Anyone who may have heard of serious problems with the HIV theory is usually reassured that any doubts about HIV were long ago laid to rest. The "crack-pots", we are told, have been "silenced" by the "overwhelming new evidence" and the anecdotal success stories of new anti-HIV treatments. Have the objections of the "dissidents" really been answered? Here are a few of their main points, along with some recent developments that challenge the HIV=AIDS hypothesis.

On April 23, 1984, Dr. Robert Gallo filed a patent application for an antibody test, now generally referred to as the "AIDS test". The same day Gallo announced at an international press conference that he had discovered "the probable cause of AIDS", a new retrovirus, later named HIV.

This announcement caught even the scientists in the audience by surprise. Gallo had circumvented an essential part of the scientific process; he had not published his research findings in any scientific or medical journal or subjected them to the normal process of peer review prior to being announced to the public. From that day forward HIV became the "AIDS virus" and all federally funded research examining other possible causes of AIDS came to an abrupt halt.

When Gallo's "evidence" was finally published weeks later there were some serious problems. Less than half of the AIDS patients in his study had any sign of HIV infection. Also in order that only the AIDS patients and not the healthy control group came up positive on his antibody test, he had to dilute the blood an extraordinary 500-fold. At lesser dilutions, healthy controls would test positive too. These facts alone should have been enough to cast serious doubt on Gallo's claim that he had discovered a new retrovirus or the "probable cause of AIDS".^1,2,3

Over the years, as the uncritical acceptance of HIV as a cunning and versatile killer took hold, an illogical and circular definition of AIDS emerged. In the textbook "AIDS Update", we are told that "AIDS is distinguished from virtually every other disease in history by the fact that it has no constant, specific symptoms. ... AIDS (or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is an umbrella term for any or all of 26 known diseases and their symptoms. When a person has any of these 26 microbial or viral-caused opportunistic infections and also tests positive for antibodies to HIV, he or she is diagnosed with AIDS. An AIDS diagnosis is also given to HIV-positive people with a T4 cell count of less than 200/ul of blood." ^4,¥

Therefore:

• Pneumonia + HIV Antibodies = AIDS

• Pneumonia - HIV Antibodies = Pneumonia

• Diarrhea + HIV Antibodies = AIDS

• Diarrhea - HIV Antibodies = Diarrhea

... and so on for 24 more diseases ...

• <200 T4 cell count + HIV Antibodies = AIDS

• <200 T4 cell count - HIV Antibodies = No Disease!

Since this AIDS definition has no distinctive clinical profile (none of its own symptoms) it relies entirely on the certainty that each case is infected with HIV. A serious side-effect of this definition is that it excludes AIDS without HIV by definition, creating the tautology "HIV causes AIDS because all AIDS cases are HIV-positive." (For a history of AIDS definitions see: What is AIDS?.)

In 1993 Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and colleagues, known as the "Perth Group" published Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection? ⁵ This exhaustive review of the scientific literature about HIV testing (of which the Western Blot is one type) came to some startling conclusions:

Meanwhile, a series of HIV-related scandals hit the U.S. scientific establishment. Gallo had been accused of "misappropriating" the "AIDS virus" from the Pasteur Institute in France. Dr. Luc Montagnier, who had sent Gallo a good-will sample of his LAV virus, and the Pasteur were convinced Gallo had just cloned their sample and called it HTLVIIIb (both later renamed HIV). The French government sued for royalties on the "AIDS test". This became something of a who-stole-who's-fake-diamonds affair. The truly explosive revelation flew over the heads of the investigators. Under interrogation Gallo admitted he had never isolated HIV from his AIDS patients. A Congressional Inquiry described the U.S. government response to the controversy as a cover-up of scientific misconduct: "The consequences for HIV research were severely damaging, leading, in part, to a corpus of scientific papers polluted with systematic exaggerations and outright falsehoods of unprecedented proportions." ⁷

"HIV" escaped the whole test patent scandal under the assumption that if Gallo had fibbed or fudged on isolation, Montagnier had done the job. But "HIV" would not be safe for long. In March 1997 two papers appeared in the journal Virology providing astonishing data on the alleged purification and isolation of HIV ^8,9. For the first time in the history of AIDS, elusive electron microscope images of "HIV" collected or 'banded' at the official density required for purifying retroviruses, 1.16 gm/ml, were published.

The electron micrographs (EMs) disclose "major contaminants" in "pure HIV" -- an oxymoron to say the least. The authors of these studies concede that their pictures reveal the vast majority of the material in the density gradient is cellular contamination. HIV expert Hans Gelderblom, of Berlin's Robert Koch Institute, co-authored the first paper which describes the contamination as "an excess of vesicles" - particles of cellular proteins, that may contain DNA or RNA. In a consecutive paper, a U.S. research team from the AIDS Vaccine Programme in Maryland reveal carefully, "It is unknown how these cellular proteins associate with the virus" and warn, "The presence of microvesicles in purified retroviruses has practical implications". Both teams discuss the resulting nonspecifity of HIV tests, all of which are based on early unchecked "purified HIV". One has to wonder how it could be possible to sequence an "HIV" genome from "isolates" like these. Perhaps all this talk of molecular analyses and genotypic forms of HIV is scientific jabberwocky? ^£

The Virology papers are painfully ironic to read as the authors persist in referring to "purified" retroviruses or HIV when what they have before their eyes is almost entirely cellular garbage. Eleni Papadodulos-Eleopulos a biophysicist from Australia's Department of Medical Physics, Royal Perth Hospital, has this to say about the retroviral-like particles in the recent EM photos; "They bear only the vaguest resemblance to retroviral particles. For sure they look more like retroviral particles than all the other particles and material but even if they looked identical to retroviral particles you cannot say they are a retrovirus. Even Gallo admits to the existence of particles which band at 1.16 gm/ml and which have the appearances and biochemical properties of retroviruses but which are not retroviruses because they are incapable of replicating." ^10,11

We have all seen pictures of "the virus". Is this proof that HIV exists? Simply flashing the inside cover of Robert Gallo's Virus Hunting and claiming the blobs in the EM photos are proof that "HIV" has been isolated is like claiming UFO photos prove we have been visited by ETs. Our bodies express these sorts of particles all the time; they are known as Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERVs). HERVs are very likely footprints of ancient germ-cell infections and encompass 1% of the human genome.¹² They are not considered pathogenic (disease-causing); some scientists speculate HERVs may confer protection from related exogenous retroviruses; others suspect their expression may be provoked by disease (oxidative) processes. Therefore, presenting EM photos of retrovirus-like particles afloat in the cellular soup cannot stand alone as proof of a unique infectious, pathogenic retrovirus.

It is most incredible that all the samples examined in the Virology papers were the spawn of Gallo and Montagnier's early attempts at isolating or purifying HIV. It is this soup of cellular debris that passes for "HIV" in much of the research conducted by HIV laboratories around the world.

Around the same time as the unnerving EM photos appeared in Virology, Dr. Luc Montagnier, the "discoverer of HIV", revealed in an interview that he had never achieved purification of HIV.

On July 17th 1997, the French investigative journalist Djamel Tahi interviewed Professor Luc Montagnier in camera at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Montagnier was asked, "Why do the EM (electron microscope) photographs published by you [in 1983] come from the culture and not the purification?".

His reply was, "There was so little production of virus it was impossible to see what might be in a concentrate of the virus from the gradient ["pure virus"]. There was not enough virus to do that. Of course one looked for it, one looked for it in the tissues at the start, likewise the biopsy. We saw some particles but they did not have the morphology typical of retroviruses. They were very different. Relatively different. So with the [unpurified] cultures it took many hours to find the first pictures. It was a Roman effort!…"

*These should be the proteins used in the HIV antibody test. So, what proteins are they using??

On the contrary, nothing should be more of interest to AIDS research and people who have been told they are "HIV" infected. Without "HIV" all "AIDS" cases revert to the old diseases. Research and debate regarding the causes of underlying immune deficiency must reopen. Doctors will have to rethink whether anti-HIV chemotherapy is wise medicine. For the "HIV-positive" and "AIDS" patients the death sentence is repealed. Once again they are free to expect full recovery from illness and the prospect of a long and healthful life.

Robert Johnston is a co-founder of HEAL Toronto and manages their website.

End notes

¥ In Canada having a less than 200 T4 cell count is not an AIDS-defining condition. In the US almost two-thirds of AIDS cases reported are people tested HIV positive with low T4 cell counts but without any AIDS-defining disease.
£ Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) is generally considered to be the greatest of all nonsense poems in English. It is so well known that a number of its nonsense words have entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Alice (of Wonderland fame) here, in the paragraph following the poem, puts her finger on the secret of the poem's charm: "... It seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't know exactly what they are."

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