Paul Philpott: A Medical Student BLACKLISTED!

By Mark Gabrish Conlan
Copyright © 1996 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine This article may be reproduced in its entirety for non-commercial use only

There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The AIDS thing — the hysteria, the stupidity, the institutional craziness — would all disappear if the fear disappeared. The whole thing is kept together by fear, intimidation, terrorism and brutality. … Even scientists, people like me, are subjected to fear and intimidation. You’re supposed to be open, and be able to talk. I can talk to my own colleagues, freely and openly, on virtually every topic in science — even about whether there are deities or not — except alternatives to HIV as the cause of AIDS.

— David Rasnick, Ph.D., Zenger’s, November 1996

When Paul Philpott decided to switch his graduate-school major from engineering to medicine in the early 1990’s, he naïvely believed he was entering a field in which independent and creative thought, if not encouraged, would at least be tolerated and met with understanding and reason. He soon discovered that modern Western medicine relies on orthodoxies which are hammered into the heads of students with the intensity of a Fundamentalist preacher reciting the Ten Commandments — and a similar degree of tolerance for dissent. And nowhere is the authoritarian, dictatorial nature of Western medicine and bioscience more absolute than in the field of AIDS — as Philpott discovered in the incidents he recalls below.

Today, his ambitions to become a doctor on indefinite “hold,” Philpott has moved to Detroit and is working for an auto company as an engineer. In his spare time, he edits and writes most of the articles for Reappraising AIDS, the monthly newsletter of the La Jolla-based Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis. This newsletter’s production is a textbook example of what is possible in the modern world of the modem and the Internet: its publisher is in La Jolla, its editor in Detroit and its copy editors, Christine Maggiore and Christine Johnson, are in Los Angeles.

Paul Philpott will be coming to Southern California on November 19 for a speaking engagement in San Diego and November 20 for one in L.A. Both are sponsored by local chapters of H.E.A.L. [Health, Education, AIDS Liaison], the grass-roots educational network that offers information on alternative points of view about AIDS. His November 19 appearance will be at 7 p.m. at Craftsmen’s Hall, 3909 Centre Street in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 688-1886 for more information.

Zenger’s: First of all, give me an idea of your own background, and how you got interested in this issue in the first place.

Philpott: I was doing my Master’s degree at Georgia Tech in mechanical engineering, and my area of interest was biomechanical applications. I had a professor who was a big-shot in the department, who was both an engineering professor and a vascular surgeon. I was very excited about the research he was doing, and decided that I wanted to be a doctor also. I had none of the undergraduate pre-med classes, and since I love to teach, I decided to go to a university that would give me a chance to teach undergraduate engineering classes while I took my undergraduate pre-med classes.

So I went down to Florida A&M; University in Tallahassee, which is one of the largest Black colleges in this country. I got a chance to teach some classes there and take my pre-med classes, and I became much more interested in my pre-med classes than in my graduate engineering classes.

One day, about 2 1/2 years ago, I got a call from a friend who suggested I turn to the PBS channel. He said there was some scientist there [UC Berkeley microbiology professor Peter Duesberg] making strange claims about AIDS. He was saying that HIV was harmless and AIDS was not contagious. I assumed he was a nut and what he was saying couldn’t possibly be true. I was just as terrified as any other college student about the possibility of contracting AIDS from unprotected sex and whatnot. But I decided to go town to the medical science library, at Florida State University, the other university in Tallahassee — the white university, which had a bigger and better library — and do a search on the computer for Duesberg’s name, expecting to get back nothing.

Instead I got back a very large list of articles that he had written, many of them on the topic of AIDS, and with very provocative titles, one of which was, “HIV Is Not the Cause of AIDS.” So I looked up all these articles and photocopied them. One of them was too large to photocopy at the time, his 1992 treatise, “AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors” [Pharmacology & Therapeutics 55:201-277, reprinted in Duesberg’s books Infectious AIDS: Have We Been Misled?, 1995; and Inventing the AIDS Virus, 1996]. So I didn’t copy that.

I went and took the other ones home, and read them. I understood them moderately well from my freshman and sophomore biology classes I had taken to this point. I used my textbooks as a reference to help me along in reading these papers. Then I started asking my biology professors about these ideas Duesberg had, which were making sense to me. But I couldn’t believe that he would be right, and all my professors would be wrong.

The response that I got from my professors was very unsettling. They were rude, and none of their responses answered any of my questions, because they essentially refused to consider the questions. They just said that it was crazy; that anybody making such claims was wrong; and if I pressed the issue, beyond simply asking them to consider that HIV might not be the cause of AIDS, they told me that they didn’t have time. I was wasting their time and my own time.

So I went and looked up a lot of the references that Duesberg made in those articles, and made photocopies of them as well. And my questions for my professors became even more specific than they had before. For instance, how do you explain AIDS in people who are HIV-negative, if HIV causes AIDS? These sorts of questions they just wouldn’t answer. They’d just say, “Well, he’s lying when he says that there is AIDS in people who are HIV-negative.” But they wouldn’t read the papers.

At this point, I went and spent about an hour photocopying Duesberg’s 80-page treatise from 1992 and set about the business of reading it, and looking up all of the important references. He has several hundred references in that article. I ended up looking up and photocopying maybe 150 total references from his papers and from Robert Root-Bernstein’s book Rethinking AIDS [1993].

I eventually became a teaching assistant for one of the organic chemistry professors, which is one of the big gateway classes for all the students in biological sciences, pharmacy and chemistry. I would teach evening study sessions at least once a week, which were very popular because I was very good at explaining organic chemistry and at helping the students to figure out the solution to their homework problems. And I would spice my lectures with discussions about what I was learning about AIDS.

The students were very interested, but most of them were very adamant that I must be wrong, and that this Duesberg guy must be crazy. One day, one student was very adamant that I was wrong, and that I shouldn’t be telling the students this because I was endangering their lives. That’s when I decided to hold my first seminar on the subject. I reserved a room, made up some flyers, passed them out to my study groups and to the classes I was in, and had about 200 people show up for an auditorium that seats about 200 people.

So I presented my first AIDS seminar, representing Duesberg’s and Root-Bernstein’s papers, and invited debate. No professors showed up, although I’d invited them all with messages in their mailboxes. I figured this might be a way to get them to finally answer some of my questions. Instead I was called to one of the dean’s offices, and told that I wasn’t to talk on the subject anymore; that I was endangering the lives of the student body. Then the director of student health for the university, who was a medical doctor, sent out a memo to every department chair, saying that there was someone on campus saying that HIV was harmless and AIDS wasn’t contagious. He said that these claims were wrong, they were dangerous, and they should be disputed at every turn, and that nobody should take them seriously.

Then I had a dean call me to his office to tell me that I was not to speak on the topic ever again on campus. I was forbidden. I told him that it was my right to do so, and I would not only continue to do so, but I would do so more often, and at greater length; and that, rather than trying to silence me, he ought to encourage his biology professors and his student health director to come to my seminars and show that I am incorrect.

Then my seminars — which I was holding regularly, about once a month — started to be attended by officials from the local Health and Human Services division. They were very pleasant people who were very nice to me and wouldn’t challenge me. They just took notes, and they wouldn’t ask me any questions. I asked them how they knew about the seminars, and they said every time I had a seminar, somebody faxed them and asked them to please come, or to do something about it. And their response was to come.

Things hit a sort of a climax in the winter of 1994, right before Christmas break, at the World AIDS Day, December 1. There was a highly publicized event, with the free condoms, booths, tables and everything, right in the main stretch in the center of campus. It included a late-afternoon seminar, a panel discussion with three or four U.S. CDC [Centers for Disease Control] and NIH [National Institutes of Health] officials from out of town, plus local health officials and the only medical doctor in town who specialized in infectious diseases.

My friends and I staged a presence at this seminar. We brought our own literature and passed it out to people in the seminar. The police came to try to prevent us from passing out any more literature. I went and talked to the person who seemed to have been responsible for calling the campus police, and told her that my understanding was that I could pass out anything that anybody asked me for. And the police officer told me that that was technically correct.

When it was time for the question period, we stood ourselves up at the two microphones available to the audience. I went to one microphone, and a friend of mine went to another microphone, to ask these questions. I asked if the panel could please explain to me how in Africa, over half of the people who get an AIDS diagnosis without benefit of an HIV test are later found to be HIV-negative. The response was quite literally complete silence. Nobody would speak up at all.

Then I began to get a little assertive, and a bit angry. I demanded that these people, who are paid by our tax dollars and our tuition dollars to educate us about this subject, either answer the questions or just say they don’t know the answer. One of the panelists, a Black physician from the CDC, responded by saying there was a lot of racism, and there are a lot of white people out there who like AIDS because AIDS is disproportionately affecting Black people. He put up a slide showing a Ku Klux Klan pamphlet saying that AIDS was sent down by God to kill Black people, with the obvious implication that I — the only white person in the room — was one of these blue-eyed devils who was down there to help AIDS kill Black people.

My friend Jesse at the other microphone, who is Black, accused this physician of being ridiculous, and showing no education about the subject at all. Jesse asked if any of the panelists knew what the transmission frequency was for HIV through a single act of unprotected vaginal intercourse, where either one of the partners was positive and one was negative. The response was silence.

So Jesse said, “You guys are supposed to be experts on this, and I’m standing here with five journal articles in my hand, written by scientists, who have performed the experiments and have come up with a transmission frequency for HIV, so I know the answer to the question that I’ve asked. But my understanding is none of you know the answer. I’m going to give you the answer. The answer is 1 in 1,000. Now, how can HIV be a deadly virus if it can only transmit once in every 1,000 unprotected — once every 1,000 times, or once in every 1,000 instances of unprotected vaginal intercourse?” No response at all.

The host of the event, who worked for the student health department, stepped forward and said the two of us weren’t to ask any more questions, and we should take our seats. Jesse said, “But our questions haven’t been answered.” The host said, “Take your seats.” So we did, and the next question that they got was from someone that neither of us knew, who said, “I would like for you to answer the two questions that Paul and Jesse had.” Then the host of the event said that the event was over.

In the next issue of the school newspaper there was a front-page story that was titled, “Experts demonstrate lack of knowledge of AIDS.” It was basically an article that was favorable to us and unfavorable to the “experts.” The only quotes they got from audience members supported us.

The following spring, the student body president notified me that the CDC and the NIH were sending down two physicians to “set the record straight” on our campus about HIV and AIDS, and would I like to present my case when they presented theirs? I said sure, but since there was going to be two of them, could I have a partner as well? I got Todd Miller, who is a post-doc at the University of Miami Medical School, with a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology.

So we debated these two physicians, who obviously had never read any of the literature at all. One of them was a Nation of Islam supporter named Barbara Justice from New York City. She works with the NIH in some capacity or another. She hadn’t read any of the literature at all. She just claimed that Todd and I were racists because we were white. She said that HIV was created by white folks, and the audience shouldn’t believe anything we had to say.

The other woman was an African woman who’s a professor of infectious disease at Morehouse University in Atlanta, who does have an official capacity with the CDC, and her last name was Lamakandra. She also had read none of the relevant journal articles, and was not even familiar with the official CDC data, because she was claiming that AIDS was increasing every year, and that AIDS cases among Blacks and women were increasing every year. So I asked her if every year there are more new cases than the last year, more for Blacks and for women — and she said yes.

I said, “Not according to the CDC data.” She said, “Yes, according to the CDC data.” I said, “I have the latest year-end report from the CDC, and it shows that new cases have gone down each year for the past two years, for all groups, including Blacks, women, whites, men, Gays, everyone.” She said it wasn’t true, so I got up and brought it to her. She looked at it, said that she had not seen these data before, and she would have to go back to her office in Atlanta and look at it more closely before she could comment on this.

During this time, I decided that I was no longer interested in engineering, and wanted to be a physician and a Ph.D. in biology. So I went over to Florida State University’s biology program and got in touch with their only practicing immunologist, a biology professor named Kenneth Roux, a very nice man who had FSU’s only immunology lab. I told him my background. I told him that I wanted to study AIDS, and he said that his lab was one of the only labs that was actively studying AIDS.

He took me on and gave me a job in his lab, doing computer integration of electron micrographs of one of the supposed HIV surface molecules, gp120. I did not tell him, in the next several months, about my activities at the Florida A&M; campus, although occasionally in our weekly meetings I would bring up this or that point about AIDS, indicating that I had some questions, some minor questions here or there. My questions were always blown off.

In the fall of 1994, while I was in his lab, I had my first editorial published in the Florida State University student daily newspaper. But I used an assumed name because I didn’t want to get into trouble with Dr. Roux. And sure enough, my article was a topic of discussion in our weekly meeting. It was trashed by the professor and by the other grad students. So I knew that I was probably doing the right thing by not giving my name, because they trashed it in a most unpleasant and unscientific manner. They dismissed this guy as a complete idiot — and, of course, they were really dismissing me as a complete idiot.

But in the spring, one of my seminars drew the attention of the press, and I was on television and on the front page of the FSU daily student paper. And Dr. Roux called me into his office and told me that he was going to have to let me go. He said I was not going to be accepted into the graduate program, because none of the professors were willing to work with me, and the director of the department where I worked on computers for Dr. Roux had banned me from any of his facilities. So I would not be able to finish my job for him; but if I were interested, he would talk to the guy and see if the guy would let me finish out the semester so I could keep getting money.

At the time I was a new single father, taking care of my infant daughter by myself, and this was a devastating personal loss, because I had already given up my graduate position in engineering, and this was my major source of paying for school. So I was really cast into the street. Dr. Roux was really a very nice person, but he just wasn’t willing to tolerate any dissent on this one issue. One of the points he made to me when he fired me, is, “Paul, I’m paying you with HIV money! Here you are, on TV and in the newspapers, saying that this is wasted money!”

So I took this almost as a badge of honor, in a way, that somebody would go to such extreme measures because of an idea that I had. At that point I decided that I was going to be in this for the long haul. I also became convinced that the entire professoriate is corrupt and cowardly. I used to be a big supporter of tenure, and I’ve come to regard tenure as actually being counterproductive.

I don’t think that our side is going to win a fair hearing any time in the next 20 to 30 years. I think that Duesberg will die without having his ideas recognized or valued by medical science. And I think that I will probably be close to Duesberg’s age [60] before people start to think, generally, that AIDS is not contagious. It’s very unfortunate.

But I do think that one consequence of the inevitable decline of the HIV theory is that the entire germ theory is going to be relegated to a relatively minor role in the medical field. One of the things I’ve learned in studying HIV and AIDS is that, even for germs that are true pathogens, the germ itself does not dictate the course of the disease the way that we’re taught in microbiology; and that what’s more important is the host.

Zenger’s: I’ve noticed that one of the claims that has been made for HIV and AIDS is that the infection is 100 percent fatal, or very close to 100 percent fatal. That, in and of itself, is a significant departure from what we know about germs that are genuinely associated with diseases.

Philpott: The reason why they had to make that claim — and this has been forgotten — is they couldn’t, and still can’t find any difference between HIV-positive people with no symptoms and HIV-positive people with AIDS. For example, most Americans are positive for cytomegalovirus [CMV] infection. Most Americans have antibodies to cytomegalovirus. But very few Americans, or very few of the people who are positive for cytomegalovirus have mononucleosis, which is the characteristic disease caused by an acute cytomegaloviral infection. What is the difference, in terms of cytomegalovirus, in a symptom-free and a mononucleosis patient, both of whom are positive? The difference is that I can find a hell of a lot of cytomegalovirus in the blood of a mononucleosis patient, and hardly any virus in someone who is asymptomatic.

But if you go to an AIDS patient, and a symptom-free HIV-positive person, you are very likely to find that neither patient has hardly any HIV at all. So in the early days of the HIV theory, they had no choice but to say, “My gosh, if this person is HIV-positive, he has little or no actual virus, but he’s got AIDS, and HIV is the cause of AIDS, then evidently you don’t even need to have much virus to develop AIDS. So, therefore, even the person that doesn’t have symptoms, his symptoms must be just around the corner, because he is microbiologically identical to the guy who has the symptoms.”

Zenger’s: There’s another reason that I can think of, and that is if you thought that this was an ordinary infection; and 10 or 20 or 50 or 90 percent of the people who encountered this virus were not going to get the disease; then it would be utterly impossible for them to merchandise the drugs.

Philpott: That is definitely a consequence of their claim that 100 percent of all HIV-positive people will get AIDS. Only if you make that claim are you going to be able to get symptom-free people to start taking drugs. That is true, but I choose to believe that Gallo and these people actually were motivated mostly by microbiology, and what they know about microbiology; and then their own scientific prejudices. Then they tried to capitalize economically on what they found.

Zenger’s: As a matter of fact, they now seem to be backing away from the 100 percent assumption.

Philpott: They have to. One thing I’ve found is that none of the so-called “experts” have a handle on what the dogma is. For instance, when I would ask my biology professors how HIV causes AIDS, each of them had a different answer that they were certain of. But they all thought that HIV was cytopathic [i.e., that it directly killed CD4 T-cells]. Dr. Roux may have been the only one who knew that the state-of-the-art dogma is that the replication itself is innocuous, but the response of the T8 cells is what kills the T4 cells. Some of thought that it was because of some autoimmune response that HIV causes. Some thought it was this silly “kiss of death,” by which a single HIV-infected cell happily goes about its business without ever dying, but every uninfected cell that it bumps into decides to kill itself. Others thought that it was a combination of all of these various processes.

The only people that have ever stayed consistent are us “crackpots.” We just consistently say that HIV has very little to no biological activity of any consequences; and that the people who are developing AIDS diagnoses, almost to a person, have some extraordinary health factor that has nothing to do with HIV. Those positions of ours, those statements of ours, remain constant and unchanging, even as the HIV “mechanism” splits into sub-mechanisms and has various widgets and dials and knobs, duct-taped and glued and screwed on. And as more papers come out, our decade-old claims are reinforced.

Some of the people keep saying, “Well, we need more research.” As far as disproving HIV, we don’t need any more research. We have more than enough data to refute it. We might need a little bit more research to show whether or not street drugs, or some other factor, is causative in certain cases. But the question of whether or not HIV can cause AIDS, we have enough data, more than enough data, to bury that idea.

Zenger’s: We’ve talked a lot about what AIDS isn’t. What do you personally think it is?

Philpott: I think there are a number of factors that are causing people to get sick — and if they are coincidentally “HIV-positive,” they have their sickness or sicknesses called “AIDS.” Before 1985, when the HIV test was introduced and people were getting AIDS on their own, I think the major causes in the United States were drug use among Gay men and injection drug users; and blood and blood products among hemophiliacs and people getting blood transfusions. I also think that the immune-suppressing effects of the blood and blood products among the transfusion recipients and hemophiliacs may also be playing a role among the intravenous drug users and the Gay men.

I’m also open to the suggestion that unprotected anal intercourse can have this sort of component as well. Some dissidents think that the drugs are the main or the only thing that is causing problems among Gay men. Others think that the foreign-protein exposure is the main factor. I’m not sure which is the main factor, or what was the main factor before the HIV hysteria.

Zenger’s: I’ve talked to both Robert Root-Bernstein and Peter Duesberg on that subject. Root-Bernstein is a very strong advocate of the theory that there is something immunosuppressive about receiving semen anally. When Duesberg was asked about this, when he spoke here 2 1/2 years ago, he said the whole idea was ridiculous. He said that Gay men have been screwing each other in the ass for hundreds of thousands of years, and AIDS hasn’t happened; and if receptive anal sex is the risk factor, where is the AIDS epidemic among the 13 percent of heterosexual women who like anal-receptive sex?

Philpott: Duesberg surprises me when he dismisses this idea with that argument. He is using the same argument that is used against his drug hypothesis. Recreational drugs have been here long before AIDS, and the vast majority of people who take recreational drugs never get AIDS. The same thing is true of anal insemination. This phenomenon has been here as long as there have been humans. Many more Gay men practice this than get AIDS, and many heterosexual women practice this and never get AIDS.

Duesberg, when confronted with this argument against his drug theory, points out that not until the 1970’s did we have a huge population of people that were doing vast quantities of a large variety of street drugs, so only now have the long-term consequences of street drugs have become noticeable. What Root-Bernstein is saying is that the amount and frequency and variety of semen that would be required to have a noticeable immune-suppressing effect, and long-term effect, is such that it would never have been noticed prior to the Gay liberation sexual and drug epidemics, which both began at about the same time and among the same people.

The Gay “fast-lane” participants were not only prodigious drug users, they were also prodigious anal-sex practitioners. I find Duesberg’s explanation of drugs as a culprit to be very tenable; and I don’t see how you can look at people who are as sick as those particular men got, and see that they did as many drugs as they did, and say drugs are not important to their illness, without doing some very exhaustive testing of that theory.

I would say the same of the Root-Bernstein idea. The Root-Bernstein idea predicts that the vast majority of people who enjoy anal-receptive sex will never get sick from it. The Duesberg theory predicts that the vast majority of people who do street drugs will never get sick. I don’t think that the epidemiology falsifies either of these ideas. The epidemiology is consistent with both of these ideas.

I don’t think this notion is anti-Gay, particularly when you acknowledge that all Gay men don’t practice anal sex, and that a lot of heterosexual women do. I think this topic is an advanced topic, and it’s not one that I’m very reluctant to bring up when I make public presentations, because the last thing that someone in my position wants to do is to alienate Gay men who may perceive this discussion, this idea, as being hateful towards them. I also don’t want to put into the hand of a Jesse Helms-type person ammunition that can be used to humiliate and degrade a Gay person.

We haven’t even talked about other factors that are common among the original Gay AIDS patients, including all the antibiotics and other drugs that they were doing; and the large variety of pathogenic viruses, bacteria and parasites these men were acquiring with their very unusual and novel lifestyle. The Gay fast lane, in my understanding as a heterosexual, is one that very few Gay men have adopted. It is not characteristic of Gay men generally. And we haven’t even talked about whether or not HIV even exists, which is another advanced topic that I’m reluctant to bring up.

Zenger’s: What about the theory that HIV was actually bioengineered, and that the reason it behaves so differently from other viruses is that some malevolent scientists who were working for the federal government bioengineered it to behave differently from other viruses?

Philpott: First, HIV cannot be a new virus in the U.S. population — bioengineered or naturally introduced — because the fraction of Americans that are positive for it has remained unchanged since the test was introduced in 1985. So it cannot be a new virus. It must be a virus that has existed in this population for some time.

Also, since HIV is harmless, if the government did manufacture it for malevolent purposes, they screwed up and manufactured a dud of a weapon. They never would have tried to make a weapon out of a retrovirus, when retroviruses are harmless. I don’t think that any retroviruses are pathogens. But even the government scientists who thought that retroviruses did cause disease said it took decades from the time of infection to the time symptoms developed. So why would you be trying to make a weapon out of something that inherently takes decades to cause any pathology?

The third part of my response is HIV could have theoretically been a virus that behaved so differently from anything we’ve ever seen before that we had to throw all the old criteria out the window — if there were no other reasonable explanation for people getting AIDS. If we didn’t find that all the Gay men that had been diagnosed with AIDS before 1985 had outrageous and unusual health factors in their backgrounds; if we didn’t find that they were all drug users, that they all had been multiply infected by a wide variety of pathogens that few other Americans were ever infected with, that almost all of them had been taking a hodgepodge of toxic pharmaceutical drugs as “prophylaxis” and treatment for these pathogens; then I’d be willing to say, “O.K., let’s examine HIV more carefully, and let’s imagine some way by which it could possibly cause the disease,” even though it flunks every existing test for a pathogen. But we’re not in that situation.

Finally, if HIV could cause AIDS simply because it infects immune cells and causes an autoimmune response, well, hell, a lot of very common viruses infect immune cells. Why aren’t they causing AIDS? And why don’t all the other retroviruses cause AIDS? They infect T-cells, they are present in low quantities, and all the rest. In other words, if Barney Fife can beat up Mike Tyson, then all humans can beat up Mike Tyson. But we know that that’s not true.