<ing>The Case Against HIV
- Alex
That HIV causes AIDS has been the officially sanctioned view for about 3 decades, believed almost universally but questioned openly by thousands of people, some of whom are expert in relevant sciences 1,2,3. These dissidents point out that a comprehensive reading of the mainstream literature together with analysis of mainstream data demonstrates conclusively that HIV is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of AIDS. An up-to-date and comprehensive yet concise summary of the facts and the history of the HIV/AIDS blunder is provided by Donald Miller 914.
An annotated bibliography of dissident books and other writings was published in 1993 4; dissident books not listed there or published since that time include Bauer 5, Bialy 6, Crewdson 7, Culshaw 8, De Harven 9, Duesberg 10, Farber 11, Fiala 12, Hodgkinson 13, Konotey 14, Kremer 15, Lauritsen 16, Lauritsen & Young 17, Leitner 18, Maggiore 19, Root-Bernstein 20, Shenton 21.
The Immunity Resource Foundation (IRF) offers important archival material including many documentary films and videos; many issues of Continuum magazine; many links to other AIDS-Rethinking or HIV-Skeptical websites; and a blog and newspage. The 2013 award-winning film, “Positively False — Birth of a Heresy” can be rented or bought at the IRF website. Another award-winning documentary is "House of Numbers."
At first sight, that HIV does not cause AIDS must seem unbelievable in light of the officially promulgated view that has so thoroughly pervaded the media and the public sphere. How could medical science be so wrong for so long about something so important? Moreover, haven’t the miracle antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) saved countless lives and changed AIDS from an invariably fatal death sentence into a chronic, manageable, condition? Aren’t Africans dying in hordes from AIDS only because they can’t get enough of those drugs?
Those questions can all be answered, but not in any brief way. The comprehensive case against HIV has to be made along several mutually reinforcing lines:
Questions to which the officially sanctioned view has no answer.
FAQs: Questions — sometimes rhetorical only — posed by adherents to HIV/AIDS theory.
Just how inconceivable most people find it, that HIV/AIDS theory could be so wrong, that official medicine and science could be so wrong in this day and age, may be illustrated by my own experience 514. I had read enough — many of the books listed above — to become open to the possibility, but it took my own digging into “HIV” epidemiology to convince me p.7 & chapter 1 in 5, and that was about 10 years after I first became aware that there exist dissidents from orthodox HIV/AIDS belief. And it has taken me further years to understand that “HIV” may not even exist, and that “HIV” tests are perhaps the central issue in the whole business. My long-standing interest in Loch Ness Monsters and the like testifies that I am significantly more open to unorthodox views than are most people, so my own difficulty in recognizing the errors of HIV/AIDS theory might serve as a warning, that the task of bringing others to that understanding is an extraordinarily difficult one.
(The Footnotes include many URLs. Those beginning with “http://wp.me” refer to the blog by Henry Bauer at hivskeptic.wordpress.com; the blog posts include further citations to the mainstream literature. URLs that were not active when this document was drafted show the date when that URL was last accessed directly; such broken links can often still be found indirectly via the Wayback Machine 22, or sometimes a copy of the source can be found via a Google search on the article’s title.)
0. QUESTIONS TO WHICH THE OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED VIEW HAS NO ANSWER
0.1 Why is there no gold-standard test for HIV infection? 127
0.1.1 [Because authentic pure HIV virions have never been isolated from supposedly infected individuals nor have they ever been successfully synthesized (cloned) — see section 3.1.3]
0.2 How does HIV supposedly destroy the immune system? (see sections 1.3.3, 4.4.4)
0.3 Why do people of African ancestry test "HIV-positive" more than all others, whether in Africa or America or Europe? chapters 5-7 & p. 106 in 5
0.4 Why were AIDS and HIV first identified in America and Europe when HIV is supposed to have first infected human beings in Africa? (see section 4.6)
1. HIV DOES NOT CAUSE AIDS
1.1 It was never established in the first place, nor later proved, that HIV causes AIDS.
1.1.1 Kary Mullis has described his unsuccessful quest — including asking the discoverer of HIV — for citations to the scientific articles that prove HIV to be the cause of AIDS 23.
1.1.2 The “fact sheets” issued by the National Institutes of Health are not scientific articles, and their claims of proof have been refuted in full detail 24,25. Those refutations have been ignored or misrepresented but never effectively challenged.
1.1.3 The issue is complicated by progressive re-definitions of AIDS, see section 2.
1.1.4 Luc Montagnier, credited with the discovery of HIV, reported that AIDS seemed to be caused by a mycoplasma and not by HIV 26,27,28,29,30,31.
1.1.5 By 1993 so many cases of “HIV-negative” “AIDS” had been reported 32,33,34,35 that the condition was pronounced a new disease, “idiopathic CD4 T-cell lymphopenia” (ICL) 36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43 (also “HIV-negative adult-onset immunodeficiency” 44): immune deficiency of unknown cause with low CD4 counts; but this is precisely the same as the original definition of AIDS.
1.1.6 “HIV-positive” individuals do not necessarily ever progress to AIDS in absence of any treatment 45.
1.1.7 Specific Italian data illustrate that HIV does not cause AIDS 46,47,48.
1.2 HIV and AIDS are not even correlated.
1.2.1 The seminal papers claimed to have found the putative retrovirus in only “18 of 21 patients with pre-AIDS … [and] 26 of 72 adult and juvenile patients with AIDS” 49. This did not even establish that HIV is correlated with AIDS 50, let alone causes it. The principal author, Robert Gallo, may have committed scientific misconduct as well 7,51,648.
1.2.1.1 Most of those who refer to the discovery of HIV credit Montagnier, not Gallo 52.
1.2.2 Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) was one of the three originally iconic AIDS diseases, yet HIV-negative cases of KS had been noted at the very beginning 53 and turned out to be quite common 54.
1.2.2.1 KS is now ascribed not to HIV but to something else 64, perhaps KSHV (Kaposi’s sarcoma herpes virus) or HHV-8 (human herpes virus 8) 55,56,57,58.
1.2.2.2 AIDS-1 (section 2.1) KS was probably caused by the widespread use of nitrite “poppers” by many gay men 59,60,61,62,63,64. Although described as a cancer (sarcoma), it may actually be non-malignant damage to blood vessels.
1.2.3 HIV and AIDS are not correlated with respect to geography chapter 9 in 5,80.
1.2.4 HIV and AIDS are not correlated with respect to race chapter 9 in 5.
1.2.5 HIV and AIDS are not correlated with respect to the sexes chapter 9 in 5.
1.3 HIV does not even cause illness, let alone death 66,45.
1.3.1 The mortality of “HIV-positive” individuals and of “People with AIDS” (PWAs) is independent of age whereas mortality increases very significantly with age in every (other) illness 67,68,69,70,71.
1.3.2 About 50% of people testing “HIV-positive” never experience illness associated with “HIV” 72,73,74.
1.3.3 It remains mysterious, in what way or by what mechanism HIV could cause illness of any kind; a number of mechanisms have been bruited, none has been demonstrated or accepted as satisfactory 75.
1.3.3.1 “HIV” is found in only a tiny proportion (<1%) of the T-cells that it supposedly kills, so the decrease in CD4 counts supposedly characteristic of AIDS or “HIV disease” is ascribed to an unspecified “bystander mechanism” 833,866,867,868.
1.3.3.2 Duesberg long ago argued that no retrovirus could act as claimed for HIV 76.
2. THE PLAIN EVIDENCE ABOUT AIDS
Which AIDS?
AIDS has been defined in at least three distinctly different ways at different times and in different places. To avoid confusion, it is necessary to distinguish among them as AIDS-1, AIDS-2, and AIDS-Africa.
2.1 The first definition of AIDS, therefore AIDS-1: A supposedly unprecedented syndrome characterized by immune deficiency (specifically, low CD4 counts) of unknown cause presumed responsible for the presence of manifest opportunistic infections, chiefly Kaposi’s sarcoma, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), or candidiasis (fungal: thrush, yeast infection) 77,78.
2.1.1 Designating AIDS-1 as a new medical phenomenon was an error because
2.1.1.1 None of the “AIDS-1” diseases was previously unknown. They occur in HIV-negative individuals for a wide range of reasons 79.
2.1.1.2 A great many conditions and infections induce immune deficiency, even specifically the low counts of CD4 cells purported to be characteristic of AIDS — non-specific conditions like oxidative stress 80,15 (see also sections 3.2.2, 4.3.2.4, 5.3.3.1, 5.3.3.11, 7.3.3.4) or such specific diseases as tuberculosis 82,83.
2.1.1.3 The initial diagnosis 103 was by a young physician early in his career who also had access to the relatively new technique of counting CD4 cells 84. However, we now know that CD4 counts are not a valid measure of good or bad health 897.
2.1.1.4 In particular, “recreational” drugs 85,86,87,88,89,90 including nitrites (“poppers”) 91,92 cause the same conditions as are said to be characteristic of AIDS, including loss of CD4 cells 93, and drug addicts display the same manifest symptoms as were ascribed to AIDS-1 13.
2.1.1.5 The first AIDS-1 patients were indeed typically users of “recreational” drugs p. 191 ff. in 16, pursuing a “fast-lane” lifestyle p. 79 ff. in 17,99,100,p. 292 ff. in 894,895,896 conducive to ill health. They were on average in their mid-to-late thirties with histories of many bouts of syphilis, gonorrhea, and other infections 95,96,97,98.
2.1.1.6 The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention used a unique, bizarre, misleading statistical classification scheme that obfuscated the fact that drug abuse was the primary common feature among victims of AIDS chapter 1 in 16.
2.1.1.7 “AIDS” was a new social phenomenon, irrational exuberance by a proportion of gay men following “liberation”, expressed in an impossibly unhealthy lifestyle pp. 119-20 in 5,99,100,101,102. It had first been designated more correctly as GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency; though since it was only a small proportion of gay men who practiced the “fast-lane” lifestyle, most correct would have been FLLRID.
2.1.2 The first AIDS-1 patients had not been in sexual contact with one another 103. AIDS-1 came to be regarded as infectious only after the mistaken conclusion that HIV causes AIDS.
2.2 Following the mistaken identification of “HIV” as cause of AIDS-1, an increasing number of diseases have come to be labeled “AIDS” just because in their presence an “HIV” test is fairly often positive. That defines AIDS-2: “HIV-positive” by definition, as in the now-common usage “HIV/AIDS”, which masks the fact that AIDS-1 was not HIV-caused. Recently the term “HIV disease” has become common.
By subliminal definition creep, “HIV disease” has come to include dozens of ailments, many of which are not opportunistic infections and all of which are previously known conditions, for example tuberculosis, weight loss or wasting, dementia 104.2.2.1 1985 definition (AIDS-2a): “HIV-positive” and additional opportunistic infections beyond KS, PCP, or candidiasis 105.
2.2.2 1986 definition (AIDS-2b): “HIV-positive” and low CD4 counts and opportunistic infections 105.
2.2.3 1987 definition (AIDS-2c): “HIV-positive” “[r]egardless of the presence of other causes of immunodeficiency” [emphasis in original] and in presence of more than a dozen diseases 106.
2.2.4 1993 definition (AIDS-2d): Re-definition increased number of “AIDS” cases in that year by 75% 107.
2.3 AIDS in Africa (henceforth AIDS-Africa) is neither AIDS-1 nor AIDS-2 108.
2.3.1 Although AIDS-2 had been defined as caused by HIV, the lack of HIV-testing facilities in Africa led to defining AIDS via the Bangui definition 109: chronic or persistent weight loss, diarrhea, fever — entirely non-specific symptoms consistent with any number of endemic African diseases.
2.3.1.1 Africans dying from “AIDS” are succumbing to diseases that have ravaged Africans for centuries 108,110.
2.3.1.2 Since the criterion for AIDS diagnosis in Africa is independent of “HIV”, one cannot know how many African “AIDS” patients are HIV-negative 32.
2.3.1.3 Malnutrition is widespread in Africa and is a known cause of lack of resistance to infection. It can be responsible for any infection incurred within 1 month of the end of food deprivation 870.