Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  So how did HIV come to be singled out as the cause to begin with? The answer seems to be, at a press conference. In April 1984, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, sponsored a huge event and introduced the NIH researcher Robert Gallo to the press corps as the discoverer of the (then called HTLV-III) virus, which was declared to be the probable cause of AIDS. This came before publication of any papers in the scientific journals, violating the normal protocol of giving other scientists an opportunity to review such findings before they were made public. No doubt coincidentally, the American claim to fame came just in time to preempt the French researcher Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who had already published in the literature his discovery of what later turned out to be the same virus. From that point on, official policy was set in stone. All investigation of alternatives was dropped, and federal funding went only to research that reflected the approved line. This did not make for an atmosphere of dissent among career-minded scientists, who, had they been politically free to do so, might have pointed out that even if the cause of AIDS were indeed a virus, the hypothesis of its being HIV raised some distinctly problematical questions.

  Proponents of the HIV dogma assert repeatedly that "the evidence for HIV is overwhelming." When they are asked to produce it or cite some reference, the usual response is ridicule or some ad hominem attack imputing motives. But never a simple statement of facts. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever provided a definitive answer to the simple question "Where is the study that proves HIV causes AIDS?" It's just something that "everybody knows" is true. Yet despite the tens of thousands of papers written, nobody can produce one that says why.

  Reference is sometimes made to several papers that Gallo published in Science after the press conference, deemed to have settled the issue before any outside scientists had seen them. 234 But even if the methods described are accepted as demonstrating true viral isolation as claimed, which as we've seen has been strongly disputed, they show a presence of HIV in less than half of the patients with opportunistic infections, and less than a third with Kaposi's sarcoma—the two most characteristic AIDS diseases. This is "overwhelming" evidence? It falls short of the standards that would normally be expected of a term-end dissertation, never mind mobilizing the federal resources of the United States and shutting down all investigation of alternatives.

  And the case gets even shakier than that.

  Biology's Answer to Dark Matter? The Virus that Isn't There

  Viruses make you sick by killing cells. When viruses are actively replicating at a rate sufficient to cause disease, either because immunity hasn't developed yet or because the immune system is too defective to contain them, there's no difficulty in isolating them from the affected tissues. With influenza, a third of the lung cells are infected; with hepatitis, just about all of the liver cells. In the case of AIDS, typically one in one thousand T-cells shows any sign of HIV, even for terminally ill cases—and even then, no distinction is made of inactive or defective viruses, or totally nonfunctional viral fragments. But even if every one were a lethally infected cell, the body's replacement rate is thirty times higher. This simply doesn't add up to damage on a scale capable of causing disease. 235

  Retroviruses, the class to which HIV belongs, survive by encoding their RNA sequences into the chromosomal DNA of the host cell (the reverse of the normal direction of information flow in cell replication, which is DNA to RNA to protein, hence the name). When that part of the host chromosome comes to be transcribed, the cell's protein-manufacturing machinery makes a new retrovirus, which leaves by budding off through the cell membrane. The retrovirus therefore leaves the cell intact and functioning, and survives by slipping a copy of itself from time to time into the cell's normal production run. This strategy is completely different from that of the more prevalent "lytic" viruses, which take over the cell machinery totally to mass-produce themselves until the cell is exhausted, at which point they rupture the membrane, killing the cell, and move on, much in the style of locusts. This is what gives the immune system problems, and in the process causes colds, flu, polio, rabies, measles, mumps, yellow fever, and so on.

  But a retrovirus produces so few copies of itself that it's easy meat for an immune system battle-trained at dealing with lytic viruses. For this reason, the main mode of transmission for a retrovirus is from mother to child, meaning that the host organism needs to live to reproductive maturity. 236 A retrovirus that killed its host wouldn't be reproductively viable. Many human retroviruses have been studied, and all are harmless. (Some rare animal cancers arise from specific genes inserted retrovirally into the host DNA. But in these cases tumors form rapidly and predictably soon after infection—completely unlike the situation with AIDS. And a cancer is due to cells proliferating wildly—just the opposite of killing them.)

  HIV conforms to the retroviral pattern and is genetically unremarkable. It doesn't kill T-cells, even in cultures raised away from a body ("in vitro"), with no immune system to suppress it. Indeed, HIV for research is propagated in immortal lines of the very cell which, to cause AIDS, HIV is supposed to kill!—and in concentrations far higher than have ever been observed in any human, with or without AIDS. Separated from its host environment it promptly falls to pieces.

  Most people carry traces of just about every microbe found in their normal habitat around with them all the time. The reason they're not sick all the time is that their immune system keeps the microbes inactive or down to numbers that can't cause damage. An immune system that has become dysfunctional to the point where it can't even keep HIV in check is in trouble. On their way downhill, depending on the kind of risk they're exposed to, every AIDS group has its own way of accumulating a cocktail of just about everything that's going around—unsterile street drugs; shared needles; promiscuity; accumulated serum from multiple blood donors. By the time HIV starts to register too, as well as everything else, you're right down in the lowest 5% grade. And those are the people who typically get AIDS. Hence, HIV's role as a marker of a risk group that collects microbes. Far from being the ferocious cell-killer painted by the media, HIV turns out to be a dud.

  Some researchers, looking skeptically at the assortment of RNA fragments, bits of protein, and other debris from which the existence of HIV is inferred go even further and question if there is really any such entity at all. (Question: If so, then what's replicating in those culture dishes? Answer: It has never been shown conclusively that anything introduced from the outside is replicating. Artificially stimulating "something" into expressing itself—it could be a strip of "provirus" code carried in the culture-cell's DNA—is a long way from demonstrating an active, pathogenic virus from a human body.)

  A research group in Perth, Western Australia, headed by Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, finds that every one of the proteins that the orthodox theory interprets as components of a viral antibody can be expressed by the DNA of any cell in the human body subjected to sufficient levels of oxidative stress—without any infectious agent from another individual being present at all. 237

  Is it not significant that chemical stimulation of precisely this nature is needed to induce "HIV replication" in cultures? Immunosuppressive oxidative stress, as a consequence either of environment or behavior, is also a common denominator across all of the recognized AIDS risk groups. If this explanation is correct, it implies that immune systems under stress from such causes as toxic drug assault or overload by foreign proteins frequently begin manufacturing proteins that parts of the rich mixture of antibodies usually found in such circumstances react to. Finding out precisely what these proteins do and why they are produced would perhaps be a better use for the billions of dollars so far spent futilely on conventional AIDS research. (My own suspicion is that they are part of a mechanism for updating the genome with new survival information, thus violating the dogma of evolutionary biology that says mutations are unaffected by the environment. But that's another story.)

  Detection of activity of
the enzyme reverse transcriptase is still cited as proof of the existence of a retrovirus. Although this was believed—somewhat rashly, it would seem—at one time, the enzyme has been shown to be present in all living matter, with no particular connection to retroviruses per se.

  A key step in demonstrating the existence of a new virus has always been the production of a micrograph showing the purified virus, exhibiting the expected structural and morphological features. Despite repeated demands by skeptics, no example was published until 1997. It turned out to be a mishmash of cellular debris, in which what had been identified as viruses turned out to be assorted fragments of material being similar only in having the size and general appearance of viruses, long familiar to virologists and known as "viral-like particles." According to Dr. Etienne de Harven, emeritus professor of pathology, University of Toronto, who worked on the electron microscopy of retroviral structures for twenty-five years at the Sloan Kettering Institution in New York, "Neither electron microscopy nor molecular markers have so far permitted a scientifically sound demonstration of retrovirus isolation directly from AIDS patients." 238

  The German virologist Stefan Lanka puts it more bluntly:

  The dispute over who discovered HIV was a distraction from the question of whether the virus actually exists at all. The public was impressed that if a President and a Prime Minister had to meet to resolve attribution, then the thing they were negotiating about had to be real. 239

  Well, the royalties on antibody testing were certainly real.

  An Epidemic of AIDS Testing

  If HIV is virtually undetectable even in its alleged terminal victims, how do you test for it? You don't; you test for the antibody. What this means in principle is that a culture containing "antigens"—foreign proteins that provoke an immune response, in this case proteins allegedly from the HIV virus—are exposed to a sample of the patient's blood. If the blood plasma contains antibodies to that antigen, they will bind to it in a reaction that can be made visible by suitable means.

  Wait a minute. . . . Aren't antibodies part of the body's own defense equipment—that you either acquired from your mother, learned to make yourself at some time in life when you encountered the virus, or were tricked into making by a vaccine? If you have no symptoms of an illness and no detectable virus, but your system is supplying itself with antibodies, isn't this a pretty good description of immunity?

  Yes—for any other disease, and if we were dealing with rationality. But this is the land of AIDS. The usual reason for antibody testing is as a check to see if somebody needs to renew their shots. Also, there are situations where testing for the antibody to a pathogen suspected of causing a condition can make sense, given the right circumstances. If a person is showing clinical symptoms that are known to be caused by that pathogen, (perhaps by satisfying Koch's postulates), and a test has been shown independently to identify an antibody specific to that pathogen, then testing for the antibody can be a convenient way of confirming the suspected disease without going through the rigmarole of isolation.

  But none of this is true of HIV. It has never been shown to cause anything, nor has a likely explanation even been advanced as to how it could. And the only way of showing that an antibody test is specific to a virus is to compare its results with a "gold standard" test, one that has been shown to measure the virus and nothing else. Establishing such a standard requires isolating the virus from clinical patients in the true, traditional sense, and for HIV that has never been done. What, then, if anything, does the "HIV test" mean?

  A genuinely useful antibody test can confirm that an observed sickness is due to the microbe thought to be the culprit. A positive HIV result from somebody who is completely symptom-free, on the other hand, means either that the antibody has been carried from birth without the virus ever having been encountered, or that the virus has been successfully neutralized to the point of invisibility. So in this context, "HIV positive" means HIV-immune. Interpreting it as a prediction that somebody will die years hence from some unspecifiable disease makes about as much sense as diagnosing smallpox in a healthy person from the presence of antibodies acquired through childhood vaccination.

  Testing for What?

  The test can mean a lot of other things too. The most common, known as ELISA (Enzyme-Linked Immuno-Sorbent Assay, for those who love quoting these things at cocktail parties), was developed in 1984 for blood screening. Now, when you're looking for contaminated blood, you want a test that's oversensitive—where anything suspect will ding the bell. If the positive is false, after all, you merely throw away a pint of blood; but if a false negative gets through, the consequences could be catastrophic. (Whether or not what you're screening for is a real hazard isn't the issue here.) But the same test started being used for diagnosis. And when people are being told that a positive result means certainty of developing a disease that's inevitably fatal, that's a very different thing indeed.

  Here are some of the other things that can give a positive result, which even some doctors that I've talked to weren't aware of: prior pregnancy; alcoholism; certain cancers; malaria antibodies; leprosy antibodies; flu vaccination; heating of blood sample; prolonged storage of the sample; numerous other viruses; various parasitic diseases; hepatitis B antibodies; rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, almost seventy other causes have been shown to be capable of causing a positive reaction that have nothing to do with AIDS conditions. 240 In a mass screening in Russia in 1991, the WHO performed thirty million tests over a two-year period and found 30,000 positive results. Attempts to confirm these yielded around 300, of which 66 were actual AIDS cases. 241

  In addition to the tests being uncertain in that precisely what they measure has never been defined, and nonspecific in that many other factors can give the same result, they are not standardized. This means that no nationally or internationally accepted criteria exist for deciding what constitutes a positive result. What people take as a death sentence on the basis of the things they've been told varies from one country to another, and even from one testing authority to another within the same country. The U.S. practice is to require a repeated positive result to an ELISA "search" test, to be "confirmed" by a test known as the HIV Western Blot (WB), which is supposed to be more accurate—although the United Kingdom won't use it because of the risk of misinterpretation due to cross-reactions.

  However, despite the reassuringly suggestive terminology, the WB remains as nonspecific, since it tests for the same antigen proteins as ELISA (but separated out into bands, so it's possible to see which ones are causing the reaction) and has likewise never been verified against any gold standard. 242 In fact, some authorities cite it as the "standard" for assessing ELISA. This is a bit like using one clock to check the accuracy of another, when neither has been verified to be correct in the first place. According to the WB interpretations handed down in different places, an HIV positive African would not be positive in Australia; a positive from the U.S. Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study 1983–1992 would not be positive anywhere else in the world, including Africa. 243 The pamphlet supplied with the ELISA test kit from Abbot Laboratories states: "At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood."

  Biotechnology's Xerox Machine

  A new diagnostic definition, introduced with several others in 1993, now makes it possible to have AIDS simply on the basis of a low CD4 cell count, without the presence of HIV being established at all. However, this amendment was not followed in Canada. Since 1995, more than half the new AIDS cases diagnosed in the U.S. have been in persons with no overt symptoms of AIDS illness, but who exhibited a "bad" cell count. All of those people, it seems, could be cured immediately by simply by heading northward and crossing the 49th parallel. It would certainly be a lot cheaper than going on medication of dubious benefit—and with the certainty of suffering no side effects.

  The latest diagnostic disease indicator, "viral load," is an indirect measure divorced
from any actual symptoms at all, which means that the efficacy of a drug is judged according to the observed change in a number deemed to be a "surrogate marker," and whether you're actually better, worse, or felt fine to begin with has got nothing to do with it. It's based on the "polymerase chain reaction" (PCR) method of amplifying formerly undetectable amounts of molecular genetic material—in this case, fragments of RNA that are said to be from HIV—by copying them in enormous numbers. Forbes magazine called it biotechnology's version of the Xerox machine. But errors are amplified too, by the same amount. The PCR process will indiscriminately copy dud HIVs that have been neutralized by antibodies, defectives that never formed properly in the first place, scraps of free-floating RNA, all of which end up being counted. And incredibly, these counts are presented as if they represented active viruses detected in the patient and not creations of the PCR process itself. 244 The Australian mathematician Mark Craddock has shown the mathematical basis of the model to be fatally flawed and based on wrong assumptions about what the number of RNA fragments says about the number of free viruses. 245 The inventor of the PCR method, Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, holds "quantitative PCR" to be a self-contradiction and dismisses its application in this way as worthless. The whole point is that if HIV were present and active in the body in the way that the viral load advocates claim, regardless of the foregoing, it should be readily amenable to standard virus-counting techniques. It shouldn't be necessary to use extra-high-sensitivity film to get an image if there's plenty of sunlight.

  The Export Industry: Africa and Asia

  "Everybody knows," from the flow of government and U.N. agency handouts uncritically passed on by the media that Africa is being devastated by an AIDS epidemic running out of control, with cases counted in tens of millions. What they probably don't realize is that the figures are estimates arrived at by basing very questionable statistical manipulations on what are often ludicrously small numbers, for example leftover blood samples in a village prenatal clinic. So when UNAIDS announces that 14 million Africans are AIDS victims, it doesn't mean that 14 million bodies have been counted, but that computers in Geneva have run a model with an assumed relationship between positive test results and AIDS deaths, and extrapolated the results to the population of the entire continent. 246 Thus in 1987 the WHO reported 1 million cases of "HIV disease" in Uganda. Yet ten years later, the cumulative number of AIDS cases actually reported was 55,000. 247 Nobody knew what had happened to the other 945,000. There are strong financial and other pressures that encourage the reporting as AIDS of old diseases that have been endemic on the African continent throughout history. According to Dr. Harvey Bialy, an American with long experience in Africa, because of the international funds poured into AIDS and HIV work, "It has become a joke in Uganda that you are not allowed to die of anything but AIDS. . . . A friend has just been run over by a truck; doctors put it down as AIDS-related suicide" 248