As AIDS grew in the 1980s into a global, multibillion-dollar juggernaut of diagnostics, drugs, and activist organizations, whose sole target in the fight against AIDS was HIV, condemning Duesberg became part of the moral crusade. Prior to that 1987 paper, Duesberg was one of a handful of the most highly funded and prized scientists in the country. Subsequently, his NIH funding was terminated and he has received not one single federal research dollar since his pre-1987 Outstanding Investigator Grant ran out. Duesberg lost his lab facilities and had to move twice within a few years to smaller labs on the Berkeley campus, where he spent much of his time writing futile research grant proposals asking to test his hypothesis that AIDS is a chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use. He lost his graduate students, who were warned that to emerge from his lab would blight their careers. He was denied and had to fight for routine pay increases by his employers at UC Berkeley, where he has tenure and still teaches. He was “dis-invited” from scientific conferences, and colleagues even declared that they would refuse to attend any conference that included him. Duesberg also was banished from publishing in scientific journals that previously had welcomed his contributions, most theatrically by the editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox, who wrote a bizarre editorial declaring that Duesberg would be denied the standard scientific “right of reply” in response to personal attacks that were frequently published in that journal. Prior to 1987, Peter Duesberg never had a single grant proposal rejected by the NIH. Since 1991 he has written a total of twenty-five research proposals, every single one of which has been rejected. “They took him out, just took him right out,” says Richard Strohman, an emeritus professor of biology at UC Berkeley.
And what was it, exactly, that Peter Duesberg had done? He simply pointed out that no one had yet proven that HIV is capable of causing a single disease, much less the twenty-five diseases that are now part of the clinical definition of AIDS.1212. HIV was declared the probable cause of AIDS in a U.S. government press conference in 1984. It was claimed that the virus had been discovered by NIH researcher Robert Gallo. In fact, Gallo had not discovered HTLV-III (Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus III, as it was known before it was rechristened with the more memorable name HIV). That honor belongs primarily to Luc Montagnier, of the Pasteur Institute, who had sent Gallo a sample of the virus. He pointed to a number of paradoxes regarding HIV and argued that far from being evidence that HIV is “mysterious” or “enigmatic,” these paradoxes were evidence that HIV is a passenger virus.
The classical tests of whether or not a microorganism is the cause of infectious disease are known as Koch's postulates. They state: 1) the microorganism must be found in all cases of the disease; 2) it must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture; 3) it must reproduce the original disease when introduced into a susceptible host; and 4) it must be found present in the experimental host so infected. Although claims to the contrary have been made, Duesberg maintains that it has never been demonstrated that HIV satisfies all of Koch's postulates. His exhaustive analysis of the peer-reviewed scientific literature has revealed more than 4,000 documented AIDS cases in which there is no trace of HIV or HIV antibodies. This number is significant, because there are strong institutional forces deterring such descriptions and because the vast majority of AIDS cases are never described in formal scientific papers. In fact, most AIDS patients have no active HIV in their systems, because the virus has been neutralized by antibodies. (With all other viral diseases, by the way, the presence of antibodies signals immunity from the disease. Why this is not the case with HIV has never been demonstrated.) Generally speaking, HIV can be isolated only by “reactivating” latent copies of the virus, and then only with extraordinary difficulty. Viral load, one of the clinical markers for HIV, is not a measurement of actual, live virus in the body but the amplified fragments of DNA left over from an infection that has been suppressed by antibodies. Another embarrassment for the HIV hypothesis is the extraordinary latency period between infection and the onset of disease, despite the fact that HIV is biochemically most active within weeks of initial infection. This latency period, which apparently grows with every passing year, enables proponents of the theory to evade Koch's third and fourth postulates.
The foregoing is merely a sketch of the central mystery presented by the HIV theory of AIDS. There are many more, which Duesberg has laid out very carefully in his scientific papers and in a trade book published ten years ago, but they all boil down to the central point that when it comes to AIDS, basic scientific standards seem no longer to apply.1313. It has been claimed that HIV somehow causes cell death even when it is not present by remote programmed “suicidal” mechanisms. Some researchers claim that HIV exploits special receptors on human T-cells that, due to a hypothetical genetic mutation, many “Caucasian Europeans” lack, but most Africans have. What's interesting is that many gay men also seem to possess these mysterious receptors, as do intravenous drug users and transfusion recipients. It is claimed that although HIV does not kill the laboratory T-cells used to manufacture AIDS tests, it does kill T-cells in the human body, even though it infects only a very small proportion of them, typically an average of 0.1 percent. HIV does not sicken or kill chimpanzees, though they do produce antibodies. It was recently claimed that HIV appears to be evolving into a form less dangerous to human beings. Such unproven hypotheses about the ingenuity of HIV proliferate in the popular and scientific media like the seasonal flu. Seldom do journalists insist on good hard evidence for these assertions. AIDS is a “syndrome” defined by twenty-five diseases, all of which exist independently of HIV. No one has ever demonstrated the cell-killing mechanism by which HIV is supposed to cause all these different diseases, and no one has ever demonstrated how a sexually transmitted virus can manage to restrict itself overwhelmingly to gay men and other AIDS risk groups instead of spreading randomly through the population, as do all other infectious diseases. The “overwhelming” character of the evidence for HIV's causation has always been epidemiological; which is to say, a correlation, a coincidence. Whenever we have AIDS, researchers say, we also have HIV. But this correlation is a result of the official definition of AIDS, which states that a disease counts as AIDS only if it corresponds with HIV antibodies. (“AIDS without HIV” has been given a singularly unmemorable name: idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia.)
Given that the evidence for HIV is coincidental, a number of research avenues suggest themselves, yet orthodox AIDS researchers have failed to demonstrate, using large-scale controlled studies, that the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases is higher among individuals infected with HIV than among the general uninfected population. Consequently, it could very well be the case that HIV is a harmless passenger virus that infects a small percentage of the population and is spread primarily from mother to child, though at a relatively low rate. (This hypothesis would tend to explain the fact that the estimated number of HIV-positive Americans has remained constant at about 1 million since 1985.) Nor have large-scale controlled studies been carried out to directly test the AIDS-drug hypothesis, which holds that many cases of AIDS are the consequence of heavy drug use, both recreational (poppers, cocaine, methamphetamines, etc.) and medical (AZT, etc.).1414. There is ample statistical and epidemiological evidence linking the rise of mass drug abuse in the late Sixties and Seventies with the sudden appearance of AIDS. The overwhelming majority of AIDS patients with Karposi's sarcoma, for example, have been heavy users of nitrate inhalers, or “poppers.” The case of “super AIDS” that was recently reported in New York turned out upon closer examination to be an individual with an extraordinarily heavy methamphetamine habit.Nor have controlled studies been carried out to prove that hemophiliacs infected with HIV die sooner than those who are not infected. Such studies might be expensive and tedious, but expense has never been a serious objection to AIDS researchers, who have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or even co-factors. (Even Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of HIV, has stated repeatedly that the virus cannot cause AIDS without contributing causes.)
Attempts to rigorously test the ruling medical hypothesis of the age are met not with reasoned debate but with the rhetoric of moral blackmail: Peter Duesberg has the blood of African AIDS babies on his hands. Duesberg is evil, a scientific psychopath. He should be imprisoned. Those who wish to engage the AIDS research establishment in the sort of causality debate that is carried on in most other branches of scientific endeavor are tarred as AIDS “denialists,” as if skepticism about the pathogenicity of a retrovirus were the moral equivalent of denying that the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews. Moral zeal rather than scientific skepticism defines the field. It has been decided in advance that HIV causes AIDS; consequently all research and all funding must proceed from that assumption. Similarly, it was known in advance that AZT was a “magic bullet” against HIV; the word was out that it was a “life-saving drug” before anyone could possibly verify this, and so scientific controls were compromised. Journalists (myself included) who reported at the time that the drug apparently was killing patients were labeled “AZT refuseniks” and even “murderers.”
. . .
“Nobody is safe,” one NIH-funded researcher told me. “The scientific-medical complex is a $2 trillion industry,” says former drug developer Dr. David Rasnick, who now works on nutrition-based AIDS programs in Pretoria, South Africa. “You can buy a tremendous amount of consensus for that kind of money.”
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