By Dr. Heide Hartmann-Taylor
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first AIDS cases. Are we really any closer to knowing the truth about this epidemic than we were in 1981? What if everything we've been told about HIV and AIDS has been a lie?
I graduated from chiropractic college in 1978. I had an excellent scientific education, taught by PhD's grounded in chiropractic, and chiropractors like Irene Gold. Along with the basic sciences, I had an amazing philosophical education taught by chiropractic doctors such as Guy Riekeman, Joe Flesia, and Reggie Gold. In science, we were taught about the virulence of the pathogen versus the resistance of the host: The importance of maintaining one's health and a properly functioning immune system to ward off invading organisms. In philosophy we were taught to recognize the inborn wisdom of the body and, rather than seeing symptoms as "wrong", we were instructed to see how they were "right" - a sign that the body was attempting to maintain homeostasis. Stated more simply, the body was doing the best it could at the time to maintain the survival of the organism. Most importantly, we were taught the value of a properly functioning nervous system, because "nature needs no help, just no interference."
So why is it that when it was announced that a virus called HIV was causing AIDS, we in the chiropractic profession didn’t stop and ask, "Can this really be true?" Instead, it appears to me that for twenty years many chiropractors, along with the vast majority of health practitioners, went down the rabbit hole of the "HIV causes AIDS" theory, along with the rest of society. History should have taught us to automatically be skeptical of our government and medical science concerning the "causes" of diseases. For example, we can find evidence that mass vaccination caused the 1918 flu epidemic, rather than some "virulent virus."
Fortunately, it turns out that many people have been questioning the "HIV causes AIDS" theory from the very beginning. Today, there are over 2300 medical and scientific researchers, chiropractors, public health workers, journalists, and other professionals - including Nobel Prize winners in medicine and chemistry and members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences - who all agree that HIV does not cause AIDS, that HIV is not contagious or sexually transmitted, and that the biggest threat to the health of someone diagnosed as HIV-Positive is the drugs they will be pressured to take to 'treat' their disease. Who are these people, why have you probably never heard of them, and is what they're saying really true?
Stephen Davis is one of "them" - a member of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis , better known as the "AIDS dissidents." A former Arizona state senator, Physician's Assistant, and Director of Development at Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic, Davis has written a book called <em>Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial</em>. Although Wrongful Death is a fictitious class-action lawsuit that reads like a best-selling John Grissom courtroom drama, Davis claims that every word of testimony is true and factual, and based on over 900 medical and scientific references that he offers at the end of the book and on his website.
I interviewed Mr. Davis on a recent trip to Phoenix. What he had to say was far too long for a single article; so in this three-part series, we're going to examine the claims made by Davis and the rest of the "dissidents" about AIDS and HIV, about the drug given to treat AIDS called AZT, and about the HIV blood tests being given today that essentially result in a death sentence for anyone diagnosed as HIV-Positive. Let's begin with HIV itself…
DR. HEIDE: Why do you believe that HIV does not cause AIDS?
DAVIS: I don't 'believe' it. This isn't a matter of 'belief' or 'faith.' This is science, and the fact is that HIV fails every single medical and scientific test to be called the cause of AIDS. Every single one.
DR. HEIDE: Such as…
DAVIS: Let's start with the criteria established by Dr. Robert Koch in the late 1800's. Dr. Koch won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the cause of tuberculosis, and he also discovered the anthrax bacillus and the cholera bacillus. In the process of his research he came up with some rules that are called Koch's Postulates, which medical science has now used for over a century to determine what can be called the cause of a disease. But these are not some esoteric set of arbitrary rules; they actually are just common sense.
For example, Koch's Postulate Number One says that if you want to call something the cause of a disease, you must find that "something" in every case of the disease. In other words, in every case of tuberculosis you must find the tuberculosis bacillus, and in every case of small pox you must find the small pox virus, if these things are going to be said to cause their respective diseases.
DR. HEIDE: I can agree with that. It makes common sense.
DAVID: Of course it does. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has on record over 4500 cases of AIDS with no HIV! And that was just through 1991. And we were only testing a small percentage of AIDS cases for HIV during those years. So the likelihood is that there are tens of thousands of cases of AIDS with no HIV prior to 1991. In other words, there's not just one case of AIDS with no HIV, which in itself would violate Koch's Postulate Number One; there are tens of thousands, and we should immediately be looking for a different cause for AIDS.
DR. HEIDE: Did all the AIDS cases after 1991 have HIV?
DAVIS: Technically, yes, but only because the CDC solved this nasty little problem in 1992 by creating a new disease call Idiopathic CD4 Lymphadenopathy, or ICL, and from then on any AIDS case who was HIV-Negative was re-classified as ICL instead of AIDS. That slight-of-hand allowed all AIDS cases from then on to be HIV-Positive.
DR. HEIDE: That sounds familiar. I recall being taught in chiropractic college by some nurses involved with polio at the time that when patients presented to the hospital with symptoms of polio, they were asked if they had the polio vaccine. If the answer was No, they were diagnosed with polio. If the answer was Yes, they were diagnosed with aseptic meningitis.
DAVIS: Deceptive, huh?
DR. HEIDE: Definitely. But does HIV violate any more of Koch's Postulates?
DAVIS: Definitely. Postulate Number Two requires that the germ you want to call the cause of a disease must be isolated and grown in a laboratory culture. That, too, makes perfect sense - to have to isolate HIV, in this case, to make sure it's acting on its own when causing AIDS. The problem is that HIV has never been rigorously or properly isolated. Even a German high court ruled in 2001 that HIV has never been isolated and therefore could not be called the cause of AIDS.
DR. HEIDE: But can it be grown in a lab culture?
DAVIS: There's a lot of question about that, but let's give 'em that one. We'll say Yes, but with great reservations.
DR. HEIDE: And Koch's Postulate Number Three?
DAVIS: Well, now we're at Koch's Postulate Number Three, which says that you have to be able to take the cause of the disease that you have isolated and grown in your lab, and inject it into a normally healthy body, and that body has to develop the very same disease. Again, common sense. You inject the tuberculosis bacillus into a healthy body, it gets TB. Obviously, we're not going to inject human beings with HIV, or any other germ that could intentionally harm them, so instead we inject these germs into chimpanzees; and of the 150 chimpanzees who have been injected with HIV over the past twenty years, only one - I repeat, only one - has ever developed an AIDS-defined disease; and there is not one other viral disease ever tested that does not make every chimp sick with the disease when injected into them - not one!
DR. HEIDE: So HIV fails Koch's Postulate Number Three as well. Then it must fail Postulate Number Four.
DAVIS: Yes, it does because if can't make a chimp sick with AIDS in Postulate Number Three, then you can't do Number Four. So even if we concede that it might be possible to grow HIV in a lab culture, HIV still fails three out of four of Koch's Postulates, and in order to be called the cause of AIDS, it must pass all four, not just one.
DR. HEIDE: If this is true, how did we come to believe that HIV causes AIDS?
DAVIS: Because we were told that by a Dr. Robert Gallo, who stood up at a press conference on April 23rd, 1984 and announced to the world that he had discovered a retrovirus that was causing AIDS.
DR. HEIDE: Refresh my memory on a 'retrovirus'.
DAVIS: It's a special kind of virus that basically goes backwards, from RNA to DNA, what's called 'reverse transcription.' And Dr. Gallo pointed to a picture of the retrovirus he claimed he discovered and said it causes AIDS. And most of the world has believed him ever since. But there were some real problems with this…
DR. HEIDE: And they are…?
DAVIS: Well, for starters, Dr. Gallo violated standard operating procedure in medical research, which is to publish your findings in a professional journal and allow your peers to try to duplicate your experiment and see if they concur with your conclusions. Only then are you allowed to announce your discovery.
DR. HEIDE: Dr. Gallo never gave others the opportunity to duplicate his findings? But he must have published his findings?
DAVIS: Not until after his press conference, and no one has been able to prove his theory since then. It turns out he also didn’t actually discover the virus he said causes AIDS. He "appropriated" it from a French researcher, Dr. Luc Montagnier, and it took an international treaty signed by President Ronald Reagan and then-Prime Minister Jacque Chirac to avoid a costly and embarrassing lawsuit in a world court.
But that's not all. Dr. Gallo also "appropriated" another virus from the Japanese. He lied on his HIV blood test application. The Office of Scientific Integrity at the National Institutes of Health issued a report finding Dr. Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct. The Office of Research Integrity at the Department of Health and Human Services called some of Gallo's key research "of dubious scientific merit," and "really crazy." And a congressional subcommittee report in 1994 accused Dr. Gallo of "intellectual recklessness of a high degree." One his own peers has called Dr. Gallo "an American scientific gangster who has committed so many crass, self-aggrandizing blunders…that he could not really be relied upon to tell the time correctly."
And this is the man we have believed for over twenty years about AIDS and HIV.
DR. HEIDE: What does Dr. Gallo say about HIV failing Koch's Postulates?
DAVIS: In his own book he admits that HIV fails Koch's Postulates, but he blames it on the Postulates, which he claims are outdated and useless in today's technology.
DR. HEIDE: Couldn't that be true?
DAVIS: Perhaps, but he doesn't give us anything to replace them, and we need some set of criteria to determine what causes a disease. Otherwise, someone could just stand up at a press conference and say "this causes that," and we'd all be in big trouble.
DR. HEIDE: Is that the only thing wrong with HIV - that it fails Koch's Postulates?
DAVIS: Well, there are other scientific rules that it violates as well. For example, the first epidemiological law of viral and microbial diseases says that a virus such as HIV cannot differentiate between men and women. In other words, we need approximately the same number of men and women getting sick from the disease. But in the first decade of AIDS, ninety percent (90%) of the HIV/AIDS cases were men.
DR. HEIDE: The way you said that, it sounds like the percentage changed at some point.
DAVIS: You're right; it did. You have to understand that it was embarrassing to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have AIDS affecting so many men and so few women. It made it difficult to maintain that HIV caused AIDS. So in the early 90's they changed the definition of AIDS to include such things as cervical cancer, even though cervical cancer has nothing to do with a deficient immune system. That's right. Today, if you have cervical cancer and are HIV-Positive, your diagnosis is AIDS. If you have cervical cancer and you are HIV-Negative, your diagnosis is cervical cancer. This allowed more women to be diagnosed with AIDS, and today the percentage of women is about seventeen percent. But that's still not enough to pass the first epidemiological law.
DR. HEIDE: But is HIV infectious, as they claim?
DAVIS: For HIV to be "infectious," you would have to find thousands, probably millions of whole, live viruses teeming throughout a person's blood. It's called "viremia." But in the past twenty years, no one has ever found one whole, live HIV virus in the blood of any AIDS patient, much less thousands or millions. Not one.
HIV is also called "contagious," but it fails on two counts here. First, there's Farr's Law, which says that contagious diseases must spread exponentially. In other words, the number of cases of a new epidemic will start small, then explode into the population as rapidly as the germ can spread from one person to another, and then taper off again as immunity to the germ can develop in the human immune system, or some kind of prevention - like a vaccine - is discovered.
But HIV has not done that. You might want to argue that AIDS has, but HIV has not.
DR. HEIDE: This sounds like the old "Bell Curve" you are talking about. AIDS demonstrates this explosion but HIV does not? I must admit I'm having trouble separating HIV from AIDS in my thinking.
DAVIS: I know this is confusing, in part because the media has equated HIV with AIDS for so long. HIV is not AIDS. HIV is the retrovirus that supposedly causes the disease syndrome called AIDS. The CDC said in 1984 when they started counting the number of people who were HIV-Positive that there were a million of them in the U.S. That same year, 1984, we had a little over 4000 deaths from AIDS.
By 1995, the number of people estimated to be HIV-Positive dropped to 700,000, while the deaths from AIDS cases reached almost 50,000 that year.
DR. HEIDE: What happened to the other 300,000 HIV-Positives during that time?
DAVIS: They died.
DR. HEIDE: From HIV?
DAVIS: No. They died from AIDS, but AIDS created by the drug AZT given to "prevent them" from getting AIDS. I'd like to save all that information for later, if you don't mind, otherwise we'll get really sidetracked.
DR. HEIDE: Okay. You were explaining why HIV cannot be called 'contagious.'
DAVIS: I think that's obvious, from the statistics. You can't start with a million people as HIV-Positive, have that number go down, not up, and call HIV contagious. In fact, from 1984 to today, the CDC estimates of the number of people in the U.S. living with HIV has virtually not changed at all; it's still .4 percent of the population like it was 22 years ago. How can you call a virus 'contagious' if it's not spreading rapidly through the population, which HIV has never done? Besides, although AIDS as a disease syndrome might meet Farr's law of spreading exponentially, resulting in a bell curve on a graph, HIV certainly doesn't. Its curve is down gradually, and then back up gradually, like a shallow dish.
DR. HEIDE: But don't you find AIDS cases mostly in urban areas, like you'd expect with a contagious disease?
DAVIS: Yes, you do. I think the CDC says that a vast majority of AIDS cases are located in major cities, like San Francisco, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles. These are called "clusters," and they represent another test to call something "contagious." For example, there was a recent outbreak of mumps in the Midwest. That's because the mumps virus is contagious and spread rapidly in the geographical area where it started.
But remember, AIDS does not equal HIV, and you do not find HIV in clusters. HIV-Positive individuals are spread out all across the U.S. equally, according to the CDC, so that .4 percent of the population of Oklahoma City will be HIV-Positive as well as .4 percent of New York. Without clusters, HIV cannot be called contagious.
DR. HEIDE: But we've been told for years that HIV will infect everyone, even the heterosexual community, unless we practice safe sex. Or, that the virulence of the HIV virus is so strong that it will overwhelm any host - even those with strong resistance. We've been taught now for years that unprotected sex can be life-threatening.
DAVIS: But the studies prove otherwise. One study that lasted over ten years in California examined 175 heterosexual couples with one partner who was HIV-Positive and the other HIV-Negative. The results: "We found no seroconversions after entry into the study." In other words, the HIV-Negative partner did not become HIV-Positive, even though only 30% of the couples had been using condoms and 39% of them had been engaging in anal sex. They concluded that the risk of transmitting HIV from a man to a woman through sexual intercourse was 1 in 1000, and only 1 in 8000 from a woman to a man.
In 2001, 174 monogamous couples were studied in Uganda, again with one partner HIV-Positive and one HIV-Negative. Despite everything we're being told about Africa today, the authors of this study concluded that the probability of HIV transmission per sex act in Uganda is comparable to that in other places, like the U.S. and Europe - .0009 for male to female and ..0013 from female to male.
Those numbers just don't add up to justify calling HIV a highly contagious virus that's transmitted by sexual contact.
DR. HEIDE: This might seem like a naïve question, but with all this evidence, why hasn't the general public heard more about it?
DAVIS: First of all, for most of the last twenty years, there's been a media blackout on the "dissident" viewpoint. It started in the late 80's when Dr. Peter Duesberg, then a world-reknown virologist, began suggesting that HIV couldn't cause AIDS. There's one chapter in my book that goes into detail about how many TV interviews and national talk shows and scientific conventions Dr. Duesberg was scheduled for that were cancelled at the last minute for some "strange" reason. But that's totally understandable. The HIV/AIDS connection has become a huge business, totaling billions of dollars every year. How many people do you know who are willing to give up their golden egg even in the face of indisputable facts? I mean, look at chiropractic. With all the evidence of the value of chiropractic care to the health of every body, there is still a large portion of the population who argue and disparage and in general scoff at the whole idea.
DR. HEIDE: I assume you have references to back up all of this.
DAVIS: Absolutely. I have listed almost a thousand references in my book, Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial, and on my website,
www.theAIDStrial.com. I'm not giving them to you one by one in this interview, because we'd literally run out of time and space just talking about the references. But there are a few other books I would highly recommend for someone who's interested. The first is What if Everything You Thought You Knew about AIDs was Wrong? by Christine Maggiore (new edition due out in September of this year), who is herself HIV-Positive, and Science Fictions, by Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson (2002). For those who are ready for a more scientific and technical discussion, there’s Dr. Peter Duesberg’s book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, published in 1996 and considered to be the bible for the dissidents. The most recent, of course, is Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS by Celia Farber (2006), who wrote the controversial article published in the March issue of Harpers Magazine.
And there are some excellent websites like
http://www.virusmyth.net /
www.reviewingAIDS.com (then choose AIDS Wiki), and
www.virusmyth.net which has over 1200 web pages and more than 850 individual research articles with references.
NEXT ISSUE:
If HIV Doesn’t Cause AIDS, What Does?" - a continuation of the interview with Stephen Davis, author of Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial.
Dr. Heide Hartmann-Taylor has an active chiropractic practise Chino valley AZ.
bron:
http://www.todayschiropractic.com/issues/2006/oct_nov/bull.html