The Church of HIV: Inventing the AIDS Virus

reply to post by RealSpoke


Here is an article called What if He's Right? by Mark K. Anderson:

Everyone knows who's buried in Grant's tomb, and the color of Washington's white horse has long been agreed upon. But tautology collectors beware: Not all redundancies are made equal. Take, for instance, the deceptively simple statement "The AIDS virus causes AIDS."

....

Of course, 12 years, 100,000 scientific papers and $35 billion later, we can now look back on Gallo's initial follies with the knowledge that, as nearly any AIDS textbook will tell you, there is overwhelming evidence establishing HIV as the cause of AIDS. So overwhelming that the few remaining scientists bold enough to question the causal connection between HIV and AIDS inspire some of the most excoriating criticism in mainstream science today.

Perhaps no one has been more vilified than Professor Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley—the most outspoken opponent of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis.

The scientific journal Nature, for instance, dirtied its hands in an editorial in May 1993 stating it would continue to publish attacks on Duesberg, but Nature said it considered itself under no obligation to print his responses. As Nature's editor later wrote: "The sad truth about debates on controversial issues in science is that there may come a point at which dissenters forfeit the right to make claims on other people's time and trouble by the poverty of their arguments and the exasperation they have caused."

Continuing, Anderson reasonably asks:

Universal consensus being one of the greatest enemies to scientific progress, what is so dangerous about Duesberg's ideas that they must be prevented from appearing in the very forums where they belong?

Thank for your contributions in this thread. It is more than greatly appreciated.

reply to post by RealSpoke


I had a cat that died from feline leukemia, it is not the same as human aids, the vet explained that to me.

Bioengineering viruses involves taking an existing virus, say one that affects monkeys and engineering it to jump species to humans for example....it is just a theory as to how aids showed up supposedly out of the blue. Also why it has this "church" of money and influence built around it...something about it stinks....

From SA I'd say we had "AIDS Denialism" from 1998-2008 as a state endorsed policy.

A lot of terms were applied at various stages, and at least before HIV was photographed the terms "skeptic" or "dissident" were quite applicable.

It's fair to question anything, and despite my convictions which support the massively proven HIV/AIDS facts, I think it's good to theorize and question, and if I disagree with the "conspiracy", then I hope people will not attack me for it personally.

As far as possible, I come to present my views, and some experiences with "AIDS denialists", whom I believe to have a conspiracy of their own (Deusberg was connected to Rasnick, who was connected to the Rath Foundation in SA, until a court case they initiated exposed their dealings and they suddenly and finally left SA, after an estimated 300 000 people died needlessly from AIDS).

Generally there is much debate between various "AIDS denialists" (to put it mildly).
- one group says HIV does not exist
- another group says HIV exists, but it is a harmless passenger virus
- another group admits that HIV exists and can cause AIDS, but this can be prevented by healthy lifestyles, foodstuffs and vitamins, instead of the scientifically tested ARVs.
- mostly they are all anti-ARVs, and in practice they encourage things like vitamins or specific foodstuffs, or simply doing nothing at all.

All of them make never-ending conspiracies about the French/US spat on who first discovered the virus, which is actually totally irrelevant.
The fact that two independent sources came to the same conclusions about HIV actually counts against denialism.
Most of them claim that ARVs, especially the early doses of AZT actually cause AIDS, which is also irrelevant because since 1996 those doses are no longer used, and at least in SA, public health does not supply ARVs to HIV-positive people until their CD4 count goes below 200 (the normal count varies between 2000-600).
So when people get treatment they are usually already sick.

There has never been starvation in SA in the 20th century, neither do people abuse poppers or do anything strange.
We never knew AIDS in SA until it spread in the 1990s.
It's a virus that affects all kinds of people, from gays to heterosexuals, from the poorest to the richest families (including the grandson of Nelson Mandela, whose admissions embarrassed our former denialist President Mbeki).

Big pharma has certainly profited from HIV/AIDS.
However, under the TRIPS agreement countries like Thailand have begun to manufacture their own ARVs and other medicines.
HIV is one of the best understood viruses to date.
It also has a virtually non-profit form of medicine distribution spreading in poor countries, that has actually cost big pharma dearly.

People are encouraged to eat a balanced diet, with a focus on vegetables.
Chemical vitamins and anti-oxidants have produced dismal results so far, sometimes with harmful effects to even uninfected people, despite massive marketing campaigns from big pharma's "functional nutrition" subsidiaries.
The fact that vitamins and anti-oxidents have no proven positive effects despite the wide usage is probably one reason why big pharma still allows the denialist circus to continue.
The immune systems of people with HIV/AIDS were, and are the hotly contested grounds of the tons of useless chemicals they smear on people every day as useless and harmful "immune boosters".
So they play a double game.
There is no proof on how such overpriced supplements could help anyone outside a starvation scenario, and they do not help people with AIDS to reduce their viral loads (as ARVs have been proven to do, because they stop the virus from replicating in most cells).

In SA there was proof that the denialist circle gave people single dosage ARVs as vitamin pills, which suggests that at least some of these "denialist" people know exactly that they are doing, and they are sociopaths.

Others may be well meaning, but I wish them better luck in 1989.
Now keep those vitamins coming ... open up and say AHH to a label that says nothing ...

Originally posted by jollyjollyjolly
AIDS/HIV/Whatever you want to call it was around in the 1940's and 50's. They have found it in sailors cryogenic frozen blood samples from WWII.

Funny...they retroactively validated Kawasaki disease the same way...by 'finding it' in a preserved sample...

The disease was first reported by Tomisaku Kawasaki in a four-year-old child with a rash and fever at the Red Cross Hospital in Tokyo, Japan in January 1961, and later published a report on 50 similar cases.[126] Later Kawasaki and colleagues were persuaded that there is definite cardiac involvement when they studied and reported 23 cases, of which 11(48%) patients had abnormalities detected by an electrocardiogram.[127] It was not until 1974 that the first description of this disorder was published in the English language literature.[128] in the year 1976 Melish et al., described the same illness in 16 children in Hawaii.[129] Melish and Kawasaki had independently developed the same diagnostic criteria for the disorder, which are still used today to make the diagnosis of classic KD.

A question was raised whether the disease only started during the period between 1960 and 1970, but later a preserved heart of a 7 year old boy who died in 1870 was examined and showed three aneurysms of the coronary arteries with clots, as well as pathologic changes consistent with KD.[130] KD is now recognized worldwide. In the United States and other developed nations, it appears to have replaced acute rheumatic fever as the most common cause of acquired heart disease in children.[131]

en.wikipedia.org...

Suspicious way to 'prove' disease was there all along...I call shenanigans. It looks like a problem-reaction-solution scenario. Problem=Introducing a new disease. Reaction=They don't believe in the new disease. Solution - Find a sample from before the introduction of the disease to prove it.

Is there substantiation to the sailor story or is this just myth. I would hate to be grasping for extrapolations here...still funny that it would be mentioned...

reply to post by timetothink

FIV differs taxonomically from two other feline retroviruses, feline leukemia virus (FeLV) and feline foamy virus (FFV), and is more closely related to human immunodeficiency virus HIV.

en.wikipedia.org...

That was a damn good post..

Thank you JPZ for taking the time to make this thread!

reply to post by halfoldman


Some points of contention with some of your claims. First, it is probably good for those reading this thread to know who you mean by "Rasnik" and "The Rath Foundation". Secondly, you phrase your contention in a way to suggest that Deusberg, Rasnik, and the Rath Foundation has "initiated" a court case in South Africa, but according to this article the suit was brought against Rath and Resnik by South African Medical Association and the Treatment Action Campaign lobby group:

A South African court has banned a team of scientists and doctors, including a former adviser to President Thabo Mbeki, from conducting unauthorised clinical trials into the use of vitamin therapies to treat Aids.

German doctor Matthias Rath and American biochemist David Rasnick, who used to sit on Mbeki's Aids advisory council, were among 12 people accused in the Cape high court of supervising illegal medical trials in black townships and selling unregistered vitamin supplements to poor Aids sufferers. The suit was brought by the South African Medical Association and the Treatment Action Campaign lobby group, which said some of Rath's patients died after relying on his unproven remedies rather than seeking conventional treatment at state-run clinics.

You also phrase your claim in a way to make it appear as if the South African law suit against Rath and Resnik "exposed" a connection between they and Deusberg. However, Duesberg and Resnik authored a paper together called The AIDS Dilemma: drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus in 1998 and no one needed a 2008 - a decade later - law suit brought to the South African courts to know that. You also, and most disturbingly make this claim:

...they suddenly and finally left SA, after an estimated 300 000 people died needlessly from AIDS

I gave you the benefit of the doubt with that claim and Googled "Rath foundation killed 300,000 aids patients". This is the first article that came up:

In an ideal world this would be only a thought experiment. AIDS is the opposite of anecdote. Twenty-five million people have died from it already, three million in the last year alone, and 500,000 of those deaths were children. In South Africa it kills 300,000 people every year:

This was the next article:

That the reviewer for JAIDS as well as these later five reviewers wish to remain anonymous may be understandable when it is realized that none of the six reviews even mentions the central point made by Duesberg et al. (I am one of those co-authors): the central point that Chigwedere et al. relied on computer models that estimated AIDS deaths at around 300,000 per year whereas the official South African Statistics agency reported about 12,000-15,000 on the basis of actual death certificates. Lehohla, the South Africa Statistics Director, has explained in detail why the computer model's estimate cannot be accepted, since it incorporates some very unlikely assumptions unsupported by independent evidence, for example, about the numbers of deaths of young adults from violence. It is extraordinarily unlikely that the actual AIDS deaths should exceed the death certificate data by a factor of 20 or 25, given that UNAIDS among other authorities acknowledges that the reporting system in South Africa is reasonably reliable; and that it is fiscally advantageous to African communities to place estimates of damage from AIDS as high as possible. Nearly a decade ago, the South African journalist Rian Malan had already pointed out that there was no evidence on the ground for the inflated computer estimates: for example, makers of cheap coffins who had believed the dire computer-modeled predictions found themselves without customers.

I have limited space remaining for this post, but I'll link this article, and this article, and finally this blog which took that same 300,000 estimate and used it in the same way you did, which is to say dubiously. I appreciate your passion, but I implore you to take heed of how you are shedding light on this issue you believe in. If your cause is just there is no need to hide in shadows.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

Well, I'm not an expert, and eventually there were other court cases (and more in the pipeline when they all just disappeared, and the scandals certainly helped to end the Mbeki presidency - what an unfortunate useful idiot), but the denialists under the banner of Rath sued the Mail and Gaurdian Newspaper, and that was the beginning of their end.
They initiated it, and they were starting to get exposed, as I intimated:
mg.co.za...

Aidstruth.org sums up the Rath, Rasnick (yes, RASNICK), Deusberg connection that existed in SA.

In summary, the facts are that Dr. Rasnick, a co-author of the paper by Duesberg et al., has worked to boost the sales of an alternative (but ineffective) way to treat HIV infection. His employer, the Dr. Rath Health Foundation Africa, has actively attacked the use of antiretrovirals (a proven, effective way to treat HIV infection) as part of its marketing campaign for its products. Dr. Rasnick has helped to promote these products in paid advertisements. A paper co-authored by Dr. Rasnick that attacks the use of antiretroviral drugs is therefore of commercial value to his former (and possibly current) employer, Matthias Rath.

www.aidstruth.org...

Of course denialists would say Aidstruth has some major conspiracy against them.
Let them, but this is the information I have, and if it is wrong then let them start another court case against Aidstruth.
I wouldn't hold my breath however.

On avoidable AIDS deaths from our period of denialism from 1998-2008 my figures are actually conservative:
www.guardian.co.uk...

Recent research showed how damaging denialist beliefs can be, concluding that Mbeki’s failure to roll out HIV drugs between 2000 and 2005 resulted in 330,000 unnecessary deaths and the infection of 3,500 infants with HIV.

www.cssr.uct.ac.za...

But SA society could notice it happening.
The stories from the hospices that could no longer cope, the many desperate testimonies that came as protests and pleas fell on deaf ears; the people who were shocked to test positive; the workers who grew thin and just never came back - it was suddenly no longer a secret.
And then there was the sheer frustration of doctors, nurses and medical staff who (apart from a few international study sites) could not help people.
Just imagine the tragedy.
Just because a silly President believed in an Internet cult!
And our health minister just told us to eat garlic, beetroot and lemon juice, and it would all go away.
It's an outrage, and maybe one day they will send these a-holes back here and we can have a tribunal!!!

reply to post by halfoldman


If one is being honest and truthful they would necessarily have to acknowledge the disturbing irony of an organization that calls themselves AIDSTruth but insists on calling people who have never once denied the existence of AIDS, but instead have challenged the efficacy of the HIV hypothesis, as "AIDS denialists":

The purpose of this website is to debunk AIDS denialist arguments and prevent further harm being done by AIDS denialists to public health. In March 2006, after Harper's Magazine published a feature article by AIDS denialist Celia Farber, a number of scientists and activists joined together to create a website for the purpose of countering AIDS denialist misinformation and debunking denialist myths, while providing truthful information about HIV and AIDS. The result is the AIDSTruth.org website.

If they mean AIDSTruth in the same way they mean "AIDS denialist" then I suppose we can only take their claims with a grain of salt...but please don't misinterpret that as me suggesting that a grain of salt is a cure for AIDS. As I said in my opening, I don't know what the truth is about this mess, only that it is indeed a mess.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

No website is neutral, and those who feel it is a wrong website can take their own measures.
Until they do it is an accredited source of documented information.
I make no apologies for using it.
There are many more denialist websites, although in reality it's no longer an acceptable theory, and many no longer even see a point in debating with AIDS denialists.
Their discourse is meant to go past any debate.
It's not a counter-discourse, it's a completely different discourse.
But that's my view, and I didn't suck anything out of my thumb.

Just saying a website must be suspect because it disagrees with a certain viewpoint is an old technique.

Whosoever I mention will have a "disturbing tendency" to disagree with the denialists.
So there's not much point if that make my sources wrong.

Ultimately we don't know everything about AIDS, and despite my misgivings I think we might need theorists like Deusberg and Rasnick, and in a way I'd also hate to see them stop exploring alternative theories.
But AZT and poppers is a bit silly by now.

I could have swore I posted, or read an old post on here about how most Africans diagnosed with AIDS only have to meet a certain criteria--some of which could be symptoms of Tuberculosis. The misdiagnosed draw funding to Africa, where they are treated for AIDS, when they might be cured of Tuberculosis altogether. Since that particular article is probably no longer in existence, this one will do:

It is common knowledge that AIDS in Africa is rampant, that it affects men and women alike, and is destroying the population and economic prospects of Sub-Saharan Africa. Everyone also thinks, as I have for most of my life, that AIDS in the West and Africa has the same diagnostic definition and symptoms; that they are clinically the same. This is only surely sensible - the same virus must cause the same illness?

But, when I investigated, I found the truth was utterly otherwise. AIDS is diagnosed entirely differently in Africa. Officially in Africa a person only has to have a few symptoms common to many diseases that ultimately are caused by great poverty, poor water supplies and lack of sanitation. Again there is no requirement to test positive for HIV for an AIDS diagnosis. This was strangely easy to discover. I only needed to go to the official WHO website and look it up. This tells me that our media has not been doing its homework when reporting AIDS in Africa.

Here

reply to post by CynicalDrivel

That information is dated and goes back to the time when there were no tests available in a medical field situation.
Since HIV destroys the immune system, the secondary complex of conditions are likely to be the viruses, fungi, bacteria in the environment.
So that was quite different in Africa (even regionally) than to the West.
In SA the main secondary condition is a co-infection with TB, which might not be the case in the US, for example.
But nowadays there are fairly accurate screening tests, and in combination with 2 back-up tests they can provide an accurate diagnosis.
So going by observation is no longer necessary.
There are also huge commonalities in AIDS patients, perhaps like thrush in the mouth that eventually covers the entire digestive tract.
Most doctors will see it nowadays, especially also with combinations of conditions and a failure to thrive from medicine that normally cures other patients.

I have a friend with TB (who's actually HIV-negative) and the doctors told him the TB stays dormant, it's never really cured, and breaks out when the immune system is stressed. Maybe a bit like chickenpox and shingles.

Hey OP do you know anything about this supposed cure in the US patent office?

patft.uspto.gov.../56769 77&RS=PN/5676977

I urge anyone interested in the topic to also compare the claims with the other side of the debate, before forming an opinion:
aidstruth.org...

When my daughter was born, I remember sitting in the hospital cafeteria sitting close to a group of doctors. Overhearing their conversation, they were talking about HIV, and seemed to have a consensus that it was a bio engineered virus. It was a serious conversation they were having, and it was very creepy to hear doctors voice this opinion.

reply to post by jollyjollyjolly


The government has frozen blood samples of soldiers from WWII and they occasionally test this blood for modern diseases?

That just seems like a unfounded claim.

I cannot find anything online about this, please provide sources.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is "THERE IS NO MONEY IN CURES!"

How are the poor pharmacudical companies going to keep making billions in profits if someone can take one pill and end their problem? That's not exactly smart business practice is it?

50 or so years ago we didn't even have half the problems there are pills on the market for now. Currently, we have more new diseases than ever recorded, and yet most still truely believe big pharma has nothing but good intentions.

For years doctors tried to shove pills down my throat, each one with even more side effects that were worse than the issue they were supposed to be treating. I finally was fed up and said to hell with all that crap, and guess what?

I'm healthier now than I ever was before I started down the completely bogus, all for profit, bottomless money pit we call our phama industry!

As long as medicine is "for profit" things will never get better. There is no incentive for big pharma to produce real cures.

In fact, the truth is they know the biggest incentive for them would be for hundreds of new diseases to suddenly randomly appear!

Hmmm...that doesn't sound familiar with what's happening now at all

But we're just a bunch of conspiracy theorists, what do we know...

Originally posted by RealSpoke
reply to post by cenpuppie

 

There are a million different strains of immune deficiency viruses in a variety of species.

Bovine immunodeficiency virus

Bovine immunodeficiency virus (BIV) is a retrovirus belonging to the lentivirus subfamily. It is similar to Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and infects cattle. The cells primarily infected are lymphocytes and monocytes/macrophages.[1]

Feline Immunodeficiency Virus

Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) is a lentivirus that affects domesticated housecats worldwide and is the causative agent of feline AIDS. From 2.5% up to 4.4%[1][2] of cats worldwide are infected with FIV

en.wikipedia.org...

Simian immunodeficiency virus

Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), also known as African Green Monkey virus, is a retrovirus able to infect at least 33 species of African primates

Did humans create those too?

edit on 20-5-2012 by RealSpoke because: (no reason given)

I would think modification of these diseases was very possible back then and very much so today...

A simple question. Statistically is the occurence of the illness more predominant in the gay community, and if so, why?

I see where you are going with this, but your reasoning is off. Just because one retrovirus can induce cell proliferation, it doesn't stand to reason that ALL retroviruses stimulate cell proliferation. The T-tropic form of HIV infects CD4+ T-lymphocytes bearing the CXCR4 chemokine receptor. This means it will be present in lymphatic tissue on a continual basis. After a quasi-latent period there is an explosive expression of viral genes and virion production which leads to apoptosis and death of the infected cell. Now, the T-lymphocytes arise from haemapoetic stem cells of the bone marrow...but...there is NOT an infinite capacity for these cells regarding proliferation...there is a limit. Once that limit is met, the CD4+ T-cell population cannot recover. [So even if HIV stimulated T-cell proliferation, the result would only be an increased rate of T-cell infection and death.] The infected individuals become more susceptible to opportunistic infection...so yes, HIV doesn't DIRECTLY kill you, but by virtue of its effect on the immune system, a person will eventually succumb (although modern treatments have worked wonders on extending the lives of infected individuals). So, as I've seen in this thread where folks claim HIV is harmless...anyone who believes that I suggest you go infect yourself and see what happens. Go ahead. I'll patiently wait a decade or so for your results and report.

With regards to the Milush et. al. aritcile I suggest you go back and re-read it more carefully...it does not state that CD4+ T-cell depletion doesn't cause AIDS as you claim...it suggests T-cell depletion is not the ONLY factor in a patient developing AIDS.

This study demonstrates that generalized CD4+ T cell depletion from the blood and mucosal tissues is not sufficient to induce AIDS in this natural host species. Rather, AIDS pathogenesis appears to be the cumulative result of multiple aberrant immunologic parameters that include CD4+ T cell depletion, generalized immune activation, and depletion/dysfunction of non-CD4+ T cells

Which is not totally incompatible with the current scientific thought on the subject. Also, the researchers were using SIV not HIV as the model and so the conclusion may or may not be applicable to HIV infection process.

Is it possible that HIV is a bio-engineered virus? Absolutely. Can we unequivocally state that it was? At this point in time. NO. The evidence doesn't support that. My gut feeling, and pure conjecture, says that more than likely there was human involvement, if not in the creation, at least in the distribution of the virus to populations most at risk to spread it.

You put a lot of work into this thread, but you've also cherry picked your supporting evidence in an ex post facto manner. 30 years is an eternity in the field of molecular and cell biology.