The same issue of Harpers that I referred to in the last post had an article about the politics of AIDS and its impact on research and the approval of drugs. Not surprisingly, politics trumps science at the FDA. I was surprised, however, to learn that the connection between HIV and AIDS has never been established by the usual scientific criteria. I had always been under the impression that this was a solid fact, that there was simply no controversy about the connection. It is taboo to question the HIV/AIDS connection, and anyone who does so will lose funding and face ostracism. An HIV denier is treated like a lunatic Holocaust denier.
The much decried epidemic of AIDS in Africa is also less well established as fact than I had previously been led to believe. It turns out that all kinds of sickness in Africa get classified as AIDS even in the absence of testing for HIV or solid differential diagnoses. This probably generates more foreign assistance than your run of the mill cholera or dysentery problem, but it also leads to the squandering of that assistance on potentially useless drugs to combat HIV. The money would be better spent on sanitation and other public health measures.
What drives this deception and refusal to brook dissent? Why would activists in the US not want to explore the actual etiology of AIDS even if the HIV hypothesis had to be abandoned or modified?
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3 comments:
This thought was bandied about recently on LewRockwell.com, by a woman named Rebecca V. Culshaw.
She wrote these two daily articles:
Why I Quit HIV
Why I quit HIV: The Aftermath
On this same topic I just found this article by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD which might interest you:
A Modern-Day Copernicus:
Peter H. Duesberg
This is nothing new. I remember somebody back in the 80's bringing this up about the non-relationship between HIV and AIDS. He was dismissed as a homophobic religious bigot, and some of the conspiracy theorists even lumped him in with Reagan as co-conspirator in creating AIDS in a laboratory to wipe out the homosexuals.
I think the reason for the activists' refusal to chase facts is simple. A cure for AIDS would mean a collapse of power for them. A headlock on the political and medical institutions of our country is preferable.
Thanks, Iceberg. The Culshaw articles were quite interesting. Duesberg featured prominently in the Harper's piece. For the life of me I can't fathom how any scientist would ever call the case "closed" on HIV. The case can always be reopened if the facts warrant it.
Steve, You may be on to something. A lot of people are deeply invested in the HIV/AIDS paradigm.
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