“The bacteria hunters of the turn of the century failed to grasp the point that vast numbers of harmless microbes exist in the world and that even potentially pathogenic bacteria only cause life-threatening disease in those whose immune systems are temporarily or chronically impaired.”
Peter Duesberg’s quote, from his book Inventing the AIDS Virus, is a good summary of his position that over-zealous microbe hunters have hijacked the fields of biology and medicine. The proposition that HIV is the cause of AIDS was just another instance in a long history of obsessive microbe-mania and not much different from the mostly-failed microbe hunting of the early 20th century.
Though the book was written in 1995, it could not be more timely because the toll of wrecked lives that resulted from the HIV – AIDS hypothesis pales in comparison to the number of wrecked lives accumulating from the still unproven idea that a novel coronavirus is the cause of a new disease.
Over a hundred years ago sailors suffered from the mysterious illness scurvy until it was discovered that eating fruit could cure and prevent the illness. Ships were provisioned with citrus fruit, thus the nickname “limey” for a sailor. Still, in the wake of Pasteur’s fame, milk began to be pasteurized (the milk was heated to kill any possible microbes). The unfortunate side effect of pasteurization was to destroy the vitamin C and, ironically, children began to get scurvy once again. Also in the wake of Pasteur’s discoveries the microbe hunters searched anew for a microbe that caused scurvy, though the cause had long been determined to be related to nutrition.
We seem to have progressed little from the early 20th century … the microbe hunters still obsessively pursue the idea that most diseases are caused by microbes. It’s as though we had not learned that scurvy, beri beri and pellagra are all caused by vitamin deficiency, rather than microbes, as originally thought to be the case. But the microbe hunters seem to have forgotten that lesson and seem intent on finding a microbe for every illness.
Of course, the book is primarily about AIDS. And Duesberg shows conclusively that there is no need to point fingers at HIV. So, if AIDS is not caused by HIV what is the cause? Duesberg goes to great lengths to show that the HIV – AIDS hypothesis never satisfied Koch’s postulates. For example, many AIDS patients didn’t have HIV, and many people with HIV never got AIDS (violating two of Koch’s postulates). And, most telling, the disease never spread outside of its original population. In many people’s minds that population is gay men, but it would be more accurate to say that the population is chronic drug abusers. In the decade that led up to AIDS, the gay community embraced free sex and indulged in drug use that facilitated it. Poppers is the best example of such a drug: it’s an aphrodisiac, stimulant and muscle relaxant that facilitated sex. Once popper use went down so did the occurrence of Kaposi’s Sarcomas which was one of the primary manifestations of AIDS. The fact that AIDS never spread outside the original population – chronic drug users, as was common with promiscuous gay men at the time – was compelling evidence that microbes had little to do with AIDS.
Duesberg recounts in great detail the difficulties he had in getting his message out. Articles about him were mysteriously cancelled. TV interviews scheduled for broadcast were either dropped or cut in half, to leave time for a rebuttal point of view. Invitations to conferences dried up. This treatment of Duesberg is similar to the current censoring of dissident opinions about SARS-Cov-2, Covid and the Covid vaccines.
Koch’s postulates – at one time considered the standard by which one proves that a microbe is the cause of a disease – have not been applied to the theory that SARS-CoV-2 causes Covid-19. In fact it is unclear that there really is an actual new coronavirus. The only proof of a new virus is from the application of PCR technology. What PCR does is pattern-match for small sequences of DNA. Such sequences have never been proven to be from a virus and could just as easily be explained as the DNA from other microbes or even degenerating cells. Even if there was a new virus, since Koch’s postulates have never been satisfied, there is no proof that the virus is the cause of Covid. And the large number of Covid deaths appear to be largely a matter of re-labelling of other diseases i.e. while Covid deaths accumulate in the CDC’s statistics, the number of deaths from other causes such as flu, pneumonia, heart disease and cancer go down.
How is it possible that the real science could get so completely hijacked? Duesberg attributes it to what he calls “command science.” Command science depends on three things:
– enforced consensus through peer review: the most well-connected get the final word.
– consensus through commercialization: Scientific funding comes largely from large institutions with their vested interests and when new ideas or therapies threaten those interests the funding dries up.
– the fear of disease: Public fear of contagious diseases makes it easy for officials to manipulate the public.
Why is all this important to know, given the current “health crisis?” The parallels between AIDS and Covid are too hard to ignore. Just one example: AIDS was an “umbrella” diagnosis under which more and more diseases were gathered until about 30 different diseases were classified as AIDS. Covid is also an umbrella diagnosis under which the flu, pneumonia and, because the guidelines from the CDC are so loose with regards to classifying an illness or death as being Covid-related, many other illnesses, too. This exercise in re-labelling many illnesses as a single illness results in creating more and more fear.
Despite a lack of evidence, many still believe the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. And, despite a lack of evidence, many people believe that a new virus is causing a new disease called Covid. While the current Covid nightmare is only a year old, it is leaving devastation in its wake. So, we must do what we can to move away from the command science paradigm and let alternative views surface, to encourage debate and to move forward with a more reality-based perspective on AIDS, Covid, etc.
From the Forward to Inventing the AIDS Virus, written by Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry:
Kary Mullis, in the foreword to Duesberg’s book recounts the story about writing a report for the National Institutes of Health, “I recognized that I did not know the scientific reference to support a statement I had just written: ‘HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.’”
He assumed that finding such a reference proving that HIV was the cause of AIDS would be easy since such an important piece of science would be cited so frequently. “Of course, this simple reference had to be out there somewhere. Otherwise, tens of thousands of public servants and esteemed scientists of many callings, trying to solve the tragic deaths of a large number of homosexual and/or intravenous (IV) drug-using men between the ages of twenty-five and forty, would not have allowed their research to settle into one narrow channel of investigation.“
He spoke with colleagues, did computer searches, attended conferences and asked the attendees, but could not find the paper that established that HIV is the cause of AIDS. “After ten or fifteen meetings over a couple years, I was getting pretty upset when no one could cite the reference. I didn’t like the ugly conclusion that was forming in my mind: The entire campaign against a disease increasingly regarded as a twentieth century Black Plague was based on a hypothesis whose origins no one could recall.”
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