Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy [Anglais] [Relié]

My favorite subject is: myself. So I was thrilled to discover that Kalichman has written a book all about me, an AIDS denialist. He has never met me but that doesn't matter because all of us denialists are the same anyhow.

I used to call myself an AIDS dissident because of my, as I learned from this book, "crusading religious and political overtones" and not as I thought previously, because this word means dissenting, having a different opinion from most people. Kalichman explains that what characterizes my opinions is not dissent but sameness. True, some denialists deny the existence of a disease called AIDS, some accept that AIDS exists but deny the existence of HIV, some accept that both AIDS and HIV exist but deny that HIV causes AIDS, some accept that HIV causes AIDS but deny that HIV is sexually transmittable, some deny only that the HIV test is reliable, and some don't deny any of these things but reject the drugs. All of us who hold such opinions are "'suspicious thinkers' prone to conspiracy theories and other wacky beliefs." We are no different from holocaust denialists like "Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Like them, I have "encapsulated delusions ... conspiracy-theory-prone personality style ... and ... tend to be overly independent in [my] thinking." Furthermore, I am "characterized by a fear of homosexuality, or even homophobia." It is understandable that Kalichman thinks this of me. I live in the Netherlands, where different-sex marriages are still legal, though who knows for how long. That's why my spouse (male) and I (female) grabbed our chance while we still could and married although we realized that by doing so we would arouse suspicion of being homophobes. What surprises me is that Kalichman seems to be saying the same thing about my dissi-- I mean denialist friends, some of whom are men married to men. Are they, too, homophobic? Perhaps they are closet heterosexuals who married only to deflect gossip?

In any case all of us denialists have "paranoiac personalities ... It is no wonder that a widespread sexually transmitted virus that is prevalent in gay communities would attract the interest of the paranoid personality." Some of us have "a form of mental illness" which is identifiable by the fact that we disagree with our doctors.

Kalichman even knows my political views. I am on "the extreme socially conservative right" and my favorite targets are "the most marginalized, including gay men, racial minorities, drug users, and the inner-city poor." I do wonder whether Kalichman has ever been to the Netherlands.

All this I read about myself in Chapter One. To my disappointment, Chapter Two is not about me but about denialist Dr. Peter Duesberg, an acclaimed scientist who is, however, a "contrarian" and likes to contradict all reputable scientists including himself. This "character flaw" is derived from his being German-born and his father having served as a doctor in the German army during WWII, explains Kalichman.

In Chapter Three the author restates denialist positions from the angle of different medical specialties, namely virology, immunology, pharmacology, and epidemiology. Chapter Four is about denialist journalism, "Bla-Blah-Bloggers" and the conspiracy theories our paranoid personalities conjure up. Thankfully there are also good scientists like Canada's AIDS campaigner Mark Wainberg who puts our wild fears of persecution to rest by stating "I think that people like Peter Duesberg belong in jail."

Chapter Five is again not about me but about presidents. "Ronald Reagan's silence about AIDS is shamefully legendary." What was the matter with Reagan, did he think a person's health is his own private business or something? President Bush who "intentionally appointed underqualified individuals to his AIDS Advisory Council" was no better. (Note that this overtly suspicious statement is quoting not the denialists but the mainstream Union of Concerned Scientists.) Clinton was just a little better, having vastly increased AIDS spending, but still not enough, of course. Furthermore Clinton did not repeal a federal ban on access to clean needles, not that any other president did. Worst of all, though, were Africa's presidents Mandela and Mbeki who felt their nation's money could be better spent on food, clean water, and housing than on USA-patented drugs.

In Chapter Six, the last one except for appendices, Kalichman states that his trust in mainstream medicine is based on "credibility, contemporaneousness, and common sense." As a paranoid denialist, I don't understand that. Credibility means choosing whom to believe. His choice is different from mine. So what? Contemporaneousness means according to him "if a scientific article was published before 2000, I would say it can be considered dated, perhaps even ignored." We might as well ignore all of the tens of thousands of articles that he claims support the existence of AIDS, because a decade after publication every one of them will be dated. As to sense, apparently mine is as common as his, because we both agree that "No one research finding ever proves anything" and "Do not purchase a medical treatment without digging deeper to learn more about it." Perhaps he himself is a closet denialist?

Too bad that Kalichman says he is not planning to write more about denialism, although he does maintain a blah-blah-blog of his own on this subject. The book does not answer all of my questions. How is it that I know people who tested positive for HIV in the late eighties and early nineties, who don't take antiviral drugs, and yet they are alive and well, though some are graying somewhat at the temples? In spite of low T-cell counts and soaring viral loads they are living active, productive lives. According to the Durban Declaration of 2000 they were destined to die within five to ten years of the test. Surely I'm not deluded that by being acquainted with me they have attained immortality, or even longevity? I know plenty of people who passed away young though most did not happen to be seropositive. Even Kalichman confesses that "Everybody dies eventually." How does he explain that these people haven't so far?

They can't be just visions or voices in my delusional mind. I shake their hands and sometimes even hug and kiss them. I was not born in Germany but in the Netherlands (admittedly not a big difference to some Americans). My father did not serve with the German army during WWII, he was on the other side. And what about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, being as delusional as I am, does he hug and kiss my relatives who were gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz and Sobibor? No? Then what about these long-term non-drug taking AIDS-test survivors? The reality of their existence, not the opinions of AIDS-denialists, exposes AIDS propaganda for the sham that it is.

Copyright © MeTZelf

Mr. Kalichman writes under the heading of "contemporaneousness" (p. 157-158) that

"To understand AIDS one should not have to look back further than the past few years. For the consumer-reader, if a scientific article was published before 2000, I would say it can be considered dated, perhaps even ignored. [..] Any writing in the area of AIDS that relies on sources from the 1980s should be suspect. Of the more than 116,000 scientific articles listed in the PubMed database concerning the HIV disease process, or HIV pathogenesis, over 31,000 have been published in the past 5 years. AIDS scientists are basing their conclusion that HIV causes AIDS on these current studies[..]."

This is a most remarkable admission. Criticism of the HIV theory of AIDS predates the year 2000 considerably. Duesberg made his case against the HIV theory in 1987, and the Rethinking AIDS movement "flourished", purely in relative terms, in the 1990s. Criticisms of the paradigm were given the same response then as they are now: that they are nuts, and that the correctness of the HIV theory of AIDS is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

And yet, according to Kalichman, HIV has only been actually, truly, reliably proven to cause AIDS since 2003, and the earlier papers (85,000 of them, by his count) cannot be relied upon! So were AIDS rethinkers then correct in questioning the HIV theory of AIDS between 1987 and 2003?

Kalichman essentially concedes that the self-correcting mechanisms of medical science were inoperative in the field of AIDS research at least until 2002, a time period during which the HIV theory of AIDS was actually unproven, but nevertheless considered proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Then how can we know that these self-correcting mechanisms are working now? How much credibility do AIDS scientists have who are claiming that they have proof NOW that HIV causes AIDS, when they were claiming the same proof all along? And what sort of "science" is it that readily acknowleges that all but the most recent work was of low quality and can't be trusted, but claims that, somehow, reliable results were obtained through work based on these flawed foundations?

This - constantly throwing away all the old research - is the exact opposite of how real science works, and Kalichman seems to realize it, because elsewhere in his book (p. 102), he contradicts himself and writes under the heading "The Single Study Fallacy":

"No one scientific study ever 'proves' anything. Scientists are cautious in drawing conclusions from even a series of experiments. Science requires that independent studies replicate a finding before it is taken as fact. Even then, there is hesitation to accept replicated research findings as 'proof'. To establish that HIV causes AIDS required countless laboratory, clinical and epidemiological studies, all converging to a definite conclusion."

And yet he argues that countless studies should now be considered "dated" or "suspect", or even be "ignored" since AIDS scientists "are basing their conclusion that HIV causes AIDS on [..] current studies"! Which one is it?

Indeed, Kalichman describes here how AIDS science should have worked, but didn't- countless studies all converging to the same conclusion. Instead, a singular scientific publicity stunt in 1984 secured the commitment and funding of the US government to a scientifically unsubstantiated speculation, the hypothesis of a new virus, cutting off all possibility of reasoned dissent and investigation into alternative causes and co-factors.

An army of scientific lemmings, all funded not to ask whether HIV causes AIDS, but how it causes it, subsequently produced over 100,000 papers that accepted it as axiomatic that HIV causes AIDS. After amost 30 years, the best answer that they have come up with is exactly the one one would expect if the underlying assumption was wrong in the first place - "we don't know".

A comparatively recent mainstream paper (Grossman, Z. et al: Pathogenesis of HIV infection, Nature Medicine 12(3):289-295) was published in March 2006 and thus qualifies as one of those current papers on which, according to Kalichman, "AIDS scientists are basing their conclusion that HIV causes AIDS". It states:

"The pathogenic and physiologic processes leading to AIDS remain a conundrum."

It actually took me a significant amount of time to finish this book, as I have been juggling several other projects the last 6 months, but it was ultimately a worthwhile read that I would recommend to those either new or unaware of the subject matter.

As as general overview of content, the work contains a summation of the psychological, political and social contexts surrounding what is commonly refereed to as "Aids Denialism". This view is championed by a very fringe group of individuals who hold the view that: HIV does not exist, HIV is not the cause of AIDS, Anti-retroviral drugs cause AIDS, AIDS deaths in Africa are a myth, as well as numerous other conspiracy mongering ideas on the subject.

As strange as this sounds (even stranger for me as I come a from microbiology background) these views can and do have dire implications on the lives of numerous people, and this book shows the reader the harms and implications of this dangerous thinking (especially in South Africa).

Upon completion of the book, you will likely feel both anger and remorse at the lives that have been torn apart by this twisted and nonscientific ideology.

The content is engaging, but the writing does tend to leave a bit to be desired (particularly towards the latter half of the book) as it comes off as heavy handed and cliche ridden. While this is only a minor gripe, some additional work during the editorial phase I feel could of alleviated some of these problems. Do not take these minor literary critiques as cause to dissuade you from reading this, as It is overwhelmingly good writing and information, just not quite as polished as it should be.