http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5661/

The authorities have lied, and I am not glad

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of 1987’s The Truth About the AIDS Panic, says it is a shame that AIDS insiders did not expose the myths and opportunism of the AIDS industry earlier. But still, better late than never.
by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

There is a widely accepted view that Britain was saved from an explosive epidemic of heterosexual AIDS in the late 1980s by a bold campaign initiated by gay activists and radical doctors and subsequently endorsed by the government and the mass media.

According to advocates of this view, we owe our low rates of HIV infection today largely to the success of initiatives such as the ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ leaflet distributed to 23million households and the scary ‘Tombstones and Icebergs’ television and cinema adverts (though they are always quick to add that we must maintain vigilance and guard against complacency).

Now former AIDS industry insiders are challenging the imminent heterosexual plague story and many of the other scare stories of the international AIDS panic. James Chin, author of The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness, is a veteran public health epidemiologist who worked in the World Health Organisation’s Global Programme on AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist turned epidemiologist and author of The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, spent most of the past decade working under the auspices of UNAIDS, which took over the global crusade against HIV in 1996. Once prominent advocates of the familiar doomsday scenarios, both have now turned whistleblowers on their former colleagues in the AIDS bureaucracy, a ‘byzantine’ world, according to Pisani, in which ‘money eclipses truth’.

“Pisani reminds readers that ‘public health is inherently a somewhat fascist discipline’”

For Chin, the British AIDS story is an example of a ‘glorious myth’ – a tale that is ‘gloriously or nobly false’, but told ‘for a good cause’. He claims that government and international agencies, and AIDS advocacy organisations, ‘have distorted HIV epidemiology in order to perpetuate the myth of the great potential for HIV epidemics to spread into “general” populations’. In particular, he alleges, HIV/AIDS ‘estimates and projections are “cooked” or made up’.

While Pisani disputes Chin’s claim that UNAIDS epidemiologists deliberately overestimated the epidemic, she admits to what she describes as ‘beating up’ the figures, insisting – unconvincingly – that there is a ‘huge difference’ between ‘making it up (plain old lying) and beating it up’. Pisani freely acknowledges her role in manipulating statistics to maximise their scare value, and breezily dismisses the ‘everyone-is-at-risk nonsense’ of the British ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign.

Chin’s book offers a comprehensive exposure of the hollowness of the claims of the AIDS bureaucracy for the efficacy of their preventive campaigns. He provides numerous examples of how exaggerated claims for the scale of the HIV epidemic (and the risks of wider spread) in different countries and contexts enable authorities to claim the credit for subsequently lower figures, as they ‘ride to glory’ on curves showing declining incidence. As he argues, ‘HIV prevalence is low in most populations throughout the world and can be expected to remain low, not because of effective HIV prevention programmes, but because… the vast majority of the world’s populations do not have sufficient HIV risk behaviours to sustain epidemic HIV transmission’.

By the late 1980s, it was already clear that, given the very low prevalence of HIV, the difficulty of transmitting HIV through heterosexual sex and the stable character of sexual relationships (even those having multiple partners tend to favour serial monogamy), an explosive HIV epidemic in Britain, of the sort that occurred in relatively small networks of gay men and drug users, was highly improbable, as Don Milligan and I argued in 1987 (1).

As both Chin and Pisani indicate, high rates of heterosexually spread HIV infection remain the exceptional feature of sub-Saharan Africa (and parts of the Caribbean) where a particular pattern of concurrent networks of sexual partners together with high rates of other sexually transmitted infections facilitated an AIDS epidemic. Though this has had a devastating impact on many communities, Chin suggests that HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean has been overestimated by about 50 per cent. The good news is that, contrary to the doom-mongering of the AIDS bureaucracy, the rising annual global HIV incidence peaked in the late 1990s and the AIDS pandemic has now passed its peak.

“From AIDS to climate change, experts have been complicit in the prostitution of science to propaganda”

Most significantly, the sub-Saharan pattern has not been replicated in Europe or North America, or even in Asia or Latin America, though there have been localised epidemics associated with gay men, drug users and prostitution, most recently in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe.

Many commentators now acknowledge the gross exaggerations and scaremongering of the AIDS bureaucracy. It is clear that HIV has remained largely confined to people following recognised high-risk behaviours, rather than being, in the mantra of the AIDS bureaucracy, a condition of poverty, gender inequality and under-development. Yet they also accept the argument, characterised by Chin as ‘political correctness’, that it is better to try to terrify the entire population with the spectre of an AIDS epidemic than it is to risk stigmatising the gays and junkies, ladyboys and whores who feature prominently in Pisani’s colourful account.

For Chin and Pisani, the main problem of the mendacity of the AIDS bureaucracy is that it leads to misdirected, ineffective and wasteful campaigns to change the sexual behaviour of the entire population, while the real problems of HIV transmission through high-risk networks are neglected. To deal with these problems, both favour a return to traditional public health methods of containing sexually transmitted infections through aggressive testing, contact tracing and treatment of carriers of HIV. Whereas the gay activists who influenced the early approach of the AIDS bureaucracy favoured anonymous and voluntary testing, our whistleblowers now recommend a more coercive approach, in relation to both diagnosis and treatment.

Pisani reminds readers that ‘public health is inherently a somewhat fascist discipline’ (for example, quarantine restrictions have an inescapably authoritarian character) and enthusiastically endorses the AIDS policies of the Thai military authorities and the Chinese bureaucrats who are not restrained from targeting high-risk groups by democratic niceties. The problem is that, given the climate of fear generated by two decades of the ‘everyone-is-at-risk nonsense’, the policy now recommended by Chin and Pisani is likely to lead to more repressive interventions against stigmatised minorities (which will not help to deter the spread of HIV infection).

Chin confesses that he has found it difficult ‘to understand how, over the past decade, mainstream AIDS scientists, including most infectious disease epidemiologists, have virtually all uncritically accepted the many “glorious” myths and misconceptions UNAIDS and AIDS activists continue to perpetuate’. An explanation for this shocking betrayal of principle can be found in a 1996 commentary on the British AIDS campaign entitled ‘Icebergs and rocks of the “good lie”’. In this article, Guardian journalist Mark Lawson accepted that the public had been misled over the threat of AIDS, but argued that the end of promoting sexual restraint (especially among the young) justified the means (exaggerating the risk of HIV infection): as he put it, ‘the government has lied and I am glad’ (2).

This sort of opportunism is not confined to AIDS: in other areas where experts are broadly in sympathy with government policy – such as passive smoking, obesity and climate change – they have been similarly complicit in the prostitution of science to propaganda.

It is a pity that Chin and Pisani did not blow their whistles earlier and louder, but better late than never.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author of MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know (buy this book from Amazon(UK)) and The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle (buy this book from Amazon(UK)).

http://elmaltes.blogspot.com/2008/06/aidstruth-according-to-doctor-nick.html

Terrible Mishap at the Weill-Cornell Laboratory!

Colleagues at Weill-Cornell University Macaque Lab were horrified to discover this morning that
Dr JayPeeMooreau had been transmogrified into one of his macaques.

Dr Meatloaf Bucketswill commented “We think there must have been some sort of nipple tweak in
the space-time continuum. When we left him here yesterday afternoon he was his usual pusillanimous
self, and quite happy to be left in charge of his macaques overnight. We have to wonder whether
this latest UN admission of high-level mendacity hasn’t pushed him over the edge; that and the
fact that his microbicide funding is at risk – macaques as you know are stubbornly heterosexual
and never black.”

Another colleague Dr Rufus Womble Shitrock, who declined to be named, said, “Well it was going to
happen at some stage wasn’t it? - I mean one can’t ‘fiddle’ with primates day in day out and not
expect some form of divine retribution - not that I’m one of those loony
CreationistConspiracyTheory NutJob types.”

Co-fiddler Adull Mammarycranium was very distraught at finding Dr Mooreau so incapacitated and in
an advanced state of incontinence: “I’ts soch e shime - he rel’ly luv’d his wark, and he nevver
let phallure standing in his way of porblication - not many HIV rese’echers would do that yu knaw!
Eeh thunk this laytest UN admishun jest mayd hem verry afrad. Hee is alzo perzunna non gratta on
hiz oen wibsight AIDSfruit.org.”

Dr Macaque Mooreau had to be isolated from the other macaques for unstated reasons.
The Chief Director of the lab, Dr Petrie Agaragar stated: “Never liked the Pommie fart anyway but
don’t worry - we’ll make good use of him.”

Here

Does HIV cause AIDS
Mayank Tewari
Monday, June 09, 2008 02:26 IST

Excerpt from the piece:

“Among the main reasons dissenters cite in favour of their movement is skewed health funding, especially in developing countries. On May 10, the British Medical Journal carried an article calling for UNAIDS to be shut down as it distorts health funding. In it, Roger England, who heads a Grenada-based think tank, Health Systems Workshop, argued that too much is being spent on HIV compared to other diseases which kill more people.

“It is no longer heresy to point out that far too much is spent on HIV relative to other needs and that this is damaging health systems. Although HIV causes 3.7% of mortality, it receives 25% of international healthcare aid and a big chunk of domestic expenditure. HIV aid often exceeds total domestic health budgets themselves.”

Purushottam Muloli, a New Delhi-based member of Rethinking AIDS, a loose group of scientists and policy makers who do not agree with the prevalent HIV/AIDS theory, says he has been questioning the Indian health ministry and UNAIDS about the scientific evidence behind labelling sections of the population, such as homosexuals, high-risk
groups.

“The health policy of the country is being controlled by international donors. Can you believe that the entire health budget of India is less than the amount of international funding the country receives on HIV?”

Rethinking AIDS president David Crowe says the AIDS “dogma” persists because doctors are trained to obey their superiors. “There are many examples of bad medical advice becoming dogma due to the power of senior medical people. The dogma of AIDS has resulted in hopelessness and despair caused by the stigma of HIV+ status.”

Slightly longer excerpt:

“In order to determine whether prostitutes operating outside of areas of high drug abuse have equally elevated rates of infection, 354 prostitutes were surveyed in Tijuana, Mexico… None of the 354 [blood] samples from female prostitutes was positive for HIV-1 or HIV-2.

The female prostitutes (mean age 29 years. range 18-49) had been active prostitutes for an average of 4.2 years and reported an average of 4.1 partners per week.

Condoms were used by 59% of prostitutes but for less than half of their sexual contacts.

Only 4 female prostitutes (1%) admitted to ever having used intravenous drugs.

Infection with HIV was not found in this prostitute population despite the close proximity to neighboring San Diego, CA, which has a high incidence of diagnosed cases of AIDS, and to Los Angeles, which has a reported 4% prevalence of HIV infection in prostitutes.”

They go on to say – and this ought to be telling – that these PROSTITUTES who have sex without condoms 41% of the time (and then only half that in practice) maybe aren’t “positive” because…

you ready?

Because ‘maybe’ they’re not exposed to “RISK GROUPS.”

Who’s that?

Homosexual Men and i.v. drug users.

Some goddamn sex disease, huh?

But it’s all in the testing. Antibody tests love to react with antibodies – and drug abuse produces lots and lots and lots of antibodies.

The medical students call it hypergammaglobulinaemia. A lot of gamma globulin, IgM, immune-system proteins, antibodies, etc.

You’re sick, you have a lot of these. You have malaria, TB, you have a lot of these. You have diarrhea, sepsis, you have a lot of these. Drug use, alcohol abuse, starving to death, being exposed to many toxins, you have a lot of these.

So when the ‘hiv tests’ come up reactive all over the place in sick people, healthy people, mice, dogs, milkmaids, goat serum, etc… well, they have to decide before or after the fact, what the test is gonna mean. And that’s the whole “risk group” run-around.

A gay man’s antibodies ‘weigh more’ in the minds of Aids researchers, than a straight man’s. And that’s just how this system works. And if you believe it indicates real infection in one, then you can’t excuse the other. And that means that all false positives are really true, and that there are probably billions of “hiv infected” people walking around, who just don’t know it.

On the other hand, if your go with the lowest common denominator, the hardest logic, and you say that you can’t accuse one person of being “positive” if the identical result means nothing in someone else, then no one has ever been “hiv positive.”

That’s why the test manufacturers work so hard in the small print, telling you there are no standards, that the diagnosis must always be made “clinically,” and not based on any test result. They tell you this, so you can’t sue them to ruin for non-diagnostic, but life-ending test results.

Look up Audrey Seranno’s case from last year – she couldn’t sue the manufacturer for their fake test, she did sue the doctor and hospital for their fake diagnosis, however, and won.

It’s an absolutely transparent lie, it’s right out there in the open, and it’s cracking open, at this very moment.

Even if you told them that they had just won the lottery they would still be “worried” it.

They are pissed off because Brendan O’Neill is actually talking about them.

The fact that The Guardian printed this story is the most significant here. It is another “sign” that the AIDS machine has ground to a halt, the call for top brass to abandon ship has been called and now it is OK for the MSM to say that it was all a great big De Cock-up. The BBC has ignored this so far.

The guardian actually took the lead. That is surprising to people, very surprising. Notice the sense of shock in everyone.It is only NOT surprising if like me you are cynical and are convinced that now those that feel the guiltiest will be the first to jump ship, swim ashore and dress like the locals…

Know what I mean?

What? Science lies? Well they didn’t know/didn’t mean it etc. I guess the fact that you are on your own when it comes to your health and welfare it too much for most people to contemplate.

The exploitation of Aids

The Aids scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 years

o Brendan O’Neill
o guardian.co.uk,
o Thursday June 12 2008

Finally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or “die of ignorance” – the head of the World Health Organisation’s HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.

Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said at the weekend that, outside very poor African countries, Aids is confined to “high-risk groups”, including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers. And even in these communities it remains quite rare. “It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in countries [outside sub-Saharan Africa]”, he said. In other words? All that hysterical fearmongering about Aids spreading among sexed-up western youth was a pack of lies.

Much of the media has treated Dr De Cock’s admission as a startling revelation. In truth, experts have known for many years that in the vast majority of the world, Aids has little impact on the “general population”. In her new book The Wisdom of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani – who worked for 10 years in what she refers to as “the Aids bureaucracy” – admits that by 1998 it was clear that “HIV wasn’t going to rage through the billions in the ‘general population’, and we knew it”.

Some people knew it earlier. In 1987, my friend and colleague Dr Michael Fitzpatrick wrote a fiery pamphlet titled The Truth About the Aids Panic. At the height of the Conservative government’s scary tombstone campaign (”Don’t die of ignorance”), he wrote: “There is no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly in the West among heterosexuals.” In Britain, most of the small-scale spread of “heterosexual Aids” has been a result of infected individuals arriving from Africa. In the UK in the whole of the 1980s – the decade of the Great Aids Panic – there were 20 cases of HIV acquired through heterosexual contact with an individual infected in Europe.

And it isn’t the case that the heterosexual pandemic failed to materialise because officialdom’s omnipresent pro-condom propaganda was a success. According to James Chin, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the new book The Aids Pandemic, it was always a “glorious myth” that there would be an “HIV epidemic in general populations”. That myth was the product of “misunderstanding or deliberate distortions of HIV epidemiology” by Unaids and other Aids activists, says Chin.

It is time to recognise that the Aids scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the past 30 years. Instead of being treated as a sexually transmitted disease that affected certain high-risk communities, and which should be vociferously tackled by the medical authorities, the “war against Aids” was turned into moral crusade.

Both Conservative and New Labour governments exploited the disease to create a new moral framework for society. Through baseless fearmongering, officials sought to police and regulate the behaviour of the public. No longer able to appeal to outdated Victorian ideals of chastity or restraint, the powers-that-be used the spectre of an Aids calamity to terrify us into behaving “responsibly” in sexual and social matters.

They were aided and abetted by the rump of the radical left. Gay rights campaigners, feminists and left-leaning health and social workers stood shoulder-to-shoulder, first with the Tories and later with Labour, in spreading the “glorious myth” of a possible future Aids pandemic. An unholy alliance of old-style, prudish conservatives and post-radical, lifestyle-obsessed leftists latched on to Aids as a disease that might provide them with a sense of moral purpose.

And they ruthlessly sought to silence anyone who questioned them. Those who challenged the idea that Aids would devour sexually promiscuous young people and transform once-civilised western societies into diseased dystopias were denounced as “Aids deniers” and “heretics”. Anyone who suggested that homosexuals were at greater risk than heterosexuals – and therefore the focus of government funding and, where necessary, medical assistance should be in gay communities – was denounced as homophobic. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of the glorious moral effort to make everyone submit to the sexual and moral conformism of the Aids crusaders.

Even in Africa – where there is a serious and deadly Aids crisis in some countries – the international focus on Aids has been motivated more by pernicious moralism than straightforward charity. Diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are bigger killers than Aids. Yet focusing on Aids allows western governments and NGOs to lecture Africans about their morality and personal behaviour. It also adds a new gloss to the misanthropic population-control arguments of western charities, which now present their promotion of condoms in “overly fecund” Africa as a means of preventing the spread of disease.

The relentless politicisation and moralisation of Aids has not only distorted public understanding of the disease and generated unnecessary fear and angst – it has also potentially cost lives. James Chin estimates that UNAIDS wastes around $1bn a year in activities such as “raising awareness” about Aids and preventing the emergence of the disease in communities that are at little risk. How many lives could that kind of money save, if it were used to develop drugs and deliver them to infected or at-risk communities? It is time people treated Aids as a normal disease, rather than as an opportunity for spreading their own moral agendas.