COVID and HIV: a telling comparison — “HIV” is not an infectious virus

A new book [1] documents the gross, damaging mis-management of the COVID epidemic.

One factor in that mis-management is a basic and unfortunately common, typical problem: Once the official experts have made up their minds, dissenting experts are ignored or, worse, denigrated, suppressed, censored. That’s why we need a way to adjudicate differences of expert opinion, so that everyone — media, policy makers, general public — can reach well-informed opinions as to the relative merits of opposing views, something like a Science Court [2]. Uncertainties cannot be converted into certainties, of course, but the worst mis-steps may be avoidable if ill-thought-out advice from official experts is publicly exposed as inappropriately claiming certain knowledge [3].

When COVID-19 came to the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained that the numbers of people infected by a new virus increased very rapidly, and later declined as populations acquired immunity, whether it be through actual exposure to the virus or because of vaccination:

“If you look at the curves of outbreaks, they go big peaks, and then come down. What we need to do is flatten that down,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters Tuesday. “That would have less people infected. That would ultimately have less deaths. You do that by trying to interfere with the natural flow of the outbreak” [4].

AIDS had been recognized as a problem in the early 1980s, and by 1984 the claim seems to have been generally accepted that this debilitating illness was caused by a sexually transmitted virus that destroyed the immune system; hence “Human Immunodeficiency Virus”, HIV.

However, a sizeable cohort of doctors and scientists did not agree that a virus was or could be the cause of AIDS; still less that it could be caused by a retrovirus (RNA virus), as HIV was said to be.

The most widely recognized of these dissidents was (and continues to be) Professor Peter Duesberg at the University of California, Berkeley, who was also at that time one of the leading and most distinguished and acclaimed microbiologists and virologists [5]. The dissidents published their views and formed an organization that came to be named Rethinking AIDS [6].

The claimed discovery of HIV was accompanied by the development of a test to detect the virus, and testing was introduced immediately; applied not only to individuals who seemed to be suffering from AIDS but also to screen blood supplies and also potential recruits for the Armed Forces, among other things.

In 1986/87, the Centers for Disease Control and prevention (CDC) reported that about 1 million Americans were infected. In 1988 the official estimate was 1.5-2 million; in 1989, about 1 million; in 1993, something over a million; and in 2003, something over a million. Then in June 2005, a press release from the CDC proclaimed that “For the first time” [!!!] the number of HIV-positive Americans had passed the million mark” [7].

In other words, for something like 20 years the number of infected people had remained essentially the same, from about the time when the putative virus first started to claim its victims.

This is nothing like Dr Fauci's description of the course of a viral infection.

The conclusion seems unavoidable:

HIV is not an infectious virus. Peter Duesberg and his fellow dissidents were right all along. HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

Whatever the “HIV tests” detect or measure, it is certainly not the presence nor the amount of an infectious virus [8].

A summary of all the other evidence for this conclusion Is available in “The Case against HIV” [9], citing nearly a thousand primary sources.

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[1] Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee, In COVID's Wake: How Our Politics Failed, Princeton University Press, 2025

[2] “Covid-19 mistakes underscore the need for a Science Court”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/covid-19-mistakes-underscore-the

[3] Henry H. Bauer, “Shamans of Scientism: conjuring certainty where there is none”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 28 (2014) 491-504

[4] Helen Branswell, “Why ‘flattening the curve’ may be the world’s best bet to slow the coronavirus”, March 11, 2020; https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/flattening-curve-coronavirus/

[5] Jeanne Lenzer, “Peter’s Principles”, Discover, June 2008, pp. 44-50;
Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012; pp. 74 ff. and passim (see book’s Index)

[6] The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis; https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/group.htm

[7] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007, pp. 1-2. The primary sources are cited there.

[8] Henry H. Bauer, “HIV tests are not HIV tests”, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 15 (#1, 2010) 5-9

[9] “The Case against HIV”, http://thecaseagainsthiv.net