HIV/AIDS déjà vu

I had focused my decades-long research in Science Studies on analyzing scientific controversies, including whether particular topics even deserve to be material for scientific study. That focus was undoubtedly determined by the fact that I had changed my academic career from chemistry to science studies through interest in a couple of topics that were regarded as not properly science and yet were held by a large body of enthusiasts to be authentic aspects of material reality: the so-called Loch Ness “monsters”, and the scenario of solar-system phenomena postulated by the psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky in a popular best-selling books.

I was surprised at the number of topics I came across on which there is substantial evidence against the mainstream consensus, which nevertheless typically fails to take the contrarian evidence seriously [1]. I learned also that trying to discern what is pseudoscience and not science amounts to wild-goose chases after red herrings: one indication of that being that some topics once regarded as perfectly scientific were later banished as pseudoscience (alchemy, say, which had been studied devotedly by, among others, such a great scientist as Isaac Newton); even as other topics dismissed as pseudoscience turned out to be quiet real and important (for instance bio-electrical phenomena and treatments) [2].

What really startled me was to find convincing evidence that HIV is not a deadly infectious virus. I had been reading about this contrarian view for many years without being able to decide whether the mainstream was right or wrong. Then, about 20 years ago, a by-the-way comment led me to check the statistics and demographics of essentially all the published HIV-test data and to discover that there is simply no good reason to believe that AIDS was caused by an infectious “Human Immunodeficiency Virus”.

Collecting and analyzing those data was as emotionally fraught an experience as I have ever had — it was enormously unsettling to be forced to accept what seemed unbelievable; for a descriptive summary, see my “Confession of an ‘AIDS  Denialist’: How I became a crank because we’re being lied to about HIV/AIDS” [3].

A more recently established website [4] has a bibliography of dozens of books and nearly a thousand articles, most of them from mainstream sources, going into the most minute details of the copious and varied evidence that HIV is not a sexually transmitted, deadly, virus.

I am far from the only HIV “denialist”  or “AIDS Rethinker” [5] to remain continually frustrated that untold numbers of human beings continue to be subjected to the administration of toxic “antiretroviral” drugs  that convey no conceivable benefit even as they are demonstrably harmful.

Among others in the same boat as I am over this is Rebecca Culshaw Smith, who offers continuing critiques on her blog and podcast [6], bringing to light and rehearsing the innumerable self-contradictions and illogicalities that the mainstream view entails.

She had first become interested in the matter as part of her doctoral work in mathematical biology, when she came to look at the basis for what had been vaunted as a breakthrough in the 1990s, the so-called “Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy” (HAART), administering a cocktail of drugs supposedly able to prevent in several different ways the reproduction of the presumed virus.

Culshaw Smith realized, however, that the mathematical basis for the new claim was simply not valid; and she published a book [7] about the mainstream blunder; an augmented edition [8] has been published quite recently.

I am writing about this now because a recent blog [9] on Smith’s Substack is so much worth reading, even by a people who do not (yet?!) know that HIV does not cause AIDS: Culshaw Smith reports, analyzes, and dissects an interview with Anthony Fauci focusing on the-four-decades-long failure of intense, dedicated, global efforts to devise a vaccine against HIV.

Not so incidentally, a rehearsal of what virology got wrong about AIDS and HIV makes it difficult not to worry about the continuing harm done to virology as a whole by the mis-step at the root of the HIV blunder: The willingness to take the presence of particular proteins as decisive evidence for the presence of infectious viral particles, even though the presence of such viral particles has never been established directly by such traditional techniques as ultra-centrifuging, ultra-filtering, and examining by electron microscopy.

[1]        Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012

[2]        Henry H. Bauer, Science or Pseudoscience: Magnetic Healing, Psychic Phenomena, and other Heterodoxies, University of Illinois Press, 2001

[3]   Henry H. Bauer, “Confession of an ‘AIDS  Denialist’: How I became a crank because we’re being lied to about HIV/AIDS” https://mega.nz/file/wegVGAqL#0kJGxh0KWMhW3OsZJUFonh6c7cetmCQAhJ-0b1B1aAoconfession

[4]        The case against HIV; https://thecaseagainsthiv.net

[5]        Determined public disagreement with the HIV hypothesis was expressed from the very beginning, by a number of eminent biologists and others as the “Group for Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis” which later became the more formal organization “Rethinking AIDS”, https://rethinkingaids.com

[6]        “The real AIDS epidemic”;  https://rebeccaculshawsmith.substack.com/

[7]        Rebecca Culshaw, Science Sold Out: Does HIV Really Cause AIDS?, North Atlantic Books, 2007

[8]        Rebecca Culshaw, The Real AIDS Epidemic: How the Tragic HIV Mistake Threatens Us All; Skyhorse, 2023; also Kindle and Audiobook editions at amazon.com

[9]        “Fauci on the state of the search for an ‘HIV vaccine’”