Harper's Again - Out of Control - AIDS and the corruption of medical science

[Sheri Nakken]

Another good one, it looks like
Celia Farber writes great pieces - more from her
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/cfarber.htm
http://www.reviewingaids.org/awiki/inde ... lia_Farber
http://www.rethinking.org/aids/CeliaFarber.html
http://www.thebody.com/gmhc/issues/spring00/denial.html

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http://www.harpers.org/MostRecentCover.html

NOT online -
Out of Control - AIDS and the corruption of medical science
Celia Farber

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HOT OFF THE PRESS IN NY PRESS
http://www.nypress.com/17/52/news&colum ... farber.cfm

Vol 19 - Issue 8 - February 22-28, 2006

FOUR GRADE EVENT
Are AIDS drugs worse than the disease? Don't ask the people who make them.

By Celia Farber

After 20 years of hysteria, alarmism, misplaced recrimination and guilt,
AIDS fatigue has beaten the newspaper-reading mind into a kind of blank.
Citizens can't be faulted for not knowing how exactly to respond to last
week's eruption of scandal from an NIH whistle-blower named Jonathan
Fishbein, an AIDS researcher charged with overseeing clinical trials here
and abroad. A reverberating language of bureaucracy and euphemism surrounds
AIDS stories, making it impossible to know what has actually transpired.
When people die from AIDS drugs, for instance, the word "death" is
studiously avoided. I have seen medical articles documenting the fact that
more people now die of toxicities from AIDS drugs than from the vanishingly
opaque syndrome we once called AIDS. Death was referred to as a "grade four
event," thus placing it eerily within the acceptable parameters of
predictable phenomena in AIDS research—not as a failure, a crisis or even
something to lament.

John Solomon broke the first in a series of stories in the Associated Press
on Dec. 14. The lede read:

Weeks before President Bush announced a plan to protect African babies from
AIDS, top US health officials warned that research in Uganda on a key drug
was flawed and may have underreported severe reactions, including deaths,
government documents show.

The story held many shocking revelations, but was quickly spun upside-down
and inside-out by the AIDS spin machine, which can take any horror and
reduce it to banality, keeping the strict focus off of government
malfeasance. What Fishbein disclosed was that NIH AIDS research chief
Edmund Tramont had airbrushed and cooked damning clinical data from a large
experimental trial in Uganda that tested a drug called Nevirapine against
AZT, in pregnant HIV-antibody-positive women, intended to reduce HIV
transmission. Tramont had censored reports of thousands of toxic reactions
to the drug, and "at least 14 deaths," concealing from the White House the
truth about the drug, just before Bush rolled out his $500 million plan to
push Nevirapine across Africa.

Additional data not widely reported in the media revealed that there were
16 more deaths in babies on Nevirapine, bringing the total to 30, and 38
babies died on AZT (the other arm of the study). The ominous data coincided
with findings from an aborted study in South Africa in the late 1990s
(stopped due to toxicities and deaths); it was disturbing enough that the
drug's manufacturer, Boehringer Ingelheim, withdrew its application to have
the FDA approve the drug for use in pregnant women in all Western nations,
including the U.S.

In 2000, the FDA put out a black-box label on the drug (which is approved
for use in HIV-positive adults as part of a "cocktail therapy"), warning
that it could cause fatal kidney damage and a syndrome that causes the
flesh to blister and peel as though burned.

This is the drug that countless campaigners—spanning the political spectrum
from George Bush to Bono—wish to give all Africans "free access" to. South
African President Thabo Mbeki has been savagely pilloried for attempting to
stop the drug's distribution to black South Africans. South African lawyer
and journalist Anthony Brink's scathing report "The Trouble With
Nevirapine" documented the long-known "problems" with the drug. The report
was widely read by South Africa's leadership, and is the source of furious
debate between black South Africans and the mostly white-run media, which
still ridicules all criticism of U.S.-imported AIDS drugs and protocols as
being a symptom of not caring about AIDS victims.

Nevirapine is a cheap drug, believed to reduce the transmission of HIV
antibodies from mother to child if given before and during birth, despite
there being no reliable data to prove that Nevirapine "drastically
reduce[s]" transmission." (On average, in women who are well nourished,
about eight percent of babies born to HIV-positive mothers with no
intervention wind up HIV-antibody-positive; of these, disease progression
is not tied to HIV status but rather to the overall health of the mother.)
Wild claims about reduction in transmission are based on outdated, flawed
research and ignore critical facts. In Africa, for instance, the test used
to detect for HIV antibodies cross-reacts with the very proteins of
pregnancy, meaning the women may not be true positives to begin with.
Furthermore, every baby carries ghost antibodies from its mother for up to
18 months, which it eventually sheds, so all data about HIV status prior to
that window of time is useless—but consistently cited anyway.

Nevirapine is a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor—a class of
drug designed in the hopes of being less toxic than AZT. This isn't asking
much, since AZT is chemotherapy that simply terminates DNA synthesis.

"Of all the AIDS drugs, Nevirapine is the most acutely toxic," explained
Dr. Dave Rasnick, a fierce critic of the government's AIDS research agenda,
and a former drug developer. "It shows its toxic effects quickly. It has
been documented in the medical literature for years that a single dose of
Nevirapine can kill a person. People don't normally drop dead from taking a
protease inhibitor, but that is what happens with Nevirapine. The rationale
for this stuff is just as bizarre as it could be."

He continued: "Liver toxicity is the leading cause of death of HIV-positive
people in America and Europe in the cocktail era."

Some months ago, I asked Rasnick to send me documentation of this seemingly
unfathomable statement, which he did. The statement is in line with
interviews I did with healthcare workers back in 2000, who reported that
many more people are hospitalized from the effects of the AIDS drugs than
from any of the 30-odd symptoms that originally constituted the definition
of AIDS (i.e., a disintegration of the immune system).

This would seem to be a p.r. problem for the AIDS industry. But as we
learned from the spin that followed the Fishbein revelations, death by AIDS
drugs is not viewed as something that should get in the way of a
well-intentioned research agenda—either in the West or in Africa.

The high dudgeon, when it came, was directed not at the NIH for
experimenting to lethal effect on pregnant Ugandan mothers, cooking and
deleting data, stating openly that African research can't be held to the
same standards as Western research, or any of the other disturbing things
that came out of Tramontgate.

The ire was aimed at the Associated Press and its reporters for spreading
alarm about Nevirapine in Africa, which raised "fears that many women there
will stop taking the drug."

The New York Times led the Orwellian spin, in a December 21 article by
Donald McNeil Jr. The lede went right to the heart of the matter: The
dyspepsia of activists and public health experts.

A series of articles critical of past trials of an important AIDS drug has
created a furor in Africa, causing many public health experts to worry that
some countries will stop using the drug, which prevents mothers from
infecting their babies with the virus that causes AIDS.

It went on: "On Friday, The National Institutes of Health for Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, sharply
criticized the articles, saying, 'It is conceivable that thousands of
babies will become infected with HIV and die if single-dose Nevirapine for
mother-to-infant HIV prevention is withheld because of misinformation.'"

Misinformation? The AP stories were specifically about the
transmogrification of information into misinformation that Tramont
engineered for his White House report. He cooked data. He deleted
information about toxic reactions and death. In what kind of inverted
universe is this not a gross violation of the entire premise of science and
medicine?

Nature soon followed suit. From an article dated December 23, this dizzying
opener:

Scientists and patient advocates this week united to defend an HIV
treatment against allegations that a key clinical trial was flawed. A
doctor from Global Strategis for HIV Prevention was quoted: 'This is the
most successful therapy in the entire AIDS epidemic. It should not be
attacked.'

"We are now living in a time of psychotic science, or abnormal science as I
call it," said former New York Native publisher Chuck Ortleb, who was
boycotted by the activist group ACT UP for publishing scathing critiques of
AZT in the 1980s—a drug that was later proven to shorten rather than
lengthen life. "That's why there are no controls in AIDS science, no
dissent, why it's all science by press release. These self-appointed AIDS
czars pretending to speak for the gay community, pretending to be
revolutionaries, pretending to be anti-government when in fact they've
always worked hand in hand with the government."

In recent years, Ortleb has turned to writing satirical novels, plays and a
soon-to-be-released film called The Last Lovers on Earth, which is centered
on a future dystopia in which AIDS research has been so successful that all
gay men are dead.

"With their logic," Ortleb says, "this risk-benefit analysis, it doesn't
matter if people die on the drugs, because they died so that the rest of
the world could be saved."

His most recent send-up is a fictional press release for a new medical
group called "Doctors Without Borders, Brains or Ethics," and focuses on
protecting the AIDS establishment from criticism, "before the infection of
skepticism spreads."

Let us not forget that Nevirapine is a drug that was pulled by its own
manufacturer from use in the West, after an investment of many millions of
dollars. It remains banned for use in pregnant first-world women.

Still, the NIH is using it on American women, in experimental trials you
never heard about—until now. Alongside the revelations about the Ugandan
trial, the AP stories brought to light that Joyce Ann Hafford, a
33-year-old, perfectly healthy, eight-months pregnant HIV-positive woman
from Tennessee died from liver failure in an NIH trial testing Nevirapine.
Her liver counts had been way off for days, and still doctors didn't take
her off the drug.

The doctors told her family, naturally, that she had died of AIDS. The
trouble is, cocktail-drug deaths are easily distinguished from AIDS deaths.
This was not the case with AZT, a drug that simply decimated the immune
system. Cocktail deaths are caused primarily by liver toxicity, heart
attacks and strokes—from the effects of the drugs on the body's fat
metabolism.

Hafford's death crystallizes the raging conflict between the establishment
point of view that HIV is deadly and drugs save lives and the "denialist"
or dissident point of view that HIV is not deadly at all by itself, but
AIDS drugs are. Hafford had no so-called AIDS symptoms; she was simply HIV
positive. She also had an older healthy child, which suggests that HIV may
not be as lethal as advertised. By refusing to lament her death, or even
the scores of Ugandan deaths, and instead attacking the messenger, the AIDS
establishment has shown itself to be lost, with a broken compass, on the
map of medicinal ethics.

Once it becomes acceptable to kill patients in experimental clinical trials
and cover it up, without consequence, you might argue that all is lost.

Volume 17, Issue 52

©2006 All rights reserved.
No part of this website may be reproduced in any manner without written
permission of the publisher.

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http://nypress.com/18/25/news%26columns/farber.cfm

Vol 19 - Issue 8 - February 22-28, 2006
DRUGS, DISEASE, DENIAL

By Celia Farber

The hysteria-laden question of whether anti-HIV drugs are “life-saving,” as
the AIDS orthodoxy holds, or “deadly,” as the HIV dissidents claim, is
unanswerable in the currently available language, which was blunted and
rendered incoherent by political forces as early as 1981. Language is the
only interface between phenomena and our comprehension of them, and I have
grown weary of being forced to use AIDS language that is itself inaccurate
and loaded. First of all, lives can’t really be “saved”—they can only be
extended. To prove that a life has indeed been extended one must first
know, with absolute certainty, that without intervention, the life would
have ended. In order to know that, one must know the natural history of the
disease, and then one must examine the fate of the untreated population.

The unified voice of the AIDS establishment has claimed thunderous victory
for the post-1996 drug regimens that came to be known as ‘cocktails,’ which
came into vogue about three years after death rates began declining, but
nonetheless got full-trumpet credit for turning the tide.

Let me say, first, that I have been told and have reported and have
imprinted upon my soul that for some people, at some stages of immune
collapse, these drugs have helped, and maybe even prevented a slide into
death. Roberto Giraldo, a doctor and expert in infectious and tropical
diseases who crosses the world treating AIDS, tells me this is probably due
to their anti-oxidant, anti-viral and anti-microbial properties. He also
tells me that in his experience, severe immune deficiency—which may be a
more useful term than “AIDS”—occurs only where severe depletion of vital
nutrients has occurred; reversing the illness starts with restoring those
nutrients.

“Biochemically speaking, people who are malnourished, whether because they
are poor, or because they are drug addicts, suffer from oxidization, and
lack vitamins A, B, E, zinc and selenium. This is true of all AIDS patients
I have ever seen,” he said via telephone. “We cannot say that protease
inhibitors are useless. In 1996 when they started to use protease
inhibitors, there is no doubt that there was a change. Before 1996, all the
people who used AZT, they were killed. There was no benefit there. Protease
inhibitors—they are also very toxic—but they have benefits—they are
antioxidants. No doubt they are poison and in the long run they kill the
person, but you need proteases in the process of oxidation. Besides that,
these drugs are also antibiotics.” Giraldo believes that AIDS is a disease
“of poverty,” primarily, meaning of extreme depletion of the cells, and
that those who have been middle- or upper-class, who have gotten sick,
depleted their bodies through drug use and prolonged exposure to toxins.
“HIV by itself causes nothing,” he says.

Giraldo has written and published voluminously on how to reverse the
condition of severe immune suppression through intensive nutritional
supplementation and orthomolecular medicine, combined with modified
antibiotic and other targeted drug regimens. I am well aware of how scorned
these ideas are among those who feel that they and they alone know what
AIDS is, and how to “fight” it, i.e., the orthodoxy and the pro-drug
activists. Since 1986, when I began reporting on AIDS, I have compensated
for this scorn, ridicule and censure by quoting the Roberto Giraldos of
this world—not because I know these voices are “right,” but because I feel
they must be represented against the relentless chorus of the
new-and-better-drugs-into-all-bodies-in-all-nations crowd. I am not a
doctor and have never treated an AIDS patient. I’ve known dozens if not
hundreds of people though, in my 20 years studying this and listening to
people, who have been HIV-antibody positive and stayed healthy for up to 20
years and probably more. I wish somebody was counting them, listening to
them, logging them in the official history. Nobody is; they are not
supposed to exist.

Each of the 26 anti-HIV drugs currently on the market, combined in infinite
combinations, or “cocktails,” is, by admission of the manufacturers,
potentially lethal. One of the unexpected effects of Protease Inhibitors,
or so-called HAART therapy (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy) seen in
recent years was a disruption of the body’s fat-distribution mechanisms.
This in turn (in addition to the fatty deposits on the upper neck and
various parts of the body) has caused strokes and heart attacks in many
patients, at the very moment when the drugs were theoretically ‘working,”
meaning so-called surrogate markers (cd4 cells and viral load) were going
the right way. The other significant danger of HAART proved to be liver and
kidney failure, which, according to a study done at the University of
Colorado Health Sciences Center, “surpassed deaths due to advanced HIV,” in
2002. In 2005 the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to a Danish
study, AIDS drug cocktails “may double the risk of heart attacks.” In 2004,
the journal AIDS reported, with characteristic lack of alarm, “All 4
classes of antiretrovirals (ARVs) and all 19 FDA approved ARVs have been
directly or indirectly associated with life-threatening events and death.”
The paper was titled “Grade 4 Events Are as Important as AIDS Events in the
Era of HAART,” and “grade 4 events” referred to “serious or
life-threatening events.”

The conclusion: More than twice as many people (675) had a drug-related
(grade 4) life-threatening event as an “AIDS event” (332). The most common
causes of grade 4 events (drug toxicities) were “liver related.” The
greatest risk of death was not an AIDS “event” but a drug event—heart
attacks (“cardiovascular events”). The authors wrote: “Our finding is that
the rate of grade 4 events is greater than the rate of AIDS events, and
that the risk of death associated with these grade 4 events was very high
for many events. Thus the incidence of AIDS fails to capture most of the
morbidity experienced by patients with HIV infection prescribed HAART.”
(Italics mine) In plain English, AIDS drugs cause AIDS and death far more
effectively than “AIDS” itself.

Any triumph or victory claimed by the AIDS lobby for these drugs must be
measured against a phenomenon they continue to deny exists, namely the
untold number of people who are, to use their language, “living with HIV.”
This includes those invisible, uncounted, unloved people who are
HIV-antibody positive, taking no drugs, not getting sick, not dying at a
faster rate than HIV negatives. This begs the question of whether HIV
causes AIDS. Currently, we have one camp—which I will call the
“orthodoxy”—that argues that although current HIV drugs have frightful side
effects and are difficult to take, they have nonetheless reversed a tide of
death, which was seen throughout the 1980s and into the mid 1990s in people
who were diagnosed with severe immune dysfunction. This camp, since it
views AIDS as “HIV disease,” meaning caused singularly by HIV, concentrates
its efforts to “fight AIDS,” on high tech drugs that in various ways are
meant to disable HIV in the blood. They are extremely mechanistic in their
view of the human body and the immune system. It’s all numbers.

The much-maligned contraries camp, which I will call the “dissidents,” have
argued since the early 1980s that AIDS has multiple causes, and that its
resolution should be rooted in a direct address to all these root causes.
These include a cessation of recreational drug use, avoidance (when
possible) of the most toxic anti-HIV drugs, a strong focus on reversing
malnutrition, (particularly in Africa) and a treatment approach that treats
the specific opportunistic infection a person manifests, with the state of
the art treatment for that infection.

PCP pneumonia, for example, is utterly treatable, yet thousands of people
died in the 1980s of it. Why? Because fighting AIDS meant “attacking” HIV,
period. Never the specific diseases; never the underlying causes—only the
virus. David Ho, Time’s Person of the Year, sported a button at a
conference that summed up this ideology. The button said, “It’s the virus,
stupid.”

How that came to be the dominant scientific religion is a subject of
infinite complexity and tragedy. The virus (which is actually a retrovirus,
of a class that was never thought to be pathogenic prior to 1984, and which
we all harbor shards of in our germline) provided an absolute measure, a
clear delineation, a battleground, and above all, a focus for a gigantic
industry, as well as an international corporation called AIDS Inc. The
natural and true history of AIDS is only beginning to be told, or rather,
retold. When AIDS Began: San Francisco and The Making of An Epidemic
(Routledge) by Michelle Cochrane traces the earliest intersection between
what was being observed, those who were doing the observing, and how the
“truth” fared in the process. Cochrane weaves a rigorously detailed
semantic, medical, and sociological examination of the first cases as they
were charted and described by the San Francisco Department of Public Health
in 1981. She explodes the myth of the first cases of AIDS having appeared,
as the New York Times famously phrased it, in “previously healthy,” and
even upwardly mobile, gay men, and shows that quite the contrary, the first
nine cases were in men who had a range of immune assaults. All were
recreational drug users, many were IV drug users, and some were even
homeless. They suffered from diseases that had been seen in IV drug users
since the 1930s, primarily fungal infections and lung diseases. That they
were “gay,” was perhaps the least significant detail. Because the federal
research effort ($36 billion so far) has been 100 percent HIV-centric, and
because AIDS was presumed to be sexually transmitted as opposed to
“acquired,” we are essentially 20 years behind in our intelligence
gathering on AIDS. One of the most astonishing things about the politics of
AIDS is the way in which the left repudiated any explanations of disease
causation that could be predicted by poverty and social marginalization.

One of the hallmarks of the AIDS orthodoxy’s language is that coiled within
each word and phrase is the answer, as well as the shaming of the question
itself. George Orwell (in 1984) described the orthodox style as, “…at once
military and pedantic,” characterized by a trick of “…asking questions and
then promptly answering them.” Anti-HIV drugs, for example, are always
called “life-saving drugs.” Why not just call them “drugs” and allow their
merits to be debated? Because at the root of the AIDS orthodoxy is a
relentless urge to control all thought on AIDS.

All people who question any facet of orthodox AIDS theory are “murderously
irresponsible,” and dripping with the psychic blood of millions. In this
gladiatorial atmosphere, it is a wonder anybody speaks out at all. If only
we could agree that most people are not, by nature, homicidal, and that
dissenting views are productive to a search for truth, we might get
somewhere. But I know, as surely as I know anything, that my opponent in
these pages will have characterized my position as “denialist.” I am not
denying anything. People have died of AIDS and the matter at hand is what
they died from. A retroviral infection? A host of immuno-compromising
factors? An absence of AIDS drugs—or indeed, the AIDS drugs themselves?

In 1984, when the US government announced at a press conference that one of
its scientists—Robert Gallo—had found the “probable cause of AIDS,” the
official theory held that HIV caused AIDS by eating CD4 cells at a rapid
clip. HIV was said to cause AIDS in a year or two, at best. Today, this
theory has morphed into a range of possibilities; HIV causes AIDS in 10 to
15 years, in most people, but a small minority, so-called “long-term
non-progressors,” might be spared due to a genetic fluke.

To my mind, if we are to stick to the orthodoxy’s own measure, one cannot
begin to speak of “saving” life until one has surpassed these ten or
fifteen years. In the 1980s, AZT was claimed, with the same high dudgeon by
the same orthodoxy, to “save” lives, yet few survived for more than a year
on the earliest AZT regimens. The word “denial” comes to mind.

When people make dramatic claims for current drug regimens, the death rates
they are actually comparing are not drugs vs. no drugs, but rather
extremely toxic drugs of the early years compared to less toxic drugs of
today. The earliest AIDS cases, marked by Kaposi’s Sarcoma, were treated
with chemotherapy (1981 to 1986) followed by AZT monotherapy in doses
ranging from 1800 milligrams to 500 milligrams (1986 to 1989) followed by
combinations of AZT, ddi, ddc and d4t (1989 to 1996) followed by protease
inhibitors in various combinations, from 1996 to the present day. The one
era I have no question resulted in deaths from the treatment itself, is the
early AZT era, (circa 1986 to 1989) particularly when the common dosage was
1200 to 1800 milligrams. A German AIDS physician named Klaus Koehnlein told
me in 2000, “We killed a whole generation of AIDS patients with AZT.”

My friend Richard Berkowitz, author of Stayin Alive: The Invention of Safe
Sex, A Personal History (Westview), said: “Every friend I had that went on
AZT in those early years is dead.” He says that they lasted on average nine
months on the drug. HIV positive since the early 1980s, Berkowitz credits
his survival to two things: 1) having avoided AZT, and 2) safe sex.

What he means by “safe sex,” a concept and term he himself developed and
coined, together with the late activist Michael Callen, is far more complex
than mere condom use. Drawing on the pioneering observations and warnings
of Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, it involves an avoidance of many STDs and
parasitic infections, coupled with a belief in life rather than a belief in
the death sentence of HIV. Berkowitz has also mitigated my repudiation of
cocktail therapy by stressing that a moderate regimen pulled him back from
the brink of death a few years ago.

Paul King, a Brit who runs a dissident website called Dissident Action
Group in the U.S., counters the establishment’s claim that dissenting views
on AIDS, HIV and drug regimens are still “fringe.”

“From the very beginning in the 1980s, the AIDS dissident movement faced a
level of censorship unrivaled since the anti birth control information
Comstock Law of the early 20th century,” he said in an email. “Every day,”
King claims, “almost without exception, we attract another PhD or doctor
and now have well over 4,000 doctors and scientists endorsing our views.”

“The public has had enough of exaggerated stories of epidemics that never
materialize and [that diminish] personal freedom.”

Volume 18, Issue 25

©2006 All rights reserved.
No part of this website may be reproduced in any manner without written
permission of the publisher.