To: Hon. Allan Rock
Minister of Health
Government of Canada
Dear Mr. Rock:
I am writing to you on the issue of AIDS. As former Minister of Justice and current Minister of Health you are in a position to prevent a major travesty – the report of the Krever inquiry. I am not writing to defend the actions of the Red Cross blood agency but to question a fundamental assumption of the Krever enquiry: that HIV causes AIDS.
It is true that most people accept the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS. However, I think that you can see the miscarriage of justice that would be caused if HIV was not the cause of AIDS and if, for example, AIDS was not carried through blood transfusions. Just because a majority believes in a theory does not make it right.
I would encourage you to have an audience with Dr. Peter Duesberg of the University of California at Berkeley. I am sure that within an hour he can convince you that the theory that HIV causes AIDS is almost entirely wrong. To encourage you to do that I would like to bring up some questions (many are taken from Dr. Peter Duesberg’s landmark 1996 book “Inventing the AIDS Virus”);
- The Epidemiology is Wrong.
The number of people who are infected with HIV has been relatively constant since the invention of the HIV antibody test, yet the number of people with AIDS has climbed dramatically and more recently started to fall. The HIV pattern is one of an old, established virus, not a new virus essential to explain the AIDS epidemic.
- Risk Factors are Ignored.
Virtually everyone with AIDS is from an easily definable risk group: promiscuous homosexual men, IV drug abusers, blood transfusion recipients, hemophiliacs. Yet the immune system risk factors are ignored in favour of a reliance upon a single risk factor - HIV. Obviously injecting blood products from others is an immune system risk factor (blood transfusion recipients and hemophiliacs). There is some evidence that IV drug use damages the immune system (explaining the prevalence of diseases such as TB that are common even among HIV-negative IV drug users). AIDS is founded on the belief that homosexual men have no risk factor other than promiscuity. Yet, many commentators (Dr. Peter Duesberg and John Lauritsen in particular) have documented the heavy drug use that was (and still is) associated with a promiscuous male homosexual lifestyle. In particular, the excessive use of inhalant drugs known as “poppers” is a significant immune system risk factor. The current decline in the prevalance of AIDS could as much be the result of the banning of “poppers” in the US (although the use is still prevalent, it may have declined somewhat) as safer sex practices and new drugs.
- Antiviral Drugs are a Risk Factor
The anti-HIV drugs that are in use have been rushed through testing, and have significant long term side effects. AZT, one of the nucleoside analogs, and perhaps the most commonly prescribed drug, is toxic to bone marrow, critical to the preservation of the immune system. If immune deficiency develops in an HIV positive patient on AZT it is assumed to be caused by the virus, why not the drug.
These drugs are never approved based on placebo controlled trials, but only in comparison with other drugs. The major placebo controlled trial resulted in the approval of AZT. Yet the conduct and conclusions of this trial have been heavily criticized, and it may be completely invalid - a shaky foundation indeed to build all other drug approvals upon.
Nucleoside analogs (AZT, ddI, ddC, d4T etc.) work on a very simple principle. They interfere with DNA synthesis which should stop the duplication of a retrovirus. Unfortunately, these drugs also randomly kill any dividing cells in the body (e.g. hair cells, blood producing cells and the cells that continually regenerate the dynamic immune system).
- HIV May Not Even Exist!
HIV has supposedly been isolated, yet no pictures (electron micrographs) of multiple, isolated HIV particles exist. This is a stunning omission from the billions of dollars of research on HIV and AIDS. It is inconceivable that if HIV was ever isolated, that no scientist ever bothered to take a picture, and important step in proving isolation of a single viral species.
- HIV Tests are Invalid
No HIV tests (neither the antibody tests nor the so-called “viral load” test) have been validated against presence or absence of the virus itself. One would imagine that it would be a necessary part of validation of any test to prove that the virus could be isolated from people who test positive, but not from people who test negative. Yet this has never been done. Indirect methods (which involve circular reasoning in all cases) are used, such as the presence of reverse transcriptase in ‘infected’ cell cultures.
- No Animal Model
Chimpanzees have been infected with HIV (or, rather, fluids from people who are HIV positive) and yet do not come down with AIDS. Is it because they do not have the risk factors of people?
- Kaposi’s Sarcoma
This skin cancer is most commonly found in homosexual AIDS patients, no in IV drug users, hemophiliacs or blood transfusion recipients. This is easily explained by Duesberg’s drug hypothesis, as promiscuous male homosexuals are the major users of the toxic inhalant “poppers”. How is this explained by the HIV hypothesis?
- Health Care and Emergency Workers Unaffected
It is extremely rare for health care and emergency workers to come down with AIDS (except in the presence of other risk factors). If the lifestyle risk factors are the cause of AIDS, this anomaly is easily explained.
I look forward to your response to these challenges to the generally accepted wisdom.
I would also like to get some contact information for Justice Horace Krever, so that I can independently present these points to him.
Regards,
David Crowe
Copyright © David Crowe & Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, Thursday, March 29, 2007.