Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society
David Crowe, President
Phone: +1-403-289-6609
Fax: +1-403-289-6658
Email: David.Crowe@aras.ab.ca

Kathleen Newell, Treasurer
Box 61037, Kensington Postal Outlet
Calgary, Alberta T2N 4S6
Canada
Office
Phone: +1-403-220-0129
Email: aras@aras.ab.ca
Web: aras.ab.ca
Rethinkers Quotes AZT HAART HIV Tests Transmission Library

Letter of Protest to Die Grünen
(Green Party of Germany)

November 27th 1998
David Crowe

Fraktion Buendnis 90
Die Gruenen
Goerresstraße 15
53121 Bonn, Germany

I have been informed that under the previous German government, it was decided to give the Paul-Ehrlich prize for medicine to Robert Gallo. I request that you object to this award, and prevent it if possible. Robert Gallo does not deserve this prize for a number of reasons:

  1. Fraud
    Robert Gallo, and his co-workers were investigated for fraud by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and eventually by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, US House of Representatives. The subcommittee staff report was completed, but never released, due to the Republican party takeover of the house. However it is available on the internet:

    http://www.nyx.net/~wstewart/CelebratedCases/GalloCase/GalloCase.html
    [Now available at: www.healtoronto.com/gallodocs.html]

    This website also contains the text of supporting articles from the Chicago Tribune and various scientific journals.

    According to this report, the NIH OSI (Office of Scientific Integrity) “found scientific misconduct on the part of Gallo's top AIDS scientist, Dr. Mikulas Popovic. Concerning Dr. Gallo, the entire panel and OSI severely criticized Dr. Gallo and they strongly questioned his fitness to continue to serve as a laboratory chief at NIH. But then, through a series of events described later in this report, Dr. Healy [NIH Director] effectively demolished OSI, greatly limited the supposedly independent review of the NAS Committee, and eventually attempted an end-run of its findings. In short, Dr. Healy did everything she could to protect her superstar, senior scientist.”

    The report also found that Gallo misappropriated the LAV culture (called HTLV-III, among other names, by Gallo) from Dr. Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute. The report also found that there were attempts to interfere with investigations through withholding, altering and destroying documents (by Gallo and others) and that people protecting Gallo exhibited “willful forgetfulness and obstructionism”. Gallo was also found to have provided false or misleadingly incomplete information to the US patent office in order to claim originality on the HIV blood test patent, and to avoid admitting that he had violated the terms of the agreement under which he had received the sample from Montagnier. Some of the offences alleged in the report were criminal in nature.

    Further documentation of one of Gallo’s false claims is given at the end of this letter.

  2. Censorship of Critics
    Dr. Peter Duesberg is a scientist whose career at one point was similar to Gallo’s. Both were well known retrovirologists, but since then their careers have diverged in dramatically different directions. While Gallo is still considered a modern medical hero by many who are unaware of the several findings of misconduct against him, Duesberg is treated as a pariah by the AIDS research community. Yet it was Gallo who has been found guilty of scientific misconduct by his employer (let alone the more serious allegations in the US Congressional report mentioned above), not Duesberg. Duesberg’s mistake has been to be the only senior retrovirologist to ridicule the HIV=AIDS theory, and to suggest in numerous scientific papers (and in his 1996 book “Inventing the AIDS Virus”) that the multiple AIDS diseases are separately caused by multiple risk factors, mostly the epidemic of drug abuse since the 1960’s. The impact of his work was initially great, but the response was not a substantive rebuttal, but denial of rights to publish, and access to public grant money. Press interest waned when scientists refused to discuss or debate his idea. An effective silencing of an honest scientist.
    While Gallo is not directly responsible for Duesberg’s misfortune, the same types of institutional skullduggery that kept Gallo in a position that he was obviously unfit for have kept Duesberg from doing the science he is so well trained for. While other scientists have made quick and big money from tests and therapies that may one day be viewed as quackery, Duesberg has to cling on to his tenured position at the University of California, Berkeley, without which he would certainly be unemployed and unemployable. All because he questioned the hysteria and hype that was generated by Gallo and others.

  3. Toxic Therapies
    Many people claim that today’s AIDS drugs are much better than they used to be, and that the horrible side effects (which included death, the ultimate side-effect) are a thing of the past. Yet women who test positive for HIV are usually given the first AIDS drug to be approved: AZT, to prevent transmission of HIV antibodies to their children. And, most combination therapies (‘AIDS cocktails’) still include AZT or another nucleoside analog. AZT, for example, mimics Thymidine, and terminates DNA synthesis. This has a severe impact on parts of the body that rely on continual cell division, such as the blood system and the bone marrow. AZT can cause AIDS-like side effects by destroying the immune system.

    Newer drugs, especially the much-hyped Protease inhibitors, have their own litany of side-effects, including fat redistribution (“Crix belly”, “Buffalo Hump”), other lipid-related problems and heart disease. But, as with earlier drugs, the definition of AIDS is so broad that it is not always clear whether deaths are due to AIDS or the AIDS therapy.

    This is the legacy of, as Dr. Peter Duesberg called it in the title of his 1996 book, the “invention” of the AIDS virus.

  4. Testing Troubles and Existence of HIV Questioned
    A group of Australian researchers (Drs. Eleopulos-Papodopulos, Turner, Causer etc.) have spent a considerable amount of time researching the accuracy of HIV tests (ELISA, Western Blot, etc.) over more than a decade. They have concluded that HIV tests, such as the one patented by Gallo, are completely inaccurate because they have never been tested against a gold standard – presence of the virus. They have concluded that none of the proteins used in the tests are specific for HIV, and that therefore all results are false positive. They do not claim that HIV tests do not identify a health risk, but simply that the antibodies can be generated from multiple non-infectious causes (e.g. drug abuse, exposure to foreign blood products) and do not indicate infection by a virus, let alone a single, specific virus.

    Unfortunately, their work is little known. Their work has been published in some peer-reviewed scientific journals, but major journals like Science and Nature that are strongly committed to the prevailing views of HIV and AIDS, routinely refuse publication.

    It is interesting to note, in support of their work, that there are no electron microscope photographs of multiple, isolated HIV particles, implying that HIV has never been isolated. Without true isolation of HIV from people who are believed to be infected, there is no way to verify the accuracy of HIV tests.
    A collection of papers from this group of scientists can be obtained, at no charge, upon request by email to one of the authors (vturner@cyllene.uwa.edu.au) [Now this, and much more, can be found at www.theperthgroup.com].

Gallo’s career is a history of inept science, avaricious misconduct and fraud. I feel that it would be a grave mistake to recognize his work in any way, let alone through such a prestigious prize. To do so would risk future injury to the reputation of Germany and, more importantly, continued injury to HIV/AIDS patients through an emphasis on chemical treatments to a disease that may be caused by exposure to toxic and immunosuppressive substances.

Although the Alberta Greens (“Green Party of Alberta”) do not have an official policy on HIV/AIDS at this time, the executive has given me permission to write this letter in my position as President of the party.

Yours sincerely,


David Crowe
President, Alberta Greens

Robert Gallo’s Claims for Isolation of HIV (also called HTLV-III, LAV)

Note: All but the first two quotes are taken from the US Congressional subcommittee staff report.

Year Quote
1985 AIDS: Etiology, Diagnosis, Treatment and Prevention, p. 34:
“The first HTLV-III [Gallo’s name for HIV] isolates were obtained in this laboratory in November 1982, and HTLV-III was subsequently isolated from approximately 100 patients with AIDS or from healthy individuals at risk for AIDS.”
Salahuddin, Gallo, et al., PNAS 82, 1985 pp. 5530-34:
“Since the fall of 1982, independent isolates of HTLV-III have been obtained in this laboratory...from 101 AIDS and ARC patients and healthy donors at risk for AIDS.”
1989 Gallo remarks to the Chicago Tribune, published 19 Nov. 1989.
“The December ‘82 data is really marginal...The data were equivocal. At the time they were not even real data...The cells died. I can’t make any claim for that. Some people would.”
1990 Gallo interview, Office of Scientific Integrity [OSI] 16 May 1990, transcript p. 110:
“...you are asking me to defend something that I don’t – I don't claim we had the cause of AIDS discovered in February 1983 or December 1982...”
Gallo, OSI interview 25 May 1990, transcript pp. 26-27.
“I never made a claim in the literature for December ‘82 samples...We didn't publish these claims in any publication. I am a scientist. I go by what I publish”
Gallo, OSI interview 16 May 1990, transcript pp. 103-104: [Concerning the PNAS claims cited above]
“For all of '82? ...Can I have the reference? I would like to see that in writing if I said that... I don't believe I would have any reason to say that in PNAS. I mean, it doesn't sound like me.”
Gallo in an interview with the Subcommittee Staff (Executive Summary):
“No one believed we really had that many isolates [100 or 101, as claimed above]...No one believed we really meant that...”

Copyright © Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, Sunday, March 7, 2004.