Roger Swan
Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society

Stephen Lewis is in town. A rare opportunity to Re–Think the fraud that HIV/AIDS has become. Lewis believes that AIDS is caused by a virus and as UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa in the past and now through charitable interests remains a major drug promoter.

This is a huge irony. As a long–time member and leader of Canada’s socialist New Democrat party we might have expected Lewis to side with Thabo Mbeki, past President of South Africa, who, in preference to drugs, called for nutritional improvements because this intelligent man believed that the correlation between poverty and the AIDS rate in Africa was a challenge to the viral theory of AIDS.

We normally think immune deficiencies occur in conditions of poverty, but the existence of AIDS, the immune deficiency that appeared with catastrophic effect in the 1980’s, gave the lie to this. Ill health that leaves the human body susceptible to opportunistic disease can result from riotous excess every bit as much as from conditions of terrible need. We don’t treat poverty as a virus so why should we treat profligacy as such? The picture of previously vibrant young men, wasting away to nothing, slowly faded as communities most affected responsibly adopted healthier styles of being.

AIDS was not a gay disease. It was a condition resulting from excess but given the tenor of the time, characterised as much by fear and mischief–making as it was by reason, it was perhaps understandable that the pressure to blame a biological agent rather than a behaviour took hold and created the HIV/AIDS industry that we have today.

On April 25, 1984 Margaret Heckler, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, at a press conference, announced HIV to be the probable cause of AIDS. Note that the announcement did not come by way of a peer–reviewed scientific paper! This peculiarity was noted by Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. In 1988 he was writing a report about the progress made in using his invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to detect retroviruses in the thousands of blood donations received by the Red Cross. He began by stating, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS” and then, because he did not know, began asking where he could find the reference for this statement.

”I felt a little funny about not knowing the source of such an important discovery….I did computer searches. Neither Montagnier, Gallo [co–discoverers of the HIV], nor anyone else had published papers describing experiments which led to the conclusion that HIV probably caused AIDS. I read the paper in Science for which they had become well known as the AIDS doctors, but all they had said there was that they had found evidence of a past infection by something which was probably HIV in some AIDS patients. They found antibodies. Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past disease, not present disease. Antibodies signaled that the virus had been defeated. The patient had saved himself. There was no indication in these papers that this virus caused a disease. They didn’t show that everybody with the antibodies had the disease. In fact, they found some healthy people with antibodies.” (Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Kary Mullis, p.171–173).(cf. aras.ab.ca/rethinkers.php).

Billions of dollars have been spent researching something that has never been shown, scientifically, to be the cause. Billions more have been spent developing and distributing medications based on this chimera. These drugs are toxic.

Initially the treatment for AIDS was AZT, lots of AZT, a drug that had failed testing as a treatment for cancer because it was itself so cytotoxic. There is every reason to believe that as many, if not more, people died from the effects of the AZT “treatment” as they did from AIDS. The beautiful, non-pareil ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev was almost certainly such a victim. He tested positive to HIV but did not exhibit any other signs or symptoms. He died a few short years after starting AZT administration.

The huge Concorde study subsequently found negative efficacy for AZT as a treatment for AIDS. Nevertheless, like a super–Phoenix, it arose again and again, first as a “treatment” for HIV+ pregnant women, ostensibly to prevent transfer of the virus to the foetus and later, in much lower doses, as part of the Highly Active Anti–Retroviral Therapy(HAART), a drug cocktail that includes other equally pernicious chemicals. (cf. aras.ab.ca/haart.html).

The orthodoxy found fertile ground for its irrational behaviour in sub–Saharan Africa, yet here, as Connie Howard pointed out in a recent letter to the Edmonton Journal, “…starving people who live without safe drinking water suffer with all manner of AIDS–defining diseases whether HIV is present or not. Half of sub–Saharan Africa bathes, does laundry and dumps waste into the same stream that supplies drinking water. Dysentry, cholera, TB, malaria and infectious diarrhea have long been causes of death in Africa, but in 1985 they all became part of AIDS.”

The orthodoxy has had to coin a new syndrome to account for the appearance of AIDS–defining illnesses that develop only after inititiation of treatment with anti–retroviral drugs – Immune Restoration Syndrome. The claim is that the immune system, suddenly released from its deficiency by the medications, goes berserk, manifesting in AIDS–defining illnesses. Given the need to create such seemingly bizarre rationalisations to keep the belief alive isn’t it more reasonable to conclude that it is the drugs and social conditions that are killing Africans, not HIV? “Why is it we still think sending drugs will help more than would a safe food and water supply?” Howard asked.

The biannual AIDS conference in Vienna this past Summer of 2010 continued to do what these conferences do best, announcing “good news” by proffering new directions to combat HIV/AIDS. Yet by the AIDS industry’s own accounting the HIV continues to withstand all attacks. This year a novel approach was proposed: “treat” all healthy, HIV–negative women with anti–retroviral drugs by means of a vaginal gel laced with a biocide. This in addition to the spermicides and condoms African women are already advised to arm themselves with.

On a continent so deficient in the basic necessities of life how come such research raises hopes rather than red flags?

Recent stories on CBC Radio’s The Current suggest the HIV/AIDS industry is ramping up its targeting of Canada’s First Nations aboriginal peoples. We are told that the rate of HIV infection amongst their women is exploding. Yet most of them have only been recently tested so how can we tell whether the incidence of HIV is on the rise or not? Perhaps the virus was present all along, causing no harm at all, as world–renowned virologist Peter Duesberg has always argued, much to his personal and professional cost.

In a disarmingly caring tone, a Saskatchewan physician described how we might expect a healthy, symptom–free First Nations woman, who has tested HIV+ by way of notoriously unreliable tests, to be treated when pregnant. She will be followed closely and, out of an interest in delivering a healthy (i.e.HIV–) baby, will be treated as early as possible with anti–retrovirals (almost certainly including the fearsome AZT) and more than probably receive a Caesarean rather than a vaginal delivery.

The HIV/AIDS medical–pharmaceutical complex captures an ever increasing percentage of aid money that might be spent otherwise on improving basic well–being, which historically has proven to be the best way of preventing opportunistic disease. Over the last couple of decades money and power has stamped out any critical debate around this censorship. This must end.