"House of Numbers", a Film Review

David Crowe

AIDS rethinkers often complain that they don’t get an opportunity to answer questions from the media. Filmmaker Brent Leung shows in his new documentary “House of Numbers” that what is really needed is to give this opportunity to the establishment.

The juxtaposition of famous AIDS dogmatists contradicting themselves is clever, funny and, most importantly, illuminating. Light rarely shines on candid statement by Robert Gallo or his competitors Montagnier, Jay Levy and Robin Weiss. It is not suprising to hear Montagnier denying AIDS, he has performed the miracle of being the one denialist within the establishment, the one who got the Nobel, while denying that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, that HIV infections necessarily leads to AIDS, and promoting fermented papaya as a cure for immune deficiency induced by oxidative stress. It is more surprising to see Gallo, Levy, Weiss, Fauci and others contradicting and ridiculing each other – and not over trivialities, but over fundamentals, such as whether a Western Blot should be used as a confirmatory HIV test. They all did agree, however, that nobody knows how HIV causes the depletion of CD4 T cells, the supposed hallmark of AIDS (as long as you ignore classic AIDS cases without any physical or lab evidence of immune suppression).

The film begins with a recitation of commonly accepted ‘facts’ and images of AIDS, including an aerial view of the AIDS quilt in Washington DC. Perhaps this is designed to make people comfortable. If so the comfort won’t last for long.

Conversations with dogmatists are also clashed against the words of the so–called ‘Denialists’ – scientists like Peter Duesberg and the Perth Group, as well as journalists like Neville Hodgkinson and Liam Scheff.

People who have long questioned AIDS might not be surprised at what they say (but sometimes how they say it). An audience exposed to propaganda for years, sometimes perinatally, will be shocked to hear rational and educated people contradicting much accepted wisdom.

The premiere was at the Nashville Film Festival, home of Brent Leung, and is now on the road to the Boston Film Festival and others. There was not an empty seat in the house, nor a dry eye, especially after the story of the Nagels brought to life the human cost of the HIV=AIDS=Death dogma. They adopted Lindsay from Romania, shortly after her birth and shortly after the brutal death of the brutal dictator Ceausescu. Cleared to take her home, including a negative HIV test, the parents didn’t realize their joy would soon be shattered by a new, uniquely American dictatorship.

American doctors ran a battery of tests on Lindsay and this time the HIV test was positive. The parents were ordered to put their baby on AZT immediately, told that this might extend her lifespan from a few months to a few years. Lindsay now withstood 22 months of agony. The parents could see when her muscles were almost literally screaming. The parents were afraid that they were dreaming when the grandfather found the work of Peter Duesberg. They didn”t want to believe in case this was just a false hope soon to be shattered. However, when a letter from Duesberg arrived, telling them to stop the AZT or their baby would die, they did just that.

Miraculously all the agony of the baby quickly evaporated, and she turned into a happy, healthy little girl. Watching the parents talk in the documentary was emotional enough, but when the healthy, radiant, 19 year old Lindsay walked on the stage after the screening it was hard to stop from breaking down completely.

On stage, the father described how there were only 10 “AIDS babies” in Minnesota 19 years ago and that all were treated by the same three doctors and that all the others stayed on the drugs. And all the others are now dead, as predicted.

The screening ended with a standard ovation and questions, directed both to Brent Leung and to the three Nagels. There was no hostility, all questions were respectful, but I could tell that some of the questioners were struggling, feeling unbalanced after a film which for 87 minutes flew each of us around a crazy roller coaster of conflicting ideas. One questioner in particular, identifying herself as trained in medicine, was clearly trying to find the fatal flaw in the movie, but was hamstrung because so many of the shocking words came right from the mouths of the official AIDS soothsayers.

Leung was only able to make this film through a veil of secrecy that the CIA would be proud of. He knew that if dogmatists knew that he was interviewing denialists they would deny him an interview. Occasionally, a thud of dull realization appeared on a face being interviewed or in the tone of the dogmatist’s voice when they saw that Leung was not asking the right questions but, in full rhetorical flight, they knew not how to effect a safe landing.

When the AIDS quilt came back on the screen near the end of the movie it made me ask whether all those people had died not so much in vain, but to satisfy the vanity of powerful, arrogant scientists who always assert that they have the absolute truth. But if they all did, all these oracles should talk with the same golden tongue, and “House of Numbers” showed convincingly that HIV and AIDS science is a tower of babble.