Document:Young reviews Adams
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1993
"HIV was discovered in an atmosphere in which filing the patent applciation for the procedures which would lead to the test kits was as important as publication in the scientific journals. Once the French and Americans had entered into a three-year dispute about who came first, how could they back down on the central question of whether the virus causes the disease?"
The theory that a recently discovered retrovirus is the sole cause of the illnesses now grouped as AIDS lies at the heart of the official, orthodox approach to the epidemic. The virus was first isolated by a team at France's Pasteur Institute, which remarked that the "role of this virus in the etiology of AIDS remains to be determined". Specimens of the virus were sent, on request, to Dr. Robert Gallo at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
In 1984, the conventional procedure of publishing research results in a scientific journal for study and comment having been dispensed with, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced at a press conference that Dr. Gallo had discovered the virus that causes AIDS and that a vaccine would be forthcoming within two years: "Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science."
Events surrounding this example of science by decree are complex, involving a threatened lawsuit by the French, a dispute over royalties on patented blood tests, a number of mixups and scandals, and a degree of private and public skepticism about the claim of the reclassified virus as the lone assassin in AIDS.
At first, public skepticism was muted, confined to the holistic health community (which favored a multifactorial explanation of the syndrome) and to a few professionals such as Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, editor of the journal AIDS Research. That Sonnabend was soon removed from his post and the name of his journal changed to AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses is indicative of the power behind the official line.
AIDS: The HIV Myth examines the whole story of the HIV hypothesis from these early times through the detailed work of Prof. Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, one of the world's leading retrovirologists. The social and medical consequences of the general acceptance of the HIV theory are examined, including the resultant channeling of research funds almost exclusively to the virus and drugs said to act upon it. Some attention is given to the lucrative industry that has grown up around HIV orthodoxy. (The market for antibody "test kits" alone is estimated at about $100 million a year.)
In his foreword, Peter Duesberg writes, "I am often asked why it is just myself, Harry Rubin, Joseph Sonnabend and a handful of others who question the virus-AIDS hypothesis. Why doesn't a young, ambitious scientist make a name for himself by questioning it? The answer lies in the strong conformist pressures on scientists, particularly young, untenured scientists, in the age of biotechnology. Their conceptual obedience to the establishment is maintained by controlled access to research grants, journals and positions, and rewarded by conference engagements, personal prizes, consultantships, stocks and co-ownership in companies. A dissenter would have to be truly independent and prepared for a variety of sanctions."
The significance of the AIDS establishment's background in the unsuccessful "war on cancer", the role played by drugs of all sorts, the "menagerie of micro-organisms" afflicting PWAs and many gay men, and the flawed deployment of Western medical technology in Africa are among the many pieces of the AIDS puzzle examined by the author, an award-winning British medical journalist. The prescribing of AZT is briefly examined.
One flaw in Adams's analysis is a too simplistic assigning of responsibility for the commercial gay lifestyle of the 70s to the gay liberation movement alone, with more complex social and economic factors left unexamined.
For the researcher whose previous information on AIDS has come through the mass media, AIDS: The HIV Myth is a good place to make a new beginning.
© 1993 by Ian Young
Originally published in The AIDS Dissidents: An Annotated Bibliography
Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ and London, (ISBN 0810826755).
