New York Native

From AIDS Wiki

The New York Native was a New York newsmagazine published by Charles Ortleb which ran from 1980 to 1996.

AIDS reporting

The Native was one of the first publications to question the HIV hypothesis. It featured ground-breaking interviews with Peter Duesberg and articles on AZT and AIDS politics by John Lauritsen. It was the Native that first featured Duesberg in 1987 just after his Cancer Research article, and it was also the Native that published Lauritsen's articles on the fraudulent trials that formed the basis for FDA approval of AZT.

The Native also promoted the hypothesis of Ortleb and Neenyah Ostrom, that AIDS is related to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and both are caused by HHV-6.

After publication of many articles highly critical of AZT, ACT-UP announced a boycott of the Native. Ortleb would later satirize the antics of ACT-UP in his book Iron Peter.

Quotes

• "Over the past year the myth that the epidemic is over because of new drugs has meant that we are perceived as unnecessary to readers and advertisers. I'm afraid people are going to learn the hard way that the new AIDS drugs are a lethal combination of toxic activists and fraudulent science. But I would not have changed our AIDS reporting for a million bucks." — Charles Ortleb (Bull 1997)
• "In the mid-1980s...I came across something very, very rare. A newspaper that fit the mythical mold of the crusading enterprise that journalism was supposed to embody, but in practice almost never did. Charles Ortleb published and edited it. It was headquartered in New York. It was a weekly. Every week you could find it under one of those old iron weights at the public newsstands next to the Post and the Times. It was called New York Native... Week after week, the front page blazed with stories about AIDS, about the phony and self-serving and corrupt research that was going on behind closed doors at various labs around the US... Ortleb had a sword, and he knew how to use it." — Jon Rappoport (Rappoport 2007)

References