Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series, written exclusively for TCW, he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here.
Part 1
THREE years into the Covid crisis, many are now aware of the disastrous advice on which so many governments blindly acted. False predictions of spread, fearmongering propaganda, lockdowns damaging young and old, suppression of cheap treatments to make way for a dangerous, experimental vaccine . . . so much of ‘the science’ turned out to be fiction, hugely profitable for a few but harmful for billions.
These failures have brought back into focus claims that the syndrome known as HIV/Aids was – and still is – being similarly mishandled and exploited by the worlds of medical science, public health and Big Pharma. Robert Kennedy Jr documents this in detail his best-selling 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
What few people know however is that for almost 40 years a small group of scientists has deconstructed almost every aspect of the theory that Aids is caused by a lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV. Their critique goes beyond questioning HIV as the cause of Aids.
They say ‘HIV’ has never even been proved to exist. And the reason you have probably never heard of their work is that, like the doctors and scientists who challenged Covid insanities, they have been silenced at every turn.
With Covid, pressure to conform came through government-directed appeals to our higher nature through slogans such as ‘Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives’ and ‘Every vaccination gives us hope’. The implied claim was that anyone who thought differently was either an idiot or a murderer.
Similarly with Aids, advocates of the deadly virus theory sought to make those who questioned it sound as though they were lacking in compassion, irresponsible or stupid.
I was working as medical correspondent of the London Sunday Times in the 1980s whenAids suddenly became big news after American government scientists claimed to have identified a previously unknown virus as the cause of a mysterious cluster of symptoms related to severely depleted immunity.
They included Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer affecting the skin and internal organs; severe candidiasis; and pneumonia caused by an out-of-control fungus. The symptoms proved resistant to treatment, and fatal in a number of cases.
The first victims were groups of gay men who were challenging long-standing homophobic attitudes in American society through what came to be known as the ‘fast-track’ gay lifestyle. This involved multiple sex partners and heavy drug use.
The partying was fun, I was later told, but it caused disease microbes to become pooled among participants such that almost every encounter carried a risk of infection. Prophylactic use of antibiotics staved off some illnesses but contributed to an underlying deterioration, and in some cases complete collapse, of the immune system.
The crisis at first met an unsympathetic response from the right-wing Reagan administration. The common histories of the victims led to dismissive descriptions of Aids as a ‘gay plague’. As numbers increased, however, outrage and anger grew.
Those involved had often already suffered greatly from discriminatory attitudes and behaviour, and their efforts to end this bigotry through the Gay Lib movement looked to be under threat.
That was the context in which US biomedical researcher Robert Gallo found immediate acceptance when in 1984 he claimed to have identified a deadly virus, new to humanity, as the cause of Aids. The theory took off like wildfire and by the end of 1984 had come to be accepted by virtually everyone. The microbe Gallo said he had found became known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV.
It brought virologists, drug companies and public health experts to centre stage. Taxpayer dollars, eventually reaching hundreds of billions, were poured into Aids research and treatment through the US National Institutes of Health, in particular the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the leadership of Dr Anthony Fauci.
Well-funded NGOs and activist groups sprang up with the aim of contributing to the fight against the disease.
Religious leaders warmed to the theory because it discouraged sleeping around. Politicians liked it because it put in place a new ‘enemy within’ against which they could claim to offer protection with advertising campaigns such as the UK’s ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ – a precursor of the intense propaganda inflicted on us with the advent of Covid-19.
Media people – including me, I am ashamed to say – vigorously promulgated warnings that the virus put at risk everyone and anyone who had sex. It felt good to be not just selling newspapers, but helping to sound the alert.
Young people were less readily taken in. James Delingpole has recalled how the ad campaign put a dampener on his sex life, though after the initial shock it became increasingly clear to him that the government had been overstating the case.
In fact, as the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis and other scientists were to point out, there never was a body of scientific evidence demonstrating the validity of the ‘deadly new virus’ idea. That remains the case today, despite hundreds of thousands of papers having been published over the years predicated on the HIV belief system.
Henry Bauer, a retired professor of science studies who has drawn on numerous sources in documenting The Case Against HIV, says: ‘Anyone open to looking at the actual data . . . can find an enormous amount of evidence that the diagnosis of HIV as cause of AIDS is simply wrong.’
One lasting outcome of the theory was that by ‘democratising’ Aids, with the message that the disease did not discriminate and so everyone was at risk, it prevented the feared setbacks for the Gay Lib movement. Lesbian and gay rights became firmly established in American society, and in some other parts of the world.
In many other ways, however, the global hysteria to which the theory gave rise has had disastrous consequences, some of which continue to this day.
A failed cancer drug called AZT, pulled off the shelf by American government researchers because of an apparent anti-HIV effect, killed and injured thousands.
It was administered in high doses not just to people with Aids but to gay men, haemophiliacs and others thought to be HIV-infected, earning hundreds of millions of pounds for the US drug company Burroughs Wellcome and its British parent, the Wellcome Foundation (later taken over by Glaxo).
American and British government institutions promoted it vigorously as the ‘gold standard’ of Aids treatment. Doctors who stepped publicly out of line were hounded out of the profession.
Although later generations of drugs can genuinely help to support a failing immune system, 40 years of research has failed to bring either a vaccine or cure for the purported ‘HIV’ infection. Taken over long periods, the drugs themselves can kill, contributing significantly to the 800 or so deaths reported annually of ‘people living with HIV’ in the UK.
The most widespread and long-lasting harm, however, has been to the countless people around the world, especially in Africa and of African descent, terrorised with a false belief that they are victims of a sexually transmitted virus which only Western medicine has the means to hold at bay.
The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that more than 80 million people have been infected, and that about 40million have died from HIV. Three-fifths of purported new HIV infections are said by WHO to be in the African region.
African Americans are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV infection compared with the white population.
American taxpayers in particular have been burdened with the huge expense of maintaining an industry that has grown up around HIV/Aids. The US government spends more than $28 billion a year on the domestic response, and expenditure globally between 2000 and 2015 totaled more than half a trillion dollars ($562.6billion), according to a University of Washington study.
Yet the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a never-ending plea for more money, says the pandemic continues to take a life every minute.
In this series of articles I am going to describe the fruits of years of painstaking work by scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, collating evidence challenging almost every aspect of the ‘HIV’ theory. The essence of their case is that there is no ‘HIV’ epidemic, and there never will be a vaccine or cure, because there is no ‘HIV’.
If you find this hard to believe, I am with you entirely in the sense that it took me years to accept fully how wrong I had been in my early reporting on Aids. I documented this painful journey of discovery in my book AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, published in 1996 by Fourth Estate.
If you ask how it could be possible that for 40 years the scientific and medical worlds have failed to correct a belief in a mythological virus, the answer is more sociological than scientific.
Solidarity with the suffering of the gay community played a part – although genuine kindness, such as Louise Hay demonstrated in her early healing work with people with Aids, strongly and successfully challenged the medical view that they were certain to die.
An arrogant, but ill-informed, neocolonial drive by countless NGOs to ‘do good’ in poorer parts of the world also contributed.
But probably the most powerful and detrimental element in maintaining the deception was the money and influence involved, as governments went into partnership with the hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry.
The resources poured into HIV/Aids created thousands of jobs, buying loyal collaboration and stifling dissent. Highly experienced scientists who spoke out against the theory were ridiculed, defunded, gaslighted, and accused of killing people by weakening the public health message.
I experienced this pressure myself when I began to examine alternative ways of looking at Aids in the early 1990s, when I was working as Sunday Times science correspondent.
Joan Shenton of Meditel, producers of prize-winning but much criticised documentaries on the issue, alerted me to the fact that several distinguished scientists had challenged the idea that HIV could be doing all the damage attributed to it.
Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, which had serialised Michael Fumento’s 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual Aids, supported my reports on an ever-deepening scientific challenge to the theory.
Over a three-year period, condemnation came from just about every quarter. The deeper the critique went, the shriller the protests became.
In 1993, with the HIV/Aids industry still pointing to Africa as proof of how millions could become infected, Neil told me to go there to find out what was happening. Over six weeks, travelling through Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, it became increasingly plain to me that the entire pandemic was an illusion arising from diseases of poverty being reclassified as ‘HIV/Aids’.
My reports to this effect proved too much for the scientific establishment, and Nature– supposedly one of the top scientific journals in the world – declared that we must be stopped. Having decided that picketing our offices would be impractical, the magazine mounted a campaign of ridicule.
The UK’s Health Education Authority started an Aids journalism award specifically in my dishonour. They said it was to counter the newspaper’s dangerously misleading coverage. There was incomprehension and abuse from all three main political parties, as well as from scientific and medical chiefs.
But we also heard from many doctors, health workers, gay men, and specialists on Africa, thanking the newspaper for its challenging coverage. An ‘HIV’ diagnosis at that time could still have the power of a witch-doctor’s hex, and people who had tested positive wrote to say that our reports were like a breath of fresh air.
Andrew Neil was undeterred by the hostile bluster, while insisting the paper was ready to publish any evidence that countered the dissident case we were presenting. In 1994 he left the paper for New York, and I left too after his successor John Witherow made it plain that he did not want me to continue this line of reporting.
The literary agent David Godwin had been in touch, suggesting a book on the controversy, and this took shape over the following year.
When Fourth Estate published it in 1996, however, it became an early victim of ‘cancel culture’. The late American gay activist Larry Kramer, at first a bitter critic of Fauci but later his friend and ally, was in the UK at the time of publication to address a conference on Aids.
He picked up a copy at a pre-conference gathering, tore several pages, and spat in it, telling his audience: ‘Do the same if you come across this book. They will soon stop stocking it.’ It quickly disappeared from view, subsequently topping a list of ‘Books You’re Not Supposed to Read’ in a work on political incorrectness in science.
(From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, by Tom Bethell, Regnery, 2005)
I am republishing it now, with additional material including a summary of where the science of ‘HIV’ went wrong, because the story is so redolent of the misunderstandings, mishandling and downright lies surrounding Covid-19.
As with Aids, huge grants from Big Pharma and ‘philanthropic’ foundations to researchers, medical associations, consumer groups, and civil rights organisations fuelled the Covid illusions.
There is one important difference. At first I thought the Covid fearmongering was as ill-conceived as that over ‘HIV’ and Aids. It soon became clear, however, that unlike ‘HIV’ this was a genuine pathogen.
A disgracefully suppressed paper by the UK’s Professor Angus Dalgleish, working with Norwegian colleagues including a biowarfare expert, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt the genetically-engineered nature of SARS-CoV-2 (see here and here).
Panic measures to try to hide its laboratory origin confirm that view. These were led by the Chinese, from whose Wuhan laboratory the virus almost certainly escaped, and by Fauci, whose NIAID had part-funded the work.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, then director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust and now WHO chief scientist, also played a leading role in the cover-up.
Many are now aware of the adverse social, economic and health consequences of the Covid hysteria into which Fauci and others led us.
Billions of people meekly accepted and even welcomed unprecedented lockdowns and other fearmongering measures, along with mass administration of the mRNA gene products. TCW Defending Freedomhas been one of few voices constantly critical of the mishandling of Covid over the past three years, despite high-level, far-reaching efforts to silence and defund the site.
Much less widely understood is the way Aids became subject to similar mismanagement 40 years ago, with adverse consequences lasting until today.
Part 2: Relentless censorship of an isolated genius
WHEN an idea is fervently adopted by most of the world’s doctors, scientists and politicians and supported by millions of people, it is a tall order to make the case for a rethink. Such was the experience of biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who 40 years ago developed a detailed theory about Aids that contradicts the generally accepted belief that a deadly virus, HIV, is the cause.
Decades of unremitting censorship and rejection preceded her death from heart failure in March 2022, aged 85.
Her story has important, and disturbing, implications for our understanding of what has been happening with the Covid crisis.
Born in Greek Macedonia, she and her brother Dmitris were part of a kinder diaspora sent to Eastern Europe to escape the Greek civil war of 1946-49. She was cared for well, and graduated with a Masters degree in nuclear physics from the University of Bucharest, Romania.
In 1965, at the age of 29, she was reunited with her family in Perth, Western Australia, where they had emigrated. She learned English and joined the staff of the medical physics department at the Royal Perth Hospital, remaining on the books there for more than half a century.
In September 1976 she married Kosta Eleopulos, also a child sent to Romania who eventually found his way to Australia. She blamed herself for his death, five years later, from gastric cancer, believing she should have been able to save him with the knowledge she had acquired.
Her job was to research and improve radiation treatments for cancer patients. The work led her into a deep examination of some fundamentals in biology, in particular how the body’s cells maintain healthy function, and the mechanisms involved when their activity and growth become disordered.
In 1982 the high-prestige Journal of Theoretical Biology published a 21-page paper in which she explored how oxidation causes cell activation and expenditure of energy, while a counterpart process known as reduction enables the cell to absorb and store energy.
The processes have a cyclic nature, controlled by a periodic exchange of electrical charge between two proteins, actin and myosin.
Changes in the factors regulating these cycles beyond the point where homoeostatic safety mechanisms are breached can lead to a variety of disorders, including cancer.
When Aids was first reported in 1981, ‘it wasn’t too big a jump to see that oxidative mechanisms had the power to explain much about Aids and perhaps even “HIV” itself,’ says Valendar Turner, an emergency physician at the Royal Perth, one of a small band of doctors and scientists who tried to help Papadopulos’s work become more widely known.
In explaining the seemingly disparate groups of people at risk of Aids, her theory implicated a variety of toxins, all known to be powerful oxidants.
These included injected and ingested drugs; nitrite inhalants used for sexual enhancement; repeated infections and many of the agents used to treat them; blood-clotting agents given to hemophiliacs, which in the early days of Aids were made from concentrated extracts of blood from thousands of donors; and anally deposited sperm.
Semen in the rectum is separated from blood vessels and the lymph system by a single, easily penetrated layer of cells, whereas the vagina has a thick protective lining.
In this multifactorial theory of Aids, the various contributory factors were unified by their shared ability to put the body’s tissues under a chronic, progressively destructive oxidative assault. This affects all cells in the body, not just immune cells, injuring them to the point of their becoming susceptible to the microbial infections and cancers that underlie the Aids diseases.
Papadopulos also described how this process gave rise to biochemical phenomena which, she maintained, had been misinterpreted as meaning a new virus was present.
She was an immensely dedicated scientist who built up a huge body of work on these lines, citing thousands of studies from the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology in support of her case. Yet of six papers she wrote from these perspectives during the 1980s, only one was published, and even then only after protracted correspondence countering criticism from referees.
Entitled Reappraisal of Aids – is the Oxidation Induced by the Risk Factors the Primary Cause? it was written mostly in 1985 and twice rejected by Natureduring 1986. It finally saw the light of day in 1988 in the journal Medical Hypotheses, which although a serious scientific publication does not carry the same weight as the mainstream journals.
A breakthrough appeared imminent when in 2010 Medical Hypotheses accepted two more papers. One reviewed evidence that Aids is not an STI – a sexually transmitted infection – although it can be sexually acquired through the mechanisms described above.
The other questioned whether HIV had ever been proven to exist. Both papers, with their every assertion supported by detailed references, entered the pipeline for publication.
A prolonged silence followed, in the wake of which Professor Bruce Charlton, the journal’s editor, explained that the journal’s owner Elsevier, a giant Netherlands-based publisher specialising in scientific and medical content, had ‘intercepted’ the papers. When he insisted on keeping them in press, he was fired. His successor pulled them both.
One of the aims of this series is to appeal to the global scientific community to re-examine the HIV theory, not just because of the harm I believe it to be causing, but because of the clues it gives us as to how and why the Covid pandemic also became so badly mishandled.
In both instances, misinformation by powerful agenciesplayed a big part. This robbed the public and most media outlets of the ability to judge the situations accurately.
With Covid, once it was realised that SARS-CoV-2 was on the loose, organised efforts were made to hide the laboratory origin of the virus. If the truth were known, future funds would be at risk. The prestige of biomedical science itself was at stake.
Funding agencies, and journals such as Science, Nature and The Lancet which depend heavily on advertisements related to biomedical research, put their weight behind attempts to persuade us that the virus had a natural origin.
Anyone who suggested otherwise was labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’. At the same time, exaggerated fears about the risks involved among those ‘in the know’ about the virus’s genetically engineered status led to the betrayal of long-established principles for pandemic management as well as vaccine safety.
Anthony Fauci, who stood down at the end of 2022 as head of the US Government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was central to this cover-up in early 2020, and in the subsequent drive for mass vaccination.
He showed a frightening degree of certainty in his leadership abilities (attributed by some to his Jesuit education) declaring in a 2021 interview: ‘Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ He condemned as ‘ridiculous’ the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by 60,000 doctors and scientists, opposing lockdowns and urging that protection should be focused on the most vulnerable. He likened it to ‘Aids denialism’, an insult long used by the Aids industry to stifle questioning of the HIV theory.
The US ended up with one of the highest Covid death rates in the world.
Money plays a big part in maintaining the illusions. The drug companies that won the race with the mRNA vaccines earned a $100billion jackpot. Vast sums were spent on advertising and on grants for scientific, medical, consumer and civil rights groups who helped to promote the jab. Largesse of this kind readily distorts judgment.
Beneficiaries find it all too easy to close their minds to arguments that might jeopardise the flow of cash.
Most mainstream media went along with the obfuscations, and the many damaging policies that came in their wake, including false predictions of spread, extended lockdowns, neglect of treatment protocols, and an experimental, poorly tested vaccine promoted globally as safe and effective, in the hope of gaining some kind of redemption for science.
According to a recent reanalysis of trial data reported in the journal Cell, the mRNA vaccines had no effect on overall mortality.
Fauci set a similar lead on Aids. When the syndrome was first recognised, he was the newly appointed head of NIAID. He supported the ‘deadly virus’ theory of Aids to the hilt, telling the New York Times in 1987, just three years after HIV’s purported discovery, that the evidence it causes Aids ‘is so overwhelming that it almost doesn’t deserve discussion any more’.
As with Covid, dissenting voices were not tolerated.
Yet the virus theory reeked of bad science from the start. Callous disregard of the first Aids victims because of their ‘fast-track’ urban gay lifestyle gave way to an urgent search for a less discriminatory explanation for the syndrome, and a front-runner proposal was that a virus might be involved.
US Government researcher Robert Gallo, in what he called his ‘passionate’ phase, was determined that if that was the case, his team should be the first to identify it.
When the French scientist Luc Montagnier tentatively suggested that genetic material he had drawn from Aids patients’ lymph nodes could mean a virus was present, British and American experts, including Gallo, dismissed the idea.
But after finding a way to amplify the material sent to him by Montagnier, Gallo announced at a government-backed press conference that the ‘probable’ cause of Aids had been found.
A blood test for what would soon be called the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was in the pipeline, and a vaccine would be available within two years. Gallo did not acknowledge that he had worked with material sent to him by Montagnier.
Decades later, the search for a vaccine continues, with Africans usually the main test subjects. There have been more than 250 failed trials, costing billions of dollars.
As we shall see, the ‘HIV’ test rushed out on the basis of Gallo’s work did not demonstrate the presence of a specific virus. It had value as a broad screen for blood safety, but was never validated for diagnostic purposes.
Nevertheless, it was nodded through for wider use at a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva in April, 1986, after regulators were told it was ‘simply not practical’ to stop this.
As the idea grew that all sexually active people were at risk, the test kits became big earners, and an international row broke out over who should get the credit.
Eventually a profit-sharing agreement was brokered by the French and American governments, but in the meantime the high-profile dispute helped to consolidate the theory in most people’s minds.
The idea that both Montagnier and Gallo were mistaken in equating an ‘HIV-positive’ test result with risk of Aids became as unthinkable as a religious heresy.
There was one prominent challenger, who met the same fate as scientists questioning Covid orthodoxies.
In 1987 US molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg, a world expert on retroviruses, of which HIV was supposed to be one, published a long scholarly article in the journal Cancer Research arguing that HIV was a harmless passenger among the many infections picked up by Aids patients, and by those at risk for Aids.
Everything he knew about retroviruses told him this could not possibly be the cause of such a devastating illness as Aids.
The alarm this caused was revealed in an internal memo about the paper from the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to recipients including the Surgeon General and the White House. Headed MEDIA ALERT, it warned:
‘This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy (If this isn’t the virus, how do we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything about transmission? How could you all be so stupid and why should we ever believe you again?) and we need to be prepared to respond.’
The journal’s editor was astonished that he did not receive a single letter in response, though Duesberg learned privately from a number of colleagues that they had been shaken by his analysis.
Like a person hiding some guilty secret, the scientific world was refusing to admit publicly that such a huge mistake could have been made. We are witnessing a similar state of denial today regarding deaths and injuries caused by the Covid vaccines.
On November 17, 1988, the late John Maddox, then editor of Nature, who rejected numerous submissions from Duesberg on HIV and Aids, wrote to him:
“I am glad you correctly infer from my letter that I am in many ways sympathetic to what you say. I did not ask you to revise the manuscript, however. The danger, as it seems to me, is that the dispute between you and what you call the HIV community will mislead and distress the public in the following way. You point to a number of ways in which the HIV hypothesis may be deficient. It would be a rash person who said that you are wrong, but . . . if we were to publish your paper, we would find ourselves asking people to believe that what has been said so far about the cause of Aids is a pack of lies.”
Well . . . yes! But isn’t error-correction supposed to be science’s great strength?
Duesberg, previously a shining star in the virological world with a $350,000 ‘outstanding investigator’ award from the National Institutes of Health, became persona non grata in the mainstream scientific community. His subsequent research grant applications were rejected. Graduate students were advised to steer clear of him.
Fauci and others refused to attend conferences or broadcast debates if he was to contribute. Publication of papers became difficult. His university could not fire him, but while other faculty members dealt with weighty matters such as teaching policies and speaker invitations, he was placed in charge of the annual picnic committee.
In contrast, today Gallo tops a list of National Institutes of Health scientists who shared an estimated $350million in royalties between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report by Open the Books, a nonprofit government watchdog.
Incomprehension and intolerance of any criticism of ‘HIV’ have continued through the decades. When President Mbeki of South Africa set up a panel in 2000 to look into Aids science,he became the subject of an international campaign of ridicule to bring him down.
When Celia Farber, a brilliant American journalist covering the controversy since the mid-1980s, wrote a major piece about it for Harper’s in 2006, the Columbia Journalism Review condemned her for espousing a ‘crackpot theory’, ‘widely refuted for years’.
When the journal Frontiers in Public Health published a peer-reviewed article in 2014 by Dr Patricia Goodson, a highly respected professor of health education, entitled ‘Questioning the HIV/Aids hypothesis: 30 years of dissent’, there were immediate protests.
The article was allowed to stand, but with several invited critical commentaries to go alongside it ‘to ensure that all readers understand that the causal link between HIV and Aids cannot be called into question’.
Five years later, following the appointment of a new editor, Dr Paolo Vineis of Imperial College London, the article was retracted. This was not because of any errors, but because it was reaching too many people.
It had received more than 91,800 views, while the commentaries had fewer than 19,000 between them. Announcing the retraction, the Frontiers editorial office said it had been decided that the article ‘presents a public health risk by lending credibility to refuted claims that place doubt on the HIV causation of Aids’.
The claims have not been refuted: they have been suppressed. Leaders of the scientific world have stubbornly refused to discuss them, just as they are refusing now to face the evidence of extensive harm from the mRNA Covid injections.
In both instances, with such extreme sensitivity to any criticism, the question arises: What are they trying to hide?
I have dedicated How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis to Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos in the hope that her endeavours will not have been in vain and that finally her work and genius will get the attention and recognition it deserves.
Part 3: Where ‘HIV’ pioneers first went wrong
WHEN Covid was first perceived as a threat to public health in 2020, many governments rejected advice that protection should focus on those most at risk. They jeopardised the health and lives of millions through repeated lockdowns and the reckless rollout of experimental mRNA injections.
In the panic surrounding the arrival of the genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2, unnecessary deaths occurred as a result of inappropriate forced ventilation, neglect of antibiotic treatment of associated bacterial infections, and the banning of effective medical therapy such as ivermectin.
Awareness of the scientific hubris that brought Covid into being, and of the corruption and abuse of power that turned the virus’s escape into a mega-crisis, has become widespread. The internet made it possible for critics to air data countering the official narratives, despite persistent attempts at censoring so-called ‘misinformation’.
Far fewer people know that a similar medical madness came into being nearly 40 years ago, before the internet was with us.
In the Aids era, a new, lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV was said to be putting us all at risk. ‘Aids does not discriminate’, we were told. A warning leaflet, heralded by a television advertisement featuring a giant tombstone, was delivered to every household in Britain.
It took nearly a quarter of a century before a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official admitted (in 2008) that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, there would be no global heterosexual pandemic.
Despite that admission, an HIV industry continues to thrive. It has proved an endless bonanza for drug companies, special interest groups and the medical research community.
At least 100 journals are dedicated to HIV/Aids medicine, including Lancet HIV, and scores of major conferences are held every year.AIDS 2024, the 25th International AIDS Conference, will take place in Munich next July and is expected to bring together some 18,000 participants from around the world.
The band plays on, but has given no time or space for acknowledgement or examination of decades of painstaking work by a small but dedicated group of scientists who maintain that ‘HIV’ is a mythological entity.
As described here yesterday, the group was led by the late Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a biophysicist based at the Royal Perth Hospital, Western Australia, who critically analysed all aspects of the theory that Aids is caused by a deadly virus. She suffered endless rebuffs and abuse from the mainstream scientific community before her death in March 2022.
In 2017 the group posted on their website a highly referenced 80-page paper setting out their case that despite thousands of claims to the contrary, there is still no proof that such a virus has been isolated from the tissues of Aids patients.
They argue that because the true causes of Aids are not being adequately addressed, millions globally, and especially in poor countries, are being burdened with a false diagnosis of ‘HIV’ infection.
Many of those who have tested ‘HIV’-positive, and even who are thought to be at risk of doing so, are being advised to take drugs whose claimed benefits come at the cost of serious toxicities. In Africa, while millions are malnourished, scarce resources are being diverted into fighting an illusory ‘HIV’ epidemic.
The Perth Group presents a case that the real cause of Aids, common to the various groups at risk of the syndrome, is prolonged breach of a chemical homeostatic process (called redox) that enables our body cells to balance energy expenditure with energy replenishment.
Oxidising substances bring about the former, and antioxidants the latter. When cells are over-oxidised, this ‘oxidative stress’ depletes energy potential and can damage cell structures.
The theory says Aids has this mechanism at its heart, and that the virus theory was questionable from the start because it was already known that over-oxidation leads to the appearance of ‘opportunistic’ infections seen in Aids.
It maintains that Aids can be prevented and treated both by reducing exposure to oxidants, and through greater exposure to antioxidants.
The different groups of patients at risk of Aids had in common powerful oxidising stimuli in their lives. These included injected and ingested recreationaldrugs; nitrite inhalants used for sexual enhancement; repeated infections and many of the medicines used to treat them; blood-clotting agents given to haemophiliacs, previously made from the pooled blood of thousands of donors; and semen from unprotected anal sex.
Antioxidants include vitamins A, C and E and are available naturally in many types of vegetables, fruits, and grains. It was a tragedy for South Africa when President Thabo Mbeki was derided for suggesting more than 20 years ago that there could be dietary solutions to the immune deficiencies widely experienced on the continent.
The roots of the HIV theory, the Perth scientists say, lay in the feverish atmosphere of fear and anxiety that arose in the early years of Aids, when signals arising from disordered cells became misinterpreted as evidence of a new virus.
An unvalidated test led to the mistaken belief that millions were infected. Once the global alert was sounded, it became almost impossible for contrary views to be heard.
The group emailed their 2017 deconstruction of ‘HIV’, the fruit of some 40 years of work, to seven top scientific and medical journals. They offered to prepare a concise version if the critique was thought ‘worthy of being brought to the attention of the scientific community’. Three of the journals failed to reply, despite repeated requests. None took up the offer.
I reported aspects of the group’s work myself in the 1990s while employed as science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, and subsequently in The Business and The European.
In recent years I have tried many times to draw their magnum opus to the attention of leading scientists. To help make it more accessible, I wrote a summary of the arguments, now also posted on the Perth Group’s website. This identifies six key pillars of the HIV/Aids paradigm which, according to their analysis, all involved a misinterpretation of what was actually going on biologically.
At the suggestion of a former president of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, I wrote to three senior biologists asking for guidance as to how the group’s theory could at least be examined. None replied.
Recently, two experts in the field whom I greatly respect did have the courtesy to respond. One regretted that he was too busy to enter into discussion. The other, a UK pioneer of the search for an HIV vaccine, assured me he had worked with concentrated virus.
When I asked him for a reference demonstrating proof that his concentrate was HIV, however, the publications to which he referred me came nowhere near doing that.
Part of the problem lies in the very nature of retroviruses, the family of microbes to which HIV is said to belong.
When scientists were developing the HIV theory, it was not realised that the human genome is full of mobile genetic elements, called retrotransposons, that amplify themselves by first being transcribed from DNA to RNA, and then transcribed back into DNA.
The second part of this process requires an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT), which plays a big role in gene expression.
Detection of RT was wrongly interpreted by the HIV pioneers as meaning a retrovirus was present.
In a 1988 Scientific American article describing the history of the purported discovery of HIV, Robert Gallo and the late Luc Montagnier, the two scientists most identified with the theory, wrote:
“The specimen [tissue from the swollen lymph node of a gay man at risk of Aids] was minced, put into tissue culture and analysed for reverse transcriptase. After two weeks of culture, reverse-transcriptase activity was detected by the culture medium. A retrovirus was present.”
The mistaken belief that RT activity ‘is truly specific to retroviruses’, as Montagnier still maintained several years later, was central to the case that he was the first to discover HIV, a discovery for which in 2008 he and his co-worker Françoise Barré-Sinoussi received a Nobel prize.
Yet it is now known that at least two-fifths of the human genome is made up of retrotransposons. Reverse transcriptase is ubiquitous in cells.
The Perth Group declare: ‘We wish it to be understood that the claim, “The evidence that Aids is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous, meeting the highest standards of science”, cannot be substantiated.’
Even today, the group say, despite thousands of claims to the contrary, there is still no proof that ‘HIV’ has been isolated from the tissues of Aids patients.
Might this be why HIV/Aids protagonists become abusive in response to challenges to their beliefs, and how the illusions have been sustained for so long? You can build endless castles in the air on top of a fundamentally flawed idea.
Part 4: The missing particles
YESTERDAY I explained how detection of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT), previously thought to prove the presence of a retrovirus but later found to be abundant in cells, lay at the root of the theory that HIV causes Aids.
This is one key finding in an 80-page deconstruction of the entire concept of ‘HIV’ posted in July 2017 by a group of scientists based in Perth, Western Australia.
Their work has been ignored, censored and suppressed in much the same way as experienced by critics of the panic-stricken, exploitative, ego-driven, cruel and hugely damaging responses to the Covid pandemic.
The Perth paper is not a loose philosophical challenge to germ theory in general. It is a forensic examination of every detail of the science that has been taken as proof of the HIV/Aids hypothesis.
Misinterpretation over the presence of RT paved the way for further foundational errors, the next of which was the bypassing of a vital step in virus identification known as purification.
This entails separating particles of the virus from cell debris, so the particles can be shown to be infectious, and their exact constituents established. HIV pioneers Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo never fulfilled this requirement, according to the Perth group’s analysis, despite claims to the contrary.
‘Viruses are particles,’ the Perth scientists say. ‘Without proof for the existence of particles there is no proof of the existence of a virus.’
It was not that the Montagnier and Gallo teams did not try. Both regularly attempted to purify particles from cultures of cells taken from Aids patients, or those at risk of Aids. They used a technique known as sucrose density gradient ultracentrifugation.
In this, a drop of the culture fluid is passed through a sucrose solution spun in a high-speed centrifuge which separates retrovirus particles at a particular density. This material is then examined with an electron microscope in the hope of demonstrating the particles.
Montagnier’s group cultured cells from a 33-year-old gay man with swollen lymph nodes, who indicated that he had had more than 50 sexual partners a year and had travelled to many countries. He had a history of several episodes of gonorrhoea, and three months previously had been treated for syphilis.
Reverse transcriptase activity was seen and interpreted as meaning a retrovirus was present. RT was also detected in their second experiment, in which cells from the patient were co-cultured with the cells of a healthy blood donor.
Despite repeatedly looking, however, Montagnier’s group failed to find evidence of the vital particles in either of these experiments.
In a third experiment, cells from umbilical cord blood, obtained from two placentas, were cultured with fluids from the second experiment; in this case a few particles were seen under the electron microscope.
The group took them to be ‘HIV’, although they were not purified, and umbilical cord cell cultures are known to produce such particles independent of any infection. No control experiment was done to see whether the umbilical cells would produce a similar result by themselves.
Particles which simply look as if they might be retroviruses can often be detected in sick people, regardless of Aids, as well as in people who are well.
This is why the Perth scientists insist that failure to purify particles, determine what they are made of, and prove they are infectious was such a huge flaw in ‘HIV’ science. Later claims by HIV researchers that they have found other means of determining HIV’s presence are all indirect, like the detection of RT, and equally open to misinterpretation.
In 2008, Montagnier and his co-worker Françoise Barré-Sinoussi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for having been first to discover HIV.
In her biographical details for the prize, Barré-Sinoussi stated that ‘it was important to visualise the retroviral particles, and Charles Dauget (the team’s electron microscopist) provided the first images of the virus in February 1983. The isolation, amplification and characterisation of the virus rapidly ensued’.
However, Montagnier had given a different picture when questioned on this point by Djamel Tahi, a French documentary film maker, in a 1997 interview. Tahi asked why electron microscope photographs ‘published by you come from the culture and not from the purification’.
Montagnier replied that when purification was attempted, ‘we saw some particles but they did not have the morphology typical of retroviruses. They were very different’. Of Gallo’s work, he said: ‘I don’t know if he really purified. I don’t believe so.’
Dauget went further, telling Tahi: ‘We have never seen virus particles in the purified virus. What we have seen all the time was cellular debris, not virus particles.’
Cellular debris means broken down pieces of cells used in the cultures. Yet because of the RT activity, Montagnier believed he had found a retrovirus. So when he incubated serum from his patient’s blood with this ‘debris’, he expected to find antibodies which would react with virus proteins. Three proteins did produce a reaction, and Montagnier concluded that one of these was ‘specifically recognised’ as being viral.
There was no scientific justification for this conclusion, the Perth scientists say. Many healthy humans have antibodies which react with this protein, identified as p24 (a molecular weight of 24,000). It is also known that at least one normal cell component is a protein with the same molecular weight.
Yet for decades the detection of this protein in blood or culture has been taken to prove the presence of the virus.
In May 1994 Gallo published four papers in Science with many similarities to the French group’s experiments, though he tested samples from more patients and used an immortal (cancer) cell line to obtain large amounts of proteins for diagnosis and research.
His claims to have found the virus held no more validity than Montagnier’s because he too failed to observe, purify and characterise actual virus particles.
In 2003 the Perth group emailed Gallo asking if he was aware of Montagnier’s admission that there were no electron microscope pictures of purified virus from the original patient, and whether clinicians had cause for concern about the implications of Montagnier’s answer. Had clinicians spent two decades diagnosing patients with a non-existent virus?
Gallo replied: ‘Montagnier subsequently published pictures of purified HIV as, of course, we did in our first papers. You have no need of worry. The evidence is obvious and overwhelming.’
Gallo’s reassurance has no basis in fact, the Perth scientists maintain. Not a single electron micrograph of purified ‘HIV’ was published by Gallo in 1984, or since. Nor did Montagnier publish any such picture.
Fourteen years later, European and US groups who tried to make good this deficiency were still unable to provide clear evidence of the existence of ‘HIV’.
Right until his death in February 2022, Montagnier tried to signal to the world that HIV was not as dangerous as had been thought. I suspect he knew in his heart of hearts that the theory was mistaken, but could not bring himself to admit it after the fame – and wealth – that came his way.
I interviewed Montagnier for the Sunday Times at the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1992, for an article the paper ran on April 26 under the heading ‘Time to think again on Aids link, claims HIV pioneer’.
His thinking on HIV and Aids was already strikingly different from most people’s picture of the disease. He insisted that HIV did not attack cells of the immune system directly, but that in the presence of other infections it could spark a process in which immune cells were self-destructing faster than they could be replaced.
This was a big contrast with the ‘lethal virus’ picture promoted by Gallo. It meant HIV-infected patients could reduce their risk of Aids by reducing their exposure to other microbes. Dietary advice and vitamin supplements were also likely to help, Montagnier indicated, by easing chemical stresses in the body that were known to cause loss of immune cells.
‘We were naïve,’ he said at one point. ‘We thought this one virus had been doing all the destruction. Now we have to understand the other factors in this.’
He tried to make his views on these ‘co-factors’ known in June 1990, at the sixth international Aids conference in San Francisco, but it was not a message the conference wanted to hear. Of 12,000 delegates present, only 200 went to hear his talk.
By the time he had finished, almost half had walked out. His concerns were dismissed by leading American Aids scientists and public health officials. Molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg, himself ostracised and defunded for challenging Gallo’s ‘deadly virus’ claims, commented: ‘There was Montagnier, the Jesus of HIV, and they threw him out of the temple.’
Molecular biology has moved into such refined areas of understanding that most people outside those directly involved in the field have little chance of detecting false claims. This is also a problem that has bedevilled Covid science.
Despite clear evidence from the start that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered, powerful interests consistently threw up clouds of confusion, claiming it was a natural virus that had jumped species and that any other suggestion was conspiratorial.
On top of that, big money was piled into promoting a global vaccination campaign, and into discrediting any ideas that could get in the way of that bonanza.
At least with Covid, the internet has made it possible for thousands of doctors and scientists to question official responses to the crisis, even in the face of relentless propaganda by the BBC and most mainstream media.
The marketing of the HIV theory of Aids was so successful, however, that few people realise there is any flaw in the science. Forty years on, millions of lives are still being blighted by an antibody test for a virus that never was.
Part 5: The ‘HIV’ test that misled millions
AS A former newspaper medical and science correspondent, I saw striking parallels between the mishandling of Covid, from 2020 onwards, and illusions over HIV/Aids on which I had reported for many years.
In both instances, scientists and public health experts seemed to lose their heads in the face of lobbying by powerful and sometimes mega-wealthy interests. The lobbyists were able to gain sway over state health agencies, whose generally good intentions became too readily misinformed and misdirected.
With Covid, the big push was for a jab to protect us against the toxic ‘spike protein’ that made the genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2, a product of biodefence research, a genuine new arrival in the world of microbes.
Involvement of agencies heavily invested in vaccines, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Wellcome Trust, contributed to economically and socially disastrous lockdowns, and to mass vaccination with the experimental mRNA gene products.
Thousands of deaths and millions of injuries have been reported in the wake of these jabs, but more than two years on, authorities such as the UK’s NHS continue to insist against all evidence (see also here) that they are ‘safe and effective’ and save millions of lives.
With Aids, the promotion of an unvalidated blood test for an unproven ‘HIV’ infection became the illusory basis of worldwide panic. A global marketing opportunity opened for drug and test kit manufacturers, and a vaccine was promised within two years.
Forty years on, a vaccine is not even on the horizon, despite billions of taxpayer dollars having gone into countless trials.
No one seems ready to face the possibility that there will never be a vaccine for a virus that, according to an exhaustive, immensely painstaking analysis by a group of scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, has never been proved to exist.
The so-called HIV test detects antibodies to a range of proteins (antigens) assumed, but never proved, to belong to ‘HIV’. The proteins do exist, of course, and they are found at raised levels in the blood of people exposed to a variety of chemical and microbial challenges.
These can include drugs, anal sex, multiple pregnancies, repeated blood transfusions, and chronic malnutrition-associated infections.
As explained earlier in this series, despite Herculean efforts in the laboratory, scientists were unable to obtain particles of ‘HIV’ from patients with Aids or at risk of Aids. Such particles would normally be considered essential for developing a diagnostic test.
The particle constituents provide the test’s developers with specific antigens. Blood that reacts with those antigens can be assumed to have antibodies signalling exposure to a specific microbe, though cross-reactions can produce false positive results.
With the HIV test, however, there were no virus particles through which antigens could be defined as relating to HIV. Instead, the test’s developers used antigens found to be reactive with antibodies in the blood of people with symptoms of immune system breakdown.
Yet those were the very patients who had often been exposed to a wide variety of antibody-inducing stimuli, which did not necessarily have anything to do with a deadly virus.
On the basis of this test, millions of people have been diagnosed ‘HIV-positive’, and if they become ill, victims of ‘HIV/Aids’.
But the reason they test positive has nothing to do with a new virus. The idea that the test shows infection with a deadly virus is based on entirely circular reasoning, bypassing the need to prove the existence of ‘HIV’ itself. People test positive because they have antibodies to proteins falsely designated ‘HIV’ antigens.
As explained in Part 3 of this series, that false designation was made by researchers who thought detection of a particular enzyme, reverse transcriptase (RT), meant the presence of a retrovirus. RT was later found to be ubiquitous in cells, whose genetic activity is much more dynamic than was realised 40 years ago when the ‘HIV’ theory was developed.
Public health experts knew of this deficiency from the outset. One hundred experts from 34 countries at a 1986 World Health Organization meeting in Geneva heard that the test kits were licensed to protect blood supplies, as they served as a broad screen for possible abnormalities in blood.
People with Aids and at risk of Aids suffer a range of active infections, some of which could be transmissible through blood transfusions. The tests helped to protect against use of such ‘dirty’ blood.
But the meeting was told that something more was needed to distinguish genuine ‘HIV’ infection or indeed determine if there were truly such a thing as ‘genuine HIV infection’. The test kits should not be used to diagnose or screen for HIV as such.
The delegates heard that a so-called ‘confirmatory test’, called ‘western blot’, relied on the same principle as the test kits it was supposed to be checking, and so was also incapable of being used to diagnose HIV/Aids.
In a monumental scientific ‘fudge’, however, a representative from the US Food and Drug Administration told the meeting that public health needs had caused usage of the kits to expand and ‘it was simply not practical’ to stop this.
In other words, panic over Aids caused science to be thrown out of the window. It was just as we now know happened with the arrival of Covid, when powerful agencies conspired to bring about unprecedented, economically and socially disastrous lockdowns, misuse of dubious testing technologies that exaggerated case numbers, and mass administration of an experimental gene product sold to us as a ‘safe and effective’ vaccine.
When later studies of the ‘HIV’ test showed a close link between testing positive and risk of developing Aids, that was taken to prove the test’s validity. The link was entirely artificial, however. It was a consequence of the circular reasoning, not of ‘HIV’ infection.
As the HIV/Aids paradigm won worldwide acceptance, increasingly complex procedures for trying to make a reliable diagnosis came into being. But the basic problem remains to this day: scientists have not been able to validate any of these procedures against pure virus, taken from patients, because no such virus has ever been obtained.
Research has repeatedly confirmed that many different conditions cause raised levels of the antibodies looked for by the ‘HIV’ test, putting people at risk of being labelled HIV-positive when there is no such virus present. They include mycobacterial infections such as TB and leprosy, widespread among impoverished people, and the cause of millions of misdiagnosed ‘HIV/Aids’ cases in Africa.
Also, when cells are dividing and growing at a higher rate than normal, such as in pregnancy, raised levels of antigens are liable to trigger positive test results which have nothing to do with ‘HIV’. This is another source of illusory ‘HIV/Aids’ diagnoses in poor countries and communities where many women undergo multiple pregnancies.
Manufacturers of the tests know they should not be used diagnostically, and test kits contain a disclaimer to that effect, such as ‘Do not use this kit as the sole basis for HIV infection’.
Healthcare providers never diagnose HIV based on a single test result – further ‘confirmatory’ tests are always required, and on the basis of how one test performs against another, high levels of accuracy are claimed. But these are bogus claims.
All the tests suffer the same problem: lack of validation against actual virus. When the tests are based on similar principles, if the principles are wrong it means all such tests are wrong too.
As in the early days of Covid, the greater the fear generated by modellers and media, the greater the sense of approval from the authorities. In 1987, a computer model prepared at the Los Alamos National Laboratory said one American adult in ten could become infected by 1994, although researchers admitted that was based on inadequate information.
In fact, the number of ‘HIV’-positive Americans has remained at a little over a million almost from the start of the testing programme. This is not the behaviour of an infectious virus new to humanity.
In 1985, the Royal College of Nursing said one million people in Britain ‘will have Aids in six years unless the killer disease is checked’. The actual cumulative total of Aids cases by 1990 was below 5,000. Today, fewer than 200 Aids diagnoses a year are reported in the UK, and well under 3,000 new ‘HIV’ diagnoses.
In poorer countries, however, continued inappropriate use of the tests has led to claims that millions are ‘HIV-infected’. This belief fuels a continuing flow of jobs and cash for researchers, non-governmental organisations, charities, and drug companies.
According to the World Health Organization, 38million people are ‘living with HIV’ today, and 27,500,000 are receiving antiretroviral drugs.
It is a great tragedy. Through good intentions as well as selfish interests, huge resources are being misdirected. Since the inception in 2003 of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the US government has invested more than $100billion in the global HIV/Aids response.
It is the largest commitment in history by any nation to address a single disease, funded through the American people’s generosity. The project is said to have saved more than 25million lives, prevented millions of HIV infections, and supported several countries in achieving HIV epidemic control – ‘all while significantly strengthening global economic security’.
The weight of support for the HIV theory is still huge. PEPFAR is managed and overseen by the US Department of State, and implemented by seven government departments and agencies, ‘leveraging the power of a whole-of-government approach to controlling the HIV/Aids epidemic’.
But what if there is no epidemic? Would not development aid be a more humane and effective response to the immune deficiency widespread in poor countries than drugs of dubious safety and effectiveness, invalid tests, and endless vaccine trials?
Thirty years ago, in 1993, Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil sent me to Africa for several weeks to report from the ground on what was happening there. At that time, there were forecasts that the population was set to be decimated because of long-established, widespread infection with HIV.
After meeting scientists, doctors, politicians and patients in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, I found no good evidence of a new, epidemic condition. But there was an epidemic of fear – Zimbabwe’s health minister told me that he called it ‘HIVitis’ – created by an invasion of Aids researchers armed with the unvalidated diagnostic tests.
My reports provoked a flood of correspondence, some supportive – such as from the influential and knowledgeable New African magazine – but also including condemnation from the highest level in the UK.
A letter signed by Baroness Chalker, Minister for Overseas Development, Sir David Steel, Liberal Democrat spokesman for foreign affairs, and Tony Worthington, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman, accused me of writing nonsense.
Their letter was said to have been seen and agreed by a long list of heads of medical establishments, including the chief medical officer, the director of the Medical Research Council, and voluntary organisations concerned with Aids. It said:
‘Mr Hodgkinson says that the scientific community have collectively failed to validate their tests for HIV and have deliberately inflated statistics.
If we are to believe him, these scientists have fooled the World Health Organisation, governments in developed and developing countries alike, international development organisations like the Save the Children Fund, ActionAid and Oxfam, institutes of public health, journalists and the general public.
‘The sad fact is that Africa is in the grip of a major HIV epidemic. Tens or hundreds of thousands have already lost their lives: tens of millions are at risk.
‘Mr Hodgkinson has got it badly wrong, and you do your readers a disservice in giving credence to his nonsense.’
In 1993 Africa’s population was approaching 700million. In 30 years, far from being decimated, it has more than doubled and now stands at nearly 1,433,000,000.
Philippe Krynen, head of the African mission Partage Tanzanie, was a star on the HIV/Aids circuit until he realised that ‘this epidemic which was going to wipe out Africa is just a big bubble of soap’, as he told me at his headquarters overlooking Lake Victoria in 1993.
Krynen, whose charity has been doing magnificent work for orphans in the region for nearly 35 years, managed to resist an attempt by the European Community’s Aids task force to have him thrown out of the country in the wake of his revelations.
We were last in touch in November 2022. He wrote: ‘The Aids issue is totally buried in dusty files, at least for us here in Tanzania. The distributors of antiretroviral drugs are still doing their business in the country but the pandemic tale is dead.’
He added:
“As for the Covid tale, it didn’t last long. In 2020 a short epidemic of acute respiratory tract infection was taken care of by a cocktail of common antibiotics. The combination of very few tombs per community, and a patent lack of statistics, dismantled the scarecrow. Prevention (masks and soaps) was quickly abandoned and business as usual never interrupted . . . Tanzaniatoday is seen as a peaceful African jewel.”
Covid has made it more important than ever that the illusions around the HIV theory of Aids should be dispelled.
They are not likely to disappear overnight, but 40 years on, with no vaccine or cure for the purported ‘HIV’ infection, and many lives put at risk by toxic medicines directed against a mythical enemy, is there not someone in the scientific community with the integrity and human decency to take an honest look at the astonishingly detailed and challenging work of the Perth scientists?
Otherwise, we may also be condemned to decades of untruths about Covid. So far, the scientists who created the genetically engineered virus have not been called out for their mistakes, and a continued climate of fear means people are still testing, distancing, masking, and queuing up for an ineffective and unsafe medical treatment that masquerades as a vaccine.
Part 6: Ill-founded claims of a virus genome
COVID has shown how the scientific and medical professions, which have done so much to improve our lives, can go badly off track when fear, and big money, come into play. Most doctors failed to resist lockdowns and vaccines, despite the violation of research and medical ethics on an unprecedented scale.
Thanks to the internet, groups such as HART and many individual health professionals were able to register their protests, but still about two-thirds of the global population took a Covid vaccine which was neither safe nor effective. Around the world, concerned individuals are asking how such a disaster could have happened and how it may be prevented from happening again.
These developments have increased the relevance and importance of a long-neglected scientific challenge to the very existence of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the purported cause of Aids.
Acceptance of the HIV theory of Aids 40 years ago brought a goldmine for the medical research community and pharmaceutical industry, generating hundreds of billions of dollars for trials and treatments.
This flood of money also brought advances in molecular biology that contributed to the creation of the genetically engineered Covid virus, SARS-CoV-2, and the mRNA gene therapy technology on which most Covid vaccines are based.
Yet a vaccine against HIV that in 1984 was promised to be available within two years is still not on the horizon. That is after more than 250 failed trials – and still the funds are flowing. Also, despite drugs that can support patients with genuine immune deficiency, there is no cure for the purported HIV infection.
‘Anti-HIV’ drugs, now also marketed as a supposed preventive against infection, often prove toxic when taken for long periods. Lawsuits over resulting kidney and bone damage have been lodged by thousands of patients across America.
After four decades, might these failures indicate that the most studied infectious agent in history is an emperor with no clothes? That is the view of a group of scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, on whose work this series is based.
Contrary to what nearly everyone believes, public health experts knew from the start that the HIV test could not be used to diagnose Aids. This was because the proteins used in the test were not obtained from purified virus particles. It meant that the antibodies the test purports to detect were never shown to specify the presence of a new virus.
But the experts, meeting under the auspices of the World Health Organization in 1986, put their reservations on one side. The HIV wagon was on a roll and it was considered ‘just not practical’ to stop it. The theory suited so many purposes that it became a fact without the data to support it.
The same uncritical acceptance greeted claims by the HIV pioneers Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo to have sequenced a full-length genome for the virus. That, surely, meant HIV was no figment of the imagination?
And yet, according to a case painstakingly assembled by the Perth group, the genome claims were just as ill-founded as those for the antibody test.
Our bodies teem with genetic activity, responding to the demands of life. Levels of activity vary within cells, and in communications between them. Genes code for proteins, and when production of a particular protein needs to be increased, such as for tissue repair or to fight disease, tiny structures called exosomes carrying specific coded instructions, both as RNA and DNA, are generated by cells.
When cells break down, a ‘soup’ of genetic material may be released. Failure to recognise these confounding factors, or to have valid controls in place to make sure the laboratory work was not producing misleading results, contributed to the construction of the ‘deadly new virus’ story.
HIV is claimed to be a retrovirus, a microbe that inserts a DNA copy of its RNA genome into the DNA of a host cell. To prove that a fragment of RNA is the genome of a retrovirus, it must be distinguished from other genetic material by showing that it originates from a retroviral particle. Yet, as previously described, with ‘HIV’ no such particles have ever been demonstrated to exist.
Genetic sequences that Gallo and Montagnier took to be the virus’s genome were of a type called messenger RNA (mRNA), identifiable through a ‘tail’ comprised entirely of the nucleotide adenine, one of the four building blocks of the genetic code.
Gallo and colleagues maintained that finding these sequences, known as poly (A) RNA, meant finding a retrovirus, but once again, that was a false assumption.
Poly (A) RNA is non-specific. Cells use it as an intermediate between DNA and the production of proteins, and fragments of it appear in a centrifugation process used to try to purify retrovirus particles, ‘banding’ at the same density.
This is why it is so important to use electron microscopy to show that particles with the characteristics of a retrovirus are clearly present in the banded material. The Perth scientists say that since no one has achieved that, then or since, there is no way of identifying ‘HIV’ proteins and genome and determining their roles and properties.
Nowhere in the scientific literature is there proof of the existence of the HIV genome based on extraction of RNA from purified retroviral particles.
Gallo’s work was suspect from the start, as a two-year Office of Scientific Integrity investigation into his laboratory practices found. A cell line which he claimed to have infected with HIV was not exposed to material from an individual Aids patient, but to culture fluids from first three and ultimately from ten patients.
The inquiry found this to be ‘of dubious scientific rigour’ (one scientist called it ‘really crazy’). Nevertheless, it formed part of the sequence of events that led to the construction and acceptance of the theory that a new virus had been identified as the cause of Aids, a theory whose reverberations are still affecting millions today.
Segments of the purported HIV genome can be detected through amplification with the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, and are often wrongly used to confirm an ‘HIV’ diagnosis. The segments vary by as much as 30-50 per cent (compared with less than two per cent between the human and chimpanzee genomes).
This huge variability is much more consistent with the sequences being newly generated within abnormally stimulated cells than from a virus for which no researcher has ever published proof of purification.
The abnormal stimulus can come from chemicals used on cells in the laboratory, or from the many agents, chemical and biological, to which Aids patients or those at risk of Aids are liable to be exposed.
The common factor is the ‘shock’ to the cells (a term used by Nobel laureate geneticist Barbara McClintock for stimuli that rearrange DNA), not the common presence of a mythical virus. This interpretation is supported by the finding of so-called ‘HIV’ sequences from tumour tissue in several types of cancer.
It means that an army of people around the world are testing for a virus never proved to exist, using proteins and genetic sequences often originating from normal (albeit abnormally stimulated) cells.
Countless articles and letters in which the Perth scientists tried to convey this critique were rejected, over many years, by scientific and medical journals. In February 2003, however, a paper published in the British Medical Journal sparked an intensive, 26-month-long online correspondence, involving 842 postings, in which it looked as though the group might at last be heard.
Several exchanges were with Brian Foley, custodian of an HIV database at Los Alamos, New Mexico, who ultimately agreed that RNA selected by Gallo was the basis for what is considered to be the HIV genome, and that it was of a type not specific to retroviruses.
He also agreed that it originated from the centrifugation density band used to look for retroviruses, and that there was no proof the band contained actual virus particles.
Nevertheless, Foley insisted Gallo’s RNA should be seen as the HIV genome. His grounds for doing so were that when a copy (‘molecular clone’) of the RNA was introduced into a cell culture, it resulted in the production of infectious retrovirus particles with the same appearance and constituents as the parent virus.
But when pressed to cite papers proving the existence of such a sequence of events, he was unable to do so. ‘When we asked for proof for the existence of such an HIV infectious molecular clone he responded with a long list of papers.
Although the titles of these papers included the phrase “infectious molecular clone” no such evidence could be found in any of them,’ the Perth scientists wrote.
In what was to be their last posting, they repeated their request: ‘Would Brian Foley please give us a summary of the evidence (not just the title) of a study as well as the evidence from a few confirmatory studies where the existence of an “infectious molecular clone” (as defined by Brian Foley) of “HIV-1” has been proven.
If Brian Foley fails to respond with his summaries and references then we must conclude his whole argument for the existence of “HIV-1”, based upon the existence of the “HIV-1 infectious molecular clone”, collapses.’
At that point, instead of giving the proof requested according to his own criteria, Foley and two other prominent ‘HIV’ advocates, Simon Wain-Hobson and John Moore, put pressure on Richard Smith, the BMJ editor, to stop the debate.
They did this through a letter of complaint about it to the science journal Nature, which over many years had rejected numerous Perth group submissions.
To his credit, Smith resisted, writing: ‘I find it disturbing to see scientists arguing for restriction on free speech. Surely open communication and argument is a fundamental value of science . . . We should never forget Galileo being put before the inquisition. It would be even worse if we allowed scientific orthodoxy to become the inquisition.’
Moore, a specialist in Aids vaccine development, responded: ‘The denialists crave respectability for their maverick opinions, and anything that energises them to continue their efforts to damage science and public health is to be deplored. Let them exercise their right to free speech on their own websites, not on one run by a respected medical journal.’
Soon afterwards, Smith resigned – for unrelated reasons, he has since told me – and in April 2005 the BMJ’s letters editor terminated the debate.
The reality is that construction of the HIV theory was riddled with errors, but once it became established, no one wanted to bring it down. The late Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the polymerase chain reaction, once asked:
“Where is the research that says HIV is the cause of Aids? There are 10,000 people in the world now who specialise in HIV. None has any interest in the possibility HIV doesn’t cause Aids because if it doesn’t, their expertise is useless . . . I can’t find a single virologist who will give me references which show that HIV is the probable cause of Aids. If you ask a virologist for that information, you don’t get an answer, you get fury.”
Similar pressures are at work currently, as the scientific establishment tries to maintain funding for pandemic preparedness (see here, here and here, for example) by covering up the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, by failing to acknowledge deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines, and by ridiculing as ‘conspiracy theorists’ those who challenge their stories.
This is not science: it is institutional self-interest. With both ‘HIV’/Aids and Covid, it is causing vast suffering. The World Health Organization has been a party to these deceptions, and yet is seeking even more power (see here and here).
Is there any other body capable of providing ethical oversight of medical science? How can we best protect ourselves against such failings in future?
Part 7: A challenge we all face
THIS series has summarised a detailed, scientifically argued case that ‘HIV’, the purported viral cause of Aids, is a modern myth. Contrary to numerous assertions, ‘HIV’ has never been proven to exist through standard microbiological techniques.
Yet huge amounts of taxpayer cash have been commandeered by the HIV/Aids industry for research and treatment, with more than 250 failed ‘HIV’ vaccine trials and an endless search for a cure.
Failures that led to the construction and maintenance of the HIV/Aids theory, and suppression of contrary evidence, are being repeated now with Covid. Worse will be to come while such high-level mistakes remain unacknowledged and uncorrected by the scientific and medical communities.
As we have seen, biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who passed away last year at the age of 85, left an extraordinary scientific legacy. She led a group based in Perth, Western Australia – 2,000 miles from the nearest major city – that for 40 years quietly amassed a treasure trove of data deconstructing the ‘HIV’ theory in fine detail, and supporting her belief that Aids was not an infectious disease. Instead, she attributed it to a build-up of cell and tissue damage known as oxidative stress.
This can arise when there is an imbalance, at the cell level, between toxic exposures and the body’s ability to deal with them.
She had at her side as fellow researcher, companion, and scribe Dr Valendar Turner, an emergency physician who first met her in 1980 when she brought her grandmother to the Royal Perth Hospital as a patient. Later, when she was working at the hospital herself in the medical physics department, they found a common interest in physics and biology.
‘When Aids came along I wandered into her office one day and announced “I see they’ve found the cause of Aids”, Turner recalled. ‘To which she replied, “Oh no they haven’t”. That’s how my involvement with Aids started.
‘I think what Eleni and I had in common was a great interest in the mechanism of everything biological. Although in my younger days I was focused on the mechanism of disease, I soon realised it was essential to figure out normalcy. Once united by Aids it was off and running.’
Another regular visitor was John Papadimitriou, Professor of Pathology at the University of Western Australia, who reviewed one of her papers on carcinogenesis. He became a founding member of the Perth group on its formation in 1981.
Other scientists have made huge sacrifices in fighting the HIV theory of Aids. They include microbiologist Professor Peter Duesberg, who as described in Part 2 of this series was a star of his profession for his pioneering work on retroviruses, of which HIV was claimed to be one, until he declared there was no way it could be causing Aids.
His critique gained more attention than the Perth group’s work, but today he is derided as ‘a proponent of Aids denialism’, despite his challenge over HIV having been supported by an international alliance of scientists, doctors and other researchers. At one time, this included three Nobel laureates.
In 1995 Duesberg published Inventing the Aids Virus, a scholarly 700-page work which began by declaring: ‘By any measure, the war on Aids has been a colossal failure.’ He argued that ‘the lure of money and prestige, combined with powerful political pressures, tempted otherwise responsible scientists to overlook – even suppress – major flaws in Aids theory’.
Duesberg put forward what he called the drug/Aids hypothesis, which argued that heavy, long-term drug use was the main cause of Aids. He saved many lives through campaigning against the first ‘anti-HIV’ drug AZT, heavily promoted as the ‘gold standard’ of treatment but later found to have killed thousands.
When its use was finally wound down, part of a reduction in disease and deaths that followed was mistakenly attributed to the drugs that replaced it.
The Perth scientists agree that heavy recreational drug use can be a principal cause of oxidative stress and Aids, and that AZT was worse than useless. Their theory goes wider, however. They share Duesberg’s view that Aids is not a sexually transmitted infectious disease, but argue that one of the main causes of both ‘HIV’-positivity and Aids is anally deposited semen.
Numerous studies in homosexual men have shown that frequent, unprotected, receptive anal sex brings a high risk of testing positive, and subsequently developing Aids. No such risk is present for the exclusively insertive (semen-donating) individual.
In heterosexual studies the evidence is the same: the only sexual risk factor for acquiring a positive antibody test is passive anal intercourse. For Aids to appear, the Perth scientists say, a high frequency of receptive anal sex over a long period is necessary.
In contrast to vaginal sex, semen in the back passage is retained and absorbed. The rectum is lined by only a single layer of absorptive cells, whereas the vagina has a multi-layered, skin-like protective lining.
Further evidence in support of this understanding includes the fact that semen is one of the most potent biological oxidants, and that it can be both carcinogenic and immunosuppressive.
On top of that, rectal and colonic trauma accompanying passive anal sex – facilitating absorption of semen – are proven risk factors. Volatile nitrite inhalants, widely used in gay sex in the early years of Aids, are also potent oxidising agents and played a part in their own right.
‘The evidence shows that Aids is not a disease of sexual orientation but of sexual practices, passive anal intercourse in men and women,’ the Perth scientists say.
“It is not the sexual act per se but high frequencies of passive anal intercourse with ejaculation combined with drug use and trauma to the intestinal lining which facilitate system absorption of semen and other toxins.”
This means that the ‘safe sex’ condom campaigns initiated by the gay community played a vital part in reducing deaths from Aids. They reduced exposure to semen, as well as to sexually transmitted infections circulating among some of the groups most at risk of developing Aids.
Pioneers of the virus theory felt supported in their belief that Aids was an STI by the fact that many early studies showed a relationship between different types of sexual activity and the presence or appearance of ‘HIV’ antibodies, for which almost all Aids patients tested positive.
This association was real. But it came about because of the flawed way the test was developed, not because a new virus was present. A positive test indicated elevated levels of the many immune-stimulating agents to which those in the Aids risk groups had been exposed. Epidemiologists and others documented such exposures from day one.
People who tested ‘HIV’ positive should never have been given to understand that they were under a death sentence, as was the case for many years because of the ‘lethal new virus’ belief.
If exposure to the true causes of ‘HIV’-positivity is reduced or removed, the increased risk of ill-health will disappear unless the damage caused to the immune system is already irreversible. Testing ‘HIV’-positive should be regarded as signalling an effect of the toxic exposures and associated cell disorder that can lead to Aids.
The mythical ‘HIV’ is not the cause.
This was seen particularly clearly in haemophiliacs. Early ways of treating their blood clotting disorder involved exposing them to concentrates made from blood donations from hundreds of thousands of people. Many tested positive as a result of this continuous challenge from foreign protein, and, tragically, were then given lethal doses of AZT.
When genetic engineering made it possible to produce the clotting factor they needed in a pure form, those who had previously tested ‘HIV-positive’ showed immediate signs of immune system recovery.
Similar results have been seen in drug addicts, another of the groups at risk of Aids. They can lose both their ‘HIV’ antibodies and risk of illness when they give up their habit.
Acceptance of this understanding would lift the curse of an ‘HIV’ diagnosis from millions, especially in poor countries where many diseases of poverty and malnutrition have been renamed Aids through misinterpretation and misuse of the unvalidated ‘HIV’ test.
Even after 40 years, there is no microbiological proof of sexual transmission based on the isolation of ‘HIV’ from genital secretions of index cases followed by tracing and testing of sexual contacts. Except in poor countries, Aids has stayed confined to groups at risk because of lifestyle factors rather than because of exposure to a genuine sexually transmitted infection.
Where does this leave us?
The Perth group’s website contains all the detailed references that support this radically different picture from what the world has been led to believe about Aids. It is not a wild challenge, but the fruit of four decades of dedicated work.
Error correction is supposed to be the bedrock of science. It is never too late. In all of recorded history, mistaken ideas arise and sometimes last for hundreds of years, until the damage they are causing finally brings about a rethink.
The gross mishandling of Covid has awakened many to the dangers of premature consensus in science, a consequence of too much power having been ceded to self-preserving, self-enriching agencies.
Can the ‘HIV’ story teach us a similar lesson? Or are we going to allow the global pandemic industry to keep us in a state of constant fear? Can Africans bring themselves to break free from the neo-colonial hold on the continent of western scientific and ‘philanthropic’ agencies?
Perhaps each of us will have to do more to strengthen ourselves if these failures are to be brought to an end. The best-selling author and psychologist Jordan Peterson declares that we must take a stand against the ‘blind and Luciferian, prideful and intellect-based top-down tyrannies of emergency and compulsion’ that will otherwise be our future.
As we become individually more powerful, he says, ‘we must take on more responsibility – or else. If we fail to rectify our personal pathologies of pride, envy, and a willingness to lie, we will find ourselves mired in conflict with the world, both natural and social – and in precise proportion to our refusal to check the devil within.’
The psychologist Carl Jung, also quoted by Peterson, made a similar call in his 1958 book The Undiscovered Self. Reason proves powerless to stop atrocities (such as the Nazi genocide), he wrote, when its arguments affect only the conscious mind, and not the unconscious.
The Covid and ‘HIV’ tragedies are both examples of how reason can fly out of the window on a mass scale.
In their 2021 book Covid-19 and the Global Predators – We Are the Prey, Peter and Ginger Breggin maintain that ‘loose coalitions of money and influence’ pursuing a globalist agenda were able to exploit widespread fears for the future, causing many to believe in the need for lockdowns and mass vaccinations despite the immediately evident and enormous harm caused.
With the ‘HIV’ hypothesis, factors leading to its instant acceptance included a generalised fear that the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies had gone too far, alongside a genuine sympathy with the early gay victims of Aids.
With great prescience, Jung wrote: ‘It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.’
By Neville Hodgkinson. He is the former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent who created an international storm by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids. His new book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, is an expanded and updated version of his previous book on the controversy. It is available here.
Published by Unz.com
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com