Dean's World

Quoted:

Dean:

Since you seem to be on a crusade to prove that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, don't you think the most courageous thing you could do would be to volunteer to have yourself injected with HIV? Since I assume that you don't engage in those high-risk behaviors like recreational drug use and gay sex, and you are in fact questioning whether AIDS drugs actually cause AIDS, you could be an important test case. Getting yourself injected, then living a long, drug-free, healthy life would be the best proof possible of your hypothesis, right?

Curious to hear your thoughts on this.

Best, Thomas More.

Hi Thomas.

Several people, including Peter Duesberg, have repeatedly made this offer, with only a few simple and straightforward requirements. They've all been ignored.

But I am not on any crusade and I have nothing to prove. Indeed, the very claim that I'm on a "crusade" on this matter is more than a little annoying. If I'm on a crusade for anything it is greater accountability to the taxpayers who fund HIV research, and greater accountability to HIV+ individuals, and more rigorous scientific standards.

However, as it happens yes, there are quite a few people who've openly offered to self-inject. There are also quite a large number of HIV+ individuals who are refusing the anti-retrovirals who are willing to be studied or take part in studies.

But, like so many mammoth government and corporate bureaucracies, the system has been jerry-rigged: as it stands, it is illegal to work with HIV or HIV+ individuals in any research setting without government permission, and any researcher doing it without permission can lose his lab and his job and maybe even go to jail.

Furthermore, over the last 20 years they have gradually expanded the case definition of AIDS, and the supposed latency period of the virus, to the point that they would no longer consider it in the least bit unusual for someone to self-inject and then live 20 years perfectly healthy. So let's see, I'm 40 years old, I self-inject now, and in 20 years I develop a heart condition and then contract a bad case of pneumonia. By current definitions they would claim I died of AIDS, not because of the heart condition but because of the pneumonia and, after all, I was HIV+.

Or if I didn't die? If I lived to a ripe old age of 95? They would call me one of the "lucky" ones, the "long-term non-progressors." Or maybe one of the people they're only just now very reluctantly beginning to admit might, possibly, maybe exist: people who are "completely immune" to the virus.

After spending literally over 20 years and tens of billions of dollars studying HIV--more time and money than was spent putting a man on the moon--so far the HIV establishment cannot answer simple questions like exactly how the virus causes t-cell loss, or what your exact odds of dying from the virus are if you live a sanitary, well-nourished, non drug using, and monogamous lifestyle. Although at least now they admit that in the United States it's actually very difficult for healthy heterosexuals to transmit the virus to each other via regular heterosexual intercourse.

Yet somehow they still wish us to believe the problem is still rampantly out of control in Africa--basically, that black Africans are so sexually promiscuous and irresponsible that as many as a third of them are dying of the disease. Funny bit being they've been saying that for over 20 years but the African population continues to expand.

Oh yes, and they recently admitted that they grossly exaggerated HIV's spread in Africa--in parts at least. Without explaining in detail why their new methodologies are that much better than the old ones they admit failed.

Thought-provoking question: even if HIV really is immune-suppressive, would we have saved more Africans (or Americans) by giving them clean water, sanitation, and decent food, and healthy lifestyle information, rather than condoms and expensive and clearly toxic drugs?

It is not in the least bit out of line for anyone who pays taxes to demand simple, straightforward, non-condescending answers to any of these questions. Nor to demand greater transparency and accountability in the funding. The establishment's hiding behind their bogus "peer review" (read: Good Ole Boy Network) process in grant allocation needs reform, and not just in this area.

You want self-injectors? Quite a few are already on the table offering this, which may in part explain why the establishment has worked so hard in recent years to suggest that any such individuals can be ignored anyway--unless they happen to die of anything that vaguely looks like AIDS, in which case they'll ferociously declare it AIDS anyway.

If none of this sounds right to you, then start asking more questions. Remember: it's your tax dollars they are spending.

Regards,

Dean

PS: By the way, here's a study that could be easily funded and would stop a lot of the debate in its tracks. And it would be amazingly cheap compared to a lot of other research. If HIV is indeed a perinatally transmitted retrovirus (of which there are uncounted numbers) then it would be simple enough to test the mothers of a few hundred HIV+ gay men and IV drug users in the United States. It'd be pretty easy to control and double-blind too.

Prediction: none of the "peer reviewers" who control all the grant funding and all the legal permissions to study HIV will be willing to give even a few thousand dollars out of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they control to fund such a study. They'll even act offended that despicable little peon taxpayers like me and you would possibly dare to suggest experiments--we aren't "qualified" and anyway we don't wear halos like they do.

P.P.S.: Magic Johnson will be on Oprah today. Lee Evans has a question for him.