AID$ INCORPORATED: My interview with Dr. Peter Duesberg (December 1st – “World AIDS Day”)

“If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document. We know that to err is human, but the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is one hell of a mistake. I say this rather strongly as a warning; Duesberg has been saying it for a long time.”

~Dr. Kary Mullis, Biochemist, 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (Developed technique used in HIV tests to measure viral load in people with AIDS)

“The HIV-causes-AIDS dogma represents the grandest and perhaps the most morally destructive fraud that has ever been perpetrated on young men and women of the Western world. AIDS has been a disease of definition… If we said that it didn’t exist and didn’t pay for it with taxpayers’ money, it would disappear in the background of normal mortality. I feel that for scientists to remain silent in the face of all this doubt is tantamount to criminal negligence.” 

~Dr. Charles Thomas, former Professor of Biochemistry, Harvard and John Hopkins Universities

“The community as a whole doesn’t listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints. Duesberg is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by HIV.”

~Dr. Walter Gilbert, Professor in Molecular Biology, 1980 Nobel prize for chemistry

“There are too many shortcomings in the theory that HIV causes all signs of AIDS. We are seeing people HIV-infected for 9, 10, 12 years or more, and they are still in good shape, their immune system is still good. It is unlikely that these people will come down with AIDS later.”

~Dr. Luc Montagnier, Virologist, 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, co-discoverer of HIV, says AIDS can be cured with nutrition

“They have hyped up HIV into this super-rapist but in reality the damn thing can hardly get an erection. When AIDS patients’ bodies finally break down from the effects of these anti-viral drugs, they say, ‘Now the virus has become resistant, and the drugs have lost their effectiveness.’ What really is happening is the toxicity of the drugs builds up to a point where the patient cannot stand it anymore. And, of course, they say it was the virus — rather than the entirely inevitable and predictable toxicity of these damned drugs.”

~Dr. Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular Biology University of Berkeley, first person to isolate a cancer gene
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Strangely enough, I first became suspicious of the HIV = AIDS hypothesis by watching Black Entertainment Television. Shortly after Bob Johnson sold B.E.T. for 3 billion dollars to Viacom, major changes started happening: Tavis Smiley, Ed Gordon, Lead Story, Teen Summit, Jacque Reid and unbelievably the news, were all gone. Then suddenly, a massive influx of commercials telling BET’s core audience to go out and get an HIV test became the norm. I couldn’t understand how a channel that had just cancelled it’s only educational show for the youth, a channel that had just fired an extremely informative reporter like Tavis “Don’t call me Travis” Smiley, and a channel that actually had the audacity to cancel the news, could have the nerve to pretend that it somehow gave a damn about our health.

Immediately, I began doing all the research that I could on HIV/AIDS and came across Dr. Peter Duesberg who, back in 1970, isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses. Perhaps even more importantly, Duesberg is also internationally known as the number one critic of the establishment’s HIV = AIDS hypothesis — And because of this, he’s been to hell and back.

Decades later, despite countless attacks from “The Powers That Be”, he still continues his crusade to prove to the world that HIV doesn’t cause “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” (A.I.D.S. aka “A weakened immune system”).

~Chase Swayze
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Q: Why do you believe that HIV is not the cause of AIDS?

DUESBERG: Chase, this is not a matter of belief. In my profession I must test, whether the available evidence fits a specific theory or hypothesis. If the hypothesis predicts and explains all facts, I would conclude that the hypothesis is right and if it does not it would be wrong. In the case of AIDS the prevailing hypothesis holds that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) causes the 26 plus infectious and non-infectious diseases that define AIDS.

1) This hypothesis predicts first and foremost that AIDS is a contagious disease.
But, according to the peer-reviewed literature:
(i) Not one doctor or nurse has ever contracted AIDS (not just HIV) from over 929,985 AIDS patients recorded in the US by 2004.
(ii) Not one of the thousand HIV researchers has contracted AIDS from HIV.
(iii) No wives of hemophiliacs have contracted AIDS from their husbands.
(iv) There is no AIDS-epidemic in prostitutes.
Thus AIDS is not contagious.

2) The hypothesis states that only 5 to 10 years after HIV has induced anti-HIV antibodies, alias a “positive AIDS test”, the virus causes fatal AIDS diseases. But, all other viruses cause diseases within days or weeks after infection shortly before they induce anti-viral immunity.  As a result disease follows soon after infection and is self-limiting via anti-viral immunity.  The anti-viral immunity ends the disease, because the virus is neutralized and can no longer infect any cells.  In rare cases immunity comes too late.  In these cases some viral diseases can be fatal also within weeks after infection. By contrast the HIV-AIDS hypothesis says that HIV causes disease only after it is neutralized by antibody and even then only 5 to 10 years later.  This is a total paradox, that 22 years of AIDS research for at least 100 billion $ have not been able to resolve. The effectiveness of the anti-HIV antibodies in “HIV-positives” is the reason, why no free virus can be found, even in dying AIDS patients.

3) HIV is said to cause immuno-deficiency by killing T-cells. But only 1 in 500 T-cells of AIDS patients is ever infected, even in dying AIDS patients.  Thus something else must kill T-cells in AIDS patients. By contrast in all other viral diseases many more cells are infected than the body can spare or regenerate during the course of the disease. And there is plenty of virus, but no antibody to neutralize it during the early phase of the disease.

4) All conventional virus diseases are randomly distributed in the population.  They don’t discriminate between heterosexuals and homosexuals or between blacks and whites. By contrast AIDS is restricted in the US and Europe almost 100% to male homosexuals using amphetamines, nitrite inhalants and other psychoactive drugs as aphrodisiacs, and to intravenous drug users. In sum, this suggests that drugs, rather than a latent and neutralized virus, are causing AIDS.

Q: Could you please explain how AIDS is nothing more than a group of old diseases with a HIV + label?

DUESBERG: The Centers for Disease Control has defined AIDS since 1985 as a collection of 26 old diseases provided they occur in the presence of anti-body against HIV.  This is a circular definition:  When tuberculosis is associated with anti-body against HIV it is called AIDS and in the absence of antibody it is diagnosed by its old name (tuberculosis).

Q: Robert Gallo is the so-called “discoverer” of HIV who was later convicted of fraud and scientific misconduct. Could you please give a little background on who Robert Gallo is and also explain why his 1984 press conference that declared that HIV = AIDS was called the biggest scientific, medical blunder in the 20th century?

DUESBERG: Unfortunately Robert Gallo’s HIV-AIDS hypothesis has subsequently failed all criteria of a viral disease and has failed to produce any beneficial results:  There is no vaccine and the anti-viral medications developed by this hypothesis cause AIDS by killing T-cells and other human cells as well.

Failure, however, is the common fate of many hypothesis.

The problem with the Gallo hypothesis is that it was endorsed by his employer, the US government, before it was published and tested.  Since it became a US government program and was advanced by government-funded researchers and  propaganda, it  could no longer be scientifically challenged for political reasons.  The US government is supposed to be infallible and likewise American mainstream AIDS scientists funded by up to 10 billion $ per year are not supposed to be fallible.

Once the government had endorsed Gallo’s hypothesis and funded 1000s of scientists to study it, AIDS science became as big and affluent as the Titanic.  But it could no longer turn even in face of an iceberg.  It had “to stay the course”.  As a result 100 thousands died un-necessarily and many of those were even poisoned by anti-viral drugs, like AZT, originally developed 40 years ago to kill human cells for chemotherapy.

Q: Is it true that while this press conference was going on, the blood test used to detect HIV was being patented, later earning large royalties for Gallo?

DUESBERG: I understand the royalties were shared by the National Institutes of Health and Robert Gallo.

Q: Are HIV tests even relevant since HIV is said not to be the AIDS virus?

DUESBERG: Based on 22 years of failures to prove the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, these tests are irrelevant to AIDS. This maybe a reason why president Bush unexpectedly suspended the former travel restrictions to the US based on positive-HIV tests. Apparently even Bush and his advisers are no longer sure that anti-bodies against (!) HIV are a serious health threat to Americans.

Q: So what would you say to someone who’s thinking about taking an HIV test, or to someone who’s scared to death because they’ve just been told they’re HIV positive?

DUESBERG: I am, of course, not a psychiatrist.  But I recommend to save anxiety until one is fully informed about the evidence for the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. This could be achieved in several days by reading “Inventing the AIDS Virus” (PD, Regnery publ. Washington DC, 1996). The book comes with a Foreword by Nobelist Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction.

Q: You were in the documentary “HIV/AIDS: Fact or Fiction” where they mentioned a study that was done where 25 HIV positive men contributed 1 million sperm cells each and out of 25 million sperm cells, only one virus blueprint was found. What are your thoughts on HIV/AIDS being labeled as a sexually transmitted disease?

DUESBERG: The experiment you just described gives a very clear answer to your question:  AIDS is not sexually transmitted. If it were, AIDS would have long ago become a heterosexual epidemic, exactly as Gallo, the NIH and all other HIV-AIDS researchers erroneously predicted for decades. After all about 4.5 million babies are generated per year in the US by conventional “unsafe” sex, but there is no heterosexual AIDS epidemic in America!

Q: The origin of AIDS is something that has constantly been blamed on Africa. The mainstream media has even gone so far as to say that Africans ate monkeys or had sex with monkeys and that’s how AIDS came into existence. We are at the point now where African Americans are being blamed for having HIV and spreading HIV at rates that are much higher than other races. If HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, then why are Africans and African Americans alike being blamed for HIV/AIDS?

DUSEBERG: This is a non-scientific question and I can only speculate on the answer. Since Gallo and rival HIV discoverers in Europe wanted to sell their discovery as a new virus causing a new disease, they had to come up with an origin that was “new” to America and Europe. For that scenario the African jungle is still a “paradise”, nobody has relatives with phone numbers to call there, the movie and TV industry have cultivated jungle monsters for decades both real and imaginary from King Kong to wild Gorillas mating damsels in distress, alligators, cannibals, voodoo men, Ebola viruses, killer bees, and now a new AIDS virus – that oddly first struck male homosexuals in bathhouses and discos of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles - years before it became a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in Africa! Cute All-American and European science fiction. But very credible on American and European TV shows and in science journals and  – as everybody understands – a bit more difficult to prove, like all other theories on evolution.

Q: Here’s a direct quote from the Center for Disease Control: “Rates among non-Hispanic black females were 19 times higher than rates among non-Hispanic white females, underscoring the need for continued emphasis on programs targeting females in racial/ethnic minority populations to reduce the number of cases of HIV/AIDS.” — I know I’m probably repeating myself here, but the question must be asked of why Black Americans (Black females specifically as of late) are being repeatedly demonized as having a dangerous STD called HIV, when your own personal studies have shown HIV not to be dangerous nor an STD?

DUESBERG: Chase, as I said in answer to a previous question of yours, the relevance of anti-HIV antibody tests depends entirely on proof for the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. Since there is no proof for viral AIDS, I consider any “programs targeting” HIV-positives scientifically worthless and politically biased.

Q: Is it true that in Africa they label almost every disease and illness as AIDS?

DUESBERG: Perhaps not every disease. 

But it is true that AIDS in Africa is clinically very different from AIDS in the US. Most African AIDS cases are tuberculosis, weight loss, fever and diarrhea – classical diseases of poverty, malnutrition and poor sanitation. These diseases are now diagnosed as AIDS without HIV-tests, because HIV tests are too expensive in Africa.  Accordingly the American Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization accept “presumptive” AIDS diagnoses from Africa – without evidence for HIV. 

This in turn helps both Africans, who get funded and foreign aid based on AIDS quotas, and HIV-AIDS researchers in America and Europe, who must defend their new sexually transmitted AIDS epidemics against declining case numbers at home to their government funding agencies.

Q: How did AIDS go from being seen as a “Gay-White-Male” disease back in the 80′s to being seen as a “Straight-Black-Female” disease today?

DUESBERG: AIDS did not “go from being seen as a Gay-White-Male disease” to a “straight-Black-Female disease” as you say. As far as I know, it continues to be seen as a gay disease by all people I know. But the HIV-AIDS propaganda from the Centers for Disease Control and from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases continues to present AIDS, as if it were a random epidemic like all conventional viral and microbial epidemics – as if, “We are are all in this together.” 
Instead, AIDS is a lifestyle epidemic caused by recreational and anti-viral drugs in the US and Europe and by malnutrition in Africa. But since the real causes of AIDS are politically incorrect and thus highly un-fundable the HIV-AIDS establishment is forced to “stay the course” for its own survival.

Q: Let’s talk about AZT (the drug used to fight AIDS). Can you discuss AZT’s history and why you call it “AIDS by prescription?”

DUESBERG: A viral theory of disease offers good prospects for vaccinations, but is a disaster for prospective anti-viral medication.  Since viruses contain just tiny pieces of information, much too little to synthesize their own DNAs, RNAs and proteins, they are completely dependent on the cell – and thus obligatory parasites.  In other words the cell must make all viral proteins and nucleic acids for the virus.

This defines the fundamental problem of anti-viral medication:  Anything that inhibits or poisons viral DNA, RNA and protein synthesis is also inhibiting cellular DNA, RNA and protein synthesis and is thus inevitably toxic.
For example the DNA chain-terminator, AZT, which was developed long before AIDS to terminate human DNA synthesis for cancer chemotherapy, kills HIV but it also kills the cell.  Since HIV does not kill any immune cells, but AZT does – like most other chemotherapies – “AZT is AIDS by prescription”.

Q: How dangerous are these new drugs that are used to fight HIV/AIDS? And what would you say to someone who says people are living longer because of these drugs?

DUESBERG: Most anti-HIV drugs were developed to kill cancer cells, and are therefore the most toxic prescription drugs available.  As a medication against a hypothetical viral cause of an AIDS disease, that could possibly treated by conventional methods, they are indeed the biggest blunder in the history of medicine I am aware about.
The slogan of the HIV-AIDS establishment that ‘anti-viral drugs prolong life’ has been refuted recently in the largest study of its kind, published in the Lancet. In this study hundreds of researchers and doctors from Europe and the US summarize their results with anti-HIV drugs as follows:

Interpretation – Virological response after starting HAART improved over calendar years, but such improvement has not translated into a decrease in mortality (Lancet, 368, 451-458, 2006). HAART = highly active antiretroviral therapy.

 
Q: What is your opinion of the drug companies that make AZT and other AIDS fighting drugs? 
 
DUESBERG: My opinion of the drug companies making AZT and similarly toxic anti-HIV drugs is not very high, but is consistent with our capitalist philosophy to sell what the market bears as long as it is legally possible.  
By contrast, my opinion about my colleagues who provided the ideology for the production and prescription of these drugs – that no poison is worse than the hypothetical AIDS virus in order to advance their careers is very low indeed.  These “free” scientists and doctors were trained and educated at our “free” universities at very high cost to the taxpayers and prospective AIDS patients, to provide the best medical and humanitarian help to a faithful public.  But my peers betray the trust of their people by not calling into question a hypothesis that has as yet not saved one single life.

‘The important thing in science is not to stop questioning’, when a theory fails, says Einstein.  And the HIV-AIDS scientists have failed to act as scientists and, above all as doctors, in the face of a hypothesis that has failed to generate an AIDS vaccine or a curative drug or any other benefits to the patients in 22 years. Instead, of welcoming alternative AIDS theories, they have censored, personally attacked and de-funded all researchers including myself, who offered alternative solutions to the flawed HIV-AIDS hypothesis and have warned about the disastrous “therapies” of HIV-antibody (!, not virus)-positives with DNA chain-terminators.
 
Q: Does the HIV/AIDS theory simply come down to money?
 
DUESBERG: I think it is ego first and money second.  A researcher like me and many of my peers prefer to solve a problem and get recognition for solving a scientific or a medical problem much more than making money from it. 

The problem is compounded, however, when ALL the money is for one hypothesis only – as is the case in American AIDS research.  In that case  science “comes down to money”, as you say.

Q: Can you explain the newfound theory of cervical cancer being caused by a virus, along with how cervical cancer was added to the list of AIDS diseases, which greatly expanded the “definition” of the disease to women?

DUESBERG: The virus-cervical cancer hypothesis is another example of virus hunters trying to blame a non-contagious disease, like cervical cancer, on their favorite virus, in this case Human Papilloma or wart Virus.  As in the case of AIDS, this hypothesis postulates that the wart virus is not carcinogenic when it first infects via sexual transmission and replicates in women and men in their twenties.  At that time it just causes benign warts. But 30 to 50 years later – yes 30-50 years! – long after it is neutralized by antibody and no longer replicating, it is said to cause fatal cancer.  This is the same age when cervical cancer typically strikes also women without prior wart virus infection.  Oddly, this time men are spared, the only risk group are women. Indeed, since 1993 the wart virus hypothesis must compete with the HIV hypothesis for cervical cancer.  At that time the Centers for Disease Control added cervical cancer to the list of AIDS defining diseases in order to support the prediction of the AIDS-virus hypothesis, that viruses don’t discriminate between sexes and cause random diseases, although AIDS in the US and Europe is 80% male.
 
Q: What problems have you encountered since you’ve went public about HIV not being the cause of AIDS?

 
DUESBERG: No more research grants, neither for AIDS nor for cancer (a total of 24 have been turned down since 1992), no more graduate students, no more invitations to professional conferences, no more citations in the professional literature, censorship of my research papers by high impact journals, no more teaching of graduate student classes, no appointments to decision making departmental committees, no more invitations to NIH or California State, Leukemia Society and other study sections reviewing grant applications of my peers for cancer and retrovirus/AIDS research, loss of over 80% of professional friends outside and inside our campus, merit increases only in 1/2 steps and only after protracted proceedings of up to 3 years involving appeals to the chancellor, as in the last case, no more invitations to name seminar speakers and no more invitations to dinner parties for seminar speakers invited to the department. 
 
And all this in “the freest of all countries” as our president calls it.

 
Q: In your book “Inventing the AIDS Virus” you have two Nobel Prize winning doctors who both agree with you and wrote blurbs on the back cover saying that HIV does not cause AIDS. Why hasn’t your book gotten the attention that it deserves?
 
DUESBERG: I think my answer to the previous question holds a key to this question too. The fear of our “free scientists” to become de-funded and excommunicated, and that of our “free investigative newspapers” to be called “irresponsible” by the NIH and the CDC are the the probable reasons!
 
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to say or add that you feel we’ve left out? 
 
DUESBERG: There is documentation for most all I have said here in www.duesberg.com
 
“Peter Duesberg is a man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humour, and a rare critical sense. This critical sense often makes us look twice, then a third time, at a conclusion many of us believed to be foregone. However, his critiques are sometimes a major problem for the casual observer. When is he truly debating? When is he only being the devil’s advocate? When is he being the devil himself? The casual observer is also often at a loss to determine which of the many weapons he possesses he is using. Peter, it is hard for us to tell when you are using your machine gun or your slingshot, or simply exercising your vocal cords. In any event you are an extraordinary scientist, a man who makes life more interesting and pleasurable to many of us and it is my good fortune to know you as a friend.”