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p Can you imagine receiving a fatal diagnosis without being told the diagnosis is based on an unproven idea and an uncertain test? Being instructed to take powerful, experimental drugs without being told these drugs compromise health, destroy functions necessary to sustain life, and were approved for use without adequate testing? Being informed that you have, or should expect, deadly illnesses without being told that these same illnesses are not considered fatal when they occur in “normal” people?

p For anyone who tests HIV positive, getting all the facts is a matter of life and death. The important decisions a person makes should be based on thorough, verifiable data. All of us need and have the right to receive honest and complete information about HIV and AIDS.

p Almost ever}^^1^^ AIDS organization in the country offers free instruction for people who test HIV positive. Standard information includes how to prepare a will, how to collect disability, health insurance, and public benefits, what drugs and tests to take, and which diseases to anticipate—all based on the assumption that HIV positives are or will be ill and do not have long to live.

p Information on AIDS that is free from bias, that accurately describes tests and drugs, and offers facts that support a will to live, participate in society, and cultivate a healthy future are rarely, if ever mentioned. Some AIDS groups even lobby to limit public access to data that undermine their dire presentations of HIV and AIDS.

p For many people handed an HIV positive diagnosis, these brief pages provide their first awareness that a normal, healthy life is not something they can only hope for, but something they can choose to achieve. Unfortunately for most people who test positive, the AIDS education they receive portrays their choices as being limited to toxic drug therapy or devastating illness, and encourages chronic fear, sadness, and resignation to an early death.

p There are thousands of HIV positives who lead healthy lives without toxic AIDS drugs. What they have in common is not some unique, mysterious gene or a weakened strain of the virus, but an open-minded approach to information, an understanding of basic principles of medicine and science, and the knowledge that the responsibility for their well-being is ultimately their own. For more information on their lives, please see The Other Side of AIDS on page 94.

This book examines only a portion of the growing body of scientific, medical and epidemiological evidence that refutes popularly accepted ideas about HIV and AIDS. Readers are strongly encouraged to conduct further research and use the resources offered here.

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Incorrect Ideas about HIV and AIDS Cost Us All

p To the degree that we allow unfounded ideas about HIV and AIDS to determine our actions, influence our choices, dictate our public policies, or define our world view, we are all victims of AIDS.

p Since the 1984 announcement that HIV causes AIDS, all AIDS research has been based on the hypothesis that HIV, an inexplicably lethal new virus, is responsible for a group of previously known, disconnected diseases renamed AIDS. Setting the focus of all AIDS efforts on HIV, a virus that strains the rules of biology, epidemiology and logic, has rendered humankind few, if any, beneficial results.

p The lives of over 400,000 Americans have been given to the notion that HIV is the only possible cause of AIDS, and that toxic drugs offer the only possible prevention, treatment, or hope for a cure. Many more lives have been forever altered by a positive result on a non-standardized test for harmless antibodies that may or may not be associated with HIV

More than $50 billion in federal AIDS funding has provided no significant understanding of HIV, has produced no safe and effective therapies, and has not brought us any closer to ending AIDS. Instead, we have constructed a powerful AIDS establishment that regulates our news, limits our access to information, and demands an ever greater allocation of our resources and support. Rather than helping to resolve AIDS, we have funded the growth of multi-billion dollar industries, institutions and organizations that depend on AIDS and on our continued devotion to the narrow and unproductive HIV hypothesis.

Objective Examination of HIV and AIDS is Fundamental to Progress.

p To understand and solve AIDS, it is necessary to investigate all legitimate scientific data, even when such information challenges our present understanding and perceptions. Progress in any area depends on the ability to engage in an unbiased evaluation of facts, to raise critical questions and to conduct an objective search for meaningful answers.

p Silence = Death...Of People, Ideas and Progress

p “There is classical science-the way it’s supposed to work-and then there’s religion. I regained my sanity when I realized that AIDS science was a religious discourse. The one thing I will go to my grave not understanding is why everyone was so quick to accept everything the government said as truth. Especially the central myth: The cause of AIDS is known. What in the world made activists accept that-on the basis of a press conference, no less?

p “ My only theory is that AIDS requires the daily management of massive amounts of uncertainty, and people cling to any certainty they can find. Even if it’s false.”

p Michael Callen, author, AIDS activist (deceased), Genre magazine, February/March, 1994

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p “ Most HIV trials are useless rubbish. Research scientists [outside AIDS research] laugh at us. To them a good sample size is 30,000 people. We do studies with 1,500 people and think that’s wonderful when the actual number of relevant patients is sometimes so small, you cannot rule out chance as the reason for the results you get. It is also unethical to run trials of drugs in places like Malaysia with only 30 people involved and then try to justify these flawed trials because some people got access to drugs who otherwise would have had nothing.”

p Kevin Frost, Manager of Research Programs for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), Positive Nation, September 1998

p “ The story of AIDS is deeply connected with the vicissitudes of the theory that viruses cause cancer and the failure of the cancer research program. Michael Verney-Elliot put it most acidly when he said: ’From the people who didn’t bring you the virus that causes cancer, it’s the virus that doesn’t cause AIDS.”^^1^^

p Jad Adams, Author, The HIV Myth, 1989

p “AIDS is not another disease, it is the most metaphorical disease in history. It is the ultimate triumph of politics over science.”

p Michael Fumento, Author, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, 1990

p “ Perhaps I’d feel different about it if I thought people were dying from AIDS. But I don’t. I think they’re dying from bad medicine, bad drugs, bad attitudes. There is nothing I want from ’Big Daddy’-l don’t want his medicines, his laws, his approval.”

p Gavin Dillard, Author, In the Flesh, HIV positive since 1985, San Francisco Frontiers, May 20, 1999

p “ In the September 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. the CDC announced that a diagnosis of AIDS no longer requires an HIV test. The government now considers you an AIDS carrier if you suffer from any of the maladies on its new list of diseases indicative of AIDS, including such relatively common infections as herpes simplex, tuberculosis, Salmonellosis and the shockingly broad category ’other bacterial infections.’ This broad definition will lead to countless new AIDS diagnoses-whether or not the person actually has AIDS. A major problem with the new AIDS definition is that it ignores the many environmental causes of immune suppression. Exposure to toxins, alcoholism, heavy drug use or heavy antibiotic use all can cause onset of the list of ‘diseases’ indicative of AIDS. The CDC itself conceded in a stunning remark near the end of the JAMA article that the new AIDS ground rules are highly suspect. The diagnostic criteria accepted by the AIDS surveillance case definition should not be interpreted as the standard of good medical practice,’ warned the CDC.”

p Los Angeles Weekly, December 18, 1987

p “ The real trick is to get off the medication. I felt I was losing quality of life...”

p Greg Louganis, HIV positive Olympic Gold Medalist, The State, April 15, 1997

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p “ It’s not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. 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 are no such documents.”

p Dr. Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate, HIV not Guilty, October 5, 1996

p “ If you think a virus is the cause of AIDS, do a control without it. To do a control is the first thing you teach undergraduates. But it hasn’t been done. The epidemiology of AIDS is a pile of anecdotal stories selected to fit the virus-AIDS hypothesis. People don’t bother to check the details of popular dogma or consensus views.”

p Dr. Peter Duesberg, Do You Think HIV Causes AIDS?, Scientists for Legitimacy in Science, 1995

p “ Beware the scientist who believes that mainstream research thinking on any public health issue is equivalent to truth. Or the scientist who bullies or ridicules other scientists because they oppose the prevailing view. This is a person who has become what I would call a propagandist and should not be trusted.

p “I have worked as a medical science reporter for 30 years. I’ve interviewed thousands of scientists for newspaper and magazine stories, radio and television productions, and books. I’ve met scientists who at least try to keep an open and fair mind on scientific issues. I have also met many propagandists who think they’re scientists. In all the time I’ve worked as a journalist, I’ve never come across a nastier group of people to interview than those propagandists who work in HIV research.”

p Nicholas Regush, Medical Science Reporter, Second Opinion, ABCNews.com, September 29, 1999

p “Asa scientist who has studied AIDS for 16 years, I have determined that AIDS has little to do with science and is not even primarily a medical issue. AIDS is a sociological phenomenon held together by fear, creating a kind of medical McCarthyism that has transgressed and collapsed all the rules of science, and has imposed a brew of belief and pseudoscience on a vulnerable public.”

p Dr. David Rasnick, Designer of Protease Inhibitors, SPIN magazine, June 1997

p “ Considering there is little scientific proof of the exact linkage of HIV and AIDS, is it ethical to prescribe AZT, a toxic chain terminator of DNA developed 30 years ago as cancer chemotherapy, to 150,000 Americans-among them pregnant women and newborn babies-as an anti-HIV drug?”

Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-MN), US House of Representatives, Letter to NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, March 14, 1995