The Debate Over AIDS
In responding to our contention that the so-called “AIDS virus” is actually harmless, Fumento seems once again to be criticizing scientific papers he has not yet bothered to read. Perhaps this is why he repeatedly flubs our arguments, convincing himself that we insist on impossibly tight scientific standards for proving the HIV hypothesis.
In fact, we merely point out that HIV and AIDS should both conform to the well-established principles governing all infectious diseases, else the virus-AIDS hypothesis must be abandoned. As with tuberculosis, cholera, and dozens of other classical diseases, the germ would have to be present in every single patient with AIDS symptoms. Like Hepatitis B, syphilis, gonorrhea, and herpes, AIDS would have to spread out of the initial risk groups into the general population, becoming a heterosexual epidemic. As is the case with polio, flu, and measles, the virus should cause the disease once experimentally injected into chimpanzees.
But as Fumento reluctantly admits, AIDS and HIV have completely failed to meet any of these tests, and many others, with embarrassing consistency. Worse yet, he cannot avoid recognizing that drug use can cause immune destruction and has exploded in exactly the groups now at risk for AIDS, and that a number of scientists are now moving to a “middle ground” that combines the impotent HIV with other health risks as “co-factors.” So Fumento is forced to dance around these problems.
He is therefore left only with indirect, suggestive arguments. He refers to the terrible epidemic in Africa--unless his audience already knows that the official World Health Organization numbers reveal a tiny African AIDS epidemic. He points to media-publicized cases of ordinary people developing AIDS--until he is told that Ali Gertz used cocaine, Ryan White suffered from fatal hemophilia, Paul Gann had traumatic heart surgery, Kimberly Bergalis used AZT, and Magic Johnson is symptom-free. Or Fumento tries to evoke images of innocent babies dying of AIDS--forgetting that virtually all such babies are either born to drug-using mothers or have such pre-existing medical complications as hemophilia.
Fumento’s fence-sitting posture might normally have a role in any intellectual debate, but his advice on the life-and-death AIDS issue is costly. Telling those at risk for the syndrome that drug use is not particularly dangerous so long as the needle is clean, and promoting the toxic, immune destructive chemotherapy AZT for patients whose lives are at stake are akin to recommending blood-letting as a cure for the flu.
Fumento has called for us to inject ourselves with HIV to prove we are serious. If prominent AIDS officials can be pinned down to declare which strain of the virus supposedly causes AIDS, and under which conditions, we will gladly do so. But before he dodges responsibility for his own claims, he should take the “beneficial” drug AZT--proving it truly “prolongs life.” And perhaps he could also begin reading the scientific literature firsthand, trying to discover why no studies have been published showing that HIV-infected people die sooner than matched uninfected people.
PETER H. DUESBERG Ph.D
BRYAN J. ELLISON
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
UC Berkeley
