Good morning.

    Much has happened in the last third of a century.  We are still fighting against the most colossal blunder and hoax in medical history.  I am proud to be among you.
    I've been thinking back to the beginning of the epidemic.  In the early 1980s came the first reports of allegedly rare diseases among gay men and intravenous drug users.  It was scary.  And mysterious.  The media did their best to terrify us.  We were told to check ourselves for swollen lymph glands, marks on our skin, night sweats....  We were told to avoid sex, wash our hands a lot, and be afraid.
    From the very beginning, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ordained that a new infectious agent was responsible.  They completely ignored drugs and anything peculiar to the circumstances of the two main risk groups, gay men and intravenous drug users.  I sensed that the CDC were on the wrong track, and naively thought that I would able to help them.  After all, I was a survey research analyst, and as a gay activist, I knew the gay world.  Boy, was I ever wrong!  Behind the scenes, people were fabricating the AIDS narrative, and the last thing they needed was for me to butt in with reality checks. 
    For a while I couldn't decide whether the CDC were dishonest or incompetent, and finally concluded: both.  They were truly incompetent, ignorant of elementary statistics.  At the same time, they lied.  Government agencies, mainstream media, AIDS groups, Big Pharma — they all lie, all of the time.  My first major “AIDS” article (1985) showed that the CDC were deliberately construing “AIDS” as an infectious disease, rather than sicknesses caused by toxins.*
    Looking back on the AIDS war, I am overwhelmed by its enormity.  I long since gave up trying to track the deaths of people with “AIDS” diagnoses.  I stress, “diagnoses”, since there really is no such thing as “AIDS”, which has never been defined rationally.  The CDC changed definitions many times, began conflating “AIDS” with “HIV disease”, and simply stopped reporting on “AIDS” deaths.  What we do know is that well over half a million people with “AIDS” diagnoses have died in the United States alone.  In addition, countless tens of thousands of people with “HIV-positive” diagnoses have died without ever progressing to an “AIDS” diagnosis.  To put these figures into perspective, in all of World War II, there were 407,316 military deaths; in World War I, there were 116,708.  These casualties were recorded to single digits, whereas a plus or minus figure for “AIDS” deaths would run to hundreds of thousands.  No one knows.
    Almost all of these deaths of people with “AIDS” or “HIV” diagnoses were caused by worthless and toxic drugs — and the terror caused by AIDS propaganda — and by the false information given out by the AIDS Establishment: heroin users were told to keep shooting up, but with clean needles; gay men were told that poppers were harmless.
    In this talk I'm going to concentrate on two main points.  One, our messages should be as simple as possible.  Two, we must survive. 
    From the beginning, AIDS talk has been technical.  The AIDS Establishment bombarded us with propaganda about branches of the immune system ... T-cells and CD4 ratios ... retroviruses ... new and rare diseases ... to the point of information overload.  On our side, Peter Duesberg countered by talking about pro-viruses, biochemical activity, titres, latency period, mitosis, and so on.  The Perth group put forward technical arguments that the ELISA and Western Blot tests are worthless.
    It is one thing to communicate with specialists, but it is also important for us to communicate with open-minded non-specialists.
    I'll give an example.  In 1988 the New York Native published an article of mine, “The Epidemiology of Fear”.**  The AIDS Establishment, grossly misinterpreting some rather tentative research, was claiming that unless effective drugs were developed, virtually everyone infected with HIV would die.  Writing as a survey research analyst, I showed that journalists were totally ignorant of basic statistics, as well as common sense.**
    I always sent copies of my articles to my parents, who lived in a small town in Nebraska.  My mother called, saying she had some questions about that article.  I assumed she had not understood some of the statistical concepts, so I started to explain them.  She said: “Oh, that's obvious.”  Then she said she'd written down a list of things she didn't understand.  “First of all, what is DNA synthesis?”  I was taken aback.  Most of us have a general idea what DNA synthesis is, but it is something else to describe it on the spur-of-the-moment.  And frankly, I can never remember more than one of the DNA building blocks: thymine or thymidine. 
    We can make a simple case against the orthodox AIDS model.  At one point in the 1991 Meditel documentary, “The AIDS Catch”, narrator Michael Verney-Elliott says, “AIDS was not behaving like an infectious disease.”  That's it.  Truly infectious diseases do not remain compartmentalized — tightly confined, year after year, to a few so-called “risk groups”.  Sooner or later, a truly infectious disease will spread into the general population.  This is something an ordinary person can understand.
    “AIDS” is not a coherent disease entity, but a construct, whose definition has changed repeatedly.  Basically, an “AIDS” diagnosis requires two things: HIV plus one or more of the so-called “AIDS-indicator diseases”.  But the “AIDS-indicator diseases”, which are now well over two dozen, have nothing in common.  Some are caused by bacteria, some by myco-bacteria, some by viruses, some by funguses, and some by toxins.  Some have no known etiology.  Some, like dementia or wasting, can have many different causes. 
    On the list of “AIDS-indicator diseases” is Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), which was once the hallmark disease of AIDS.  The most dramatic moment in Larry Kramer's play, “The Normal Heart”, is where Kramer's lover sees a purple spot on the sole of his foot.  The audience is shocked: they know that he is doomed.  At first, KS was considered to be a rare form of cancer.  Patients were given cancer chemotherapy, which quickly killed them.  Everything changed in 1994, when top “AIDS experts”, including Robert Gallo, spoke at a meeting called by the National Institute on Drug abuse (NIDA).  At this meeting, government experts admitted that KS was not a cancer after all, but an affliction of the blood vessels.  KS is not caused by HIV.  It is not associated with any kind of “immune deficiency”, but rather with an over-active immune system.  The only tenable hypothesis for the occurrence of KS among gay men is their use of “poppers” or nitrite inhalants, whose biochemical properties make them ideal candidates for causing KS.
    So then, if KS is not caused by HIV or “immune deficiency”, is it still an AIDS disease?  Yes it is and no it isn't.  The AIDS Establishment can't decide.  Being committed to an infectious disease model, they have proposed still another virus, HHV8, but this is an absurdity from the standpoint of epidemiology.
    The other half of an “AIDS” diagnosis is HIV infection, which can be inferred through various tests — all worthless — or simply presumed.  Yes, presumed.  If a gay man or intravenous drug user presents with an AIDS-indicator disease, a doctor is permitted to make an “AIDS” diagnosis by simply presuming that HIV is the cause.
    It is all crazy, but a vast AIDS industry, running into tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars a year, is based on this craziness.  I think that ordinary people, if intelligent and open-minded, can understand the craziness of the prevailing “AIDS” definition.
    Another issue that can be understood by non-specialists is AZT, which was once the premier AIDS drug.  As I found, from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, AZT was approved for marketing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the basis of fraudulent research.  Blatant cheating took place, especially in Boston.  The FDA itself uncovered this cheating, but nevertheless deliberately used data that they knew were false.  AZT is the most toxic drug ever approved for long-term use.  AZT has no benefits of any kind demonstrated by good, honest research.  As a random terminator of DNA synthesis, AZT is necessarily incompatible with life.  AZT is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.  Let us not forget AZT, although the AIDS Establishment would like to forget it.
    However, having said all that, it's no longer so simple as just debunking the “AIDS” paradigm.  The AIDS Industry (or racket) keeps moving the goal posts and creating new paradigms, without abandoning the old ones or ever admitting they were wrong.  It's like Hercules battling the Hydra monster: as soon as he cuts off one head, two more heads emerge.  The AIDS experts now talk about “HIV disease” and “HIV infections” rather than about “AIDS”.
    Here we need to confront the bogus tests that are used to diagnose “HIV infection”.  This necessarily gets technical.  We need to debunk the ELISA and Western Blot tests, and the misuse of the Polymerase Chain Reaction tests.  We need to argue that true HIV infection, or viremia, has never been demonstrated, even in a single case.
    We AIDS critics don't need to agree with each other on everything, but we need to explain what we mean by a “virus” — and in plain language.  Speaking as a layman — neither a doctor nor a virologist — I sense that Peter Duesberg and the Perth Group have different definitions of what a virus is.  For the Perth Group, a virus is a cell-free particle.  For Duesberg and other molecular biologists, a virus might be genetic sequences in DNA.  Perhaps I'm wrong about this, and in the discussion period someone can clear this up.
    And the AIDS, or rather HIV Establishment, has changed the game plan still again.  Now it is about “Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis” or “PrEP”.  People allegedly at high risk are expected to “take HIV medicine (Truvada) daily to lower their chances of getting infected.”  (hiv.gov web site)  Ads for Truvada, in print and on their website, blatantly target gay men.  The sheer horror: healthy people are being brainwashed into taking a toxic drug to protect themselves against a harmless or non-existent virus. 
    Now I want to talk about survival.  We must be strong, because psychological warfare is being waged against us.
    The two key chapters in my 1993 book, The AIDS War, are “The Risk-AIDS Hypothesis” and “Recovery From ‘AIDS’”.  In the first, I focussed on the early “AIDS” cases, who were very sick.  I argued that under the “AIDS” umbrella, different risk groups and different individuals were getting sick in different ways and for different reasons.  And I then went into detail to describe what those health risks might be.
    In the other key chapter, “Recovery From AIDS”, I said that someone with an “AIDS” diagnosis should examine his life, detoxify his body and mind, adopt a healthful way of living, and expect health.  This is still true, but we now are dealing with people given “HIV infection” diagnoses.  These people may be completely healthy before getting their diagnosis.  After that, it's downhill.  The psychological consequences of the diagnosis are deadly.  Even deadlier are the drugs.
    In counselling people diagnosed with “HIV infection” we need to convince them that all of the HIV tests are worthless, and that true HIV infection has never been demonstrated.  We need to argue against the protease inhibitors and other drugs in the “cocktails”.  Contrary to Big Pharma's propaganda, these are not miracle drugs, which have enabled terminally sick patients to arise, like Lazarus, from their sickbeds and begin to play tennis or climb mountains.  On the contrary, these drugs are causing healthy people to get sick.  They are causing hideous physical deformities and death.  In Massachusetts, where I live, the leading cause of death among the “HIV positive” is death from liver failure caused by the drugs.  These are called “deaths before diagnosis”, since the patients never developed an “AIDS-indicator disease”.
    Now more than ever we need to deal with the psychological factors affecting those with “AIDS” or “HIV-positive” diagnoses.  In 1997 Ian Young and I edited a book, The AIDS Cult: Essays on the Gay Health Crisis.  Our contributors discussed the ways that AIDS propaganda was making people sick.  Fear was making people sick.  “HIV-positives” were programmed to become sick and ultimately to die. 
    It is not easy.  When we try to persuade an “HIV-Positive” that HIV is either harmless or non-existent and that the drugs are unnecessary and harmful, we are up against the AIDS Establishment, his physicians, and the mainstream media.  I myself have failed more than once.  One young man listened to me up to a point.  He still believed in the virus, but intended to fight it without taking drugs.  He was then in robustly good health, but unfortunately, he continued to see a doctor.  One day he told me that he was going on the drugs after all.  Almost hysterically he said: “I don't have any T-cells!”  I tried to explain that he looked perfectly healthy and the T-cell tests were worthless, but he wouldn't listen.  Within a few months he had begun to lose muscle tone and had his aura had become fey.  (“Fey” is a Scottish word meaning “under a spell of doom.”)  I haven't seen him now for eight years, and don't know what happened to him.



    Our greatest enemy is FEAR, which wrecks our health and causes us to make bad decisions.  I experienced paralyzing fear early in the epidemic.  I knew that my health, and indeed my life, were in danger.  Fortunately, I was in-between jobs and had money in the bank and there were cheap flights to London.  Packing only a carry-on bag, with good walking shoes and a book on country walks in England and Scotland, I escaped what Michael Ellner called “the AIDS zone”.  They were wonderful walks.  One in Scotland was almost thirty miles long.  For over a month, I walked and walked and walked.  On the first or second walk, my fear went away.  I felt at peace with the world and was happy to be alive.
    Walking is a cure for many things including, as I've found out, high blood pressure.  But we all have to discover our own ways of dealing with fear.  For me, one way is music.  Right now I'm going back to the Bach Two-Part Inventions, practising each one slowly until I finally feel I can do justice to it.
    In conclusion, we must be resourceful.  We must survive.  We must be strong.  We are David against Goliath.  In the short run, Goliath usually wins.  In the long run, we will prevail, because we have one thing that Goliath — the AIDS Establishment — does not have.  The Truth!



* “CDC's Tables Obscure AIDS-Drugs Connection”, Philadelphia Gay News, 14 February 1985.

** This article was included in my 1990 book, Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story, which is online as a free pdf book.




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