'Disparate
voices join chorus that questions veracity of the AIDS virus'
Sacramento News and Review
by
Amy Yannello
2nd November 2000
To
many -improbable.
Thoroughly wild.
Heresy even.
But 20 years after the first gay men died from the condition we know as
AIDS, a growing chorus have banded together to question the very basis of
the epidemic itself.
Poster version
here
"Call them the disbelievers"
• Such groups as ACT-UP/San Francisco,
H.E.A.L., Alive and Well AIDS Alternatives, the rock group the Foo Fighters
and South African President Thabo Mbeki have all come to the same
conclusion: There is no scientific evidence that proves HIV equals AIDS.
Many of these same groups, most vocally ACT-UP/SF,
have challenged HIV-positive people to throw away their drug therapies (or
to not begin taking them at all) and openly flout conventional wisdom that
says condom use is the only responsible sexual practice to stem the rate
of infection, besides abstinence.
'Call them the disbelievers.'
"I think the majority of people are sick of AIDS," says
David Pasquarelli, spokesman for ACT-UP/SF. "They've tuned
out. They're tired of the terror, tired of the stigmatization and instinctively
know that sex cannot lead to death. Sex without condoms cannot equal death."
Strong words from a group that, in the early years of the disease,
led the fight to force the federal government to recognize the crisis, agitated
for clinical and research dollars as well as fast-track approval for new
drug therapies.
"At that time, there was a lot of hysteria, a lot of fear around AIDS,
and there wasn't a rational climate to look at this disease objectively,"
Pasquarelli says. "Now, we say our goal back then -- getting experimental
drugs into bodies -- was a tragic mistake."
Today, Pasquarelli's group spends its time promoting the theory
that AIDS itself -- more specifically, its supposed cause, HIV -- is a "medical
mistake." ACT-UP/SF has distributed fliers and leaflets throughout
the Bay Area, charging that "AIDS is a Lie" and that "AIDS
Drugs are Poison." Other fliers are even more caustic, saying, "Fire
the Liars; Open the Baths" strongly implying that if HIV isn't a
threat, then now-accepted unsafe sex practices should be repealed.
Pasquarelli and others maintain that doctors and scientists who
continue to buy into and promote the traditional AIDS paradigm have been
corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry, their careers and reputations
based on a medical mistake.
"AIDS is the medical scam of the millennium," he adds. "Hundreds
of thousands of people were poisoned to death. The entire American population
was terrorized by anti-sex propaganda, and billions of taxpayer dollars
were squandered. AIDS is a medical mistake mixed with societal homophobia."
While these questions about the AIDS paradigm have been in the background
in some form or another since the late 1980s, it's worth noting that the
message has grown louder in recent months.
It was vocal enough to gain national media
attention, most notably in the August 28 issue of Newsweek. And strong enough
to gain Christine Maggiore, founder of Alive and Well AIDS Alternatives,
an audience with South Africa's Mbeki during the recent World AIDS Conference
in that country. And vocal enough to cause some 5,000 doctors and scientists
attending that conference to issue a joint letter condemning the dissident
views being proffered by Maggiore and others.
Science questioned
While the argument has heated up recently, its history
goes back to the discovery of HIV itself. The disbelievers start their argument
this way: Going back to Dr. Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute's
retrovirologist who claimed in April 1984 to have isolated the virus --
then known as HTLV-III -- that causes AIDS. These "AIDS dissidents"
maintain that Gallo's discovery was not subject to peer review (meaning
it had yet to be published in medical journals at the time of the announcement).
Maggiore and others also claim that since Gallo was the same scientist who
claimed, in the mid-1970s, to have isolated a virus that causes cancer --
a theory that brought jeers from his peers for a time -- his connection
to the discovery of HIV is suspect.
Not addressed, however, is the fact that Dr. Luc Montagnier, a retrovirologist
with the Pasteur Institute in France, arrived at the same conclusion at
virtually the same time and was later credited as a co-discoverer of HIV.
The dissidents go further, claiming -- in printed materials, in
meetings with local civic and government leaders and in the media -- the
fallibility of the HIV test itself, noting that some people have received
both false-negative and false-positive readings.
ACT-UP/SF also maintains that if HIV were a "true epidemic," the
number of people who are said to have died from this disease would have
skyrocketed, not dropped, in the United States over the last decade.
Pasquarelli also asserts that if AIDS were a "truly contagious" disease,
it wouldn't have stayed confined within certain risk groups, such as gay
men and injection drug users. In other words, if AIDS were truly caused
by a virus, it would have infected men, women and children across the board,
regardless of sexual orientation or social behaviors.
Some 400,000 people nationwide have died from AIDS-related complications
-- about half as many as were projected to die when numbers came out in
the early 1990s. Yet, Dr. Peter Piot, head of the joint United Nations HIV/AIDS
Program reports that two-thirds of the estimated 33 million HIV-infected
people worldwide live in sub-Saharan Africa. In the United States, the Centers
for Disease Control estimates that some 700,000 people have HIV/AIDS.
Because the federal government requires states to report only recorded numbers
of AIDS cases, HIV estimates are just that
-- estimates. This will change in California, however, come
January 1, 2001, when the state will require reporting for both HIV infection
and AIDS. These figures, many contend, undercut the very basis of the disbelievers'
claims.
Additionally, the CDC reports that HIV infection among American women has
increased significantly during the last decade, especially in communities
of color. It estimates that between 120,000 and 160,000 adult and adolescent
females are living with HIV infection or AIDS. While the number of people
living with AIDS in the United States increased in all groups between 1992
and 1997 because of an expanded AIDS case definition and an improved survival
rate among those who have benefited from the new drug therapies, the number
of infected women has more than tripled, from 7 percent in 1985 to 23 percent
in 1998.
Dr. Scott Christensen, an oncologist with the UC Davis Medical center,
rejects the disbelievers' claims, asserting that the spread of the disease
in the United States has slowed, and that the number of deaths has not reached
1 million is a direct measure of the success of public health interventions.
Christensen further notes that while epidemics are usually limited to a
population group or location, HIV is actually a pandemic in that it affects
people worldwide, regardless of location, culture, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
The disbelievers' logic, Christensen asserts, "is bullshit."
Despite having the bulk of the medical and scientific community against
them, Pasquarelli and others are fervent in their contention that if HIV
doesn't cause AIDS, as they believe, then everything that has come afterwards
-- HIV testing, drug therapies to treat the virus and disease prevention
strategies has been based on a lie.
Pasquarelli goes a step further: "AIDS, statistically, isn't a real
risk to heterosexuals ... non-drug using heterosexuals have a greater chance
of being struck by lightning than [they do] of contracting AIDS."
Alive and questioning
Steven Keller understands most people's astonishment
or outright hostility toward the suggestion that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
It was only four years ago when he began questioning conventional AIDS wisdom.
Testing HIV-positive in 1993, Keller's T-4 lymphocyte cells (T-cells) dipped
below 200 -- the defining criterion for an AIDS diagnosis in 1995.
He tried AZT for about a week in 1996 but had severe reactions to the drug.
Shortly thereafter, he went on protease inhibitors a cocktail of drug therapies
that had been recently approved. His drug regimen, like that of many gay
men, was intense and read like an alphabet soup -- D4T, 3CT and Viracept,
to name just a few. And, initially, the drugs seemed to work: His T-cells
increased to a high of 300, and his viral load -- the measure of how much
of the virus is in a person's system -- decreased significantly.
But after about a year, his T-cells dipped to 50, and his viral
load increased to about 180,000. A different regimen was tried. But side
effects from a chemotherapy drug called Hydroxyurea, which kills white blood
cells in the bone marrow, caused extreme joint pain and pain in the soles
of his feet -- so much pain that Keller at times couldn't stand or walk.
Keller's experience with protease inhibitors isn't uncommon. The
drugs work by halting the replication of the virus within the cells. Even
people who credit the drugs with extending their lives report side effects
ranging from kidney stones to liver problems, as well as fatigue, diarrhea,
anxiety and insomnia.
"At that time, the theory was, 'Hit early, hit hard,'" says
Keller, speaking from his San Francisco home. "Meaning you didn't
have to have any AIDS defining illnesses. It just mattered that your T-cell
count was below 200 and your viral load was high. So you took the drugs
no matter how you were feeling."
In some cases, side effects have been so pronounced as to cause the same
wasting condition associated with the disease itself. This is evidence,
to Keller and others, that the "Hit early, hit hard" practice is negligent.
"It's because of this theory that we're seeing a lot of guys walking
around the Castro looking like skeletons," Keller says. Seeing men
in that condition and experiencing negative side effects himself, Keller
stopped taking all of the drugs in 1998. Since that time, he says he has
remained asymptomatic -- even though his T-cell count is around 160 and
his viral load is about 300,000.
Keller insists that, despite his AIDS diagnosis, he doesn't have
AIDS. His conclusion is based, he says, on the fact that he has no "AIDS-defining"
illnesses, such Kaposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis, two of the more common
illnesses seen in AIDS patients that have led to death. "At this moment,
I don't believe that HIV has any negative effect on my life," Keller says
during a recent interview.
In the past, however, Keller did experience night sweats, diarrhea and insomnia
-- all common symptoms accompanying an AIDS diagnosis.
"But that's because I was under a lot of stress because I had bought
into this 'death sentence' lock, stock and barrel," Keller says.
"I was told I had AIDS, and as a gay man, I didn't know if I was going
to live to see tomorrow. I was stressed, sad, depressed and angry. It was
horrible."
The disbelievers contend that the establishment's willingness to rush AIDS
therapies to market before they were fully tested resulted in people needlessly
dying and countless others becoming horribly disfigured from the very drugs
prescribed to save their lives.
"You have to remember that in the beginning, gay men were given AZT
at somewhere between 500 and 1,500 milligrams per dose, five times per day,"
Keller says. "This stuff was poison; it says so on the label. Scientists
had studied this as a chemotherapy drug for cancer patients but scrapped
it 30 years ago because it was causing deformities in newborn mice -- and
from much smaller doses. But we were so desperate to live, we'd try anything
in those days."
The labels on bottles of AZT do, in fact, bear a skull-and-crossbones graphic
and a warning about the medication's poisonous content.
Believers and disbelievers agree that AZT was given
at too high of a dosage and could have hastened many people's deaths in
the early days.
Kevin Johnson, a longtime AIDS activist and former El Dorado County resident
who was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in 1989, says that while he believes
AZT hastened the death of many gay men who took it early on, he doesn't
agree that this one fact is sufficient to support the rest of the anti-HIV
theory. "Here's the truth," Johnson says. "To the best
of my reading, not one person who has died of AIDS has been found not to
have HIV."
Keller disagrees, but says his refusal to take AIDS drugs -- specifically
protease inhibitors, since AZT is rarely given alone anymore -- isn't meant
as a sweeping fiat for everyone.
The people who are on protease inhibitors, Keller says, "believe these
drugs are saving their lives, so I don't want to be insulting. I really
feel for these guys. But I'm convinced the drugs are doing more harm than
good."
Beliefs and disbeliefs
Speaking from her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Studio City,
Christine Maggiore sounds more like an impassioned neighbor than a spokesperson
for a group leading the charge against the "AIDS industry."
The founder of Alive and Well AIDS Alternatives is thoughtful, can rattle
off scientific processes, therapies and statistics without notes and, frankly,
doesn't sound like a radical.
And she doesn't consider herself to be one, either.
"We're not putting forth a theory," Maggiore says of Alive
and Well, an organization whose board is made up almost entirely of HIV-positive
gay men. "We want informed consent. We promote awareness.
"When you have so many unanswered questions that tend to be glossed
over, disregarded or explained through convoluted, complicated reasoning,
things that don't add up, you start to wonder, 'Is this just one big huge
mistake, and, in a certain sense, have we justified that mistake all these
years?'"
Like other disbelievers, Maggiore was once herself a believer in the traditional
AIDS model. Active in AIDS Project Los Angeles, the L.A. Shanti
Project and a founding member of that area's Women at Risk organization
from 1992 to 1995, Maggiore said her transition began after seeing people
around her follow "doctor's orders" and go on the various drug therapies.
"Every single woman on the Women at Risk board
was taking medications. And they've all died," she says.
And the gay men who didn't "conform," who didn't take the AIDS drugs
and died anyway?
"They found themselves in profound isolation by deciding not to participate
in the collective consciousness of AIDS and lived very much outside of things.
So they most likely succumbed to the depression that went along with being
sick and being in isolation," she says, adding that others whose
immune systems were already compromised could easily have died because of
untreated health problems associated with years of recreational drug use
and/or addiction.
Maggiore also feels certain that scientists never isolated HIV and
that the viral load test itself is flawed, in part, because no one has ever
performed the test on both HIV-negative and HIV-positive people. She maintains
that labs will admit that HIV-negative people can get a positive reading
and doesn't see that as much of an endorsement of the test's veracity.
Maggiore says that in 1992, she had a viral load of 360,000, has never taken
any AIDS medications and that she's "fine."
She also bristles somewhat when reporters ask her to describe her beliefs.
"A belief falls into the realm of religion, where you accept something
on faith," Maggiore says. "My position is not faith-based.
I'm of the belief that if something doesn't make sense, you have the right
to question that. "I say I don't see, thus far, enough properly prepared,
correctly presented, scientific evidence that indicates that testing HIV-positive
means that I have to live as if I'm dying or that I have to medicate."
But Alive and Well, Maggiore insists, does not advocate abandoning safe-sex
practices, nor does the group push the idea that HIV-positive people should
suspend all drug therapies.
"We're not authoritarian. We're not into 'shoulds,'" Maggiore
says. "I've never said 'Throw away your condoms.' I wouldn't put myself
in that role."
What she's done, instead, she says, is create an organization in which people
can tap into alternative information not represented in the "narrow
view presented in the HIV establishment and government."
Like other disbelievers, Maggiore says it frustrates her when the medical
establishment pins every ache and pain, no matter how small, on a person's
HIV-positive status.
"HIV diagnoses blind doctors to any other illnesses that could cause
symptoms," she says. "One guy I know of kept coming in and complaining of
headaches, and the doctor said, 'Of course, you have HIV.' Well, it turns
out he had a brain aneurysm. With HIV, the individual has been lost."
In an attempt to turn the tide, Alive and Well is conducting a clinical
study taking 22 HIV-positive people who don't want to go on conventional
therapies and directing them toward doctors who will "look beyond
their HIV diagnosis," deep into their health history to determine
"what is really causing these health problems, instead of just assuming
they're HIV-related," Maggiore says.
She and others claim it's time to open up 20 years of "single-minded"
focus to new voices, and they want a seat at the table, saying that disbelievers
have a contribution to make.
"The problem called AIDS obviously exists," Maggiore says.
"We're asking 'Is that the best way to describe what's happened and
do the words associated with this undermine our ability to understand and
resolve this tragedy called AIDS?' "
Accepted truth
Gary Myerscough shakes his head in frustration
as he listens to a reporter tick off a list of concerns and claims made
by disbelievers. The 54-year-old Vietnam veteran and former field director
for the Republican National Committee doesn't hesitate in his response.
"I don't believe HIV causes AIDS, I know it," he says. "I
need to be adamant about that. The data is empirical and has been studied
around the world. HIV causes AIDS."
Myerscough, who lives in Sacramento with his partner of nine years, was
diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in 1992. At the time, his T-cells were well
below 200, and he had Kaposi's sarcoma lesions on his legs. He says denial
kept him from getting tested previously, although he had begun safe sex
practices as early as 1979. His partner, Will, is HIV-negative.
"I also had the night sweats...but, it couldn't be me," he
says of his thinking then. But in 1981, before a name was even put to the
illness, Myerscough says the Bay Area Reporter -- a gay weekly in San Francisco
-- was publishing two to three pages of obituaries per week.
"Gay men were dropping like flies," he says, remembering the
early days of the disease. "You'd go in with a cold and you'd be dead
in six months to a year, if it took that long, because you were going in
with a very advanced stage."
Unlike the disbelievers, Myerscough fully credits protease inhibitors with
staving off death and raising the quality of his life.
Between 1992 and 1996, however, the 5-foot 11-inch-tall Myerscough went
from 205 pounds to 160 pounds and was told he had the wasting syndrome that
often accompanies an AIDS diagnosis.
"I started making the rounds, saying good-bye to people, putting my
affairs in order," he says. "I was sliding. My T-cells were
down to 35. Then I found out I had developed adult-onset diabetes."
Within three months of taking the first round of protease inhibitors, Myerscough's
weight began to return (he now weighs about 180 pounds), and his T-cells
shot up to 382, where they remain today. His viral load became undetectable
for about three years, although it is now at about 12,000.
While agreeing with critics that AZT "probably hastened and certainly
didn't prevent people dying in the early years," Myerscough notes
that "it was the only thing available, and people were willingly taking
it because they were desperate. People take chemotherapy today, and it doesn't
always halt cancer; people get operations, and they don't survive. Treatment
is a gamble with almost any disease."
And Myerscough goes a step further, freely admitting that people with AIDS
who take protease inhibitors are "guinea pigs" who "don't
really know what the long-term effects of these drugs will be."
But he vehemently disagrees with critics who say that is reason enough to
reject drug therapies.
"Without the drugs," Myerscough says simply, "I would
not be sitting here talking with you today."
Although on permanent disability leave since his diagnosis in 1992, Myerscough
says he's been luckier than some in that there are hours during the day
when his energy level enables him to still participate in AIDS education,
prevention and planning activities. As a Sacramento AIDS Foundation board
member since 1991, Myerscough is now active in the organization's "Oasis"
project, which provides a coordinated and collaborative continuum of care
including transitional housing for women with AIDS and their children. He
also serves on the HIV Health Service Planning Council, which oversees the
distribution of federal Ryan White Act monies to Sacramento County and the
Health and Human Service Coordinating Council, which assists service delivery
agencies in identifying and responding to the human-services needs of county
residents.
Myerscough says it's difficult for him to fathom the disbelievers' arguments
against the virus itself and its transmission.
"We know perfectly healthy people -- men who didn't use drugs, didn't use
poppers, go-to-the-gym-type healthy who now have HIV. That proves to me
that even if some people's immune systems were already compromised, the
method of transmission is what holds up.
"If I infect my partner with HIV, to me, I've done a morally wrong
thing. I've just given him a disease that can kill him. Do they forget how
many gay men have died? We know that transmission is either through infected
blood or semen. I can't believe they don't believe that. It just doesn't
make sense."
Finally, Myerscough fears that younger generations will get the wrong message
if groups like ACT-UP/SF become more vocal. "It's fine if you want
to reject the drug therapies for yourself," he says. "But
I wonder, if you're really saying you don't believe that HIV causes AIDS,
and you don't believe you're sick, then why are you meddling in other people's
lives by putting forth this theory?"
Absolutely incorrect
Having worked as an AIDS oncologist for eight years and
having served as president of the Sacramento AIDS Foundation since 1994,
Dr. Scott Christensen comes up with more than a few contradictions
when reviewing the disbelievers' contentions.
To their argument that treatment hasn't always been effective and therefore
bolsters the theory that HIV isn't the cause of AIDS, he points to the fact
that STDs such as syphilis and gonorrhea "have been with us for 2,000
years, and we haven't eradicated that."
"And
we haven't cured diabetes. But to take a heretofore unknown disease and
develop effective treatments in 20 years' time is unheard of before in modern
medicine. Has it been perfect? Of course not."
Secondly, Christensen says, "Taxpayers' dollars have not been squandered.
To transform an acute terminal disease to a chronic disease in 20 years
is amazing. Their comments are very much like those we heard in the 1940s
and '50s about cancer."
As to the questions of peer review and the legitimacy of the HIV test, developed
by Gallo, Christensen says the disbelievers are wrong on both counts, starting
with the fact that both Gallo and Montagnier published their findings in
Science and the New England Journal of Medicine, both peer review journals
of great import.
"But I actually find that to be a minor point," Christensen
insists, maintaining that with a disease of this magnitude, "if they
were wrong, then all of the other subsequent work, such as the HIV test,
would have been wrong. It's one of the fundamentals that have to be in place
for everything else to work. There's no gray area here."
Christensen also rejects the notion that the HIV test and viral load
test are unreliable and have been used incorrectly.
"Absolutely incorrect," Christensen
says, bluntly.
As to the charge that doctors such as Christensen wouldn't dare challenge
the AIDS orthodoxy because they have staked their career on the disease,
he says, "Despite their protests to the contrary, that sounds like
a conspiracy theory to me. Besides, there's actually a monetary incentive
for scientists and drug companies -- anyone -- who comes up with a cure,
with a vaccine."
And he's more than frustrated by the suggestion that HIV has never been
proven.
"You take an HIV-positive patient and give them a clear method of
distribution to an HIV-negative person, and that person will become infected.
You've proven the theory in that way alone," he says.
If the number of full-blown AIDS cases have dropped in the United States,
yet risen in places such as South Africa and Indochina, Christensen contends,
it doesn't make sense that HIV doesn't cause the disease. Additionally,
when more states begin reporting HIV numbers, Christensen says, a truer
picture will emerge.
He also notes that all the major health authorities in San Francisco,
including UC San Francisco and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, sent out
a letter a few months ago, denouncing the tactics of ACT-UP/SF, adding that
many of the organization's tactics have been "particularly offensive" --
something ACT-UP members themselves admit with some pride.
Does the possibility of the disbelievers gaining a stronger foothold in
the national debate give Christensen pause?
"It doesn't scare me," he says. "It's symptomatic of
a frustration that we don't have a cure. Also, AIDS is no longer sexy --
it rarely makes the front page any longer. So this is possibly a way for
them to draw attention to themselves, to their wants and desires. But I
won't guess what their motivation is; I don't know."
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