HIVGATE - JANINE ROBERTS

  Part One.

HIV/AIDS is a double tragedy - of deadly illnesses made much worse by a critically flawed theory.

I never imagined for a moment when I set out to research the HIV theory of AIDS some years ago that  I would uncover a quagmire of flawed illogical science and unreported serious scientific fraud in the most important HIV papers of all -  those to which Government health institutions direct all inquirers when asked when and how was HIV first proven to cause AIDS.

Some senior scientists have been forced to conclude that there is something deeply wrong with the HIV theory.  An Internet search will reveal eminent professors at major universities and Nobel Laureates who say HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS - and that antiretrovirals are thus entirely the wrong treatment.

These experts have set out their reasons for this in many a learned paper,  but for our mass media, they may as well not have bothered.

Other scientists have meanwhile spent an absolute fortune, $170 billion at last count, trying to resolve the difficulties of the HIV theory and find a cure.

Despite this, in the media the HIV theory is now enshrined as scientifically undisputed. Practically all   media reports confirm this.  The BBC's web pages on "The AIDS debate" are a fine example. They do not mention the existence of any scientific debate about the HIV theory whatsoever. [1]

A Voyage into HIV science.

But I must confess that I must share some blame for this. For many years I never thought to question the cause of AIDS, despite friends dying of it in the early 1980s, despite my working for decades as an investigative journalist. When in 1984 a virus called HIV was blamed for this horror, I presumed that it had killed these friends. I was then out in the deserts of Australia documenting the fight for survival of Aboriginal nations.  As the pandemic swelled, other issues had absorbed me.

It was not until 1995, when my help was sought for an investigation of the pharmaceutical industry, that I started to learn more about the world of viruses, bacteria and corporate medicine. This led to Channel 4 in 1997 sending me to an emergency scientific workshop in Washington DC, summoned because of highly disturbing reports of a monkey virus, SV40, being found in human cancers after spreading in contaminated polio vaccine.  The workshop was at the top US health research authority, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Horrifying as this was,  I was still more shocked to learn at it that HIV may have spread likewise. Steps to screen this vaccine for HIV were only put in place in 1988, after the vaccine had been given to millions.

Dr Ben Sweet,  who helped develop the polio vaccine for Merck, had confessed; 'We really didn't think about it ... and now, with the theoretical links to HIV and cancer, it just blows my mind.... we didn't know what these monkey cell cultures [used for growing vaccine virus] were carrying...  But it was too late to switch gears and start using raccoon or chicken systems, because then you could be dealing with another whole set of viruses.' 1 

I decided that if such terrible carelessness had helped spread the AIDS plague, I would document it and make it public. I thus plunged into researching HIV.

The AIDS epidemic had started in the late 1970s among heavily drug-taking gay Westerners. HIV was said to come from an African chimpanzee virus that mutated to infect humans, just as we now fear a bird flu virus might do.

There were, on the face of it, no evident links between Africa and the white gay scene. But several theories had been put forward. The first was that HIV came with the slave trade. Then via Haiti where there was a big gay scene, and then via a sailor. A leading UK virologist suggested that the link was in fact promiscuity - claiming this was a characteristic shared by Western homosexuals and African heterosexuals.

But was the real link to Africa a contaminated polio vaccine?  When I learnt that poliovirus had been injected into a chimp's brain by a vaccine scientist to see if the virus would grow in it, then extracted the virus and put it into a human cell culture - all before trying out an experimental polio vaccine on over 200,000 Congolese children, I thought I had found the very moment when a chimp virus might have mutated into HIV and spread.

But as I dug deeper, questions came up that were harder to get answered. I found scientists widely differed on how long it took HIV to evolve from a chimp virus.  Some argued it would take over a decade. If so, this would clear suspicion from the polio vaccine, as insufficient time would have  elapsed between the chimp brain experiment and the vaccine's use. Others argued that mutations could happen very quickly. I purchased works of virology so I could understand this better.

hunt was drawing me in deeper and deeper.  I was told HIV was a retrovirus. These are, I learnt, extremely minute protein shells that carry, among other things, a short length of genetic code which they insert into our cells, whereupon these codes are incorporated into our DNA.

These DNA changing viruses caused much alarm when first discovered. The NIH poured millions of dollars into researching if they could be a major cause of cancer.  The code they brought into our cells was described by many as 'junk DNA', and thought to have no value.

But, then I discovered to my surprise that evolutionary biologists saw most retroviruses much more positively, as produced by our healthy uninfected cells and as playing a major role in our evolution. I leant from them that, over the ages, these incorporated codes have given our DNA a vast genetic library, several times larger than the codes for our genes. Today experts are constructing a map of evolution going back over 300 million years by consulting this same library.

This raised many questions for me about AIDS and the drugs we use for its treatment. What were the long-term effects of anti-retroviral drugs if retroviruses are such an intrinsic part of us?  Wouldn't it be better to use medicines that target HIV alone?   Why is HIV so uniquely dangerous when no human retrovirus kills?

HIV is said to cause AIDS by killing our T-Cells - a vital part of our immune system, thus opening the way to deadly opportunistic diseases.  I thought we must know how HIV did this, so was astonished when an article in Nature in 2001 reported: 'We still do not know how ... the virus {HIV] destroys CD4+ T cells...

Several hypotheses have been proposed ... some of which seem to be diametrically opposed.'2.  

It seemed HIV had not been caught in this act and studied- despite 17 years of monitoring!  I searched AIDS literature, but found most papers dealt with tiny aspects of the whole, with proteins, enzymes and genetic code fragments, so did not answer my quite elementary questions.

I soon realised that if I were to understand how a retrovirus out of Africa caused this terrible epidemic, I had to start at the beginning with the primary research that first established how HIV caused AIDS.

The papers recording this research were not hard to locate.  They are praised by the major health authorities.  They are 4 in number, all published on the 4th May 1984 in the authorative Science journal. They describe experiments said to prove for all time that HIV is the cause of AIDS. These were carried out at the NIH between 1982-4 by Tumour Laboratory Chief Dr. Robert Gallo and his chief investigative scientist, Dr Mikulos Popovic.  They reported that the guilty virus was fortuitously a relative of two retroviruses they were investigating to see if  they caused cancer. They thus named the AIDS virus as Human T-Cell Leukaemia Virus III (HTLV-III.) 3 This would be renamed in 1986 as Human Immunodeficiency Virus, HIV.

Among the first things virology teaches its students are the clear logical procedures devised for isolating a virus and discovering if it causes an illness. The results are then published, with all the substantiating evidence. Once done, there is no need to repeat this elaborate testing. It is instead time to work on a cure

I had little doubt that these papers would document such experiments, for they were highly endorsed from the moment their forthcoming publication was announced to the world's press as a great victory for American science by President Ronald Reagan's Health Secretary on the 23rd of April 1984. Two days later the leading science journal Nature had unambiguously headlined; 'The Cause of AIDS Identified'.  Ten days later they were published in Science . Today it is to these that scientists turn to learn how and when HIV was proven to cause AIDS.

But my initial trust in them was shaken when I learnt their veracity in many respect s was then bitterly disputed for years at the highest levels of the political and scientific establishment, involving in legal conflict Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and President Reagan; the NIH and the Institut Pasteur in Paris. This dispute led in 1990 to the launch of the most formidable governmental investigations into scientific fraud ever conducted.10 

These inquiries were charged to establish the truth of the French charge that the key experiments documented in these famed AIDS papers, the ones said to prove the HIV theory, were fixed by having a French-discovered virus, LAV,  secretly substituted at the last moment for the American virus HTLV-III, after the latter could not be proved to cause AIDS. The French claimed this meant their virus was the real HIV, and they were thus owed royalties for the HIV test.

These fraud investigations continued until 1994. They called many eminent scientists as witnesses, subpoenaed all relevant laboratory documents, and analysed in great detail every aspect of these papers.  I sought out what they had discovered, helped in part by the work of John Crewdson, an American journalist whose powerful articles in support of the French case had helped bring about these investigations

I eventually acquired a treasure trove of hundreds of pages on the key experiments, all highly authoritative, since they came from investigations supervised by the highly prestigious National Academy of Science and Institute of Medicine  - and also by a powerful Congressional Investigative Sub-Committee. The latter even enlisted the US Secret Service, the body responsible for the security of the US President, to check the related laboratory records in the finest forensic lab in Washington. If any were forged, it would find out.

These inquiries ended after establishing the substitution took place.  But I was interested in the evidence produced for entirely another reason. It was irrelevant for my purposes whether HIV were the French or the American virus. I wanted to know simply how it had been proved to cause AIDS. (For details of these inquiries see box.)

But I soon discovered the conclusions of these investigations were much more devastating than I had ever anticipated.  They completely demolished the central claim made by Gallo in these famed Science papers; to have isolated HIV in dozens of AIDS patients in experiments conducted in 1982 and 1983.

The investigators scathingly concluded that, as of the 22nd February 1984, that is six weeks before the Science papers went to be published, Gallo hadn't proved any virus to cause AIDS. [11] Their  verdict was; 'Despite these repeated published claims, when Dr. Gallo was challenged to provide substantiating evidence, he did not, could not, do so;'  and that his claim to have discovered HIV prior to this date was 'scientifically impossible'.

They reported finding 22 serious scientific errors in just the first of these papers, including many 'deceptions'.   They condemned captions to photographs, descriptions of experiments and enclosed tables as 'false and misleading'.[34] On top of this, the US Secret Service found many Gallo laboratory records were falsified prior to being presented as evidence. After this, how could I, or anyone else, trust these papers?

But I was astonished to find the investigators then did not demanded the withdrawal or correction of these papers! It seems they let them stand, with all their errors, simply because they thought Gallo had succeeded at the very last moment. He had done so, they decided, by cheating - by secretly substituting the French virus. They concluded he had proved the French virus caused AIDS.

This left me completely perplexed. I had just read their devastating critique of the experiments Gallo performed over the previous two and a half years with his own virus.  It was none too obvious from their reports, nor from the Science papers, just what Gallo had done in the final weeks with the French virus that was so very different.

It was not as if the French had proved that their virus caused AIDS prior to lending it to Gallo. They had stated: "the role of the virus in the aetiology of AIDS remains to be determined" [12 ] 

Gallo said much the same when he wrote to the UK medical journal Lancet in March 1984, 'it is hard to say that it is really 'isolated' as virologists use that term.' [18]

Later the investigators dismissed this as a crude attempt to belittle the product of a rival laboratory, and thus did not test the truth of his claim; most unfortunately as it turned out - for Professor Montagnier, the head of the Institut Pasteur, would later confirm that Gallo was right in this, saying of what they sent to him: 'We saw some particles but they did not have the morphology [ appearance ] typical of retroviruses. They were very different...What we did not have [had not proved], and I have always recognized it, was that it was truly the cause of AIDS." [19]

 

When I went back to the Crewdson investigation, the one that launched  these inquiries,  I found he did not examine the evidence for the French virus being the cause of AIDS - neither at the time nor in his later book about his investigation, Science Fictions . He apparently  presumed that, once he had eliminated the Gallo virus, the French one had to be HIV.

 

Had the investigators taken this further?  Did they check Gallo's proof for the French virus being the cause of AIDS - or had they made the same assumption as Crewdson? I sat down with their reports and the Science papers, and went through everything once again.