Possible Essay, Research Paper
Is More Than One Cause of AIDS Possible?
?The HIV establishment and its journalist allies have replied to various specific criticisms of the HIV theory without taking them seriously. They have never provided an authoritative paper that undertakes to prove that HIV really is the cause of AIDS…. After ten years of failure, it is time to take a second look.?
-Charles A. Thomas, Jr., Kary B. Mullis, and Phillip E. Johnson
(qtd. in Atwan)
A homosexual male exits the HIV/AIDS testing center with a pale and sick look on his face. He has just been told that he is HIV positive. Due to the statement that is taken as fact in the media, ?HIV causes AIDS,? he takes his being HIV positive as a death sentence. This happens every day in the United States and the reaction is virtually the same across the board.
In an article called ?What Causes AIDS? It?s an Open Question,? a trio of doctors of scientists, Charles A. Thomas, Kary B. Mullis and Phillip E. Johnson, try to prove that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and that there is another cause of AIDS out there somewhere, but the scientific community continues to ignore the possibility (Thomas-1995). It has been proven that HIV does have something to do with causing AIDS. The majority of AIDS patients that also have HIV cannot be ignored. HIV is however not the only cause of AIDS. This is proven by the thousands of AIDS victims that do not have HIV. It is widely assumed by nearly everyone in the world that HIV is the only cause of AIDS. It is puzzling, however, that this is believed, because there has never been any solid evidence to say that this is true and there has not been a single paper written that proves that this is true. Scientists need to stop basing all of their research on something that may not be valid in the first place. They need to find proof that HIV is the only cause of AIDS before they can research a way to prevent it. Dr. Charles Thomas, molecular biologist and former Harvard and Johns Hopkins professor says, ?I feel that for scientists to remain silent in the face of all this doubt is tantamount to criminal negligence? (Thomas-1994).
It is widely known that, before looking for a cure for a disease or virus, in this case, it should be solidly proven that the disease or virus is doing all of the damage that is trying to be evaded. There has never been any research or experiments done to show that HIV is the only cause of AIDS. The only evidence that is offered is correlation. In an article by biochemist Charles A. Thomas, Jr., who is the president of the Helicon Foundation in San Diego and secretary of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis; Kary B. Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing the ?polymerase chain reaction? technique for detecting DNA, which is used to search for fragments of HIV in AIDS patients; and Phillip E. Johnson, who is the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley (qtd. in Atwan):
The correlation is imperfect at best, however. There are many cases of persons with all the symptoms of AIDS who do not have any HIV infection. There are also many cases of persons who have been infected by HIV for more than a decade and show no signs of illness (qtd. in Atwan).
Despite all of this evidence, there are no scientists stopping their research to prove that HIV is the only cause of AIDS, and instead of responding to the argument against the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, scientists are ignoring it. Before scientists go any further in looking for a cure for HIV or AIDS, they need to prove that HIV is the only cause of AIDS in the first place. If HIV is not the only cause of AIDS, billions of tax dollars, years of research, and millions of lives may have been wasted, because pompous scientists have refused to admit that they were wrong. Why is it that scientists continue to ignore this argument? It?s not as if all of these doctors and scientists are trying to disprove the fact that smoking causes lung cancer. Even with lung cancer, there is more than one possible cause. All that this side of the argument wants is evidence that what we are spending so much time and money on is true.
One might ask just why there is reason to believe that HIV isn?t the only cause of AIDS. So far, it has been shown that there is no evidence that HIV is the only cause of AIDS, but there is a large amount of evidence showing that HIV is not the only cause of AIDS. According to the scientific community, HIV breaks down the immune system, and when combined with a disease, such as tuberculosis, becomes AIDS. Without the immune system to fight off tuberculosis, the victim dies.
According to Dr. Peter Duesberg, who is the professor of molecular biology at the University of California at Berkely, and one of the world?s experts on retroviruses, which, according to the scientific community, is what HIV is, ?Every virus I?ve ever seen gets its job done by killing a cell at a time and when it has killed enough, you get sick. HIV is said to be responsible for the loss of T-cells, which are the immune system. Now, in every AIDS patient studied so far, there is never more than, on average, one in 1,000 cells infected by HIV? (Guccione). If such little effect is done by HIV, and AIDS still exists, there must be some other cause.
The only evidence that the supporters of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis have is correlation. The correlation is that the majority of AIDS victims also have HIV. Unless all victims of AIDS also have HIV, it is impossible for HIV to be the only cause of AIDS. The correlation that they offer as evidence does not even seem to begin to prove that HIV is the only cause of AIDS. According to Duesberg:
?There are a million Americans with HIV who are totally healthy. There are six million Africans according to the World Health Organization who have HIV; 129,000 had AIDS by the end of last year, that means five million, eight hundred and so many thousand had no AIDS. Half a million Europeans have HIV and 60,000 have AIDS. So there are millions and millions of people on this planet who have [HIV but] no AIDS-why don?t seven-and-a-half million get autoimmune disease if HIV is the cause of an autoimmune disease?? (Guccione)
If HIV is doing so little to affect the immune system and plays such a small part in creating AIDS, there has to be some other cause.
The interviewer in this particular article then stated, ?Well, the establishment says that everybody with HIV will develop AIDS and it?s just a matter of time? (Guccione). Duesberg replies:
?In the last ten years this has happened in America to about 20 percent of people with HIV, 250,000 [including deaths to date] out of a million. But the people who are dying from AIDS are hardly ever your all-American friends of 20 to 40 years of age: Virtually all heterosexual Americans and Europeans who had AIDS are intravenous drug users. And the homosexuals who get AIDS had hundreds if not thousands of sexual contacts. That is not achieved with your conventional testosterone. It is achieved with chemicals. Those are the risk groups, they inhale poppers, they use amphetamines, they take Quaaludes, they take amyl nitrite, they take cocaine as aphrodisiacs.? (Guccione)
There are many more people that are out to prove that HIV is not the only cause of AIDS. According to Thomas, Mullis and Johnson:
There are at least three reasons for doubting the official theory that HIV causes AIDS. First, after spending billions of dollars, HIV researchers are still unable to explain how HIV, a conventional retrovirus with a very simple genetic organization, damages the immune system, much less how to stop it…. Second, in the absence of any agreement about how HIV causes AIDS, the only evidence that HIV does cause AIDS is correlation…. Third, predictions based on the HIV theory have failed spectacularly…. The number of HIV infected Americans has remained constant for years instead of increasing rapidly as predicted, which suggests that HIV is an old virus that has been with us for centuries without causing an epidemic (qtd. in Atwan).
All of these statistics are working against the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. It is startling to believe that the scientific community could be so stubborn to still believe that HIV is the only cause of AIDS. Not only do they still believe this, but they have still not set out to prove it.
The only argument that I have seen that set out to prove that HIV is the only cause of AIDS had almost no solid evidence, and the only worthwhile part of the whole paper compared not believing that HIV causes AIDS to not believing that smoking can lead to lung cancer. It offered the correlation of 90% of lung cancer victims being smokers (Harris). That still leaves 10% of lung cancer that is not caused by smoking. Even in lung cancer, with an overwhelming number of victims being smokers, there has to be a second cause. With AIDS, the majority of patients also have HIV, but there are still thousands of AIDS patients that don?t have HIV (Thomas-1994). That means that something else must have caused their AIDS. Before the scientific community goes any further in finding a cure for HIV, AIDS or how to prevent them, they have to find out what the other causes of AIDS are. There are billions of people around the world that are uneducated as to what all of the causes of AIDS are and how to prevent all forms of AIDS.
Scientists have hardly even acknowledged that there is an argument against the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. The fact is that until this argument is disproven, or until the scientific community changes their hypothesis, this argument is not simply going to go away. There is too much support for it. There are thousands of doctors, everyday people, and scientists that believe that there is a strong argument against the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. They believe that the scientific community, before directing their research at finding a cure for HIV or AIDS, needs to direct their research at finding what all of the causes of AIDS are in the first place.
The problem working against this argument is that it has almost no support in the televised media. The reason for this is that ever since Robert Gallo, the originator of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis announced that HIV causes AIDS, it has been assumed to be true and has been assumed that contracting HIV is the only way to get AIDS (Thomas-1994). The media and the scientific community thinks that it is completely absurd to think otherwise.
The media and the scientific community need to realize that they probably are (or at least could be) wrong about the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. If they find out the truth about what all of the causes of AIDS are, they will then be able to direct their research at a possible cure for AIDS that has eluded the scientific community for years.
Guccione, Bob, Jr. ?AIDS: Words from the Front.? Spin Sept. 1993.
Harris, Stephen B., M.D. ?The AIDS Heresies.? 1994. Online Posting. Address: http://www.skeptic.com/03.2.harris-aids.html.
Thomas, Charles A., M.D. ?Rethinking AIDS Home Page.? April 1994. Online posting from Penthouse magazine.
Thomas, Charles A., M.D., Jr, Kary B. Mullis and Phillip E. Johnson. ?What Causes AIDS? It?s an Open Question.? Reason. Atwan, Robert. Our Times. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin?s Press, 1995.