When I was a child at the inquisitive age of about 11 years, I questioned my mother's dogmatic edicts where religion was concerned. She would say that only those who believed in Jesus as being the "Son of God" would have eternal salvation. Over time I pondered this, and as a bold kid, I ventured brazenly one evening to test her logic.

I asked, "So does that mean that all Muslims and Jews are going to hell?" That didn't set so well with her. She picked up the fork she was cooking with, stabbed me in the left shoulder, and said, "Yours is not to question, yours is to believe."

As I suspected, her faith was blind and irrational. To this day I have a scar on my left shoulder that reminds me of the dangers of blind faith.

The following blog entry posted on the venerable "New Aids Review" is a reminder to all those AIDS believers that blind faith in the sacrosanct HIV / AIDS dogma actually has no roots.

-- The Editor

In 1984, when my colleagues and I were first to claim—and in my view demonstrate—the linkage of HIV to AIDS, we showed that we could isolate HIV from forty-eight individuals who had AIDS.

--Robert Gallo in a letter to Harpers Magazine

Gallo is forced to leave the number "forty-eight" standing out there in his letter all by itself, not saying 48 out of how many, because in fact he found the virus in blood from 48 individuals out of 119, and 22 of the 48 did not have AIDS...

--Truthseeker, "New AIDS Review"

How Gallo proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS
By Truthseeker, posted on "New AIDS Review."

Robert Gallo's recent letter to Harper's, just published in the May issue (see previous post), provoked a thought which we thought deserved a post of its own, for the result of checking one of his sentences reminded us of a little known fact: one of his original papers at the beginning of the HIV?AIDS affair in May 1984 had a surprising result which has been long overlooked.

In fact, the press conference at which Margaret Heckler, Heath Secretary of the Reagan administration, presented Gallo as the savior of the day in being about to publish four papers in Science finding HIV was the probable cause of AIDS, appears to have been mistaken.

Contrary to the report typed rather too hastily by Larry Altman for the front page of the New York Times the day after the press conference, the ebullient Bob had actually proved that HIV was almost certainly not the cause of AIDS. In fact, in this helpful result he preceded Peter Duesberg by at least two years in demonstrating that the linkage between HIV and AIDS was unsustainable.

Going back to the Gallo letter in Harper's, this is why the most remarkable sentence Gallo pens is the one saluting his moment of epiphany when he decided that HIV was the cause of AIDS: "In 1984, when my colleagues and I were first to claim—and in my view demonstrate—the linkage of HIV to AIDS, we showed that we could isolate HIV from forty-eight individuals who had AIDS."

The bold effrontery will amuse seasoned admirers of the pr genius of HIV?AIDS's greatest scientist, and not just because in the first place it was Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur who first "linked" HIV to AIDS in a 1983 paper. Luc Montagnier hadn't claimed that HIV alone could be the cause of AIDS, and he was happy to forward HIV to Robert Gallo on request, and in fact did so twice, since Bob lost the first batch.

Montagnier was not amused when Gallo subsequently claimed to have discovered it all by himself, however, and after an extended international wrangle at the governmental level over royalties, which established that Gallo's virus was in fact Montagnier's, discovered by Gallo in the two Federal Express packages from France when they arrived at the NIH and the receipts were signed and returned to Montagnier, found he had to share credit for HIV with Gallo as the "co-discoverer". But that's another story.

For the paper Gallo is referring to in his letter to Harper's is "Frequent Detection and Isolation of Cytopathic Retroviruses (HTLV-III) from Patients with AIDS and at Risk for AIDS", the key paper of four published on May 4, 1984 in Science, which demonstrated that HIV was almost certainly not the cause of AIDS.

How Gallo managed to pass this off so brilliantly at a press conference before it was published, as suggesting so powerfully that HIV was the cause of AIDS that the celebrated Larry Altman of the Times reported that inverted conclusion the next day, is a puzzle that science historians have yet to solve. We put it down to the fact that Larry was in a hurry to get his story on the front page, and no one ever bothered to read the paper itself once the Times had spoken.

But that paper's landmark finding is the reason why Gallo is forced to leave the number "forty-eight" standing out there in his letter all by itself, not saying 48 out of how many, because in fact he found the virus in blood from 48 individuals out of 119, and 22 of the 48 did not have AIDS, rather than all of them being "individuals who had AIDS", as he states above in what must have been a slip of his pen in writing to Harper's.

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"So the historic irony is that the man who proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS twenty years ago was Robert Gallo himself. Luckily for him, however, the science of AIDS has been run by press conference ever since, so no one has noticed."
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In fact, the paper shows that he found virus more often in "pre-AIDS" people without AIDS (18 out of 21, or 86%) than people with AIDS (26 out of 72, or 36%), and he found that it wasn't able to survive in a dish more than "2 to 3 weeks" in the blood of AIDS patients and "pre-AIDS" patients, while it flourished in established T-cell lines.

"Pre-AIDS" patients were people in a risk group - ie gay in this case - who had developed some chronic swelling of the lymph glands (lymphadenopathy), or some undefined low count of white blood cells (leukopenia). They must have often been in the early stage of HIV infection, before antibodies had mounted sufficiently to erase the infection, as this paper revealed happens in the majority of cases even in people who progress to AIDS.

Clearly, according to the paper, the best way to get rid of HIV is to get AIDS proper, easily achieved by taking large amounts of designer drugs and eating badly. In other words, if you think that HIV is the problem, hurry up and have fun and get AIDS, and you'll likely get rid of HIV entirely. We are saying no more than the paper says with its data.

Thus the paper suggested not "strong evidence of a causative involvement of the virus in AIDS," as Gallo wrote at the end of it, but the exact opposite. That is to say, it demonstrated that HIV was almost certainly ruled out as the cause of AIDS, since not only did it flout Koch's first postulate by being found in only one third of AIDS patients' blood samples, but it was more likely to be seen in pre-AIDS patients than people with AIDS, in whom it mostly wasn't found.

So the historic irony is that the man who proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS twenty years ago was Robert Gallo himself. Luckily for him, however, the science of AIDS has been run by press conference ever since, so no one has noticed.

If a Nobel prize is ever awarded for solving AIDS, however, surely Gallo as well as Peter Duesberg is in line for this honor. For nothing could have been more helpful that to rule out HIV at that early stage in the search for the true solution to defeating the novel outbreak of immune system deficit.

Clearly the real culprits in this gross neglect of Robert Gallo's initial breakthrough finding are the people, whoever they are, who prevented this original scientist from getting his true message across to the press and public, and instead pressured him to stick with a misunderstanding of his true achievement for over twenty years, at the cost of many lives lost to AZT and current antiviral medications, which his paper showed so long ago are inappropriate, and which we now know have unpleasant side effects involving large humps and dying of liver failure.

Whoever they are, they must have exerted massive pressure on this leading figure in the drama of what was the best reported health disaster of all until bird flu came along. For Bob Gallo is not famous for his reticence. The financial or political interests behind this must have been very large to win this distinguished scientist's presumably reluctant coperation.

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