Reappraising AIDS Vol. 3, no. 1

VOLUME 3, NUMBER 1, PAGE 3 REAPPRAISING AIDS JANUARY 1995

long-suspected dubious research of the young Mead's
first field trip. Instead anthropologists enlisted every
available authoritative voice to blacken Freeman's
character and to boost Mead's stock.
My paper defined truth management as deception
practiced by science leaders who use authoritative
institutions to persuade the public that they may trust
the scientific consensus. The stratagem reconciles the
professional understanding of science as an ongoing
search that recognizes no absolutes with the public's
need for certainty. Certainty is needed because science
often operates at lethal or catastrophic margins, as with
nuclear energy or the "therapeutic window" in medicine.
The fraudulence of the consensus claim comes publicly
to light when distinguished dissenters are pronounced
outcast. I gave a short roll call of anathematized
scientists: Fred Hoyle for his steady-state universe ideas,
Thomas Gold for denying that fossil fuels are fossil
products, Linus Pauling for megavitamin therapy, Peter
Duesberg on HIV. The concluding portion of the paper
discussed AIDS policy. I observed that AIDS is complex in
its etiology, transmission, and effects on public health.
Many uncertainties have surrounded it from the
beginning and continue to do so. Devising a strategy to
protect public health involves the weighted estimate of
uncertainties and a host of value judgments that assign
fiscal, legal, and health priorities. Imperfect knowledge
together with the latitude for choice logically imply a
variety of policy responses, and the logical contingency
of all. Given theses initial conditions, the expectations of
reasonable response is that scientists and public health
authorities would present governments a variety of
policy options. We might also expect AIDS scientists to
conduct a continuing airing of differences. Yet this is not
what happens. Scientists and health authorities put up a
sham unanimous voice for a single policy option, which
they advocate as the only rational and humane policy.
Any dissent is irresponsible.
Many medical science representatives attended the
symposium because the smoking gun of misconduct in
Australia at that time was in medical science. A senior
AIDS scientist had just forecast a vaccine for HIV in twothree years. It was a target I couldn't resist. In the
course of the panel discussion, I referred to Duesberg's
writings and predicted that an in vitro vaccine would not
work in vivo. "There will be no vaccine," I said.
That statement, plus the criticism of peer review that
was the main focus of the paper, ran in the media as the
symposium's main story. The editor of the Search, the
journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association
for the Advancement of Science, asked to publish it.
It appeared in the last issue he edited.
By 1988 I had concluded that AIDS was not a disease
entity, that the CDC definition of AIDS was diagnostic
codswallop, and that there was no compelling evidence
that HIV causes immunosuppression. Peter Duesberg
sent a packet of papers that I closely studied. In a letter

of December 8, 1992,1 wrote him of a view I formed four
years previous: "Your initial article on the HIV model
seemed to me one of the finest scientific criticisms I have

read...ever. The 1991 article in Proceedings and the use
of drugs article are of the same quality."
In late 1993,1 received a letter from Nevile Hodgkinson,
then the science writer at the London Sunday Times,
requesting a statement of my view on the epidemic.
In April 1994 his feature based on responses like mine
appeared under the headline. The Conspiracy of
Silence. The article concluded with a quotation from
my submission. In its report on the feature, Nature also
quoted my words. The science editor at The Australian
decided to run Hodgkinson's article and requested a
fuller statement from me. I obliged. There were many
consequences. The AIDS mandarins sent faxes flying
denouncing The Australian for printing such "loony
fringe" opinion with their permission. I did four radio
news interviews and one talk-back. Producers from
three television networks rang to sound me out about
a documentary on the challenge to AIDS science.
However, the mandarins, when contacted, threw such
a tantrum that all three producers backed away.
Not intimidated was the editor of the University of New
South Wales Press. She invited me to write a book for the
newly established Frontline series, whose aim is to disturb
dogmatic slumbers on selected public issues. I asked for
two days to think about it. Out in Perth, Val Turner had
seen the publicity and established contact with me.
I soon had the papers of the Perth Three and Val's
scholarly tutoring service as I wrote The AIDS Mirage.
Also about that time I began to harvest the riches of
[email protected]. John Lauritsen's
reporting on Robert Gallo and on nitrites was especially
important during the writing phase.
The pre-publication response to The AIDS Mirage bore
out the expectation that the media would like it.
Several national current affairs programs were keen and
the print media came on strong. But when producers
contacted the mandarins for their opinion, they got the
tantrum treatment. Running the story, they were told in
an urgent voice, placed the AIDS education effort at risk,
which in turn would make the media accomplices to
homicide. This oldest of doctor tricks, based on the
charming belief that any deviation from the doctor's
advice threatens life, worked again. Nevertheless, the
print media and radio picked up the story and one
television science producer will begin filming a
documentary in January 1995. There have been other
ruptures in the media consensus. A New Zealand
journal, Health Care Analysis, is giving critics considerable
space, and the Perth Three have finally gotten into the
popular press on African AIDS and on unreliability of the
Western Blot test.
Truth management in the medical sciences is at risk if
authorities cannot maintain diagnostic and treatment
orthodoxy among the primary clients of a particular
service. For AIDS, the salient client groups are gay men,
hemophiliacs, and lately mothers of HIV+ infants. Gay
men must be kept on side. Their vocal defection in
numbers from just one pillar of orthodoxy, such as

treatment, would seriously impair credibility of the
whole edifice. The AIDS Mirage maps the course of
truth management in AIDS science. It also predicts