HIV and AIDS: Questions of Scientific and Journalistic Responsibility

HIV AND AIDS

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see that there is some logic to the hypothesis."...Haverkos believes the government's unofficial position today
is that HIV may not be involved in KS, but whatever is, is
transmitted sexually; the unwritten rule of public health seems
to be that infectious disease always trumps toxicology. Haverkos
argues: "If somebody could find me five white women with
Kaposi's who did not use nitrites, between the ages of 18 and 45,
sexually linked to a man with Kaposi's -- just five couples -- that
would take me back. But we're 13 years into this epidemic, and I
have not seen such cases reported. If this was a sexually
transmitted agent, there ought to be a handful of women like
that."
Once again, one finds such analyses from a "lone crusader at the
National Institutes of Health" (as SPIN calls Haverkos) in SPIN, but
not in Science or the New York Times, or the other major scientific or
main-stream newspaper and magazines.
London Sunday Times. Perhaps the most spectacular
revisionist event was the publication of a series of articles in fall 1993
by the London Sunday Times, which also quoted Kary Mullis in the
Sunday Times editorial (12 December 1993): "The HIV theory, the way
it is being applied, is unfalsifiable and therefore useless as a medical
hypothesis...If there is evidence out there that HIV causes Aids, there
should be some scientific documents which either singly or collectively
demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no
such document."
The Sunday Times series of articles was virulently attacked by some
of the medical and scientific establishment, especially in editorials by
Nature's editor John Maddox, such as the one of 9 December 1993. The
Sunday Times science editor Neville Hodgkinson replied equally
vigorously on 12 December 1993. His reply began:
The Sunday Times has been subjected to a wave of
extraordinary attacks in recent weeks over its attempts to widen
discussion of one of the most crucial medical and scientific issues
of our time, the cause of AIDS.
A growing body of evidence suggest that when the medical and
scientific communities rallied in 1984 behind a call to arms
against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) as the