HIV and AIDS: Questions of Scientific and Journalistic Responsibility

HIV AND AIDS

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earth is not flat. It is incumbent on those who reject HIV to come to
terms with this."
Thus Winkelstein and the "distinguished medical scientist"
Groopman equate those who question the HIV hypothesis with flatearthers. I ask readers to evaluate Winkelstein's scientific standards
in light of:
- the criticisms to which the "Commentary" with Winkelstein as coauthor was subjected in the article "HIV as a surrogate marker for drug
use: A re-analysis of the San Francisco Man's Health Study" (see
footnote 12);
- the challenges to the HIV-AIDS hypothesis by a number of
scientists, including those mentioned in this article;
- the questions which have been raised at the AAAS and NIDA
meetings concerning drug use as a possible cause of some AIDS-defining
diseases.
The above-mentioned article critical of the Ascher et al.
"Commentary" was submitted for publication in Nature, but rejected.
As we have already mentioned, Nature's editor John Maddox expressed
his position clearly about the refusal to publish: "...the right of reply
has to be modulated by its content." (Nature 363, 13 May 1993, p. 109.)
Neville Hodgkinson reported Nature's refusal to publish these
criticisms of the Ascher et al. paper in the London Sunday Times (1 May
1994), under the title: "Poppers and Propaganda - Censorship is
blocking the debate vital to discovering the truth about Aids". He
wrote that
repeated efforts by Duesberg and others to reply to the attacks on
him have been frustrated by John Maddox, the journal's editor.
Their latest effort, re-analyzing data from an eight-year study of
homosexual men in San Francisco, was rejected two weeks ago. It
reaches conclusions that directly contradict those in the original
article. Almost 100% of the men who died had used poppers, and
there was a much higher level of general drug use (including
heroin and cocaine) among HIV-positive men than their HIVnegative counterparts...To refuse Duesberg and colleagues any
right of reply is an act of censorship on one of the most important
scientific debates of our time.

Hodgkinson also gave the more general evaluation: