HIV and AIDS: Questions of Scientific and Journalistic Responsibility

HIV AND AIDS

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how I know that's true.' I think it's good form."
So he said, "Why don't you cite this Centers for Communicable
Diseases [CDC] report?" He gave it to me. It was a stupid little
thing, without scientific merit; you might as well quote the New
York Times. So I went to other people in the lab, and I started
looking at the scientific literature, and I began to notice that
nobody ever quoted a scientific paper to back up the notion that
HIV causes AIDS.
Both Duesberg and Mullis have emphasized that the papers of
Montagnier, Gallo or others do not provide any scientific justification
that HIV causes a disease. They asked for such papers but none was
forthcoming. In his California Monthly interview, Mullis tells how he
began to think there was "something fishy" about the evasive answers
he was getting to his questions. He tells about the way he confronted
Montagnier in San Diego, after Montagnier had given a talk on AIDS.
Mullis "noticed that Montagnier hadn't said one word about how come
we ought to think HIV is the cause of AIDS". After the talk Mullis
asked Montagnier directly for a scientific reference, and Montagnier
admitted that none existed.
Duesberg wrote a letter dated 11 February 1993 to Harold Jaffe,
Director of the HIV/AIDS Division at the CDC. In that letter,
Duesberg asked: "Exactly which papers are now considered proof or, if
there is no proof, the best support for the HIV-AIDS hypothesis?" Not
a single specific paper was mentioned in Jaffe's reply. Jaffe only gave
what he viewed as epidemiological evidence.
2. The case of chimpanzees. From 1983 to the late eighties, 150
chimpanzees were infected with HIV, but did not become sick as of
1994. This information was obtained by Duesberg directly from Jorg
Eichberg, cf. Duesberg's article "AIDS acquired by drug consumption and
other noncontagious risk factors", Journal of Pharmacology and
Therapeutics [referred to as Pharmac. Ther.] Vol. 55 (1992), pp. 203 and
211. Like humans, chimpanzees are susceptible to HIV. The virus
replicates in them and antibodies form against it exactly as in human
beings.
3. What does HIV-positive mean? A difficulty lies in determining
who is "HIV positive" and what HIV positivity means. The blood test
for HIV does not determine directly the presence of the virus. At best it
determines only having antibodies to the virus called HIV, and this