CHAPTER 4

However, the rejection of the argument by the omnipotent apparatus - that there is no special African HI Virus, but, rather, the scourge of poverty and underdevelopment - means that there are more questions that require answers.

One of these concerns the constitution, therefore, of our own unique HI Virus. How is it composed? How does it behave? What are its various mutant forms?

Scientists say that for them to be able to answer these questions, first of all, they need to isolate the Virus. They say that the tried and tested method of doing this is to use an electron microscope capable of magnifying this minute retrovirus to 300, 000 times its size. They would then be able to photograph and analyse it and thus answer the questions that have been posed.

There is at least one such an electron microscope in our country. The questions that arise are whether the Virus has been isolated and analysed, using this microscope and whether the resultant photographs exist!

Given the numbers of people who are said to have died of HIV/AIDS, the question must be asked - has the HI Virus been isolated during medical examinations and post-mortems to establish that the prime cause of illness and death is HIV infection?

The reality is that this seemingly critical first step that would enable us to know the nature of the creature we are dealing with has not been taken.

Strange as it may seem, given what our friends tell us about the Virus everyday, nobody has seen it, including our friends. Nobody knows what it looks like. Nobody knows how it behaves. Everybody acts on the basis of a series of hypotheses about the Virus, which are presumed to be facts, supposedly authenticated by 'clinical evidence'.

Those who have imbibed the faith that millions among us are infected by a deadly HI Virus, will disbelieve the assertion that the work of isolating our unique HI Virus has not been done. The omnipotent apparatus will scream loudly that the telling of this truth constitutes the very heart of the criminal non-conformity that must be denounced and repressed by all means and at all costs.

Rather than perpetuate our self-repression, it is time that we demanded that the necessary scientific work be done to isolate and analyse the Virus that is said to be so deadly.

To defeat the HIV/AIDS pandemic requires that science does what it does normally, as it tries to understand viruses. It is difficult to understand why the HI Virus stands in a caste of its own, as an untouchable.

In any case, the scientists have the advantage that, more than 15 years ago, the scientists Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier claimed that they had identified and isolated this Virus. The scientific world accepted this claim and continues to do so.

There should therefore be no problem in repeating the established scientific work carried out by Gallo and Montagnier, who are accepted as the "co-discoverers" of the HI Virus.

What the Africans do not know, of course, is that at the time HIV was 'discovered' in 1984, Montagnier's French Pasteur Institute accused Gallo of having stolen the HIV discovery from them. Ultimately, this controversy was resolved when the two scientists, together with US President Reagan and French Premier Chirac signed an agreement in 1987, which proclaimed the two scientists as co-discoverers of HIV.

Interestingly, nobody asked the question - what do the political signatories know about science!

But even after this document was signed, in 1991 the US government's National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Office of Scientific Integrity found that, with regard to the discovery of HIV, Gallo, as laboratory chief, had "created and fostered conditions that give rise to falsified/fabricated data and falsified reports."

In 1992, the NIH Office of Research Integrity determined that Gallo was guilty of scientific misconduct. Nevertheless, it said that this did not "negate the central findings" of Gallo, with regard to HIV.

In 1984, before any information was published in the scientific journals, and therefore examined by the scientific community, Gallo and US President Reagan's Health and Human Services Secretary, Margaret Heckler, announced at a press conference that Gallo had isolated the "AIDS virus" and developed the test to prove the existence of the virus in human blood.

Clearly, the later findings about the scientific conduct of the "co-discoverer" could not, and would not, be allowed to interfere with what had been announced to the press and the world!

We must accept that all this belongs to an ancient and unchangeable past. What was stated as fact then, has become set in stone as fact.

Dr Joseph A. Sonnabend published an article in AIDS Forum 1989 entitled "Fact and Speculation about the Cause of AIDS." He wrote:

" The precise point at which a conjecture comes to be accepted as an established fact is far from clear, although in a commonsense fashion, the distinctions between them is usually quite evident. That HIV-1 is the cause of AIDS is a contention that was ceremoniously propelled out of the realm of speculation into that of proven fact by Margaret Heckler in 1984 in her public pronouncement the U.S. government scientists had discovered the 'probable cause of AIDS' - HTLV-III, later to be renamed 'Human Immunodeficiency Virus', of 'HIV', in an apparent confirmation of its etiologic role. Thus, overnight, a new orthodoxy came into being, unruffled by the subsequent discovery that there was a second cause of AIDS in another retrovirus.Despite the widespread acceptance of the etiologic roles of the HIVs in AIDS, these must remain conjectural as long as two questions (at least) remain open. One concerns pathogenesis and the other the association of the HIVs with AIDS. Both are import!
ant to the original presentation of HIV as the cause of AIDS, as the relate to the two props on which this presentation rested.

" It is now known that insufficient numbers of helper lymphocytes are actively infected to account for their loss by a direct cell-killing effect of HIV, and there is an alternative explanation for the association of HIV seropositivity with AIDS that does not require that it play an etiologic role, and that has yet to be excluded. To these two problems concerning the etiologic roles of the HIVs in AIDS must be added the apparent failure, thus far, of antiretroviral chemotherapy.

" The premature acceptance as fact of a contention that more properly belongs in the realm of speculation has had a number of far reaching consequence - let alone the painful fact that it has provided virtually no help to people with AIDS, despite a massive investment and six years of intensive work on the biology of the HIVs and the chemotherapy of infection with these viruses.

" The acceptance as fact rather than hypotheses that the HIVs cause AIDS is responsible in great part for a number of grave consequences.

" A. The almost total commitment of resources to the study of the HIVs has left alternative etiologic hypotheses unexplored. Should the HIVs be proven not to be the cause of AIDS, we will have to go back to the beginning in our studies on the cause of this disease, and will have lost six years and countless lives.

" B. Aspects of pathogenesis apparently unrelated to HIV have not been explored. Some examples will be given that could have been pursued as early as 1981.

" It has been suggested that questioning the etiologic role of HIV in AIDS may promote the spread of disease as it 'frees one of the worry about testing positive as it 'frees one of the worry about testing positive or the guilt of spreading the disease'. This is an irrational and poorly thought out objection. The reality of the mode of transmission of AIDS, whether sexually or by blood or blood products, is of course quite obvious, whether it is HIV or some other factor or factors that are transmitted.

" In fact, a ground-breaking booklet presenting the first safer sex guidelines appeared in 1883 and its was based on a multifactoral mode - not a single agent model. The measures suggested were identical to those usually proposed to limit the spread of HIV."

Despite the objections by the South African born and trained Dr Sonnabend, one of the first doctors to treat AIDS in New York and the US, speculation had been accepted as fact, that HIV causes AIDS.