Reflectorites
Here is an article on the AIDS conference in South Africa by a more
open-minded reporter than most.
Steve
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http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=1973&now=05/25/2000&content_section=1
5-25-2000
[...]
NYPress
[...]
Feature Celia Farber
[...]
AIDS & South Africa
A Contrary Conference in Pretoria
In 14 years of AIDS journalism, I've never seen the AIDS leadership
writhing in the kind of agony they now find themselves in daily. The
prospect of having to debate, defend or quantify their paradigm is melting
them down. Since last fall, when the government of South Africa
announced that it would suspend AZT use while investigating its toxicity,
the country that once symbolized oppression has emerged as a crucible of
enlightenment.
Over the past several months, the Western AIDS orthodoxy has been
rendered increasingly deranged by South African President Thabo Mbeki's
call for a reopening of the HIV-AIDS causation question. Before long they
began earnestly calling for the criminal prosecution of AIDS dissidents.
(This rabid wish was voiced by way of the mainstream AIDS media.)
Fantastic, I say. Just make sure it's televised because Americans will
recognize the face of at least one man being hauled off in handcuffs for
supporting open debate on AIDS, and it won't be his first visit to the
slammer: Nelson Mandela.
Just last week, Mandela came out in support of Mbeki's "controversial"
AIDS initiative, which has "AIDS activists" and "AIDS experts" around the
world in fits of apoplexy. And this week, with Mbeki visiting Clinton, the
stories all revolve around the disturbed emotional states of "AIDS
activists" who don't quite know how to express their horror. Project
Inform's Martin Delaney told the Times this weekend that "the fear here is
that he'll dig in worse if he gets pressured."
The trigger for all this strife was a simple, historic event: After months of
deliberations and internal strife, Mbeki and the government of South Africa
convened a two-day panel in Pretoria, May 6-7, at which 33 scientists
deliberated about the evidence for and against HIV as the single and
sufficient cause of AIDS worldwide. They also discussed the drugs used to
combat it, and asked themselves whether the drugs have saved lives or
ended lives. The AIDS orthodoxy was widely quoted as fuming about
Mbeki wasting time on dead scientific questions while they themselves
were busy saving lives. But the panel did take place, and I was there.
If you've absorbed the situation thus far from the mainstream press, you've
been left with the impression that the story is all about President Mbeki
betraying his country, if not losing his mind altogether-Mbeki "trawling"
the Internet late at night and "stumbling" across a few "obscure" American
scientists who say HIV doesn't cause AIDS. What's consistently absent
from reports on this subject is a statement not of conjecture but of fact:
Mbeki did not fall under the spell of two American scientists who question
HIV's role in AIDS (by which is meant Drs. David Rasnick and Peter
Duesberg). The scientific opposition to the mainstream view of HIV and
AIDS is in fact longstanding, formidable and far more extensive than two
scientists. This opposition was first galvanized around retrovirology
pioneer Peter Duesberg, who in 1987 wrote his first deconstruction of the
hypothesis. Duesberg mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses, and
was widely regarded as one of the leading retrovirologists in the world at
the time of his first critique. In subsequent years, hundreds of scientists
from around the world have joined the ranks of the dissenters, under the
auspices of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS
Hypothesis, an opposition group that boasts up to 600 signatories, many of
whom hold PhDs and two of whom hold Nobel Prizes.
These are the so-called AIDS dissidents, now also labeled "AIDS
denialists." On June 6, 1991, the initial signatories drafted a letter that
stands as the working definition of an "AIDS dissident." The letter, which
no major science journal would publish for years until Science finally
relented in 1996, read as follows:
It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV
causes the group of diseases called AIDS. Many biochemical scientists now
question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the
existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable
independent group. We further propose that critical epidemiological studies
be devised and undertaken.
Epidemiological studies? Whoever heard of anything so whacked? We all
know HIV causes AIDS. Anybody who doubts it obviously doesn't care
about the dead and dying.
Seriously, this simple statement is all that lies at the heart of the maligned
and despised AIDS dissident movement. That wish for a "thorough
reappraisal" was behind the Pretoria conference in early May. Yet judging
from media reports, you'd think that Mbeki had called for AIDS
quarantines and tattoos for all HIV-positives.
In fact, Mbeki's heresy consisted of opening up one large room at the
Sheraton hotel in Pretoria, and placing along a rectangular table 33
scientists with opposing views on what causes AIDS. About a dozen of
them argued that no proof of causation has been established between HIV
and AIDS. The others took the opposing, majority view.
There was predictable response from some quarters. "It's irresponsibility
that borders on criminality," a South African "medical graduate" and
"respected intellectual" was quoted saying in the Sunday Herald of
Glasgow. "Mbeki's position defies logic," said Dr. Ashraf Grimwood, the
chairman of the South African National AIDS Convention, in the same
article. "The suggestion that AIDS is not caused by HIV is totally at odds
with what is happening on the ground. South Africans are burying wives,
husbands, children, relations and friends every day. People are terrified.
No-one has seen anything like it before. This country needs to get its
priorities right, or it will hardly be a country at all." (Notice the leap of
illogic from the first to the second sentence of that statement.)
People are sick and dying in alarming numbers on the continent of Africa,
but what is it that leads us to trace this phenomenon to sexual promiscuity
and this particular retrovirus, when other complications abound? Why has
AIDS not spread outside the original risk groups in any industrialized
nation, yet where poverty is widespread, the virus (and AIDS) spreads like
wildfire? The orthodox theory is that this is due to sexual promiscuity
among Africans and a penchant for dry sex, rough sex and even sexual
rituals involving monkey blood.
"It isn't the facts that are in dispute," says African historian Charles
Geshekter of California State University at Chico, who took part in
advising Mbeki prior to the panel formation. "It's the theoretical construct
behind the facts. Yes, there is a measurable decline in African health and
increases in African mortality. What is in dispute is whether the symptoms
of such illnesses are caused by extraordinary patterns of sexual behavior or
whether the signs reflect the deterioration of life on the continent over the
past 20 years. The breakdown and decline of public health and medical
treatment across Africa is due largely if not entirely to domestic civil war,
impossible levels of indebtedness and sharp declines in the prices paid for
commodities produced by Africans. This is standard World Bank and IMF
micro- and macro-analysis. Where's the mystery?"
The statistics ubiquitously cited to demonstrate a plague of AIDS sweeping
Africa are untrustworthy in the extreme, as virtually no statistics are kept
on either rates of infection, numbers of deaths or causes of death on the
whole continent. In addition, the shoddy test used there can cross-react
with microbes endemic to the region, such as malaria. The "Bangui
definition" of AIDS was published in Science in 1986; the diagnosis is
AIDS if a patient has a persistent cough and two of three other conditions:
"prolonged fevers (a month or more), weight loss of 10 percent or greater
and prolonged diarrhea." In other words, people were diagnosed with
AIDS without being given HIV tests.
"According to the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD), which is a
WHO-sponsored project," says Geshekter, "Africa maintains the lowest
percentage of vital statistics for cause of death of any continent in the
world." The GBD estimates that statistics can be considered accurate on
the continent for a microscopic 1.1 percent of all deaths.
One of the South African dissidents on Mbeki's Pretoria panel, Dr. Sam
Mhlongo, arrived at his own skepticism while working at a hospital in
London in the mid-1980s. There he came across a group of patients from
Uganda who, he was told, were all HIV-positive (on the ELISA test).
After retesting them using more rigorous tests, he found that every one of
them was in fact HIV-negative. "That's when I knew something was very,
very wrong," he told me.
The countries where AIDS supposedly rages in Africa are also afflicted by
dire poverty and malnutrition. But the "massive effort" to combat AIDS
that Mbeki is supposedly undermining with his skepticism amounts to
widespread condom education and distribution, and the dumping of failed,
toxic drugs onto a population that does not, in many cases, have access to
food or clean water. AIDS advocates seem curiously unmoved by the
practice of driving around to desperately poor villages in Africa and
preaching condom use to people who don't have water. They also don't
seem bothered by the fact that poor Africans are used in shoddy drug trials,
pressured to sign consent forms they don't understand, manipulated by
AIDS terror and told they will "probably die of HIV anyway." In one
Nevarapine trial in South Africa, five pregnant women were recently killed
by the drug, a protease inhibitor; others suffered debilitating side effects.
Thabo Mbeki was a central figure in the worldwide anti-apartheid
movement, as was his father, Govan Mbeki. He led the ANC delegation
that finally negotiated the release of Mandela and other political prisoners,
and managed to negotiate a peaceful end to apartheid. "The Mbeki family is
like the royal family here in South Africa," a South African journalist told
me.
Mbeki is renowned for his intellect, decency and sense of honor. He is a
rapacious reader. He was sent abroad by the ANC as a young man to spare
him from prison and ensure that he got a good education. At the University
of Sussex, where Mbeki obtained his degree in economics, the theme of his
education, according to biographical notes, was "the notion that the
students had to know enough to be able to question whether what they
knew was, in fact, knowledge."
Mbeki was literate from a very early age, and it fell upon him to read the
letters written to the illiterate wives of the husbands who had gone off to
work in the coal, gold and diamond mines. When the miners began dying
from coughing up blood, lore had it that they died because they had been
kicked in the chest by the killer-birds of witches (impundulu). In fact, they
died of phthisis, brought on by mine dust.
Is it surprising, then, that now as president of South Africa, he looks at
AIDS and questions its causes? Twenty years of crisis. An estimated 50
billion research dollars expended by the U.S. government. But a head of
state can't invite 33 scientists into a room to discuss the actual data
underlying the AIDS edifice without triggering international outrage.
This is the Thabo Mbeki described in The Washington Post as "thin-
skinned" because when "a reporter asked if he could afford such a cautious,
studied approach to treating AIDS when activists estimate that 1,500 to
1,700 South Africans are becoming infected with HIV daily, Mbeki
retorted skeptically: `How is that figure derived? Do you know? I don't
know."'
A better question might be why "AIDS activists" are put in charge of
estimating HIV infections on a continent that keeps no such figures.
Mbeki's "I don't know" is by itself a revolutionary statement. When
discussing AIDS, rule number one is: Don't ever admit you don't know
something. Rule number two: Statistics, especially in Africa, are always
beyond dispute, spiraling toward the skies, getting worse and worse and
worse.
The night before I boarded a plane for Johannesburg, my phone rang. It
was my friend Noah Bogen, a documentary filmmaker who had for years
been telling me he wanted to do something on the HIV debate. "I'm
coming with you, Celia," he said. "I've decided I'm ready to die for
something important. I've had enough of my pointless mundane existence."
"We're not going to die, Noah," I said. "We're going to the Sheraton hotel
in Pretoria."
Two dissident scientists and three orthodox scientists are on the plane with
us. Fourteen hours later, we touch down in Johannesburg and unfurl our
aching bodies. We are greeted by the coordinator of the panel, and ushered
into a diplomatic lounge, where they take our passports, offer us drinks and
welcome us. Eventually we are divided into cars and speed off toward
Pretoria, half an hour away. On arriving at the hotel, we learn that there
will be no press access to the actual proceedings, because the mainstream
side objected fiercely to this.
A few hours later, jetlagged, I wander down to the cocktail reception,
where hardcore dissidents like Duesberg and Harvey Bialy are conversing
happily with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and the NIH. In
walks Luc Montagnier, from whose laboratory the entire ball of wax
emanated in 1983, when he isolated the virus (or, some dissidents would
say, "what passes for the virus").
I look around the room and smile at the very sight of all the orthodox
scientists eating salmon snippets from the same tray as people who don't
think HIV causes AIDS. A single air strike against this hotel at this
moment and you'd wipe out the HIV debate forever after. I greet
Duesberg, whom I've known, interviewed and admired since 1987. For
years I've been telling him that this day would come. He looks around the
room. "I have to admit," he says, "this is unbelievable."
The next morning at 8 a.m., a red carpet runs through the Sheraton, and we
take our seats to await President Mbeki, who will address and welcome the
panel. When he enters the room, it feels great, standing up to salute
somebody you actually want to salute.
He addresses us, his voice melodic and gentle, quoting Irish poetry, asking
rhetorically if he might be a fool. "Indeed, when eminent scientists said,
`You have spoken out of turn,' it was difficult to think I was not a fool," he
said. "You cannot respond to a catastrophe merely by saying, I will
respond in a way that is routine. We must never freeze scientific discourse
at a particular point."
He detailed the trajectory of his own skepticism, and said that the data on
HIV and AIDS in Africa had confounded him.
(Days later, Rachel Swarns of The New York Times would report that
Mbeki said in this address that he "knew that the human immunodeficiency
virus causes AIDS." He said no such thing. I called Swarns twice for
comment. At print time, she has not responded.)
Around the world, even in South Africa, the media has pilloried Mbeki,
depicting him as "unable to sleep" and searching the Internet for conspiracy
theories about AIDS. Mbeki has accused his critics of waging a "campaign
of intellectual intimidation and terrorism" against him, which he likens to
"the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed."
The real story has nothing to do with the Internet. It started with a South
African journalist and consultant named Anita Allen, who, having read
Nobel laureate/HIV dissident Kary Mullis' book Dancing Naked in the
Mind Field, began her own crash course in the dissident critique, and
started calling South African scientists and health officials to alert them.
After many weeks of polite rejections and assurances that the scientific
community of South Africa was quite sure HIV caused AIDS but thanks
anyway, Allen finally appealed to the President himself in the form of a
letter and a 100-page dossier. Three months later, an astounding thing
happened.
"It was close to midnight," Allen recalls, "and the fax machine went off. I
thought, `Who on Earth is faxing me at this hour?'" What came through
the fax was a handwritten letter from Mbeki, saying he had read her letter
expressing concern about the HIV-AIDS question and that he wanted to
meet with her in the morning to discuss it.
Allen met with Mbeki for an hour. She brought with her a dossier of
scientific articles for him to read.
"He said to me, `What exactly do you want me to do?' And I suggested he
convene a panel. He said, `I'm going to be slaughtered, you know.'"
"What other leader in the world would talk to an ordinary citizen like
that?" Allen wonders.
She was invited to submit a proposal on whom to invite to the panel and
how to structure it. The man placed in charge of dispatching the
invitations, Dr. Ian Roberts, was, according to Allen, hostile to the debate
and simply didn't send them out. This explains why, in the days leading up
to the conference, I was on the phone with dissidents Rasnick, Bialy and
others, trying to find out if this was really happening or not, and they didn't
know. Many of the panelists only had their flights confirmed in the
immediate days before departure.
"What's going on in there?" I continually asked whatever panelist I could
snag when they came out of the conference room for their coffee breaks.
"They have nothing, just fairy tales about friends dying, architects dying, all
these funerals," says Christian Fiala, a dissident doctor from Austria.
"There is an interesting argument in there, that so many millions are dying
and we have to act now, and all these people trying to reopen a discussion
about the causes of AIDS is stopping this important action. But what they
don't keep in mind is that before you start to go in a certain direction, you
have to know which direction you're going in, and why. What if it's the
wrong direction?"
"It took a head of state to accomplish what scientists couldn't accomplish
in 15 years," Rasnick told me. "The event itself was historic, but I would
not say that anything was resolved. Everybody just laid out their positions,
and nobody really budged from those positions... It was two days of
`You're wrong and I'm right.'"
In a separate meeting, it was decided that Duesberg and Bialy, under the
auspices of the CDC and the South African government, will design
epidemiological studies that will put the HIV hypothesis to a test (16 years
after its birth).
After the first day of the panel, there was a joke going around that Helene
Gayle, the very beautiful African-American director of the National Center
of HIV/AIDS prevention at the CDC, had invited Duesberg to the CDC for
a yearlong sabbatical. Duesberg and Gayle were joking and being flirty, and
before long nobody knew if the joke was real or not. By the end of the
conference, a version of it had taken root, and it was announced that a
subcommittee of four-Gayle, Duesberg, Bialy and Prof. Malegapuru
Makgoba, head of South Africa's Medical Research Council-would work
together to design and carry out the HIV experiments. This was confirmed
by the Health Minister at the closing press conference, and reporters were
meekly asking who would pay for the experiments.
"Peter Duesberg was more surprised than anybody on the planet to hear
that he's now collaborating with the CDC," said Rasnick. "This is beyond
anybody's wildest imagination."
Rasnick also reported that when he said that AZT has "killed a lot of
people," no one on the panel disagreed.
"That was quite openly stated and nobody disagreed with it," Rasnick said.
"I would put the figure at at least tens of thousands killed, at the doses they
were giving people in the early years."
Dr. Klaus Koehnlein, a German AIDS practitioner and dissident on the
panel, concurred. "I remember vividly the early years, and seeing those
AZT patients, and they just had no bone marrow left and that was it. They
think AZT wasn't so good and the new drugs are better, but they have no
idea that we killed a whole generation of AIDS patients with AZT.
Especially in the early high doses of 1200 and 1500 milligrams. That was
just murder."
Dr. Sam Mhlongo, head of the Dept. of Family Medicine and Primary
Health Care at the Medical University of South Africa, was the only South
African on the panel who holds the dissident position. He speaks to Mbeki
on a regular basis. I ask him whether he thinks Mbeki might back down
under international pressure.
"There is no way this president will give in to attacks on him, because he is
convinced, like he was in the struggle against apartheid, that there needs to
be a debate. This is all related to apartheid, because the theories and
practices of apartheid were not to be questioned. It was taken for granted.
"I grew up under apartheid," he continued. "There were funerals every
week because of the violence and the poverty of apartheid. There are many
funerals still today, and I say that there is no evidence whatsoever that
these people have died of AIDS."
I ask him what I would see if I went to a local hospital (which I've done in
other African countries, but not in South Africa). "If you didn't see poverty
and malnutrition as the number-one cause of death in South Africa," he
replied, "I am prepared to close my bank account and give you all my
money."
I asked him how that was possible-how could there be all these media
reports about the millions dying of AIDS in Africa? It can't be a wholesale
fabrication, can it? Don't they say that AIDS affects the middle and upper
classes, not just the poor?
"Look, there are no death certificates whatsoever," he said. "We have no
references for anything. All you have is the media. Television, radio and
newspapers agreeing on this. That stuff about the upper classes is really
rubbish. I am so-called bourgeois, and I don't see any of this among the
middle class. It's the poverty-stricken, unemployed, black South Africans
who are dying, because of diseases related to poverty."
Political earthquakes sometimes begin as flukes, or oversights-like the
"opening" of the Berlin Wall, which the East German government did not
intend at all.
The panel is being followed up by a six-week Internet discussion with all
the panelists, and then another meeting in Pretoria in early July, where
conclusions will be drawn and recommendations will be drafted for the
South African government's AIDS policies.
A strange thing happened on the last day. Apparently, Clinton called and
spoke to Mbeki just as the panel was convening, and asked if he could
dispatch four (African-American) AIDS specialists from the White House
to sit in on the panel. Mbeki agreed, and the four suddenly appeared on the
last day, but evidently didn't say much.
"It seemed like they were there to observe," said Rasnick.
"That's the United States AIDS forces coming in," quipped Duesberg.
When I collared people from the CDC in the halls and asked them for
comment, they would say diplomatically that this conference was
"important" and that many of the dissident arguments could be helpful in
the "fight against AIDS."
It felt a little like the period around the time of the Velvet Revolution,
when former authoritarian socialists suddenly started talking about the
importance of "socialism with a human face."
vol 13 no 21
[...]
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"Despite a close watch, we have witnessed no new species emerge in the
wild in recorded history. Also, most remarkably, we have seen no new
animal species emerge in domestic breeding. That includes no new species
of fruitflies in hundreds of millions of generations in fruitfly studies, where
both soft and harsh pressures have been deliberately applied to the fly
populations to induce speciation. And in computer life, where the term
"species" does not yet have meaning, we see no cascading emergence of
entirely new kinds of variety beyond an initial burst. In the wild, in
breeding, and in artificial life, we see the emergence of variation. But by the
absence of greater change, we also clearly see that the limits of variation
appear to be narrowly bounded, and often bounded within species." (Kelly K.,
"Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines," [1994], Fourth Estate: London,
1995, reprint, p.475)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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