Exclusive Interview with Dr. Duesberg!!

Nah, just kidding. It's an old interview from 1993 -- the great Spin Magazine. I reproduce the first part below, conducted by Bob Guccione:

BG: Why do you think HIV doesn't cause AIDS?

PD: Every virus I've ever seen gets its job done by killing a cell at a time, and when it has killed enough, you get sick. HIV is said to be responsible for the loss of T-cells, which are the immune system. Now, in every AIDS patient studied so far, there is never more than, on average, one in 1,000 cells infected by HIV.

BG: How many cells in 1,000 would another virus infect-for instance a flu virus?

PD: If it would cause flu, then 30 percent of your lung cells are ruined by the virus, the lining is gone, or is infected. If you have hepatitis almost every single cell in your liver is infected.

BG: A lot of very bright scientists are working in AIDS and they don't all have dubious agendas and they must have asked themselves the same questions. If HIV doesn't kill a lot of cells, why is it widely believed to be the cause of AIDS?

PD: By assigning it all these unprecedented, paradoxical properties that no other virus ever had. They say it can kill cells indirectly, or can induce something called autoimmunity, which essentially is, the virus sends out a trigger and the body is now convinced to commit suicide. Or they say there are cofactors, if you really press them hard on it. But what they are has yet to be determined.

BG: How feasible is the argument that HIV triggers autoimmunity?

PD: It is very implausible indeed. There are a million Americans with HIV who are totally healthy. There are six million Africans according to the World Health Organization who have HIV; 129,000 had AIDS by the end of last year, that means five million eight hundred and so many thousand had no AIDS. Half a million Europeans have HIV and 60,000 have AIDS. So there are millions and millions of people on this planet who have [HIV but] no AIDS-why don't seven-and-a-half million get autoimmune disease if HIV is the cause of an autoimmune disease?

Well, the establishment says that everybody with HIV will develop AIDS and it's just a matter of time.

In the last ten years this has happened in America to about 20 percent of all people with HIV, 250,000[including deaths to date] out of a million. But the people who are dying from AIDS are hardly ever your all-American friends of 20 to 40 years of age: Virtually all heterosexual Americans and Europeans who had AIDS are intravenous drug users. And the homosexuals who get AIDS had hundreds if not thousands of sexual contacts. That is not achieved with your conventional testosterone. It is achieved with chemicals. Those are the risk groups, they inhale poppers, they use amphetamines, they take Quaaludes, they take amyl nitrite, they take cocaine as aphrodisiacs.

BG: What is it about intravenous drug use as opposed to ordinary drug use, like snorting cocaine, that would mean theses people would go on to develop AIDS?

PD: It's a matter of degree. With drugs, the dose is the poison. You take one aspirin, you lose your headache, you take 200, you drop dead. You smoke one pack of cigarettes, you're fine, but if you smoke two packs of cigarettes for 10 or 20 years, you may get emphysema. It is the same with drugs. If you snort a line of cocaine on a weekend, you probably won't notice the difference. But if you inject it intravenously two or three times a day, that's when the toxicity shows up. We're designed to take some shit. But we're not designed to inject cocaine three times a day. People have been having a little cocaine in their tea in South America, yes, but not injecting it three times a day, and nobody was inhaling nitrites-nitrites are toxic as hell. Nobody was taking amphetamines at those doses; they were not available. That's what's new.

But back to this argument about HIV. Viruses can only work one way. They can only be toxic if they affect a cell. They cannot work at a distance. There's no exception. Viruses are what you call an intracellular parasite. They don't have an autonomous life. They are just a little piece of information that is stuck into a cell and acts like a parasite. But outside of the cell it's like a disc outside a computer.

BG: So is there any precedent of a virus creating an autoimmune disease?

PD: There are a few hypotheses, but no. When a doctor doesn't know how to explain a disease, he has two classical crutches: it's a slow virus or it's an autoimmune disease. I've heard that for the last 20 years. When they didn't know what diabetes was, it was a slow virus or an autoimmune disease. Alzheimer's: slow virus or an autoimmune disease. And with AIDS, slow virus, causing an autoimmune disease. You have both!

An autoimmune disease is a misdirected immune response. It cannot tell a harmful virus from a harmless one, it overreacts. If the virus were the trigger, that should follow as soon as the virus gets in you. Not, as they say about AIDS, you get infected now, ten years later you get diarrhea. It's totally absurd.

BG: Is it possible that AIDS could be an autoimmune created disease, but HIV isn't the trigger?

PD: Some of the AIDS diseases could possibly be autoimmune diseases. Certainly not all. 38 percent of American AIDS cases have nothing to do with immune deficiency. 38 percent. 10 percent are Kaposi sarcomas, 19 percent are this so-called wasting disease.

BG: That's seen in Africa a lot, the slim disease?

PD: Yeah, there it's somewhat different, it's usually coupled with infections. But the American or European wasting disease is actually specifically defined as a nonparasitic disease.

Anyway, 6 percent is dementia, 3 percent is lymphoma cancer. If you add those up, that's 38 percent of all American AIDS cases. Out of 250,000, that's about 100,000-their diseases cannot be explained by any form of immunodeficiency whatsoever.

BG: Why is it considered AIDS, then?

PD: That's one of the questions I would love to know the answer to. I have asked several experts; they always get mad. AIDS is always presented as if it's all immune deficiency. It is not at all. Cancer has nothing to do with immune deficiency.

BG: So what is the common denominator between all of the 25 AIDS diseases?

PD: None! They name it AIDS, that's all. None of these 38 percent have anything whatsoever to do with immunodeficiency, but they're called AIDS.

There's not one AIDS disease that's new. What is new is only the incidence of these diseases in 20-to 45-year-old men, mostly, and a few women, has gone up.

BG: I've always thought the 25 diseases that form the AIDS syndrome had the common denominator that they were the results of the Immune system's inability to stave them off.

PD: That's how they try to sell it without looking at the evidence. But cancer is not a consequence of immune deficiency. Dementia has nothing to do with the immune system. Your brain is independent of the immune system. Of course, if there's no immune system, and your brain gets infected, you can get meningitis. But it doesn't affect your IQ. Sure, in the end, if everything fails you can get all sorts of diseases.

Even if you accommodate the virus with all sorts of absurd and paradoxical hypotheses-indirect mechanisms, and cofactors, autoimmunity, a ten-year latency period-even that doesn't get you around the solid number of 4,621 HIV-free AIDS cases [worldwide, a third of these in the U.S.]. How do you explain those? You couldn't have a better alibi than being there! And that is suppressed. Here we have a real cover-up. Last year the numbers of these cases was going up like crazy, and Anthony Fauci [director of National Institutes of Health [NIH], and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] called a meeting. And you know what they did? They gave it a new name. They call it "Idiopathic CD-4 lymphocytopenia." Or ICL. When you're HIV-free now, it's no longer called AIDS.

BG: There's 4,000 cases that don't have HIV, but the 250,000-plus cases that remain do have HIV.

PD: That's what you think. How do you know that?

BG: Because they've been tested.

PD: By whom?

BG: By their physicians

PD: So who tells us that they have been tested?

A guy goes to his doctor, clearly very ill, he has AIDS. He's tested or was tested earlier on and is found to be HIV-positive.

Even now, there is no record, anywhere, that says in how many American AIDS cases HIV was actually found.

But in every AIDS case, the CDC would know whether or not the patients were HIV-positive, because the physicians reported it.

You're led to believe this by the CDC, but the evidence that HIV is there, they never disclose. Nowhere in the HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, as they call the national statistics kept by the CDC, do you ever find HIV data. No survey on HIV at all. All they talk about is AIDS. And then you read a little more of the fine print, how AIDS is defined. They accept what you call "presumptive diagnosis"- AIDS cases without HIV tests. You know what that means? The guy wears a leather jacket, has an earring, and is coughing. And he's from San Francisco. That's an AIDS case. I don't even have to check it, his physician thinks.

I recently wrote a letter to Harold Jaffe [acting director of the Division of HIV/AIDS at the CDC]. He acknowledged 43,606 presumptive diagnoses up to 1988. I checked the literature and came up with 62,272 until 1992.

BG: Let me get this straight, you're saying between 43,000 and 62,000 of the cases of AIDS up until 1992 were not tested, which means we have no idea whether or not they were HIV-positive.

PD: Absolutely.

BG: They may or may not have been HIV-positive.

PD: Yeah. Even in the latest AIDS definition, in January 1993, they allowed presumptive diagnosis. In other words, a good number of them even now will be reported without and HIV test.

The public perception is that all cases of AIDS have HIV, that a case is not defined as AIDS without the presence of HIV, which would mean, by definition, that somebody tested them.

Most people assume, like you do, that everyone [with AIDS] is positive. That's not the end yet. We have what is called false-positive antibody tests. They call them HIV tests, but you know what you're testing. The antibody can be there and the virus could be long gone.

Comments

[noreen martin]

Great history lesson Hank. I did not know that up to 62,000 AIDS cases were not tested for HIV, talk about inflating numbers. 38% not even immune deficient diseases plus the HIV negative cases surely would drop the numbers significantly.

This HIV, home-team is a trip as they change the rules of the game as they go. It's time for the opposing side to kick some butt!

[HankBarnes]

Go on out there a kick some butt, Noreen!:)

Best, Hank

[noreen martin]

Hank,
Just wanted to give you and the folks at Barnes-ville an invite to a new diner in town. Come on over to noreenshealthdiner.com for good, old-fashioned tips!