THE MASSIVE FRAUD BEHIND HIV TESTS
On July 12, 2006, ABC News ran a story about testing all adults in America for HIV:
“Along with Washington's new screening program, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] is expected to release similar guidelines this summer that would expand HIV screening to all adults in the United States.
“If this happens, it means that just about anybody over the age of 13 could be asked by their doctor, ‘Would you like an HIV test?’”
Although this would not be a compulsory program, it would be another step in that direction. And of course, in a doctor’s office or in a hospital, many patients simply go along with doctors’ recommendations.
If a doctor says, “Would you like to get tested for AIDS? It’s very important, it could save your life,” the patient will often give his/her consent.
The CDC is also claiming that today’s HIV tests are much more accurate than the tests done in the early years of AIDS. However, in the early years, US health authorities asserted that standard HIV tests were 99.78% accurate, which is to say they very, very rarely called a patient HIV positive when he/she wasn’t. Were US health authorities lying then, or are they lying now—or both?
In 1988, my book, AIDS INC., was published. It was the first book that challenged the assumption that HIV causes AIDS.
I also devoted an entire chapter to proving that routine HIV tests were unscientific, useless, misleading, and produced devastating results, since those tests were (and are) the gateway into highly toxic drugs---to say nothing of the horrendous consequences of telling a person he has contracted an ultimately fatal disease.
In the years since 1988, a great deal of information has come to light regarding HIV tests.
For example, last year (2005), the following explosive lead paragraph appeared in a KTVU/Associated Press story:
Anxiety Triggered By AIDS Test/ False Positive Results
POSTED: 8:01 am PST December 9, 2005
UPDATED: 8:23 am PST December 9, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO – “A promising new oral HIV test that uses fluid swabbed from the mouth to quickly and easily detect the virus that causes AIDS incorrectly diagnosed a quarter of the people who tested positive in San Francisco, city health officials found.”
People were tested for HIV, told they were positive, when in fact this was false.
The article continues:
”Forty-seven people who tested positive after using the OraQuick Advance HIV test in city clinics were not infected at all, the San Francisco Department of Public Health said this week.”
So apparently, not all HIV tests are “much more accurate today.”
At the end of the article, a scientist at the California Office of AIDS made a telling admission:
“One explanation for the spate of false positives might be that there is something unique about the San Francisco group, such as a high number of people with hepatitis, that may unexpectedly interfere with the test results, said Deanne Sykes, a research scientist for the California Office of AIDS.
"’We will watch it,’ she said. ‘We will monitor it to see if there is something consistent we can pinpoint.’"
Sykes was stating that hepatitis might cause the HIV blood test to register positive when it was really negative. This is called a cross-reaction.
Actually, blood products given to treat hepatitis, as well as the hepatitis B vaccine, can both cause a false-positive HIV test. This has been known for a long time.
See, for example, Lee, D, Eby W, Molinaro, G. 1992. HIV false positivity after Hepatitis B vaccination. Lancet 339: 1060.
***
While writing AIDS INC., I was told by an employee of the FDA that the universally used Elisa blood test for HIV was, in fact, designed to cast a very wide net and catch possible HIV contamination in the overall stored blood supply. The tests were not designed for individuals. The tests were too broad and too unreliable for individuals.
The FDA is the federal licensing agency for all US AIDS testing. In 1987, a person from their Washington office sent me a rather stunning document simply titled “Summary and Explanation of the Test,” dated July 23, 1987 (and not on Agency letterhead): “In order to afford maximum protection of the blood supply, the EIA [Elisa] test was designed to be extremely sensitive. As a result, non-specific [falsely positive] reactions may be seen in samples from some people…due to prior pregnancy, blood transfusions, or other exposure…”
Remember, in those days, US medical authorities were touting the Elisa test as extremely accurate for individuals---99.78% accurate in being able to find true HIV-negative people.
I recently made several phone calls to the FDA. On July 17, 2006, the FDA press office connected me to Paul Richards. He consulted an FDA spreadsheet. He found that the FDA had approved and licensed a blood test for HIV in 1985 (shortly after the test was developed). But that license was for screening donors who were giving blood at clinics. It wasn’t for diagnosing HIV in a patient. The earliest approval license Richards could find for diagnostic purposes was 1990---a full six years after the Elisa test was developed. As far as I can determine, the Elisa test was in use for diagnostic purposes roughly five years before FDA approved it. This certainly raises red flags.
The Elisa test is, by far, the most widely used instrument for determining whether an individual is HIV positive or negative. Conventional wisdom has it that the ultimate backup for the Elisa is the Western Blot test, which has been called the gold standard. In other words, to verify (or negate) a positive Elisa, a person should get a confirmatory Western Blot.
However, while writing AIDS INC. and searching the medical literature, I found a paper published in the March 1987 issue of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. The author, James Carlson, of the University of California at Davis School of Pathology, dropped a bombshell. He stated that in low-risk groups, the false-positive rate in Elisa tests was an overwhelming “84.2% in our study and 77.1% recently reported by the American Red Cross…”
In plain English, this means that, of all the individuals from low-risk groups who were Elisa tested for HIV, the overwhelming number of those who tested positive were not really positive at all.
***
Perhaps the most devastating analysis of HIV testing was offered by Dr. Harvey Fineberg. When I interviewed Fineberg in 1988, he was Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. Later, he went on to become Provost of Harvard University, and then was appointed president of the very prestigious Institute of Medicine. A man with impeccable conventional credentials, Fineberg had, in the spring of 1987, published a statistical analysis of HIV testing in Law, Medicine, and Healthcare.
“To begin with,” Fineberg told me on the phone, “in the study, we accepted the advertised accuracy ratings of the Elisa test. It’s reportedly able to find true [HIV] positives at a rate of 93.4 percent, and it supposedly can detect true [HIV] negatives correctly 99.78 percent of the time.
“So let’s say that three out of 10,000 people in the US are really infected with the HIV virus. If we consider a sample of 100,000 people, that means 30 will actually be infected with HIV. The Elisa test will be able to pinpoint 93.4 percent, or 28 of those people.
“On the other side of the ledger, that leaves 99,970 out of 100,000 who are truly not infected with the AIDS virus.
“If the Elisa test is 99.78 percent capable of finding these real [HIV] negatives, it will locate 99,750 of these people without fail. That leaves 220 [HIV] negatives it missed.” How did it miss? By calling those 220 people [HIV] positive.
Fineberg stated, “So now you have, out of every 100,000 people, 28 truly [HIV] positive and 220 falsely positive test results. That means the statistical chances are about 90 percent that [an HIV] positive-reading Elisa is wrongly positive [false-positive].”
Fineberg continued: “A second Elisa won’t change that either. If you do a Western Blot, the odds might, at best, be lowered to 25 percent. In other words, a fourth of the time, a positive AIDS test would be false-positive.”
Fineberg’s analysis was largely ignored by the mainstream press, medical researchers, and of course the US government, which was funding most of the major research on AIDS.
In fact, as you can see from reading what I’ve presented so far in this article, a great deal of CONVENTIONAL medical assessment of the crippling problems associated with AIDS testing was ignored.
The reason for this avoidance was obvious. There existed (and continues to exist) a network of government funders, government labs, private AIDS fund-raising agencies, PR groups, “star researchers,” medical journals, compliant and superficial medical reporters, and drug companies---to say nothing of the FDA and the World Health Organization---devoted to presenting HIV testing as an entirely reliable instrument.
An admission that this whole testing system was (and is) scientifically bankrupt and dangerous would collapse the certainty of the whole AIDS structure.
And this is just the beginning of the problem with AIDS tests.
Copyright © 2006 by Jon Rappoport
The complete article (including the ellipses [***] in the above) is available as a PDF file here.
Jon Rappoport is the author of the 1988 classic, AIDS INC., Scandal of the Century, from which parts of this article are adapted (and that also contains The Story of the Suicide Gene - one of the more remarkable satires ever penned on the current state of biomedical science). In recent years, Mr. Rappoport has been mostly retired from AIDS investigative reporting activities as can be seen at his website, www.nomorefakenews.com. (Hank)
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