"You Bet Your Life"

One More $155 Million Big Pharma Scam

Can Big Pharma do anything right?

We read from Reuters that another pharmaceutical company -- this time Medco from New Jersey -- just settled a fraud case with the DOJ for a whopping $155 Million. Do I need to say it or can we all agree -- thatsa lotta sheckels:)

Money quotes:

"Hidden financial agreements with drug manufacturers and health plans can influence which drugs patients receive, the price we all pay for drugs, and whether pharmacists serve patients with their undivided professional judgment," Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler said in a statement."

"The government also charged that Medco violated an anti-kickback law by soliciting and accepting payments from drug makers to favor their products on Medco's published list of drugs, and by paying kickbacks to get health plans to award contracts to provide the mail order pharmacy benefits."

You wanna hear Medco's reponse? It's so laughable, it would make Bart Simpson blush:

"Even though we did nothing wrong, for our company and our clients it is the right decision to put these aged matters in the past," Medco said in a statement.

Where have we heard that before?

"Wrongful Sentence": HIV Finally on Trial for Real in Australia

Thanks to our new pal Hollywood, we received the following this morning. Stephen Davis fans take note. Maybe this is the beginning of what he (and others) have predicted. We will be following this story as closely as we can, and reporting what we learn here. (Otis)

"Sex doesn't spread HIV"

Adelaide Now
By Colin James, Legal Affairs Editor

October 24, 2006 03:12pm

South Australian prosecutors have been forced to defend claims by a prominent lawyer that the HIV virus cannot be spread by sexual contact.

Kevin Borick, QC, yesterday began a four-day hearing in the Supreme Court in a bid to prove HIV – which causes AIDS – is not transmitted sexually.

Mr Borick is seeking leave to appeal against the conviction of an Adelaide man, Andre Chad Parenzee, 35, who had unprotected sex with three women despite knowing he was infected with HIV.

The case is being closely monitored by state and federal health officials, who are concerned it could undermine more than two decades of public education about the need to practice safe sex.

During his opening address yesterday Mr Borick told Justice John Sulan there was "no evidence for sexual transmission of HIV can be found even in the best conducted studies published from the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States of America and Africa".

Prosecutor Sandi McDonald told Justice Sulan she would be extensively questioning two "experts" called by Mr Borick about their credentials to give evidence.

Man to challenge existence of HIV in court"

YAHOO! ABC 7 (Australia)
Tuesday October 24, 02:10 PM

An HIV positive man convicted of endangering the lives of three former partners through unprotected sex is appealing against his conviction, claiming the HIV virus does not really exist.

It is believed to be the first time the existence of HIV has been challenged in a court of law.

Andre Chad Parenzee is awaiting sentence for having unprotected sex with three women who were unaware he was carrying the HIV virus.

But his lawyer, Kevin Borick, today argued that Parenzee's conviction should be quashed because there is no scientific proof that HIV actually exists.

Mr Borick will call evidence from two Western Australian based scientists, who will argue that the virus has never been isolated, current testing regimes are inconclusive and that there is no proof HIV is transmitted sexually.

Prosecutors plan to call evidence from five HIV experts, who will claim that Parenzee's defence argument was debunked by the scientific community in the 1980s.

Darin C. Brown: The HIV House of Mirrors

The Congress, like any political body or any politician, need not worry about what reality is, only the perception of reality. Scientists, on the other hand, it's their job to be concerned about what reality really is. — Charles Thomas, biochemist

I was going to post on "viral load" determinations this week, but an accidental circumstance has led me to comment more generally today.

The major impetus for creating the AIDS Wiki was a continued frustration with the editors at Wikipedia; in particular, frustration with their inability to tell, as Serge Lang would have put it, "the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground". I made the mistake of returning to the article I created more than three years ago at Wikipedia on HIV dissent and made a small but important change to the introductory text, the importance of which was first pointed out to me by Harvey Bialy some months ago. 

Consider the following text which appeared at Wikipedia until quite recently: 

"The AIDS reappraisal movement (or AIDS dissident movement) is a loosely connected group of activists — journalists, scientists, doctors, HIV-positive persons, and concerned citizens — who deny, challenge, or question, in some way, the consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)."

Compare and contrast this statement to the text at AIDS Wiki:

"An AIDS dissident is an individual who denies the veracity of, challenges, or questions, in some way, the prevailing scientific consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a necessary cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)."

The most important modification here (among many) is "denies the veracity of" in place of "denies". This is especially true, given the fact that dissidents have been increasingly branded as "denialists" who "deny" that "things that are so are so".

What is the distinction between "denying a consensus" and "denying the veracity of a consensus"?

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines consensus as "general agreement...group solidarity in sentiment and belief". Those who doubt the HIV hypothesis do challenge and question the "general agreement...group solidarity in sentiment and belief" on HIV. However, they do not deny it. To deny the HIV consensus would be tantamount to claiming that most researchers conclude HIV is not the cause of AIDS, or that dissidents really aren't in the minority, after all. This claim is hardly tenable.

"What dissidents do deny is the veracity of the consensus. Merriam-Webster defines veracity as "power of conveying or perceiving truth ... conformity with truth or fact".  Dissidents do deny that the consensus view on HIV has the "power of conveying or perceiving truth" or is in "conformity with truth or fact". When I recently made this correction at the Wikipedia article, I was immediately "reverted" because it was felt my edit represented a subjective statement of viewpoint rather than a neutral relating of fact."

At first, I thought this particular incident was just another example of common stupidity, of the inability to understand the meaning of words, or of the inability to pay sufficient attention to the meaning of words. This would be nothing new, either in HIV/AIDS 'thinking' or Wikipedian practice.

Upon further reflection, I came to realize that this particular incident is emblematic of a much deeper pathology afflicting thought on HIV, as well as other issues in today's society. "Why," I thought, "would someone even consider changing 'consensus' to 'veracity of a consensus' to be subjective and expressive of a 'point-of-view'?"

It finally hit me -- for these people, there is no distinction between a consensus and its veracity. They are one and the same. Merely to acknowledge the distinction between a consensus and its veracity is forbidden, is beyond the boundaries of acceptable thought. Consensus is reality. There is no distinction between reality and created reality. It is all the same house of mirrors, the convex and concave distortions of reality replacing reality itself.

Currently, the Wikipedia text reads:

"The AIDS reappraisal movement (or AIDS dissident movement) is a loosely connected group of activists — journalists, scientists, doctors, HIV-positive persons, and concerned citizens — who dispute the consensus view that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)." 

Merriam-Webster defines dispute as "to call into question...to struggle against". They got that much right. As always, however, the only way they can maintain accuracy is to shift the rhetoric to political and social struggles and away from the veracity of scientific claims about reality.

Darin C. Brown received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. His dissertation was in algebraic number theory, although he tells us he also has "interests in Fuchsian groups, category theory, and point-set topology". (Fuchsian groups? Sounds exciting !) His "mathematical lineage traces to Stark and Chebyshev". Dr. Brown is also the wikimesiter at the AIDS Wiki, and recently became curator of the Memorial Serge Lang Archive, announced in the Oct. issue of The Notices of the American Mathematical Society

Views from the Mysterious Eastern Front: Medical-Industrial Morals

The Moral Principle Appealed to by the Medical Industry is Utilitarian

The Utilitarian philosophy  was admitted into the stern company of moral value systems in the latter half of the 19th. Century, where it quickly rose to prominence and became the major contender for the throne held by Immanuel Kant's elegant translation of the spirit of the Commandments into moral imperatives deriving their authority from Reason.

Most famously stated the 2 opposing priciples look like this:

Act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law (Kant)

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure . (John Stuart Mill)

J.S. Mill, who formulated Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism and his father, James Mill, were both economists. This explains their fondness of the new pseudo-philosophy: In its essence Utilitarianism does not introduce a new definition of moral value – it is parasitic on other definitions to tell what constitutes real pleasure or happiness – rather, it is an introduction of the idea of a universal measure of value into all moral value judgments. The early Utilitarians even attempted to work out a calculus, the so-called felicific calculus, to calculate the comparative worth of actions.

The idea that moral value(s) can be measured, compared, calculated on a cost/benefit analysis is the idea of money, the great equalizer of value.

The felicific calculus has been abandoned but the idea lingers. The medical industry is one example of this: In the final analyis, the killing of one patient is considered justified if it saves the lives of two others, yesterday's  failures, no matter how great, are stepping stones for tomorrow's even greater successes. And so on ad infinitum.

The medical industry, in addition to cost/benefit analyses, operates with risk/benefit analyses. This is a classical Utilitarian formulation because it creates the illusion that all factors, known as unknown, physical, psychological, spiritual, social, economical, ethical… have been exchanged into one universally accepted currency which makes the analysis a simple matter of adding and subtracting: risk vs. benefit.

Another fundamental dishonesty of the risk/benefit equation is that it pretends to be a function of the ethical rules of patient care. Our next best friend, the good doctor, is the instrument of this deception. If he is truly caring and conscientious, if he is trying his best, according to ability, to make the right decisions, so much the better. He lends a human face to a system which, far from being guided by care, ethics or anything else our species in its self-praises calls 'humane', subsumes these factors in the prior risk/ profit analysis.

This is nothing new. Who will not admit the process is sometimes flawed, that research and development is often misdirected and different factors capable of influencing decisions in 'undesirable' ways? But the admission to imperfection is part of the deception whose function is to ensure the survival of the system itself.   

Doctors' or patients' choices not correct? We must become better educated, better informed.- In fact we already are better informed, how else could we be aware of the shortcomings? Funds or research misdirected? Still better than no funds and no research.- Besides corrections are already on the way slowly, responsibly, the way of science. Corrupt trials? We must institute better control mechanisms.- In fact we already have, how else could we have discovered the fraud? A licensed drug found to be more harmful than beneficial? We must renew our risk/benefit assessment.– In fact we already have, how else could we have concluded the initial calculation was wrong?

The system is self-controlling, self-correcting, self-improving, self-proving. Checks and balances are in place, if only managed correctly. Consider the alternative. Would we want to do away with the idea of risk assessment altogether? Or drug development? Or perhaps the scientifc method itself?

But these questions are part of the sustaining deception. They are framed by the Utilitarian mindset and its leveling of all values. They are not meant to have an answer.

The ancients knew that essence becomes form, that form is no accident. Nowadays we say that form is essence. The essence even of the moral checks and balances governing the medical industry is the idea of money. The parameters within which we are conditioned to think and rethink are set by that idea ..

The question not meant to be asked is this: "How do we change the form of something whose essence is already expressed in that form?" This question has an answer.

***

Claus Jensen is a Dane living in Thailand where he is able to eke out a meager but sustainable existence as a martial arts instructor primarily because he is much taller than the average Thai, and can overpower most ordinarily accomplished Thai boxing teachers provided they are half his size and twice his age.
 

***

Claus Jensen is a Dane living in Thailand where he is able to eke out a meager but sustainable existence as a martial arts instructor primarily because he is much taller than the average Thai, and can overpower most ordinarily accomplished Thai boxing teachers provided they are half his size and twice his age.
 

Jeffrey Dach, MD: Descent into Viral Load Internet Hell

For the past 20 plus years, like most other hospital based physicians working inside mainstream medicine, I accepted the HIV/AIDS hypothesis without question. The idea that HIV infected and killed T cells and therefore wiped out the immune system causing opportunistic infection was accepted by every one else, so I had no reason to question it. My major concern was avoiding a needle puncture from a patient whose HIV status was unknown. In retrospect, I admit I was vaguely aware of questions, but I didn’t know what those questions were or who posed them.

A few months ago, while surfing the internet for news, I came across a Google video entitled,” HIV/AIDS, Fact or Fraud?”, containing interviews with Dr. Peter Duesberg and Dr. Charles Thomas. The information seemed credible and sparked my curiosity, so I ordered the book, “Inventing the Aids Virus“ by Peter Duesberg, as well as books by Farber, Bialy and Lauritson, and emailed Dr. Duesberg for more information. He quickly replied with a collection of more recent articles along with a sample of his appealing sense of humor. After weighing the arguments and style of the proponents of the two sides, I came away impressed with what seemed the higher moral and ethical standards of the AIDS rethinkers; their obviously much higher, scientific standards, and their inescapable, common sense credibility.

It was only then that it occurred to me after working inside multiple hospitals since the beginning of the "epidemic", I did not know of a single co-worker who had contracted AIDS, a supposedly contagious disease. I do, however, have personal knowledge of co-workers contracting real infectious diseases such as hepatitis and tuberculosis from exposure to patients. In addition, as a radiologist, I routinely saw the admission chest xrays and admitting diagnosis on many patients. There was no massive epidemic, or even mini one, of sick people carrying the diagnosis of AIDS.

Which brings me to the point of my descent, that began after I read the Sept 27 JAMA 2006 article by Rodriguez et al. showing essentially no correlation between CD4 cell count and HIV viral load - indicating that unchecked virus replication is not killing the CD4 cells.  On the same day, I posted this information at the misc.health.aids newsgroup and quickly realized that I had entered the proverbial snake pit.

My posted message was almost a direct quote from the JAMA authors:  “The noncorrelation in the Figure 3 (click on the miniature to the left) scattergram on page 1504 is the finding which indicates that HIV plasma RNA level (HIV viral load) is not a reliable predictor of CD4 cell loss in HIV infection and challenges the concept that the magnitude of viral replication is the main determinant of the speed of CD4 cell loss at the individual level.” 

I promptly received a reply from a Nick Bennett, who turns out to be an MD /PhD from Cambridge (UK), currently a pediatric infectious disease resident trainee in NY, and a self appointed guardian of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. He explained to me in a condescending and extremely arrogant manner that, "No, I am mistaken, the JAMA article actually confirms a correlation between CD4 cell count and HIV viral load. There is indeed a linear trend in Figure 3, because the R-squared Coefficient of Correlation is not zero.”   

This absurdity revealed the lie behind the credentials, as clearly the man knows nothing about linear regression analysis. The Figure 3 R-squared is actually 0.04, which for statistical purposes is just slightly above zero. R-squared values range from zero to 1.0, with 1.0 indicating a straight line and zero indicating a random pattern of dots very much like Figure 3. 

Bennett continued his post by questioning my training and background and ability to read and interpret the medical literature.

” I find it astonishing that you somehow think yourself better qualified to analyse (sic) the results of a paper than the authors themselves or indeed anyone else with specialist qualifications in the relevant field. Where's your research background in HIV (or even microbiology in general)?  Why should I trust what you say versus what every microbiologist/epidemiologist/clinician and researcher I've ever met tells me about how to analyse (sic) a paper and judge and interpret the evidence?  I would say you had no relevant experience upon which to base your views and are incapable of correctly interpreting scientific evidence in context !” 

I barely controlled myself in reply: “The JAMA, as you know, Dr. Bennett, is the Journal of the American Medical Association and is written specifically for the members of that organization. I have been a member of the American Medical Association and have been reading JAMA since 1976, which is probably before you were born. I was certainly reading it when you were still in knickers, my youthful but arrogant correspondent. I've had thirty years of experience reading and interpreting this journal. How many years have you had? “(I neglected to mention my own publication in 1983). 

Bennett must have gone back to read his math book, because he finally agreed an R squared of 0.04 indicates non-correlation, and excuses his ignorance of linear regression analysis by telling me in his PhD thesis research he used PCR and did Western blots. He nonetheless continues in the same self-important manner, and then, with his new found mastery of linear regression, calculates his own R-squared value, which does not appear anywhere in the paper, from the data in the paper's Fig. 1 (click on the miniature to the right). This turns out to be a much more acceptable 0.9776. It is also in total error. If we assume Bennett's PhD is not a completely fraudulent document, this is either an intentional deception designed to fool the few gullible who are persuaded that this man is some kind of authority, or yet another example of the Orwellian Doublethink characteristic of the AIDS church.  Bennett’s Oct 6 blog posts his deceptive graph with the sham R-squared value of 0.9351. [In the event that the post linked in the line above is deleted "by accident", a PDF of the page as it exists on 22 Oct. 2006 is located here. Otis]

The real explanation for the straight line shown in this figure is provided by a real mathematician, Darin Brown, in his discussion of the Rodriguez et al. paper that appeared on YBYL on Oct. 9.

"But the most plausible explanation to me is that Figure 1 (JAMA Sept 27) is just a mathematical artifact.  If you take a cloud of data points that are essentially random (no correlation) and you break them into 5 subgroups by magnitude of the predictor variable and choose the median outcome of the response variable for each subgroup, this will have the effect of obscuring the lack of correlation.  It's the statistical equivalent of squinting your eyes so you can't see any details anymore."

I sometimes jokingly tell my sons how I know when things are getting serious: They hand you the blindfold and the cigarette. For your own sake, Nick, don't wait that long.

 

Jeffrey Dach M.D. is board certified in interventional radiology and a member of the Board of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. He retired from radiology two years ago, and is currently in private practice focusing on bio-identical hormone treatment. He is also a painter who frequently exhibits. (The artwork that graces the top of this post is a self portrait of sorts, Otis.)

New on the Dissident Net: Two Websites for "HIV Positives"

Stephen Davis has launched two new websites designed specifically for those diagnosed HIV-Positive, as a starting point for them to begin to explore the truth about the HIV tests and HIV drugs.

“Unfortunately, we’re liable to have a lot more people testing HIV-Positive as the new CDC recommendations take effect to test everyone for HIV,” Davis wrote us. “When you take an antibody test that’s already fraught with false positives and apply it to low-risk populations, the false positive rate is bound to skyrocket.”

The first site is www.HelpForHIV.com (or www.Help4HIV.com). This is meant to be a gentle introduction to get everyone to realize that their own test results may have been wrong, and to give them the opportunity to read and study the relevant scientific literature. It includes links to nearly 50 podcasts featuring recorded interviews from various dissident experts, videos, scientific papers and newspaper and magazine articles dealing specifically with the HIV tests and HIV drugs, books to buy, links to all the dissident websites and blogs, and even a questionnaire they can fill out to help us build a database for future legal action.

 

The second site is www.livingwithoutHIVdrugs.com, which is a growing number of true-life stories of HIV-Positives who are living healthy and happy lives without HIV medications.

 

The plan is to promote HelpForHIV.com in the coming weeks and months by direct contact with HIV-Positives through blogs and chatrooms and such, through radio interviews, Google and Yahoo ads, and hopefully even 30-second TV spots.

 

It is my hope that these new websites can attract a large number of HIV-Positives and help them learn the truth about the HIV tests and HIV drugs, and create a powerful community of support at the grassroots level to enable the kind of efforts that will be required over the next 3-5 years to bring down the AIDS establishment’s house of cards.

 

A special thanks to Christine Maggiore for her help in finding just exactly the right wording for HelpForHIV, and to Neville Hodgkinson and others who provided support and information to make the lists of papers and articles as complete as possible.

 

If you find anything that doesn’t work correctly as you surf through these new sites, please email me so I can correct it as quickly as possible.

Stephen Davis is a former Arizona state senator, and the author of "Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial". He can be contacted through his website.

The Mouth of the Yellow River Says 是

On October 14, a commenter who identifies himself as "Mouth of the Yellow River" (MOTYR) left one of his usual perceptive remarks in the "For the Saturday Surfer" entry. It concerned a publication by Nobelist Kary Mullis of a "scientific correspondence" in Nature when he was still in graduate school. I was motivated by it to leave a message for MOTYR inviting him to become a contributor to YBYL - in a simple and *extremely* florid Mandarin. (Both can be read  here.)  I ended the comment by expressing the hope that he would say 是 (yes). As the essay below shows, he did. (Otis)

Cancer Genome Sequencing in Wonderland Ad Infinitum

The most extensive results to date concerning the repertoire of point mutations in cancer samples revealed by gene sequencing is out in the 29-author treatise published by one of the science industry’s Holy Trinity (CSN--Cell, Science, Nature) (The Consensus Coding Sequences of Human Breast and Colorectal Cancers, Science 314:268, 2006).  The study costing about $5 million is an analysis that shows that the number of mutations in products of about half of the estimated genes of the human genome from eleven cell  lines or xenografts from breast or colorectal cancers exceeds a mind boggling 800,000+ compared to a normal sample.  Mutations are errors in the four letter alphabet that spells out in words of three the sequence of the 20 amino acid units that make a functional protein. Thousands of functional proteins working together at wide ranges of activity due to thousands of forces that modify them make up a healthy cell. Xenografts are chunks of cancer tissue removed from patients and selected for their ability to survive and grow in the artificial environment under the skin of a mouse without being attacked by the mouse’s immune system so as to provide enough material to analyze.  Cell lines are mixtures of cancer cells selected one step further for their ability to survive and grow in a Petri dish like bacteria independent of their existence in tissue and even the artificial, but more close to physiological environment in the mouse.

Mutations thought to be methodological artifact, sequence differences between the two normal tissue samples, and “silent mutations” that don’t change the amino acid sequence of protein products were subtracted.  [Although each amino acid of a protein is spelled out by the sequence of three letters of a four letter alphabet, the third letter of each triplet for an amino acid can be variable referred to as codon degeneracy.  A mutation to one of the variants that can code for the same amino acid is termed by the authors a “silent mutation”).  It was concluded that a total of 1307 mutations that could affect a protein amino acid sequence occurs in 1149 genes in the samples of the two cancers.

 

When the sequence of the 1149 mutated genes from the cell lines and xenografts was examined in 24 additional tissue samples of tumors taken directly from patients without xenograft or cell culture, an additional 365 mutations in 236 genes was detected showing that different tumor samples have different numbers and types of mutations.  After all this, 921 and 751 mutations of potential interest (MOI’s) in the breast and colorectal tumor samples, respectively, for a total of 1672 cancer MOI’s were noted.  Recall the above numbers need to be doubled since only about half of the suspected coding sequences in the genome were examined.  This is an enormous number of MOI’s to begin to sort through concerning questions of whether any one or combination have anything to do with the individual cancers sampled much less other samples of the same types of tumors.

                                                 [...]

To attempt the impossible task of reducing this mind boggling number of mutations to some sort of meaning in terms of causality, the authors went on to try to rank mutations in terms of genes that might be involved in a tumor property described in the literature in single gene functional studies (CAN-genes for cancer candidate genes) in various tumor models or analyses relative to those that are along for the ride (“passenger mutations”).  Mutations were found in genes that have been previously implicated in diverse cancers and cancer models and others that have not been mentioned before.  Most important was the author’s conclusion that among the 24 breast and colorectal cancer samples examined, the two cancer types exhibit their own signature of mutations and each cancer sample of the same cancer type also exhibits its own signature of CAN-gene mutations and no two individual sample had more than 6 CAN-genes in common.  The grapevine of unpublished results from diverse laboratories like the Sanger Institute in England examining diverse subsets of genes across diverse cancers and samples of the same cancers are reporting in with the same results, the diversity and number of mutations among different cancers is astounding.

The current Science report is being hailed as a landmark study, a “tour de force by other cancer scientists” states Science’s News section (First Pass at Cancer Genome Reveals Complex Landscape, Science 313, 1370, 2006).  Rightly so, this report confirms with the most extensive analysis to date (half of the coding gene sequences in the human genome) what the data from hundreds, thousands of prior studies studying lesser numbers of single genes in diverse cancer-related samples varying from one to a few to hundreds predict despite that the authors interpreted their data as a breakthrough in cause of at least some cancers.  The genome of cancers is a tangled mess awash with mutations, the number and types of mutations vary with the individual type of cancer, an individual cancer within a single type of cancer, the time in progression of an individual cancer within a single type of cancer, how an individual cancer at a specific time in progression within a single type of cancer was sampled (big chunk, little chunk) or manipulated prior to analysis (primary tissue, xenograft or cell line) and location of the individual cancer at a specific time in progression (location within the organ of origin or location outside the organ).  Mutations may be happening at a rate in individual cells within a given cancer faster than the cancer can be sampled and sequenced.  And the mind boggling number and diversity of mutations revealed in this first study among two types of cancers and a few samples of them focus on parts of the total genome that code for proteins.  A proportional number likely occurs all up and down the genome that do not directly have to do with appearance of a protein.  These may be equally important to the properties of cancers as what is seen so far.    

Although the title of the current subject paper is misleading, e.g. “The Consensus Coding Sequences of Breast and Colorectal Cancers,” the report is a landmark because the data in it question whether anything can be learned about cancer, its prevention and treatment from mutational analysis.  It questions the entire single or collective gene mutation theory of cancer causation, at least for what is currently observable as a cancer sample.  It should be the basis for calls for new ideas and re-evaluation of where the basic science, clinical science and pharmaceutical industry are headed in respect to cancer, its understanding and management based on the collective mutation theory of malignancy.  (Continued)

The complete essay is available as a PDF file, here.

 

MOTYR (Mouth of the Yellow  River) is a pen name of a scientist with 30 years experience in basic and applied biomedical research in academic and industrial settings. "By any measure, I have been extremely successful in my chosen profession, continuously supported by the NIH for 27 years. Yet I have never had a single, truly original idea funded when written into one of their grants.”

Huge AIDS Data Massage Operation Busted By Police

NY, October 21, 2006 -- NYPD morals squad commandos armed with stun guns and tear gas grenades staged a surprise raid on an AIDS research laboratory at Columbia University yesterday, claiming it was really a data massage parlor. This was a big operation, one of the biggest in the country," said Dan Farella, a detective who took part in the raid. "They were claiming to be a center devoted to AIDS research, but in the back rooms, they were massaging raw data for money." 

Some of the data was massaged by applying "mathematical models" from top modeling agencies, Farella said. One of the apprehended models, Naomi, a buxom six-foot tall blonde, protested, "What's wrong with manipulating data? Chiropractors manipulate the spine and nobody complains."

The "laboratory's" clients apparently included top US government and WHO health officials and leading Aids journalists, according to a little black book seized by police. 

 "Soft" data were taken into the back room and tickled until they became hard data, police said. Then they were caressed with computer stimulations and luberatory fluids until they gushed forth with the desired answer.

These explosions of massaged information were lapped up hungrily by the "scientists" at the "laboratory," who knew that if they could swallow it, anyone could. Sure enough, their massaged data was almost always accepted by leading scientific journals, resulting in big paydays and offers of "consulting fees" for the "researchers" who did the work. 

For an extra fee, the scientist-models and labia assistants even mouthed the massaged data and regurgitated it at press conferences.

Small titers were massaged into big titers, police said. And some of the models had very big titers that had been featured in centerfolds in sleazy publications like Science and The Lancet.

Often two "scientists" worked on the same data at once, with one massaging it from the top, and the other from the bottom. Sometimes a third would join them, and insert his PCR probe into the data in hopes of creating new baseline variables.

A few of the models and masseuses seemed perplexed, and said they had done nothing wrong. 

"If I've got a cute little number and I can make it a better number by massaging it, why shouldn't I do that?" said Dr. Mathilde Quim, the madam of the "laboratory," as a wad of massaged data dribbled from her mouth and trickled down her chin.

Noted AIDS scientist Dr. David Ballmemore agreed. "Our massage work takes data that are too fat or too slim or otherwise unappealing and gives it a nice figure," he said. "What's wrong with that?" 

Dr. Anthony Faust, who police say was one of the "deep pockets" involved in funding the "laboratory," said he would cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for leniency in sentencing. "This place is small potatoes compared to what's out there," he said, hands cuffed behind his back. "All of these AIDS labs are really data massage parlors. Everywhere in the world! This is big bucks we're talking about." He declined to say more, saying that he hadn't spoken with his attorney yet.

Another data masseur, Dr. Bobbit Gallo, had a slightly different view. "We may be prostitutes, but we have a HAART of gold," he screamed as he was taken away by police. "Here, I have the data that proves it !"

© 2006 Marcel Girodian

Marcel Girodian is a satyr -- I mean a satirist -- who specializes in objective reporting about the "scientific community." His application for a $5 million grant to write about the AIDS establishment was recently turned down by the NIH. (Otis)

Dear Dr. Culshaw: "Well, What About Those Tests?"

“You talk a lot about how the HIV tests are not very accurate. It’s my understanding that they are actually very accurate and I’m afraid you’re misleading people into not being tested when they should be.”

Yet another peculiar feature of the HIV/AIDS gospel is how much of what we hear, and even much of what doctors and researchers believe to be true, is so far removed from what is documented in the scientific literature that when one learns what really is in the literature, the immediate reaction is disbelief.

I doubt that very many ordinary citizens – or god forbid, medical practitioners – are aware that in HIV antibody test kits are warning sentences saying things like: “EIA [Elisa] testing cannot be used to diagnose AIDS.” I doubt that many people who submit to this testing have any knowledge that their very future, their ability to obtain insurance, to bear children naturally, to travel, or to live without fear, are hanging on the results of a test that has not even been approved to diagnose HIV infection without being “confirmed” by numerous similar tests, all of which work in the same way, and all of which contain similar warnings.

But I doubt even more that the majority of medical practitioners are aware of the subtle but significant shift in the language used in HIV test kits since the beginning of the AIDS era. For example, from 1984 until the very recent past, test kit inserts contained the unambiguous statement “AIDS is caused by HIV”. In 2002, the OraSure toned down that statement to say: “AIDS, AIDS-related complex and pre-AIDS are thought to be caused by HIV.” (Italics mine)

But just this year, in a remarkable – and potentially significant – shift in thinking, the trend seems to be toward making an even less committal statement. For example, Abbott Diagnostic’s ELISA test insert contains the following sentence: “Epidemiologic data suggest that the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is caused by at least two types of human immunodeficiency viruses, collectively known as HIV.”

Vironostika appears to be even less willing to support a true causal role, as their 2006 test kit insert says: “Published data indicate a strong correlation between the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and a retrovirus referred to as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).” (Italics mine)

What this is telling us is that twenty-two years later, we’ve still got nothing. As the recent Rodriguez et. al. paper indicates, virus levels (as dubiously measured by viral load tests) have almost zero influence on CD4+ cell decline, and these are the cells that have so long been believed to be dying at HIV’s behest. As  Zvi Grossman stated in a recent paper, “The pathogenic and physiologic processes leading to AIDS remain a conundrum.” In other words, we still have no clue what HIV actually does. Where are the T-cells going? No one knows. What is viral load, anyway? No one knows.

After twenty-two years, we’re back to correlation – back to epidemiology. Yet we’re still stuck in the same pattern of promoting these tests that may measure something – but no one really understands what it is. Worse yet, we’re using the results of these tests to literally ruin people’s lives. Something is very, very wrong.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend of late is the “strong recommendation” that all pregnant women be tested for HIV. And if she doesn’t get tested for HIV during her pregnancy we’ll strongly recommend that she be tested while she is in labor. Am I the only person disturbed by this? To terrorize and intimidate women when they are at their most vulnerable – while they are pregnant and while they are giving birth – is a sign of a society that is suffering a worse sickness than the one that so terrorizes it.

This is made worse by the fact that pregnancy is documented in the medical literature as a source of false positives on the HIV antibody tests. What might seem at the time a caring decision made on behalf of one’s unborn child actually ends up being an uninformed decision, because most expectant mothers are not aware that their chances of registering falsely positive will increase (and the increase appears particularly striking among black women). Most will not know that a positive result will deny her child the opportunity to receive optimal nutrition via breastfeeding. Most will not be aware that they will be coerced to take drugs whose long term effects on either her or her child are not even known.

At its worst, this type of medical terrorism results in situations such as the tragic case of Joyce Ann Hafford (as chronicled to such devastating effect by Celia Farber in her recent article in Harper’s magazine), who died as a result of nevirapine toxicity. The fact that Hafford may well have been falsely positive only makes the loss all the more gruesome. And we cannot forget the fact that we have no idea what will happen in the long term to children who receive these drugs in utero. We have no idea, just as we have no idea whether they would even get sick if they did not receive the drugs.

When all is said and done, the only support we have for any role HIV may play in AIDS is an epidemiological correlation. Worse, it is a correlation between manifestations of a particular clinical syndrome and the results of an antibody test that has never been standardized, never been verified against true viral isolation, and which is not even approved for diagnosis of HIV infection. For this test we have put all manner of discriminatory laws on the books, but we don’t even know what the tests mean. And if we don’t know what they mean, any correlational data that might be obtained from them must be looked on with caution, if not thrown out entirely. When all is stripped away, as we slowly begin to understand just how uncertain the foundations of the entire HIV/AIDS industry are, all we are left with is nothing.

                                                         ***

Rebecca V. Culshaw worked on mathematical models of HIV infection for almost ten years. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics (with a specialization in mathematical biology) from Dalhousie University in Canada in 2002 and is currently an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Tyler. She is a celebrated internet author as a result of her writings on Lew Rockwell, and "Science Sold Out: Does HIV Really Cause AIDS?", a book based on those essays is due this December. [The miniature at the top left is Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415), famous as the first woman known to have made a substantial contribution to the development of mathematics.]

Neville Hodgkinson on AIDS in Uganda

Aids was supposed to destroy Uganda. So why is it flourishing again?

“Can Africa be saved from Aids?” asked Newsweek magazine in two stories in 1984 and 1986, reporting that “nowhere is the disease more rampant than in the Rakai region of south-west Uganda, where 30% of the people are estimated to be seropositive [HIV positive].”  Newsweek was not alone.   Over the next 15 years, prestigious newspapers and magazines across the globe repeatedly published similar reports; the consensus was that a devastating proportion of the Ugandan population was doomed by Aids to premature death, with all the consequences on families and the society as a whole.  Their predictions announced the practically inevitable collapse of the country in which the worldwide epidemic supposedly originated.

The data seemed authoritative.  By mid-1991, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was estimating that 1.5m Ugandans, nearly a tenth of the general population and a fifth of those sexually active, had the HIV infection.  WHO predicted that in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, child deaths in the 1990s could increase by as much as 30% because of Aids.  In November 1996, the agency reported that more than three million children were already feeling the direct impact of Aids in Uganda alone.

Today the public prints and airwaves are still full about the African “Aids crisis”. But you will read little about Aids in Uganda.  The reason: all prophecies have proved false, as the results of a 10-year census published last year has shown.  Uganda’s population grew at an average annual rate of 3.4% between 1991 and 2002, one of the highest growth rates in the world, due to persistently high fertility levels (about seven children per woman) and a decline in infant and childhood mortality rates.  Economic development has also shown constant growth over the same period reflecting the energy and determination of Ugandans to improve their living conditions.  Fewer people are testing HIV-positive and nationally, the figure is now put at around 5%.

The good news from Africa comes at a time when WHO is spearheading a massive campaign to combat Aids by raising funds to buy anti-HIV drugs for poor people in developing countries.  It says 99% of HIV-positive people in sub-Saharan Africa who need treatment today because their illness has advanced to Aids do not have access to the drugs.  Within two years, WHO wants the medicines to be reaching half an estimated 6m people worldwide whom it believes to be in urgent need.  The cost, along with prevention and other activities, is estimated at $10.5bn in 2005, rising to $15bn a year by 2007.

Pledges from the United States, European Commission and European national governments, if fulfilled, will take Aids funding for developing countries from $4.7bn this year to $5.9bn by 2005. That still leaves a gap of nearly $5bn. According to WHO and its partners in the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids), the money is needed to tackle an Aids “catastrophe” in which 42m people are estimated to have become infected with HIV.  Africa alone is said to have 30m infected, threatening economic collapse and national security in the worst-affected countries.

These enormous, grim statistics, regularly repeated, have created a pall of uncertainty over much of sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the eyes of many Western investors, which further blights Africa’s economic development. The encouraging news from Uganda might have been taken to suggest that a huge increase in funds devoted to the anti-aids drugs would be money well spent – except that Uganda has shaken off the worst of its apparent HIV/Aids epidemic without resort to such drugs. Moreover, there have been other developments that cast doubt on the validity of putting pharmaceuticals centre stage in the fight against Aids – and even call into question WHO’s entire strategy in targeting HIV as the best way to fight AIDS.

The complete article is available as a PDF file here.

   

Neville Hodgkinson has been writing about AIDS for 20 years.   As medical correspondent of the London Sunday Times during the second half of the 1980s, his reports "reflected the conventional perspective: that the cause was a deadly new virus being transmitted sexually and, because of a long time lag between infection and illness, surreptitiously".  In 1991 he learned about Professor Peter Duesberg’s challenge to the HIV theory.  He was "dismissive at first, because of evidence that seemed to contradict Duesberg", but in 1992, working as science correspondent at the Sunday Times, he was given an opportunity to go deeper into the subject and in April that year the paper published a two-page article setting out the main threads of Duesberg’s critique. 

An angry but unreasoning response from medical and scientific leaders increased the paper’s editor’s interest and between 1992 and 1994 the Sunday Times published more than 40 articles exploring the scientific case against the virus theory, and questioning the validity of the tests, drugs, and search for an “HIV” vaccine.  "Medical and scientific leaders in the UK accused [him] and the newspaper of putting millions of lives at risk by weakening confidence in the scientific community’s fight against the disease", and Nature under John Maddox mounted a campaign to stop the critique. 

"However, deaths from Aids in the UK went into steep decline in the wake of [these] articles.  Claims that new drug treatments were responsible for this decline have not been supported by scientific evidence."  After a change of editor, Hodgkinson left the newspaper in July 1994 to write a book about the controversy, AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate, UK, 1996).  He has "continued to contribute articles on the subject as a freelance in the hope of hastening an end to what he regards as a tragic error blighting the lives of millions of people, particularly in poor countries where diseases of poverty have mistakenly been relabeled as HIV/AIDS." (Otis)