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January 01, 2007

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Chris Rawlins

Below is a letter I had published in the Natal Mercury in July, to which, as usual, there was no response from anyone. Other national newspapers refused to publish it, also as usual.

Using the official antenatal clinic rates and the experts conversion rate there were at least 150,000 HIV infants born by 1997 in S.A. but the official StatsSa death totals show effectively zero HIV deaths from 97 to 04 between the ages of 5 to 14.

Thus the experts argue that the substantial prevalence from 5 to 14 as found by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), is a result of other causes such as sexual abuse, hospital needle infection etc, a phenomenon apparently unique to S.A. and they will soon begin to die in great numbers unless the life-saving drugs are administered. My letter argues that the figures do not add up whatever the cause of the prevalence.

"Monday, July 03, 2006
The Editor,
The Mercury.

Sir,

The latest StatsSA mortality totals for the years 97 to 04 further destroy the credibility of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis.

In March 2003 the MRC published a detailed analysis of child mortality for the year 2000, finding that in the age group 0 to 4, 42,000 of a total of 106,000 deaths were caused by HIV/AIDS, in 5 to 9, 1,000 of a total of 3,900 and 10 to 14, none of 3,800.

StatsSA reports death totals for 2000 of 39,192 for 0 to 4, 3,610 for 5 to 9 and 3,059 for 10 to 14, and a registration completeness of 37%, 92% and 80% respectively, based on the MRC comprehensive analysis. It reports 0 to 4 increasing to 56,808, 5 to 9 to 5,907 and 10 to 14 to 3,860 by the year 2004.

From the annual totals, even disregarding the population growth and any improvement in registration, the maximum total of HIV deaths in the 5 years to 04 is 8,000 for 5 to 9 and effectively zero for 10 to 14. In addition, 15 to 19 increases by only 1,400 over the 5 year period.

In their study of Nov 02 the HSRC found 6.2% or 300,000 HIV+ in the age group 5 to 9 and 4.7% or 200,000 in 10 to 14. In their later study of Nov 2005, they found these totals to be 214,000 (4.5%) and 80,000 (1.7%) respectively. Arithmetically the prevalence could not have exceeded 88,000 in 5 to 9 in 2000 and it would be remarkable if these had moved through to 10 to 14 without any significant increase in deaths or any new incidence in 10 to 14, despite the HSRC reporting 200,000 in 02. Conversely if 5 to 9 was much less than 88,000 in 2000 it is remarkable that the HSRC, with its expertise in scientific sampling, reported 300,000 in 02.

Using the annual antenatal clinic HIV rates, the annual birth statistics, the experts' conversion rate of 30% and applying the MRC's ratio of deaths up to age 4, there should have been an increase in HIV deaths from 0 to 4 between 98 and 01 of 18,000, yet StatsSA report a total increase of only 3,000. In 03 and 04 when the mother to child transmission rate was reportedly halved by the administration of ARV drugs, StatsSA report an increase in deaths of 10,000 over 02.

Yours faithfully,

Chris Rawlins,
Secretary, Treatment Information Group."

Lee Evans and Ron Freeman

We are in Guinea, West Africa, conducting a sport's clinic on behalf of The International Olympic Medalists Association, and we knew about the WHO guidelines before.

But we want to take a minute to ask our favorite TV personality to read them, and after she has, to ask her what she thinks then about her efforts to help our materially less fortunate brothers and sisters in The Motherland.

Peace & Love in '07

Lee and Ron

Jean Umber

I think that Fischl et al. were blinded by the dogma hiv -> AIDS and by the fact that at the beginning of the treatment with AZT the number of T4 cells increased. We can indeed explain this initial increase by the chemical properties of the drug, as I do in this essay:

Biological critiques of AZT's alleged mode of action

What is perhaps most horrible is that glutathione metabolism of poorly nourished babies is badly altered, as are the amounts of selenium and other minerals. Adding AZT to this awful biochemical imbalance is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

David Burd

This is an unpublished article of mine that concerns the matter of this posting.

This is the US pediatric killing regimen, essentially identical to the WHO's.

Charles Geshekter

Sooner or later the HIV and AIDS orthodoxy and its multinational pharmaceutical supporters may devise newer, more sophsiticated surveillance categories that measure mortality and morbidity in Africa and thereby manage to capture almost all deaths on the continent.

New possibilities might include TB/AIDS, malaria/AIDS, malnutrition/AIDS, pneumonia/AIDS and diarrheal/AIDS ... those could probably account for upwards of 80% of all African mortality.

The remainder would be attributed to traffic accidents, gunshot wounds, bodily traumas, diseases of old age, and civil disturbances, but even some of those might be considered "an AIDS-related condition."

Accurate, verifiable statistics placed "on the table" for public scrutiny often mean little to adherents of the HIV and AIDS orthodoxy. Yet only they and their "front line AIDS fighters" know the real truth.

Forty years ago white racists in South Africa routinely claimed that Africans were "breeding like flies." Nowadays, AIDS alarmists piously intone that "Africans are dying like flies."

Curiously enough, the latest statistics (May 2006 - Statistics South Africa Report #P0309.3) on the underlying causes of death in South Africa list so- called "HIV diseases" as the #21 cause of death, accounting for 2.3% of all deaths, down from 2.6% in 2000.

The data on death rates from “HIV diseases” from 1997 to 2004 in South Africa also reveals interesting anomalies from select provinces:

1) In 1997 in KwaZulu-Natal Province, “HIV diseases” accounted for2.2% of all its deaths; in 2004, it was 2.3%.

2) In 1997 in Mpumalanga Province, “HIV diseases” accounted for 2.3% of all its deaths; in 2004 it was >2.2%.

3) In 1997 in Limpopo Province, “HIV diseases” accounted for 2.3% of all its deaths; in 2004, it was >2.0%.

4) In 1997 in Free State Province, “HIV diseases” accounted for3.9% of all its deaths; in 2004, it was >2.1%.

And even for South Africa as a whole, in 1997 “HIV disease” was said to account for 2.0% of all deaths; in 2004 it had risen to 2.3%, but that figure was down from 2.6% in 1999.

There is no way of ascertaining from this data exactly how any attending physician, health care worker, or coroner actually knew for certain that so-> called "HIV disease" was the underlying cause of death.

I leave it to adherents of the AIDS orthodoxy to explain how that works.

Finally, the actual definition of an "African AIDS orphan" varies enormously amongst the conventional view of AIDS.

Some say it refers to anyone who has lost BOTH parents to some vague, often elastic definition of "AIDS." Other researchers and other countries say an orphan is someone who has lost ONE or both parents to "AIDS." While still others insist that an orphan is anyone who has lost ONE or BOTH parents to AIDS or has a parent that is "suffering" from "AIDS."

There are probably some AIDS researchers who deem any African child with a running nose and soiled clothing, seen walking around a village without adult supervision as an "AIDS orphan." Far-fetched? Not really........

Phil Seeman

Regarding Canada and Aids, a great deal of very enlightening information is becoming available. For example, Canada's ever diminishing Aids deaths are now totalling 60 to 70 per year (with only the very rare child death recorded -- possibly due to much more sane prescription guidelines for the pharmacologically potent agents that are administered "medicinally" in some quarters.)

These totals include as Aids' deaths those having some
very specific diseases (such as fatal PCPP), but not needing any proof of Hiv presence, neither antibodies nor RNA copies, or p24 antigen. Thus,'presumptive' Hiv/Aids deaths seem to be included in these meager tallies.

However, there is another classification called "Hiv related deaths," that now tally about 400 per year in Canada (Not Aids deaths per se).

This category is based on the ICD-10 (International Classification of Disease, Revision 10) that lists dozens and dozens of diseases, including cancers, that in conjunction with having 'hiv-positivity' get them classified as "Hiv-infection deaths".

According to this logic anybody with "Hiv disease" will eventually die from Hiv/Aids no matter what the proximal cause, including accidental death, that can be reclassified as "Aids-related suicide".

For any one strenuously interested in these numbers, the latest official figures are compiled in this 2+ MB PDF.

Dean Esmay

The following was just posted at Tony Woodlief's weblog:

Friday, January 5, 2007


Lying as Business Strategy

Those of you who take The Wall Street Journal probably caught Wednesday's story about the efforts of Abbott Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, to sell more of a very lucrative AIDS drug. The challenge for Abbott was that one of their lower-margin drugs was widely used in conjunction with a competitor's drug, in lieu of a more expensive Abbott uber-drug. The Journal obtained documents revealing some of the strategies Abbott considered for reducing use of its lower-margin drug.

I'll say up front that I'm not someone who thinks drug companies make too much money -- quite the contrary, it's precisely in critical fields like medicine that we want to see large profits, so that more brains and resources are attracted to them. So I have no problem with a company trying to make a buck, or a billion bucks.

According to memos obtained by the Journal, however, Abbott executives considered ideas like taking the lower-margin drug off the market and telling people that they had to do so in order to ship it to poor countries in Africa. Another alternative was to convert the pill form to a syrup that they described as tasting "like someone else's vomit."

Caught out by the press, Abbott did the usual corporate spin, claiming that the executives were "just brainstorming."

Apparently, lying is a plausible enough option at Abbott Laboratories that its executives feel comfortable considering it as a possible action item. That's what Abbott admits, in effect.

I'm not sure how one cuts out such a cancer once it has permeated an organization's culture. And if anyone doubts that Abbott's culture is threatened by a lack of integrity, consider the coda to this tale: after settling on a strategy of raising the price of its lower-margin drug by 400%, Abbott tried to counter outcries by posting on its website misleading data about the drug's cost compared to alternatives. The FDA later ordered it to take the misleading information down.

To be fair, one never knows, when reading a newspaper account, whether all the relevant facts are being presented. What seems clear, however, is that Abbott executives considered telling a disgusting lie about helping poor people in Africa, and that they see no problem contemplating such a lie.

People like this are a far greater enemy to markets and liberty than anyone in the hapless Democratic party, because they reinforce stereotypes of corporate executives as unprincipled brigands. They should be ashamed of themselves. Unfortunately, that's probably unlikely.

posted by Woodlief

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