"You Bet Your Life"

Private investigator vindicates Duesberg, Farber "clean hands"

On May 13, 2008, Semmelweis Society International (SSI) presented the Semmelweis “Clean Hands” Award to Peter Duesberg and Celia Farber.  (Click on the images at right, and click here to read a press release about the awards.)

Clark Baker, a private investigator and retired LAPD officer, was hired by the SSI to investigate Duesberg and Farber, after members of SSI received political retaliation for giving the awards.  As Baker describes in his report,

"In the spirit of freedom and science, SSI commissioned this report to respond to questions and arguments regarding Professor Duesberg’s unanswered questions of Dr. Gallo’s 1984 HIV hypothesis. As an independent investigator who could not be influenced by the threats or attacks made against vulnerable SSI members and others; and as someone who had never heard of Duesberg, Gallo, Farber, or AIDS Denialism before May 2008, SSI believed that this investigator had the unbiased and proven investigative experience necessary to examine both sides of the controversy. For his efforts, this investigator was not compensated."

Baker's complete report, "Gallo's Egg", vindicating Duesberg and Farber can be read in its entirety here.  Baker concludes, "Based upon the evidence contained in this report, this investigator must agree with hundreds of reputable scientists and doctors who remain unconvinced that Dr. Gallo’s retrovirus is real or has anything to do with the disease called AIDS.... As I looked at the evidence against Duesberg and Farber, I found evidence of prevarication, subterfuge, libel, and criminal behavior on the Gallo side against that PNAS-published science of Duesberg’s side."

You can listen to Baker interviewed on the Robert Scott Bell podcast at the following two links:

The Robert Gallo HIV Egg is Cracking, and
Exclusive Bonus Interview

Also, stay tuned to Robert Scott Bell's podcast for an upcoming interview with Duesberg and Farber this Sunday, August 3.

Animal Pharm -- Selling Prozac to Dogs!

Do these jokers at Big Pharma have no shame?!!? Now, they wanna medicate Fido for "Separation Anxiety" and "obesity"? Oy vey, as my grandma used to say:

Depressed dachshunds and anxious alsatians can now get their paws on a little pooch-me-up – thanks to the US drugs industry. Guy Adams reports

Monday, 21 July 2008

Back in the day – before Paris Hilton carried a pooch in her handbag, before professional dog-walking was a serious career, and before "doggy day-care" even existed – the most popular cure for an unhappy canine was, as the nursery rhyme goes, to give the dog a bone.

How times have changed. A surge in the popularity of household animals, coupled with the licensing of several new veterinary drugs, is seeing thousands of American dog owners replace comforting marrow-bones with a chemically enhanced modern alternative: Pet Prozac.

Lifestyle drugs to treat troubled canines for depression, anxiety, bad behaviour and even obesity are being launched by pharmaceutical firms anxious to cash-in on the nation's booming love affair with man's best friend. Most of the new pills are almost identical to those popped by humans – and some are proving very controversial indeed.

This month, the American Veterinary Medical Association's (AVMA) annual convention in New Orleans, attended by more than 10,000 of the country's leading vets, saw a heated debate about the doggie anti-depressants Clomicalm and Reconcile, and a product called Slentrol – the world's first canine anti-obesity pill.

Roche to AIDS Patients: Drop Dead!

Our Buddies at Roche are moving from one boondoggle to another. Bye-bye to AIDS drugs, Hello to Hep C drugs! Lord have mercy! More drugs for a different set of non-viruses:)

Our gal on the spot, Ann Thayer (PhD from UC Berkeley in chemistry) has the goods:

SWISS PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY Roche has discontinued research on HIV therapies after determining that nothing in its pipeline would offer enough benefit over existing drugs to warrant further development. Roche had been investigating several new antiretrovirals, all of which were at the preclinical stage and at least six years away from the market.

Roche will, however, continue to support the few therapies and diagnostics it already makes, according to a company spokeswoman. These include the protease inhibitors Invirase and Viracept (sold outside the U.S.) and the cell-fusion inhibitor Fuzeon.

In 2007, worldwide sales of Fuzeon reached $267 million but dropped 34% in the first quarter of 2008 because of competition from new HIV drugs. In 2006, Roche stopped selling Hivid, which was launched in 1992 and was one of the first three HIV drugs marketed, as other treatments superseded it.

About 30 individual medicines or combinations are available to treat the 33 million people infected with HIV. Another 50 drugs are in clinical development, according to the industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America. Market research from Datamonitor predicts the global HIV drug market will grow about 3.7% per year to $11.5 billion in 2016.

Roche will redeploy scientists in HIV research to other activities, its spokeswoman says. The company's virology efforts are largely focused on hepatitis C, with three products in clinical trials. If Roche identifies a significant HIV-related breakthrough outside the company, she says it would consider contributing in some way, as it did in developing Fuzeon with the biotech firm Trimeris.

In the past, activists have targeted Roche for its drug-pricing policies in poor countries and the $25,000 annual cost for Fuzeon. The difficult-to-manufacture peptide drug was the first new treatment for drug-resistant patients, points out Jules Levin, executive director of the National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project.

AIDS advocacy groups regret the loss of any research efforts. Although a burst of new drugs has hit the market in the past two years, the pipeline is actually pretty skimpy, says Peter Staley, founder of informational website AIDSmeds.com. Most candidates are only in early clinical trials. Roche's commitment to hepatitis C, however, is viewed as important because the disease is a leading cause of death for those people also infected with HIV.

AIDS Vaccine: When Failure IS an option!

Oy vey! Yet another episode of NY Times and its faithful scribe, Altman, discussing the latest of many hideous, continued, epic, sustained failures in the field of vaccine research.

Trial for Vaccine Against H.I.V. Is Canceled

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

Published: July 18, 2008                          

Plans for a large human trial of a promising government-developed H.I.V. vaccine in the United States were canceled Thursday because a top federal official said scientists realized that they did not know enough about how H.I.V. vaccines and the immune system interact.

The decision is a major setback in an effort to develop an H.I.V. vaccine that began 24 years ago when government health officials promised a marketed vaccine by 1987. Health officials have long contended that such a vaccine would be their best weapon to control the AIDS pandemic.

A number of other H.I.V. vaccines are in various stages of testing around the world. But there had been high hopes for the government’s trial because the potential vaccine was among a new class that sought to stimulate the immune system in a different way

A number of other H.I.V. vaccines are in various stages of testing around the world. But there had been high hopes for the government’s trial because the potential vaccine was among a new class that sought to stimulate the immune system in a different way.

The official who canceled the government trial, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it was becoming clearer that more fundamental research and animal testing would be needed before an H.I.V. vaccine was ever marketed.

Scientists say that developing a vaccine against H.I.V. is one of the most difficult scientific endeavors in history because of the uncanny nature of the virus.

The government vaccine — known as PAVE, for Partnership for AIDS Vaccine Evaluation — was similar to a much-heralded vaccine that failed last year. That vaccine was developed by Merck, and Dr. Fauci’s agency helped pay for the Merck trials.

Dr. Fauci said he reached his decision to cancel the coming trial after meeting with scientists to try to understand why the Merck vaccine had failed. He said he had concluded that scientists must go a step at a time because they did not yet know fundamental facts like which immune reactions are the most important in preventing the infection.

Dr. Fauci said the new trial was intended to determine whether the vaccine could significantly lower the amount of H.I.V. in the blood of those who become infected. He said a smaller trial was needed to figure out whether the vaccine could do that before large trials were conducted.

“Show me that the vaccine works by lowering the amount of H.I.V. in the blood,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then we will move to a larger trial that will document the link with a particular immune response.” He added that until then, “doing a large trial is not justified.”'

Is he joking? They don't find any HIV in the blood. That's why they use all these bogus surrogate markers (unspecific antibodies, white blood cell counts, dna fragments)for the intrepid virus. Culture the virus, and measure the titer!

Dr. Alan Bernstein, executive director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, said that his organization supported Dr. Fauci’s decision and that there was an “urgent need for a diversity of new approaches to H.I.V. vaccine design.”

For instance, Dr. Bernstein said, recent laboratory advances, which allow scientists to look at hundreds of genes simultaneously, “offer immense promise in helping us understand how to design new H.I.V. vaccine candidates that can achieve long-lasting immune protection.”

Myth of Consensus Explodes! APS Opens Global Warming Debate

Well, these bogus consensuses (consensi?) need to be shattered. Total herd mentality science, with a dose of echo chamber and confirmation bias.

Considerable presence" of skeptics

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.  The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.  The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."

New Rule -- any scientist or scientific organization that refuses to debate or discuss a scientific topic in their own field of expertise is probably masking some serious doubt about their views and is merely trying to prevent whatever petty financial, sociological or cultural fiefdom from ordinary scrutiny.

We are pleased.

Update: After publication of this story, the APS responded with a statement that its Physics and Society Forum is merely one unit within the APS, and its views do not reflect those of the Society at large. 

HIV Travel Ban is Lifted

Andew Sullivan, who doesn't quite get the whole complex picture, celebrates the repeal of the HIV travel ban.

Our view:  Great news. A dose of common sense. No, there shouldn't be a travel ban, nor should there ever have been a travel ban. The one good unintended development from the usual knucklehead crowd is that more and more, HIV is being de-stigmatized. This is very good.

Mainstream "poz" mag: AZT "has a chequered history: its toxicity killed patients"

Anyone who follows the HIV fiasco long enough will notice a common pattern: a dissident position which is described as "looney" and "dangerous" one day is accepted as conventional wisdom several years later.  Some examples:

1. HIV does not directly kill cells (Duesberg, circa 1987);
2. AIDS will not spread outside the original risk groups and into the general heterosexual population (Stewart, Maver, and many others, late 1980s and early 1990s);
3. HIV tests are not standardized, reproducible, and have no gold standard (Perth group, early to mid 1990s);
4. "Hit early, hit hard" is a dangerous prescription (Duesberg, Sonnabend, Farber, and many many other people, late 1990s).

One could add to this list: AZT is a poison, not a "life-saver" or "life-extender" (Duesberg, Lauritsen, Farber, late 1980s).  Witness this article in Positive Nation, a British HIV magazine.

The impetus for the article was the loss of patent protection for AZT by GlaxoSmithKline a couple years ago.  Here are some admissions the article makes. Keep in mind, these acknowledgments appear in a mainstream HIV magazine:

1. ACTG 019 (one of the early AZT trials) "bypassed many regulatory barriers".
2. AZT received approval "before any long-term toxicity trials in animals had been completed."
3. AZT is "highly toxic" and "some people were unable to tolerate it at all, suffering vomiting, muscle pain and searing headaches. Many needed blood transfusions."  “We were discussing whether people should be setting their alarms for a sixth dose of AZT that day; it’s unbelievable now,”
4. Not only ACTG 019, but also the Concorde trials, may have become unblinded.
5. AZT monotherapy was "an apparent failure".
6. AZT may "contribute to fat loss".

Nevertheless, the article concludes with an activist quote: "combining [AZT] with other drugs saved many lives and opened up the path for the nukes (NRTIs). For many people this meant life."  Given the above admissions, one might ask what evidence there is that AZT ever "saved many lives" in the first place.  And this brings up back to the original oft-cited 1987 Fischl study, which was noted by John Lauritsen (see "AZT on Trial" and "FDA Documents Show Fraud in AZT Trials") as marked by incompetence, unblinding, and outright lying.

(Many thanks to "satyagrahamonkey" at AME for pointing out this article.)