Celia Farber’s powerful article on AIDS, in particular her airing of the views of Professor Peter Duesberg, has been greeted with incomprehension by The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review and others. They believe that questioning HIV as the cause of AIDS is a “crackpot theory”, “widely refuted for years”, as the CJR put it.
Unfortunately, these respected opinion-leaders have been misled. There has been a long and persistent unwillingness to think again on the part of those who, in good faith, brought the HIV theory into being. There has therefore been much denigration, but never any scientific refutation of Duesberg’s critique.
The reasons for this unwillingness are best understood from two very early responses to the critique.
On 28 April 1987, less than two months after publication of Duesberg’s first paper on the subject, a memo was sent from the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) headed MEDIA ALERT. Copies were addressed to the Secretary, Under Secretary, and Assistant Secretary of HHS, and to the “Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs”, the “Chief of Staff”, the Surgeon General, and “The White House”. The memo noted that:
This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy (If this isn’t the virus, how do we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything about transmission? How could you all be so stupid and why should we ever believe you again?) and we need to be prepared to respond.
On November 17, 1988, John Maddox, the then editor of the influential science journal Nature, who rejected numerous submissions from Duesberg on HIV and AIDS, wrote to him:
I am glad you correctly infer from my letter that I am in many ways sympathetic to what you say. I did not ask you to revise the manuscript, however. The danger, as it seems to me, is that the dispute between you and what you call the HIV community will mislead and distress the public in the following way. You point to a number of ways in which the HIV hypothesis may be deficient. It would be a rash person who said that you are wrong, but…if we were to publish your paper, we would find ourselves asking people to believe that what has been said so far about the cause of AIDS is a pack of lies.Concern for the public health, for the reputations of science and politicians, and good old-fashioned embarrassment, are all very human and understandable. Twenty years on, these same factors are still at work. In fact, they probably weigh even more heavily today on HIV’s “discoverers” and on those who took up the cause of fighting the virus that was said to constitute such a threat to humanity. But they do not constitute refutation of a leading scientist’s critique. Nor of the careful work contributed by many other scientists who have questioned the HIV orthodoxy, but whose views have been similarly kept out of the mainstream of scientific debate.
Thank you for publishing Farber’s article.
Yours faithfully
Neville Hodgkinson
Medical and Science Correspondent, The Sunday Times, London, 1985-89 and 1991-94; author, AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate, London, 1996)