Celia Farber - Serious Adverse Events

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Serious Adverse Events

An Uncensored History of AIDS

Preface:

The Truth Barrier

"The threat of death hangs over all men and, however disguised it may be, and even if it is sometimes forgotten, it affects them all the time and creates in them a need to deflect death on to others. The formation of baiting crowds answers this need."

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Preface:

The Truth Barrier

Winston Churchill famously said: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." This was during his spell of enthusiasm for the implementation of a linga franca used by the Allies called Basic English, a language of only 850 words. George Orwell, during his years at the BBC, was himself interested in Basic, and scholars say it formed the basis of the totalitarian language "Newspeak" in 1984.

Since April 23, 1984, an empire of the mind has been expanding around our world. It is a simple, terrifying idea, and each mind in which it implants becomes incorporated, as territory, into the empire. It was not really an idea but more of a dictum. Colossally powerful, the dictum was that there was a single sexually transmissible virus that would bring imminent death upon millions of Americans. It was declared during a packed press conference held in Washington, DCon April 23, 1984wherein the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, declared, "The probable cause of AIDS has been found." She introduced National Cancer Institute virologist Robert Gallo, chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology, who explained that he had discovered a collection of retroviral "particles" to be the "probable cause of AIDS." Heckler added that an "AIDS vaccine" could be expected in two years, and that the announcement marked a watershed moment in the "honor roll of American science."

By the next day "probable" had fallen away, and the "novel retrovirus," later named "HIV"the human immunodeficiency virusbecame forever lodged in global consciousness as "the AIDS

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Serious Adverse Events

An Uncensored History of AIDS

virus." (The word "probable" was dropped when Lawrence Altman, writing in the New York Times, definitively referred to the retrovirus as "the AIDS virus." Altman, the Times chief medical reporter, was, at that time, a member of a sub-division of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), known as the "medical CIA." He was recruited into the EIS in 1963, six years before he started at the Times. Established in 1951, the chief purpose of the EIS was to fan out in various fields, including media, and act as public health activists, promoting the agenda of the CDC, and acting as "its eyes and ears.")

The now famous press conference drop-kicked the world into a new era and marks the beginning of official AIDS historyan event the HHS put on par with NASA's first moon landing.

But others saw it differently. As one AIDS researcher put it to me, "the cause of AIDS was declared by government fiat." Some of the scientists in the audience that day were astonished to the point of speechlessness at Gallo's claims. His viral sample, for a start, was identical to one that had been isolated in Dr. Luc Montagnier's lab at the Pasteur Institute in Paris during the previous year and sent to Gallo for comment. Scientists recognized it yet nobody said anything. This point has been more rigorously analyzed and proven than any single moment in all of virology, by several investigating committees, journalistsone in particular, John Crewdson, has written hundreds of pages about the sample's appropriationand, finally, conceded by the U.S. government itself, which; in 1994, quietly settled a long running legal battle with the Pasteur scientists, admitting that they had discovered the virus and that the U.S. therefore owed them millions in HIV test royalties. Montagnier never suggested the virus was the cause of AIDS, but Gallo and the NCI did.

Preface:

The Truth Barrier

There have been many accounts of the iconic press conference. (I have written the easy, movie version of it myself several times, complete with "flashing bulbs" and "global media" hysteria.) But studying the press conference now through all the threads of history, all the weather systems that led up to this perfect storm, one can see clearly that it was a moment not only of scientific disgrace but a theater of the absurd. If we remove the starchy coverings of the Ambitious Scientist and His Jealous Rivals, the Brave AIDS Activists, The Politicians In Denial, The CDC official twisted into knots of worry because Nobody was Listening, and look at the 1984 press conference starkly, without its casing, we can at last see the strange and disjointed wiring that lay beneath the surface.

Fewer than half (36 percent) of the group of gay male patients on whom Gallo was basing his findings had any sign of the retrovirus at the time. We also know that until that moment in time, retroviruses were considered non-pathogenic, non-cell killing, though of great interest to a generation of "retrovirologists" who had had emerged after the discovery of "reverse transcriptase" in the 1970s.

Gallo claimed "strong evidence of a causative involvement of the virus in AIDS," but it was not a proven scientific fact. Gallo had, at best, identified the retrovirus's presence. He had not shown a causal relationship. Gallo later published four papers in Science in the spring of 1984 that form the bedrock of the HIV theory, but looking there, one does not find the fine threads that would explain how he and his colleagues knew HIV "caused" AIDS. This is where the story becomes truly strange. One must wind back to the very first cases of AIDS, in 1981, to understand it.

In 1980, the CDC was trying to recover from the fiasco of what was supposed to have been its shining triumphthe vaccina

14 Serious Adverse Events

An Uncensored History of AIDS

tion program against Legionaires Disease, termed the beginning of a "swine flu" epidemic. A few American Legion members had come down with pneumonia at a convention in Philadelphia, and the CDC went into overdrive, insisting that the cause was a microbe found in soil. After mass panic about "swine flu" was spread in the mediareported, as well, by the Times Altmanthe CDC developed a research branch devoted to the disease and even a quick vaccine, which was given to fifty million Americans. The vaccine resulted in at least six hundred cases of paralysis and seventy-four deaths. A cascade of lawsuits ensued, and the CDC's chief, who had tried to obscure the vaccine deaths, lost his job. The CDC continued its pursuit of infectious disease causes, because its mission was to stop the spread of a disease, ideally through public health measures. Swine flu was, for the CDC, the one that got away. The failure did not cause them to change course, but rather heightened their drive for what they called a "suitable epidemic."