Montagnier punctures World AIDS Day balloon
December 2, 2009 by: Magick Dragonfly
Global cult celebrates, unaware of AIDS leader busting main assumption
Montagnier confirms HIV no threat to healthy people, no need for vaccine, microbicides
UK Independent demonstrates how media trash HIV/AIDS dissidents with gross bias
Climate email row makes it harder for HIV/AIDS defense team to get away with slanderous politics
Today’s world wide celebration of non science in the form of HIV/AIDS propaganda and associated charity events will delight do gooders all over the earth, but it will profoundly irritate a lot of people familiar with the journal literature of the field.
Such scientifically literate observers are, after all, keenly aware that Peter Duesberg’s adamant refutation of HIV=AIDS, the basic rationale for delivering damaging drugs to AIDS sufferers here and abroad, stands unanswered in the same elite journals in which they were published.
In other words, the basic theory which drives the enormous amounts of money devoted to “stopping AIDS” is not only unproven, but without any good evidence, scientifically absurd and maintained sacrosanct only by the politics of a church, a church very comparable to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints run by Warren Jeffs before his arrest for turning his community into a gang run dictatorship of polygamous child abuse.
So in the view of some we have a global party to celebrate a broken paradigm, busted every year by more and more evidence of its error, which never should have been adopted in the first place, and one which causes immeasurable suffering, in other words, the festivities are a misguided toast to corrupt scientific leadership and scientific illiteracy even within science, let alone among the educated public, and a belief system that, like that Mormon cult, is the flip side of what it purports to be.
But today, however, these sensitive observers will find some solace for this global insult to intelligence and scientific literacy in a video released today on YouTube by Brent Leung, in what amounts to him firing an Exocet missile at the gunboat of HIV defenders that have been harassing him with false accusations of bias and worse, an explosive that stands a good chance of tearing a very large hole in the mothership of HIV/AIDS itself.
Brent Leung is the director of House of Numbers, the current movie that brilliantly exposes the embarrassing fact that the generals of HIV/AIDS science agree more with the critics of the paradigm than with each other, and come up empty when asked to explain how HIV/AIDS makes any sense at all.
The film has had the HIV paradigm defense squad run by John Moore of Cornell-Weill in a state of hysteria, and mounting a desperate counter move in the form of an attack website (HouseofNumbers.org) to trash the entertaining and enlightening movie, a well executed enquiry that merely faithfully records the words of the leadership they support (see previous posts).
HIV discoverer Luc Montagnier says HIV no threat to healthy people
Undoubtedly the most striking comment in House of Numbers was made by none other than Luc Montagnier, the Pasteur scientist who first discovered evidence of a retrovirus in AIDS patients, a dubious discovery for which he received the Nobel last year. Montagnier informed the Leung and and the world that anyone with a healthy immune system could shrug off HIV in two or three weeks, and that even poor black Africans could do the same if they were given decent food and clean water.
This of course was precisely what Peter Duesberg and his thousands of fellow critics of the scientifically hollow paradigm of HIV-is-the-cause-of-AIDS have been saying all along ie for the last 23 years, earning the calumny of “denialist” and other labels for what is really nothing but common sense science which can be explained to a twelve year old.
More than any of the other conflicting and scientifically illiterate or questionable comments made by John Moore and others during the film, this remark of Montagnier’s threatened to bring down the whole house of cards that is the theory of AIDS that every scientist involved in this Enron of science is milking, especially since the film contrasted the belief they all proclaim with a portrait of reality in Africa that made it clear there was a much more sensible interpretation of HIV/AIDS, and it was in line with what Montagnier was saying.
Poverty and malnutrition, and the associated diseases especially TB, are almost certainly the real causes of supposed HIV/AIDS symptoms in Africa, and to give ARVs as a palliative, especially to pregnant women, is not a cure but a cause of worse health, since the TB goes untreated, and the all important good food and clean water is not emphasized as it should be.
This truth is so obvious that when they heard Montagnier expressed it in the film John Moore et al must have felt especially threatened, and they have evidently had a hard time handling it since, claiming that Montagnier was taken out of context or didn’t mean what he said, while canvassing accusations from participants that Brent Leung misled them in saying that his film was a study of how HIV/AIDS research had progressed.
In fact, the irony is that his stealth bomber of a film is exactly that – a study of how HIV/AIDS research has made no progress in making scientific sense in 25 years, and a clear suggestion why – all of this enlightenment out of the mouths of the top experts in the field.
Brent Leung’s HIV/AIDS depth charge – Montagnier on YouTube
As it turns out, the attacks of the paradigm death squad have now had the result they deserve. Today Brent Leung released the full segment of the interview where Montagnier makes his remarks on this theme, and it is up on YouTube today. Now that John Moore et al can no longer claim that the statement was taken out of context, it will be amusing to see how they try to wriggle out of this one.
Here’s what Montagnier said in full:
Brent Leung: You talked about oxidative stress earlier. Is treating oxidative stress one of the best ways to deal with the African AIDS epidemic?
Luc Montagnier: I think it is one way to approach. To decrease the rate of transmission because I believe HIV, we can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected. Our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system; and this is the problem also of Africa, of African people. Their nutrition is not very equilibrated, they are in oxidative stress, even if they are not infected with HIV. So their immune system doesn’t work well, already. So it’s prone, you know, it can allow HIV to get in and persist.
So there are many ways which are not the vaccine, – the magic name, the vaccine! – there are many ways to decrease the transmission just by simple measures of nutrition, giving antioxidants, proper antioxidants, hygiene measures, fighting the other infections. So they are not spectacular, but they could, you know, decrease very well the epidemic to the level they are in occidental countries, Western countries.
Brent Leung: So if you have a good immune system, then your body can naturally get rid of HIV?!
Luc Montagnier: Yes.
Brent Leung: Oh, interesting. Do you think we should have more of a push for antioxidants and things of that nature in Africa than antiretrovirals?
Montagnier: We should push for more you know a combination of measures, you know, antioxidants, nutrition advice, nutrition, fighting other infections, malaria, tuberculosis, parasites, worms, education of course, genital hygiene for women and men also, very simple measures, which are not very expensive but which could do a lot.
And this is actually my worry about the many spectacular action for the global funds to buy drugs and so on. and Bill gates and so on, for the vaccine. But you know those kind of measures are not very well funded, they’re not funded at all, or they are, you know, it really depends on the local government to take choice of this. But the local government they take advice of the scientific advisors from the (international?) XXXX institutions and they don’t get this kind of advice very often.
((Any reader who can fathom the incomprehensible word use by Montagnier at 2.48 min please advise – Ed.))Brent Leung: There’s no money in nutrition, right? There’s no profit.
Luc Montagnier: There’s no profit, yes! Water is important, water is key.
Brent Leung: Now I think you said you were talking about if you have a built immune systemthat it is possible to get rid of HIV naturally. If you take a poor African who has been infected and you build up their immune system is it possible for them to also naturally get rid of it?
Luc Montagnier: I would think so.
Brent Leugn: OK. That’s an important, that’s an important point.
Luc Montagnier: It’s important knowledge which is completely neglected. You know, people always think of drugs and vaccine.
(grinning broadly) So this is a message which may be different from the other what you heard before, no?
Brent Leung: The closing?
Luc Montagnier (smiling): No, no, yes, my message is different from what you heard from Fauci or er..!
Brent Leung: Yes. It’s a little different.
Luc Montagnier (beaming and grinning widely): Little different!
Like Samson, Montagnier brings down the main pillar of the temple of AIDS
All in all, a stunning shift in AIDS lore from the Nobel prize winning discover of HIV, the European leader now of world opinion in the science of AIDS, ever since Robert Gallo was sidelined by departure from the NIH after embarrassing investigations into the validity of his original lab work with the virus, and his humiliating omission from the Nobel prize award for the discovery of the virus which he, Gallo, had originally claimed for himself.
Why is this so stunning? Because Montagnier freely admits, indeed even emphasizes, that anyone with a healthy immune system has nothing to fear from the so called AIDS virus, which will be quickly defeated by the immune system.
No need for John Moore’s fruitless microbicides being further tested in drug company financed research on his hapless bonobos at Cornell-Weill Medical Center in Manhattan, nor for the billions being spent on the fruitless and irrational search for a vaccine for a virus which already easily vaccinates you against itself, nor for the cheap drugs for Africa which Bill Clinton hopes will redeem his moral reputation, an unlikely outcome in the long run if this kind of truth in AIDS finally finds its way into the reports of the uniformly bewildered media correspondents on AIDS at the New York Times and elsewhere, who have for so long acted as Xerox machines for the press releases of Dr Anthony Fauci at the NIAID, who it may impolitely but fairly be said is the chief drug pusher in the realm of HIV/AIDS.
The power of House of Numbers
Small wonder John Moore and the HIV defense league are excited about House of Numbers, and striving to ban its showing and the discussion panels which might follow (the Spectator of London tried to mount a showing and a panel a month ago, but retreated in the face of attacks from activists).
The fact remains, bottom line, the film makes a mockery of all that HIV scientists claim in their analysis of AIDS symptoms and their origin, simply by quoting their own words back to them. And no quotation is as powerful as Montagnier’s in damning the enormous effort they have provoked to bring dangerous drugs to Africans instead of good food and clean water.
No wonder Montagnier has a little mischievous smile which broadens into a massive grin at the end of the segment, when he volunteers to Leung that he is sure what he says is not the same as Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID told him.
Trashy Independent article trashes dissidents too obviously
This statement from Montagnier immediately outdates scurrilous press items trashing AIDS realists (”denialists”) such as today’s World AIDS Day propaganda from the Independent newspaper of London. We refer to the insult to truthseekers in science in the form of this not-so-independent article, Killer syndrome: The Aids denialists – Why does a small band of scientists and campaigners persist in denying the link between HIV and Aids, when the evidence that they are wrong is overwhelming? Rob Sharp reports wherein their correspondent Rob appears totally ignorant of the fact that it is late in the day to trash HIV/AIDS dissidents as “denialists”, not to mention that such prejudice is unprofessional, especially in science, where the reporter has no expertise to judge which side of a high level scientific dispute is likely to be right, nor any business coloring his report with his own opinion.
In the comment thread that follows, however, these and other points against what is written are made quite effectively by Michael Geiger and other AIDS realists – and significantly, John Moore himself was drawn into posting. Evidently the original and quite effective policy of avoiding all debate with his scientific critics trumpeted by Moore a few years ago is now null and void.
The scene in HIV/AIDS is heating up, with HIV defenders finally goaded into action by the serious challenge posed by House of Numbers which borrows its authority from the leaders of HIV ideology, and presents its results with a clarity that a child could understand. Its featured interviews and quotes from established HIV/AIDS authorities show that what we might suppose to be AIDS science is a self-contradictory mess, and what the real answer is once official outside review is not stifled as it has been for over two decades.
Climate email exposes HIV scientific misbehavior to examination
Add to this another tremendous setback for the HIV defense gang in the form of the now famous climate science email hack, wherein the emails to and from climate scientists collecting data on global warming at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were swiped by some servant of free speech and released to the world on the Internet.
The exposed emails (see them here) opened a window onto those scientists’ schoolboy political behavior behind the scenes that would have made a very good File for Serge Lang, Yale’s truthseeker, if he was still alive. (Click the link to see the list and read them for yourself.)
Amid the scientists scorn for and withholding of data from climate skeptics, there was proof that the data was more doubtful than admitted and of secret manipulation of a graph of temperature change released to the world on the cover of a pamphlet offering journalists and others supposed proof of recent temperature increase, when decrease was indicated.
As John Tierney at the Times today writes:
How much concern should there be over the revelations about hacked emails and files from the computers of British climate scientists?
In my Findings column, I mention a stolen file from a computer expert named Harry and discuss one of the issues of contention — a British scientist’s mention of a technique to “hide the decline” in a temperature graph that appeared on the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization. You can see the relevant graphs at the bottom of this post. You can read critiques of the graphing technique at Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog, and a defense of the technique from one of the scientists responsible for the graph, Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
I’ve long thought that the biggest danger in climate research is the temptation for scientists to lose their skepticism and go along with the “consensus” about global warming. That’s partly because it’s easy for everyone to get caught up in “informational cascades”, and partly because there are so many psychic and financial rewards rewards for working on a problem that seems to be a crisis. We all like to think that our work is vitally useful in solving a major social problem — and the more major the problem seems, the more money society is liable to spend on it.
I’m not trying to suggest that climate change isn’t a real threat, or that scientists are deliberately hyping it. But when they look at evidence of the threat, they may be subject to the confirmation bias — seeing trends that accord with their preconceptions and desires. Given the huge stakes in this debate — the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions — it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?
My colleague Andy Revkin has been discussing the e-mails at his Dot Earth blog and publishing some very thoughtful proposals to improve the research process and foster transparency. Roger Pielke Jr. discusses the case of the missing data — the absence of the original records from some of the weather stations, which the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University said was discarded. In response to concerns about the missing data, the British record-keepers have issued a statement saying that most of the data have been available, and that the British conclusions square with independent analyses in other countries. Skeptics still wonder, though, how independent and unbiased the analyses are.
In other words, a classic case of biased expectations affecting the interpretation of data and misrepresentation to the world to avoid outside criticism and review, to which they were hostile and prepared to defend themselves with political and underhand measures.
Or, exactly the behavior that has protected the exploitation of a false paradigm in HIV/AIDS for 25 years.
Science’s horrid secret revealed
So now we have a great advance in the public’s understanding of how science operates, a second The Double Helix, that is to say, reminiscent of how Jim Watson’s account of how he and Francis Crick were ruthless in their obsessive drive to find the structure of DNA in 1953, a revelation at the time because it tipped off outsiders as to how powerful the ambitions of scientists could be, and how ruthless their behavior in fighting for their ideas:
Watson holds nothing back when revealing the petty sniping and backbiting among his colleagues, while acknowledging that he himself was a willing participant in the melodrama. In particular, Watson reveals his mixed feelings about his famous colleague in discovery, Francis Crick, who many thought of as an arrogant man who talked too much, and whose brilliance was appreciated by few. This is the joy of The Double Helix–instead of a chronicle of stainless-steel heroes toiling away in their sparkling labs, Watson’s chronicle gives readers an idea of what living science is like, warts and all. The Double Helix is a startling window into the scientific method, full of insight and wit, and packed with the kind of science anecdotes that are told and retold in the halls of universities and laboratories everywhere. It’s the stuff of legends
This week’s exposure of the internal politics of a science whose conclusions are hotly disputed outside the field as a public policy issue of great moment involving huge expenditures has also finally alerted the public to the idea that science can be distorted by internal politics as much as external influences.
Everyone knows that censorship and pressure from the Bush Administration became so obviously scandalous that Bush himself finally changed his tune on global warming. Now they know how distorting politics inside science can be. Now they understand that scientists may war among themselves and abandon professionalism to win their point and maintain public acceptance of their overall belief, the paradigm that they support, and which supports them.
They may adopt underhand methods, massage data, misinterpret the evidence and shut out expert skeptics who endanger their hypothesis and the career benefits that flow from it.
In other words, they may behave exactly a HIV/AIDS scientists have behaved for 25 years.
The game is up
To repeat this all important point, the fact that this misbehavior has been exposed in the sphere of global warming alerts the public to the possible similar distortion of scientific theory in other fields, such as AIDS, where the above description by Tierney is also a fairly accurate account of what has happened in that tormented field.
It is hard to see that John Moore, Anthony Fauci, and Robert Gallo, the scientists who currently lead in protecting and perpetrating the paradigm in AIDS that HIV is the cause, can survive the comparison that will inevitably be made by investigative journalists and other sophisticated writers dealing with the radical doubts shared by many scientists and professionals of whether AIDS science is soundly based.
It is hard to imagine Moore and others such as Mark Wainberg of Montreal getting away so easily as they have in the past with ad hominem and political arguments to silence HIV skeptics in public, or with calling up university administrations and other employers of AIDS dissidents to see whether they can get them fired.
As a poster in the Independent comment thread says, “The jig is up!”
See also Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research by Andrew Revkin, NYT Nov 27.
