3 ms·

It's probably just worth reading the book as I have only summarized a tiny fraction of it, and I suspect any debate about the topic could end up as just re-writ

It's probably just worth reading the book as I have only summarized a tiny fraction of it, and I suspect any debate about the topic could end up as just re-writing the book in forum comments. Obviously Duesberg discusses the history of AIDS treatments. Indeed it doesn't discuss treatment history after the book was written, but it makes a convincing case that the AIDS treatments that did exist up to that point were fraudulent in various ways and being presented as successful whilst actually killing patients (this is the justification for the book, in fact). If I recall correctly, the gist of his argument is like this: 1. When AIDS was new scientists confidently predicted that everyone who caught HIV would die within a year or so. But then people who were HIV+ kept living longer than a year. Rather than treat this as evidence against the link, 'the science' as we call it these days kept being retroactively changed to stretch the supposed incubation period of HIV. This kept going until HIV was claimed to be able to hide non-active for a decade or more. 2. At some point AZT and other anti-retrovirals were developed. These were extremely toxic treatments because they work by stopping cells dividing. They're more like a form of chemotherapy. The drug trials didn't follow the rules of good trials and became hopelessly corrupted, e.g. patients were able to unblind themselves as to whether they were in the placebo group or not and then started trading with others who weren't. They had been told they were guaranteed to die without treatment, so obviously everyone in the process was highly incentivized to get their hands on this supposed miracle drug via fair means or foul. There were many other problems with the trials but that's the one I remember. 3. Not surprisingly given the nature of AZT, people put on it frequently ended up dead even though they hadn't previously been sick. This was interpreted as a failure of the treatment to treat the finally appearing AIDS, rather than the treatment itself killing the patient. The picture was muddied by admissions that of course this therapy had extreme side effects, but it was justified by the guarantee of death that came with HIV. 4. Nonetheless, they kept decreasing the dosages and mixing it with other drugs to reduce the toxicity of the treatments. This was then written up as improvements in the treatment. Duisberg argues they merely kept making a treatment known to be toxic less so. Because (in his theory) HIV wasn't killing the people in the first place, this then led to improving life outcomes which were interpreted as a success for medicine. 5. At this point the HIV/AIDS theory became unfalsifiable. Because HIV was claimed to be a special virus that might kill you very quickly, or might wait decades to do so, everyone with it was given treatment. If they survived a long time, the treatment was the cause. If they died, HIV was the cause. Regardless of what happened the data was interpreted in such a way as to reinforce the theory. Any evidence that disagreed with it was swept under the carpet or fixed via redefinitions, like the addition of HIV positivity to the required symptoms list for AIDS that I previously mentioned. If you'd like more background then this article by a former science journalist who worked at the Sunday Times might be interesting. At first he believed what he was being told about AIDS, but eventually decided he was being misled and came to feel guilty about his role in promoting AIDS hysteria. He wrote about his experiences here: https://dailysceptic.org/immunity-hysteria/ https://dailysceptic.org/immunity-hysteria/ https://dailysceptic.org/new-variant/ https://dailysceptic.org/new-variant/

pasabagi 5y ago
Seems weird to me. My brother in law literally works with HIV every day in a biology lab. There are thousands of academics who do the same. Why would they bother if it was just some random virus? I can't really speak to the arguments you've presented. Frankly, they seem totally explicable for any number of reasons, but it's not my field. My feeling is simply that tons of people who work in the field believe that HIV causes AIDS (it also totally makes sense to me you could have an immune deficiency without some specific virus, but whatever). So I believe it. If tomorrow, it's discovered not to be the case, I'll probably believe that too. It's not my field, so why would I have a strong opinion? What's the point of even reading a book about it, unless you're working in microbiology?
- native_samples 5y ago
  If you look at what happens to the scientists who dissented, it's no real surprise that nobody investigates this any more. Look at this thread. Mullis invented the PCR test and won a Nobel prize for it, but his beliefs about AIDS were immediately written off without investigation (except by me) and in fact used as a reason to attack and undermine him. Now what happens if you raise questions about this without being a Nobel prize winner? The HIV faction won decades ago, fighting it would be impossible. Science is often said to be self correcting. I no longer believe this. Rather it's ridden with groupthink, politics and power games. I watched in 2020 as the scientific "consensus" about COVID models became defined by whichever factions were most aggressive, most shameless and most willing to lie, despite the evidence right in front of my face. Like I said, I never developed a strong opinion on the "HIV not the cause of AIDS" theory, partly because I don't really care. COVID is far more important. But could scientists end up collectively believing something that just isn't true at all for decades? Yeah, absolutely. I totally believe that's not only possible but quite likely. Scientists will still be claiming that COVID models worked well when we're all in care homes. As to why anyone should care: because how do you know who to listen to, if you don't evaluate their past reliability? You say that you'll believe anything academics tell you because it's "not your field". Sounds like you might be a scientist? I think a lot of us would like to know what's true even in fields that aren't our own, especially because governments have a habit of making the pronouncements of scientists everyone's problem.

pasabagi 5y ago

Seems weird to me. My brother in law literally works with HIV every day in a biology lab. There are thousands of academics who do the same. Why would they bother if it was just some random virus? I can't really speak to the arguments you've presented. Frankly, they seem totally explicable for any number of reasons, but it's not my field. My feeling is simply that tons of people who work in the field believe that HIV causes AIDS (it also totally makes sense to me you could have an immune deficiency without some specific virus, but whatever). So I believe it. If tomorrow, it's discovered not to be the case, I'll probably believe that too. It's not my field, so why would I have a strong opinion? What's the point of even reading a book about it, unless you're working in microbiology?

native_samples 5y ago
If you look at what happens to the scientists who dissented, it's no real surprise that nobody investigates this any more. Look at this thread. Mullis invented the PCR test and won a Nobel prize for it, but his beliefs about AIDS were immediately written off without investigation (except by me) and in fact used as a reason to attack and undermine him. Now what happens if you raise questions about this without being a Nobel prize winner? The HIV faction won decades ago, fighting it would be impossible. Science is often said to be self correcting. I no longer believe this. Rather it's ridden with groupthink, politics and power games. I watched in 2020 as the scientific "consensus" about COVID models became defined by whichever factions were most aggressive, most shameless and most willing to lie, despite the evidence right in front of my face. Like I said, I never developed a strong opinion on the "HIV not the cause of AIDS" theory, partly because I don't really care. COVID is far more important. But could scientists end up collectively believing something that just isn't true at all for decades? Yeah, absolutely. I totally believe that's not only possible but quite likely. Scientists will still be claiming that COVID models worked well when we're all in care homes. As to why anyone should care: because how do you know who to listen to, if you don't evaluate their past reliability? You say that you'll believe anything academics tell you because it's "not your field". Sounds like you might be a scientist? I think a lot of us would like to know what's true even in fields that aren't our own, especially because governments have a habit of making the pronouncements of scientists everyone's problem.