‘HIV Denialists’ Spread Falsehoods on ‘Net
IOWA CITY, Iowa, Aug. 21 (UPI)
The Internet is being used to circulate false ideas about HIV/AIDS that could impact public health, U.S. researchers said.
Tara Smith of the University of Iowa College of Public Health and Steven Novella of Yale University School of Medicine said “HIV denialists” reject the consensus of the scientific community that HIV is the cause of AIDS by either denigrating the notion of scientific authority in general or by arguing that the mainstream HIV community is intellectually compromised.
Those who believe the false information spread by HIV denialists could end up putting themselves at risk of HIV infection by abandoning safe sex, while those who are already infected could end up seeking unproven, ineffective remedies, the researchers suggested in a policy paper published in PLoS Medicine.
“The effect of denial groups on public perception of HIV infection is an area ripe for careful research, as this denial can have lethal consequences,” the researchers said in a statement.
Copyright United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
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Tara Smith- the Ann Coulter of AIDS.
There’s little science in her so-called “science blog”.
She’s an AIDS propagandist posing as a scientist.
When are gay men going to take a hard look into the construct of AIDS and see where the real homophobia lies? As a gay man, I’ll tell you that Tara Smith is not on “our side”, as she promotes the deadly AIDS paradigm.
Tara Smith’s trashy blog is a total joke. She pretends to be a scientist, when all she really does is promote genocide for Gay Men nd dark skinned people with her propaganda style support of the HIV lies.
I am sick of Tara and all she stands for. Her nauseating fanaticism, and her unrelenting manipulation, or lack of understanding of facts is insulting. Her absurd “jihad” style tactics regarding those who question from personal experience the real causes of AIDS is unacceptable and must be challenged.
As a gay man I too accuse Tara of homophobia…even if she tries to dress it up as having our interests in mind and under the guise of science. She promotes death for gay men
Who does she think she is kidding?
As gay men, who are our friends?
Is it those who promote a paradigm that tells us our natural sexuality is deadly, and that the punishment (treatment) for that natural sexuality is a regimen of body-deforming, liver-poisoning drugs?
Or is it those who question the inherent homophobia, racism and absurdity of this paradigm?
I’m with those who question!
Note the following 3 responses to the Smith/Novella piece, published as comments on PLoSMedicine
Claus Jensen
retired
No affiliation was given
E-mail
Competing Interests: I have been editor of the HIV/AIDS sceptical internet magazine ‘You Bet Your Life’
Submitted Date: September 12, 2007
Published: September 13, 2007
Whole areas of inaccuracy in Drs. Smith and Novella’s article have not been addressed in the previous commentary. I will provide what is no more than a representative sample.
The authors state their errand is to “review the current intellectual strategies used by the HIV denial movement”, within which they claim to have found “serious inconsistencies” that are “overlooked for the sake of presenting a unified front”.
There is no “HIV denial movement” and no “unified front”. This is fanciful conspiracy theory. In the available fora and venues, disagreements are discussed with the uncensored openness HIV dissidents are unified in calling for from mainstream scientists.
The authors devote a whole section to arguing that “denial literature reflects a basic distrust of authority”.
Apart from the negatively slanted “basic distrust”, this is a meaningless truism. Questioning the establishment or consensus is the definition of “dissidence”. As a method of sceptical inquiry, this “intellectual strategy” is also the scientific ideal tracing back to Descartes.
The authors state, dissidents “dismiss studies that support the HIV hypothesis as being biased by “drug money,” while they accept uncritically the testimony of HIV deniers who have a heavy financial stake in their alternative treatment modalities”.
Untrue. While dissidents are sceptical of heavily funded research monopolies, their fundamental position(s) is based on critical reading of peer-reviewed studies, not wholesale dismissal of same in favour of selected “testimony”.
The authors state: [HIV/AIDS is] is a well-established scientific theory that is being challenged by politically motivated pseudoscientific notions”.
The accusation that dissidents’ “pseudoscientific notions” are politically motivated” is part of the denialist conspiracy theory peddled by the authors. It also begs the question since this wholly unsubstantiated claim is used as sole basis for their conclusion that “because HIV denial is not scientifically legitimate, such exclusion [from debate] is justified”.
The authors state: “In the 1980s, HIV deniers argued that drug therapy for AIDS was ineffective, did not significantly prolong survival, and in fact was toxic and damaged the immune system. However, after the introduction of a cocktail of newer and more effective agents in the 1990s, survival rates did impressively increase HIV deniers no longer accept this criterion as evidence for drug effectiveness, and therefore the HIV theory of AIDS”.
Dissidents have never accepted that “longer survival” on any drug is evidence of the causal connection between HIV-AIDS. Revealingly, the authors directly contradict the very argument they have just made when in their eagerness to make a different point they state: “the past decade, the very drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS have come under fire by HIV deniers, who have suggested that the medicines themselves are a cause of AIDS.”
If the drugs have only come under fire the last decade, the goal posts could hardly have been “pushed back” from the 1980s. The dissidents hold that the drugs can cause some of the conditions called AIDS - some not all, since so called AIDS is a collection of many distinct conditions and diseases.
The fact is HIV dissidence has been remarkably consistent and informed on all main points from the very beginning, which is a deal more than one can say for this article.
Authors Are Ignorant of Dissident Science and History
Darin Brown
Mathematician
No affiliation was given
E-mail
Competing Interests: Creator of the dissident website the AIDS Wiki
Submitted Date: September 11, 2007
Published: September 12, 2007
Tara Smith has stated that she “hadn’t even realized there was an active [HIV] denial movement until recently, beginning with the story of Eliza Jane Scovill” (1). Based on several misrepresentations and factual errors in “HIV Denial in the Internet Era”, it is clear she has invested little time since then, studying either scientific papers written by dissidents or the history of AIDS dissent.
For example, Smith and Novella state, “Peter Duesberg initiated the HIV denial movement with a 1987 article suggesting that HIV does not cause AIDS.” This statement is outstandingly untrue on several counts. First and foremost, Duesberg was not “initiating” anything, let alone a “movement”; he was commissioned to write a review article on retroviruses and cancer for Cancer Research. Secondly, Duesberg did not “deny” anything — he raised questions supported by evidence. Finally, Duesberg was not the first to question the HIV hypothesis in print (2-5), and the AIDS tenets had been questioned since the early 1980s (6).
The authors describe Christine Maggiore as “diagnosed with HIV in 1992″, and we are told her daughter “died in September 2005 of HIV-related pneumonia”, said HIV presumably acquired by perinatal transmission. Why then did Jeanne Bergman write in the New York Press in 2005, “but of course Maggiore has no ‘fear of AIDS’ — she doesn’t have HIV” (7)? The authors fail to inform their readers that Maggiore has also repeatedly tested indeterminate and once negative (8), which would expose the malleability of Maggiore’s “HIV status”.
Regarding the “suitable independent group” alluded to in the original 1991 unpublished letter, Smith and Novella claim, “These signatories do not, however, suggest who the ’suitable independent’ group should be.” Yet in 1995, the Group published a letter suggesting the Society of Actuaries as just such a “suitable independent group” (9).
The authors consistently misrepresent dissident positions with strawmen. They take the title of Duesberg’s 1989 PNAS paper (10) and proclaim that dissidents “reject correlation as insufficient to establish causation”. But this trivial fact (which is taught in every Stats 101 class) is not the point of the paper, which is to provide specific virological and epidemiological reasons why the association between HIV and AIDS is not causative. Similarly, they claim, “In Africa, HIV deniers attribute AIDS to a combination of malnutrition and poor sanitation…In America and other wealthy countries, they claim AIDS is caused by drug use and promiscuity.” But they create a false dichotomy with the term “AIDS”, obscuring the dissidents’ real point: that “African AIDS” and “Western AIDS” are two entirely different epidemics and should not be given the same name.
“HIV Denial in the Internet Era” indicates that Smith and Novella are not familiar with dissident scientific arguments and are ignorant of basic historical facts.
REFERENCES
1. “The Least Known War In Science: Does HIV Cause AIDS?”, http://www.scientificblogging.com/hank/the_least_known_war_in_science_does_hiv_cause_aids
2. Schmidt, C “The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS”, Journal of Psychohistory, Summer 1984
3. Lauritsen, J “CDC’s Tables Obscure Drugs-AIDS Connection”, Philadelphia Gay News, 14 February 1985
4. Lauritsen, J and Wilson H, “Death Rush: Poppers and AIDS”, Pagan Press, 1986
5. Papadopulos, E, “Reappraisal of Aids: Is the Oxidation Induced by the Risk Factors the Primary Cause?”, Medical Hypotheses 25, 151-162, 1988 (twice rejected by Nature in 1986)
6. Cohen, MA, “AIDS in the US, Early Period (1981-87): Interview with Michael Ellner, President, HEAL”, Townsend Letter, #265/266, 88–9
7. Bergman, J “Drugs, Disease, Denial”, New York Press, 22 June 2005
8. Farber, C, “A Daughter’s Death, A Mother’s Survival”, Los Angeles CityBeat, 8 June 2006
9. Science, 17 Feb 1995, 267, 945-946
10. Duesberg PH, “HIV and AIDS: Correlation But Not Causation”, PNAS, 86, 755-764, February 1989
Consensus in science
Henry Bauer
Professor Emeritus, Chemistry and Science Studies
Virginia Tech
E-mail
Competing Interests: As revealed in the letter, I am author of a dissident HIV/AIDS book
Submitted Date: September 06, 2007
Published: September 10, 2007
Smith and Novella fail to define ‘rigorous scientific standards’, and apply implicitly this single criterion: accordance with the prevailing mainstream consensus. Evidently they accept as unproblematic a ’strongly held consensus opinion of the scientific community’ that has persisted for ‘23 years’. This begs questions grappled with in a century’s worth of scholarship in science studies (history, philosophy, sociology, etc., of science), thereby ignoring fundamental insights about scientific activity. Amateur pundits - including scientists, journalists, and others - continue to rely on such discredited notions as ‘the scientific method’ and ‘falsifiability’ even as scholarship in science studies long ago demonstrated their inadequacy and abandoned the quest for a definable distinction between science and pseudoscience (1). Pseudoscience is like pornography: it cannot be defined, only ‘recognized when we see it’ - albeit different people judge any given case differently.
A mainstream consensus in science is useful in the short run, as a summary of empirical data and a guide to further research, but it is no absolute truth. Indeed, the mainstream consensus almost always proves inadequate in the longer run: science progresses precisely by modifying a ‘well-established’ consensus in fundamental ways or by overturning it entirely in scientific revolutions (2). Most important to note and not widely appreciated is the fact that before such a paradigm shift, the mainstream typically resists strenuously what eventually becomes the new consensus (3). The contemporary attacks on ‘HIV/AIDS denialists’ (including the frequently ad hominem features of those attacks) illustrate well that typical circumstance.
Among indications that HIV/AIDS theory, like so many consensual scientific beliefs before it, is destined for replacement are these: Gisselquist et al. (4) have shown that sexual transmission of HIV cannot explain the purported epidemics in Africa; an insider has revealed that the estimates promulgated by UNAIDS are unrealistic (5); the totality of official data on HIV tests in the USA are incompatible with the demographics of an infectious and sexually transmissible agent (6). The latter analysis by the present writer has been described in non-partisan sources as ‘credible’ (7) and ‘important . . closely reasoned . . . systematically demolishes the theory - more correctly the hypothesis or conjecture - that . . . (HIV) causes . . . (AIDS)’ (8). The first review to appear in a mainstream AIDS journal (9) is not uncritical yet acknowledges the book’s demonstration of ‘major failings of HIV epidemiology’ and that ‘competent and qualified people who questioned the orthodoxy have been largely excluded from the leading journals’ - illustrating the resistance to change noted above.
Smith and Novella are simply wrong in taking a prevailing mainstream consensus as a sound or sufficient basis for criticizing the views of well qualified individuals who dissent from that consensus.
References
1. Laudan, L. 1983. The demise of the demarcation problem. Pp. 111-27 in Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, ed. R. S. Cohen and L. Laudan, D. Reidel.
2. Kuhn, T. S. 1962/70. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
3. Hook, E. B. (ed). 2002. Prematurity in Scientific Discovery. University of California Press.
4. Gisselquist, D., R. Rothenberg, J. Potterat, and E. Drucker. 2002. HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa not explained by sexual or vertical transmission. International Journal of STD and AIDS 13: 657-66.
5. Chin, J. 2007. The AIDS Pandemic. Radcliffe.
6. Bauer, H H. 2007. The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory. McFarland.
7. Eberhart, G. 2007. C and RL News (College and Research Libraries News) 68, 6 (June).
8. W. F. Shughart II, Public Choice, in press.
9. Potterat , J. J. 2007. International Journal of STD and AIDS 18: 645-6.
How telling is it anyway, when people like Tara expose themselves by the over use of the word “denialists”. It’s not even a word. It literally does not even exist. It’s a crude vulgarism, just like the paradigm they try to push on gay men and the rest of the world.
The truth is that they have nothing else. Nothing!!! All they can do is try to insult those who question. Call us manes. Try to get the rest of the world to censure us. Try to scare people into not listening to us and do the same.
Pathetic!!! Absolutely pathetic Tara!!!
On top if it all she tries to pass herself as some protector of gay men, crying out homophobia. It’s time to tell these Abigail’s that we do not appreciate them. We see through them. We will make sure that they get the titles that they deserve. Homophobes!!
Tara is a homophobe!!! She wants to poison us all. She wants us all dead!!!
She and her lot are trying to convince us all that we are sick when there is nothing wrong with us. She is trying to usurp the high moral ground in her pathetic scare-mongering arguments. She is just another Medea, who in order to prove her point will not bat an eyelid at hacking her own kids to death if she had to. That’s who Tara is. Tara is a gay hater.
HIV=AIDS is promoted only by idiots, people who benefit, self-haters, racists and gay haters.
Tara probably qualifies for at least four of those titles. Who the hell is she to speak for us and in our name? She is just a common AIDS Inc hood. Nothing more. Why is she given the space to voice her venom on here whilst gay men who question are vilified?
This is outrageous. Here are at least three gay men who challenge this. We all say Tara is a liar. Tara is homophobic. Tara promotes death for gay men.
Why is she being given the space on a gay site to do it form?
Shame. Shame. Double shame…
Wake up boys…it’s time to give up this crap and fight back. No more shame and no more death.
HIVis a lie…AIDS is just a political construct.
Tara knows there are more each day that realise this. That’s why she is so desperate.
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Hells Bells! the CDC and FDA are the most CORRUPT agencies in the UNITED SNAKES of AMERICA…and Tara Smith is a piss ant!
ok a Cockroach!
HIV is Big Business for her but one day as generations come to pass her children can look their pathetic mother in the face and say You MURDERED all those People! You Greedy Bitch!
Public Health will NEVER mean IATROGENOCIDE no matter how many times they whine Denialist.
The Tides are changing… soon the HIV Industry will go bankrupt and the Government will arrest the Perpetrators of this DECEPTIVE and DEADLY $CAM.
HIV DISSIDENTS UNITED!
The gay men who have spoken here must make themselves heard, somehow, to all of the media outlets that continue to maintain the stranglehold that keeps actual voices, true stories, true feelings, out of this very carefully maintained Lenin Bust. (AIDS, according to media)
Tara Smith speaking for gay men is indeed abominable. She writes like a slightly malfunctioning robot–has no original thoughts and less data. As gay men you should demand to be allowed to tell your own history and not have it told for you by people who aren’t even living it, and have never lost anybody to, say AZT.
But in additon to being kept out, gay men are also used as arbiters of where this “debate” stands. You know who I am talking about, the sainted “treatment activists” and other sainted gay media figures: The attack that was launched against me (the latest one, I should say) following publication of my 2006 article in Harper’s that explored corruption in AIDS research, in the US and in Africa, was launched and executed first by gay men. It began in South Africa with (pharmaceutical activist) Nathan Geffen of TAC composing a libelous and false manifesto claiming I had made 56 errors (at least) in my Harper’s article. Gallo and others signed this defamation and Geffen commanded the global AIDS armies to be sure the attack document went out around the Internet, media, and the world, as fast and far as possible. There was nothing I could do except watch them burn down an article that we took two years to compose and solidify.
The first shot was fired by a gay man at The Nation. What was his name? Richard Kim?
Then the marching orders for the rest of the media were clear: A gay man at the most radical progressive of mainstream periodicals had given the attack command, so everybody else could safely follow suit–and they did.
A gay man was quoted in the NY Times Rue Over Harper’s piece as saying that he used to have “faith” in Harper’s and now that faith was destroyed. I forget his name too. Benjamin Ryan?
It struck me at the time that our society is so upside down, our media so wholly sick, that an article describing the pharmaceutical murder of a pregnant black woman and single mother in Tennessee is later depicted as one that gay men lost faith in Harper’s over. Not lost faith in the medical establishment, the NIH, the doctors in charge, no–these guys were losing faith in Harper’s. THAT was considered more quote worthy in that piece, by NYT reporter Lia Miller, than, say, the feelings at the home of the dead woman’s family. Her mother, her sister, her sons. They could have been contacted and asked to comment, but no, instead we were treated to the finer emotions of the editor of Gay City News, upon experience a loss of altitude in his enthusiasm and “faith” in Harper’s magazine. The attacks have been so vicious and persistent that my professional life was made untenable–my work totally mis-represented and vandalized by a pack of informational terrorists.
Can somebody talk to me about what we are going to DO?
People must be held accountable. All those who helped the informational terrorists must held accountable. Gay men must initiate boycotts or in some way find ways to express your rage. It is a rage I empathize with, but it has NOT penetrated the ivory towers of media, so crank it up a few notches. Find ways to insist upon your true stories being told, at least by gay media.
I am going to do my part: I am starting a website that is ALL TESTIMONY. Only stories, only people, only truth.
It will be called The Truth Barrier.
If you have stories you would like to share with me, please write to me at Perestroika22@aol.com
Thank you. I look forward to hearing from you.
VIVA Celia!
Thank you Celia!
Gay men will wake up and clean up this mess. We owe it to ourselves and to the world.
We will previal in the end.
NO MORE AIDS LIES.
AIDS IS HOMOPHOBIA.
I have posted a longer comment at the site. You may also find it here at my blog:
http://liamscheff.com/daily/2007/09/17/the-aids-pogrom-my-letter-to-biggaynews/
Sincerely,
Liam Scheff
http://liamscheff.com
[…] Tara Smith’s PLoS journal entry on, Denialism on the Web, I personally have tried to engage Tara Smith in reasonable, factual, point-for-point, […]
When one reads though the vast literature of the mainstream research done on AIDS one can only find some correlation between HIV and AIDS, but no definitive papers that prove beyond a doubt that HIV causes AIDS, none whatsoever. However, what one does find quite more often than not is demonstration that HIV does not equal AIDS. Tara Smith and her supporters, like all paradigm protectors, are witnessing an ever increasing call to end the censorship, end the poisoning by AZT/HAART and end the horrors of the death null and voodoo hex for those unfortunate ones who happens to test positive on a non-specific test. Tara and her following as demonstrated in her science blog and her over the top PloS article, that they all have a strong hateful stance towards anyone who disagrees. That’s not how science progresses, that’s how they get to keep their jobs.
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http://www.poz.com/articles/203_10274.shtml
I am alive and well today because Celia Farber had the guts to tell the truth. I’ve been “positive” since 1985…just in denial, I guess.
Scott Zanetti
Via the Internet
http://www.morristownumc.com/webspire10-25.pdf
We mourn the death of church and choir member Scott Zanetti, who died October 6, 2002 after a brief illness, and extend our sympathy to Ellen, his wife, and to his family and friends.
I also mourn the death of Joyce Anne Hafford, who was murdered by AIDS doctors by taking AIDS drugs.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/16/health/main661482.shtml
Fatal Drug Error Kept From Family
Never Told That Experimental AIDS Drugs Likely Killed Woman
A family photograph of Joyce Hafford, who died in 2003 in an experimental drug regimen. (AP /APTN)
The study during which Hafford died recently led researchers to conclude that nevirapine poses risks when taken over time by certain pregnant women.
“This case was particularly unfortunate b/c (because) the PI (principle investigative doctor) didn’t stop drug when grade 3 liver enzymes were reported,” Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, NIH’s chief of good research practices, told Tramont in an August 2003 e-mail.
Fishbein, who is seeking federal whistleblower protection after raising concerns about NIH’s practices, told AP that Hafford’s death is attributable to a bigger problem in government research.
“This is not just a clinical trial issue, this is a healthcare issue. The public expects that diagnostic test results are promptly evaluated and acted on, if need be,” Fishbein said. “Sadly, this is but one example where an assessment was not done quickly and it cost this young mother her life.”
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