61 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Solid Investigation on HIV not Causing AIDS, July 9, 2007
This review is from: The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (Paperback)
One of the most difficult things to write is a refutation of a massive fraud, especially a health fraud, in the face of media control and knowledge monopolies by financial powerhouses. Making it still more difficult is the possible threat of libel lawsuits from the powerful parties essentially accused of scientific misconduct at best and criminal negligence at worst. Following in the footsteps of Peter Duesberg, Robert Root-Bernstein, Neville Hodgkinson, Gordon Stewart, David Crowe, Linda Marsa and many others, Henry Bauer has produced a very readable explanation of why HIV does not cause AIDS, and whatever AIDS is, it has not caused an epidemic. His civility of tone is remarkable. Dr. Bauer's conclusions are backed up by about 450 references, about 100 to primary medical journals. The book has a good index, 27 figures and 35 tables.
Part I shows that HIV does not cause AIDS. Dr. Bauer makes it clear that "HIV positive" means a response to a test that shows little more than stress and immune system potentiation. Because of this, Dr. Bauer labels the prevalence or frequency of positive HIV tests "F(HIV)". An actual virus has not been isolated. This is the main reason that no vaccine has appeared. People who test positive are usually not sick, will not develop AIDS, may spontaneously change so they are no longer HIV positive, and are not likely to infect anyone else by blood transfer or sex. The failure of F(HIV) to spread, and its steady incidence, with some decline, over 20 years contradict the scary warnings that permeate publications and TV programs. The % of people who show HIV-positive is dependent on race, sex and location, not their behavior. Some people who develop AIDS were not HIV positive. Further obfuscating the issue was a medical cabal confusing an outbreak of Kaposi's sarcoma in the 1980s with AIDS. More confusion was sown by changing the definition of AIDS to merely being HIV positive, rather than a wasting illness from infections normally controlled by a healthy body. Many perfectly healthy people who were given AZT or mixtures of anti-retroviral drugs (triple cocktail) developed symptoms said to be AIDS that were actually drug side effects. In a sneaky way this "confirmed" the false premise that a positive HIV test indicated AIDS. Even now, healthy people who have a positive test are said to be "living with AIDS", a false and destructive description, according to Dr. Bauer.
Part II discusses other mistakes and scares in medical science. One sequence is on treatment of schizophrenics, who were infected with malaria, treated by electric shock, and then by lobotomy as supposed "cures" we see today as brutal and idiotic. The very common notion that high cholesterol levels cause atherosclerosis and heart attacks is also mentioned by Dr. Bauer as false. So was the resistance of orthodox medicine to admit that bacteria were the prime cause of stomach ulcers. Much of this resistance to the latter pair of ailments was said to be Big Pharma's desire to maintain profits, which also applies to anti-retroviral drugs.
Part III is the most wrenching to read, at times as hard as reading details of the Holocaust. The claim by Robert Gallo in the National Cancer Institute to have isolated "the cause of AIDS", eventually named HIV. After his receipt of a sample of something in AIDS patients from the Pasteur Institute, he developed a test for antibodies to HIV. This was followed by a patent dispute between the NCI and the PI on who invented the test. Dr. Bauer noted that the PI probably did it based on the outcome of the patent fight. Dr. Bauer also noted that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention spread panic about the connection between F(HIV) and AIDS, exactly opposite to one of their mandated functions. Exact quotations from the CDC and others on HIV and AIDS were reproduced with explanations of internal inconsistencies or mutant statistics. Turns out that President Mbeki of South Africa was correct to refuse anti-retroviral drugs, and that there is no epidemic of AIDS or even F(HIV) in Africa. On p241 Dr. Bauer cites a WHO claim that 34,000,000 people worldwide were HIV positive in 2000, and that there were 470,000 AIDS cases. This is only 1.4%, of which many would be misdiagnoses. A gullible media, also prone to financial pressure by withdrawal of advertising revenues, gets some blame, with most reporters accused of going only to mainstream "experts", and not taking the time to understand the field. The control of medical journals and failures and biases of peer-review are aired. (See my review of The Trouble with Medical Journals.) The difficulty of dumping the dogma is made only too clear as Dr. Bauer discusses the near-impossibility of having so many organizations recant, partly because of the record number of lawsuits that would arise.
Buried under this exposé of brutal bureaucratic bungling and fraud, some really good news emerged from this book. In my opinion, if you test positive for HIV, relax, and refuse any treatment if you have no symptoms. If you have had "unprotected sex" at any time, relax, because transmission of whatever the test responds to is under 1/1000. Many people, babies especially, spontaneously become HIV negative. Of course, refuse to have the test if at all possible, and where you are forced to have the test, be ready to sign on to any class-action lawsuit for invasion of privacy, since transmission rates are so low, negating the excuse for invading privacy in the first place. Not in the book were promising results of treatment of AIDS patients with low levels of CD4 cells or with PCP by means of intravenous sodium ascorbate. (See pp92-102 and my review of: Levy TE (2002). Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins, Xlibris.com, Xlibris.)
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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Devastating Update on the HIV=AIDS Myth, December 7, 2007
This review is from: The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (Paperback)
Henry H. Bauer
The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory
(McFarland & Co, Jefferson, N.C.) 2007
xiv + 282 pages
Comprehensive Critique by Frederic Jueneman
What goes around comes around. Or, so it might seem to the casual observer. Henry Bauer -- despite his calling as an emeritus professor of chemistry and science studies and dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech -- has moved on from taking on relatively small-fry on the science frontiers, and has now donned the garb of the Man from La Mancha for a major jousting of lances with the credentialed giant windmills of academe, industry, and the federal administration, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, along with their academic and industrial associates, and the World Health Organization, not to mention such mainstream publications as Science, Nature, and Journal of the American Medical Association.
Bauer's argument revolves around a comparatively old controversy by dissident researchers in the HIV/AIDS arena, aptly highlighted by earlier work by retrovirologist Peter Duesberg of UC Berkeley, who himself has been vilified and ostracized by his own compatriots in the medical research community as a heretic for questioning -- actually denying! -- that HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) causes AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). But, the author under review here has taken the additional step of indicting the entire medical scientific community, even those remotely involved in disease research, not merely of massaging the numbers but egregiously holding to false, undocumented premises for the detection and causes of AIDS.
A courageous accusation, indeed!
Bauer actually uses the old saw: "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." In fact, he devotes most of Part I "Does HIV Cause AIDS?" of the three-part book on the application -- or rather misapplication -- of statistics by all agencies and individuals who should know better, with the unfortunate result that the captive media feeds the public only the official releases, which we all despairingly know as "Received Wisdom," the orthodox view. The apparent general agreement by the medical community and beguiled public then make for lurid headlines; but again, we are also made acutely aware that consensus is not science. Bauer further shows through many examples that these so-called statistics on HIV are faulty at best, and concludes that upon closer inspection, including that of the most exacting research, shows that there is absolutely no correlation between HIV and AIDS. The dissident researchers had argued this point for years, possibly even decades, but as usual no one heard them amid the media hype to arouse public concerns. Bauer hammers this point home.
Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancerous purple blotching on the skin, has been known as one of the signature diseases of AIDS, along with a specific pneumonia, PCP, as well as a variety of fungal infections. But, Kaposi's sarcoma is now known as not being associated with HIV. Moreover, no "virus" defining HIV has ever been documented, a critically missing piece of data that has troubled serious researchers for years, and which has led to a few ad hoc theories about retroviruses and associated mycoplasms as potential causes. And further, Kaposi's sarcoma has also been found in HIV-negative patients.
Curiously, too, no official explanations are forwarded as to why occasional "infected" HIV-positive newborns come from HIV-negative mothers, children who later through seroconversion become HIV-negative. Duesberg, mentioned earlier, thinks that being HIV-positive means that antibodies have already immunized the body against further infection. Moreover, according to official statistics, some one percent of the population is HIV-positive, which if injudiciously applied on a global scale would mean some 60,000,000 people!
HIV-negative patients who have TB are just given the standard treatment for tuberculosis, while HIV-positive patients with TB are unfortunately relegated to AIDS status and are encouraged to embark on appropriate treatment regimens, such as AZT, a DNA chain-terminator that is unselective between healthy and diseased cells. Many die from such iatrogenic treatments within a few years, thereby fortifying the official "statistics," as AZT recipients exhibit AIDS-like symptoms whether HIV-positive or not.
Dissident investigators, such as virologist Duesberg, Nobel laureates Paul Lauterbur and Kary Mullis, physiologist Robert Root-Bernstein, epidemiologist Gordon Stewart, among many others, including knowledgeable science writers, as Neville Hodgkinson and John Lauritsen, all have pointed out time and again that fast-lane lifestyles and drug usage are, fundamentally, the insults to the body that cause AIDS by devastating the body's own ability to bring its immunoresponse system into play, respecting neither heterosexual nor homosexual, male nor female. And, unlike many venereal diseases, is not sexually transmitted. AIDS has become an "epidemic" that has not happened. The dissenters have used the same official statistics to fortify their own case, but have had to resort to publishing privately or via the Internet, as mainstream journals have been off-limits to their heretical views, and who are otherwise ignored, or at worst accused of being charlatans.
Such mindsets by the establishment are not unknown in the annals of science, as pointed out by Bauer in Part II, "Lessons from History." So many officially prescribed procedures and theories have, over time, been superceded or overthrown by new, enlightened paradigms, as Thomas Kuhn outlined years ago, but the process of science has often been excruciatingly slow, proceeding from "funeral to funeral," as Max Planck once observed. The dissident researchers themselves, nevertheless, have been unrelenting in their quest for truth, despite the roadblocks imposed on their heroic efforts. And yet, many other professional as well as amateur critics have come to the fore, citing the work of Karl Popper, that the counter-arguments are not subject to "falsifiabilty," not being aware that Popper had distanced himself somewhat from that concept early-on with his introduction of critical rationalism.
Notwithstanding, Bauer says, "[T]he presumption that HIV leads inexorably to AIDS [is] something that was never established and in fact is demonstrably false" -- a bit of datum that Bauer never lets us forget. This was also a point detailed at length by well-known author James Hogan, who subtitled his own book "Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible," in the section devoted to "AIDS Heresy in the Viricentric Universe." (See my Review of Hogan's "Kicking the Sacred Cow.) He points out that being HIV-positive is merely an indication that the body's defense mechanism is at work. Thus, the laboratory test for HIV is just an indicator of an effect, not of a cause.
Amusingly, however, biophysicist Paul Lauterbur wrote that "you could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of the papers rejected by Science or Nature." Now, isn't that a hoot!
What are we to make of all this? Indeed, the public has been duped by so many "official" agencies over the years that it has become inured, or at best disgusted, with what goes on within various establishments, and yet the public still seems to remain amenable to what is being spoon-fed with the pap, the political patronage, that authorities dish out. Bauer goes into this in Part III, "How HIV/AIDS Theory Took and Kept Hold," where he claims, "[E]vidence does not speak for itself," while acknowledging that all models, which attempt to mimic reality, have their limitations. Such models as presented by authorities fall far outside the statistical limits usually applied to such methodologies, as most presumptuously rest on the same erroneous premise.
The systemic problems, which he outlines, and which have existed throughout scientific history, are rarely ever solved to anyone's satisfaction, especially when there are heavy investments in time, energy, and economics made by the participants. He goes on to say, somewhat ameliorating if not apologetic at this point, "Conflicts of interest are so damaging not because so many people are unethical, but because we are all human, doctors and scientists no less than others." And further, "Conflicts of interest are so built into the modern bureaucratic apparatus of science and medicine that these major mishaps are an ever-present possibility." Perhaps so, but this doesn't excuse it.
We are otherwise informed by our scientific colleagues and patrons that hot fusion containment is just 40 years away, something that we'd been told 40 years ago, but we have to believe because cold fusion enthusiasts and researchers don't know what they're doing as all of their viable theories have always been suspect. There are many myths circulating about global warming, but we have to believe because Nobel prizes and other awards are handed out like candy to anyone who speaks "green." String theory has held out the promise of mathematically giving us a theory of everything wrapped up in many multi-variate dimensions, despite frequent encounters with infinities and other mathematical abstractions, and we have to believe since we're not smart enough to understand the complexities involved. Dark matter and dark energy pervade the universe, we are told, because electromagnetism couldn't possibly have the influence that gravity holds, for we therefore have to devoutly believe these mind-boggling pundits, as no one else knows the secrets of the cosmos as well as they. So, systematically, Idiopathic CD4-T-cell lymphopenia is the new non-AIDS condition used...
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