Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS [Paperback]

Celia Farber (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 1, 2006

Controversial AIDS reporter Celia Farber collects twenty years of investigative work on AIDS.

Building on her much discussed cover story in Harper’s Magazine—“Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science”—Celia Farber’s Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS asks important questions about the costs and results of the two-decade long “war on AIDS.”

Here Farber conducts new interviews with controversial AIDS dissidents, including UC Berkeley’s Peter Duesberg, UNAM’s Harvey Bialy, and Nobelist Kary Mullis. Their views on HIV and cancer—rarely discussed in the mainstream press—are considered at length.

Also included are accounts of some of the most dramatic and controversial questions caught up in the fight against AIDS. Farber investigates AIDS co-factors, unexplained causes of immunodeficiency (HIV-negative AIDS), estimates of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and, perhaps most importantly, drug treatment plans. In 1989, Farber was the first magazine journalist to call attention to the dangers of high-dose AZT monotherapy. In 2000, she took aim at David Ho’s “hit hard, hit early” treatment plan. In both cases, Farber’s suspicions turned out to be correct. AIDS drugs, when improperly prescribed or promoted, can be much more deadly than AIDS itself.

Farber’s candor and extensive research sheds new light on the AIDS epidemic and its important effects on our current state of medical research.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Although much of what Farber dredges up is not new, the fact remains that her argument has not been answered to the satisfaction of a lot of people. I would guess that it is not going to be so easy now to sweep this debate under the carpet by naming Farber and Duesberg and others ‘crazies’ and ‘HIV deniers.’ As Farber herself points out, there is too much money and greed now controlling the entire system of our ‘treatment’ for that to be an effective response.”
—Larry kramer, Founder, ACT UP

“It’s an engaging piece of investigative journalism that exposes deep problems with the standards of medical research when it comes to AIDS.... Her argument is that AIDS has become an industry and a certain kind of sloppiness has entered the search for new anti-retroviral drugs.”
—Gal Beckerman, Columbia Journalism Review

About the Author

From 1987 to 1997, Celia Farber wrote and edited SPIN magazine’s AIDS column, “Words From The Front.” She has also written for many magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, Rolling Stone, Gear, Salon, and Harper’s. She lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 345 pages
• Publisher: Melville House (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933633018
• ISBN-13: 978-1933633015
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,096 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Corruption of Science February 1, 2007

By John Bleau

Format:Paperback

Science is facing some serious challenges nowadays. We have people who insist that humans walked alongside dinosaurs or that there is no such thing as time dilation, regardless of the scientific canon, we still have catastrophists and UFOlogists and people who insist that the moon landings were a fraud... It's a frustrating thing, sometimes, to waste precious time on people who have corrupted science out of ignorance or for their non-scientific agendas, and one can be tempted to insist on censoring them and locking them out of the hallowed halls of science.

I have examined various challenges to the established scientific currents and found them wanting. I validated a number of calculations regarding relativity, refuted a computation that arrives at a 6,400 year age for the sun, studied the videos of men on the moon: I invested much precious time examining sundry claims. It's clear to me that there are many Corruptors of science, with the AIDS dissidents seemingly among the worst.

Delving into the complicated world of HIV/AIDS, however, I found that I could not refute the better-laid arguments of the dissidents while the orthodoxy repeatedly fails to substantiate its fundamental tenets. Whereas creationists are almost exclusively religious zealots, AIDS dissidents include Nobel laureates and thousands of Ph.D.s, physicians and scientists. When I would read that there is no study that establishes the necessary presence of HIV in patients, that HIV has never been isolated from any one patient, that no study has established the sexual transmissibility of HIV, that the pathology of HIV has never been demonstrated, that the spike in AIDS deaths corresponds to AZT prescription, etc., I would check these statements from sites such as TheBody, the NIH, the CDC - bastions of the orthodoxy. I would follow the unfortunately very rare discussions (for ex. Foley vs. Rasnick) on the web, and much to my surprise, the orthodoxy has never been able to meet these challenges. The HIV virus seems to have arisen out of a scientific void.

Farber's book gives a good account of the history of the purported virus, the players in the drama, the forces at work, such that the reader will see what is lacking in the science and how such a big lie can come to be. She has been in the trenches from very early on and I perceive no agenda on her part other than to uncover the truth - it is, after all, hardly a good career move to challenge a 170 billion dollar juggernaut. Accusations that the dissidents are doing it for the money are ludicrous. A similar argument goes for Duesberg, who would be far better off financially (and reputation-wise) if he were to renege on his dissidence, but he has adamantly refused: the only motive I can imagine is respect for the truth, a quality that is in perilously short supply.

I give the book three stars because the majority of reviewers here are the choir to which important dissidents such as Farber are preaching. Some of the one-star reviewers also have their minds made up the other way. Though you may find the dissident claims surprising, those of you who realize that you really don't know are the important audience. The book merits five stars as befits its quality and that of its author, but gets three as befits the controversial nature of its contents. But it must be read. There is a battle going on right now to get "life-saving" AZT and nevirapine into Africa, but these are lethally toxic drugs and the several hundred thousand who died needlessly over here from AZT will translate into tens of millions over there, with the deaths being attributed to AIDS and not the drugs. For this reason alone, minds and books such as Farber's are hugely important.

Much of Serious Adverse Events had already been known to me and however hard I may try and have tried to refute the facts it contains, I wind up only strengthening them. How is such a big lie possible, with constant media harping about "HIV/AIDS" and "life-saving anti-retroviral medicine"? Some of the answers are in this book. If, as I am now convinced, the HIV=AIDS paradigm is false, then we are faced with the chilling fact that we can hardly contemplate locking the Corruptors out of the halls of science: they're already barricading themselves in and the Duesbergs out.

Satyagraha

34 of 41 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Unanswered Questions August 15, 2006

By John Strausbaugh

Format:Paperback

Because of its catastrophic impact and the unique time and place it struck, AIDS very quickly became more than a medical story. It took on tremendous political, moral, sexual, religious, intellectual and economic significance as well, and Farber argues that these elements soon came to dominate and distort the medical science. If she's right, pretty much everything we've been told about AIDS--what it is, what causes it, how it spreads, how it may be resisted and cured--is wrong, a collusion of panic, politics and greed. AIDS became a dogma, and anyone who questioned it a heretic. At great cost to her career, Farber has questioned the dogma for 20 years. This book is a fascinating alternate history of AIDS, a chronology of how she and other "heretics" believe it all went wrong. This is not kooky conspiracy theory. Ultimately, it's an Orwellian treatise on intellectual totalitarianism in our time.

38 of 49 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Quality Of Armor August 30, 2006

By Martin Edelweiss

Format:Paperback

Yes, the questions Farber raises are important. Yes, she should not be attacked, ostracized or ignored simply for raising these questions. Yes, the subject matter itself is so inherently polarizing that the consequences of exploring any dimension of the story other than the mainstream version inevitably results in a cataract of vitriol and condescenion - when anyone even bothers to acknowledge the existence of alternate dimensions - so far out of proportion to the reportage in question that an objective observer might easily question the sanity of anyone involved in the debate, on either side. Yes, Farber has an agenda: an undeterred desire to dig up a core truth that may in fact be undiscoverable, ever, or for years. To the apparent detriment of her career, in the face of death threats and accusations of "murdering" those who've made the (evidently suicidal) mistake of taking her journalism seriously, she trudges on, bears up, moves forward. Why? No earthly idea. I only know that the writing on display in this book, as writing, is unusually passionate, articulate, and alive in ways that most writing about any subject is not. And that whatever drives Farber to continue in the face of the abuse and hatred she's endured through the twenty years it took for this book to be written - well, it's not money, it's not fame, and it's certainly not common. Facile comparisons to Orwell aside, Celia Farber is one of our most important contemporary writers because of her rare courage, and her still more rare ability to convey the complexities of an impossible issue in human terms. Whatever biases you might diagnose as flaws in this collection of stories are doubtless present, because she makes no attempt to bury her emotions. She writes, in sum, with both head and heart. Agree or disagree, but to ignore her adds only to your own ignorance.