Bryan has impressed us all in the past, but perhaps nothing is so explosive
as his revelation that the U.S. Public Health Movement is full of
doctrinaires, dogmatists, tyrants, and public policy disasters. This piece is
derived from some of the material in his new book (with Dr. Duesberg),
INVENTING AIDS, sold to Addison-Wesley (who chickened out at the last moment)
and then bought by St. Martin's (who chickened out at the last moment, and
then... .
It's only fair to warn you, that this excerpt ends in the middle of a
sentence. If that bothers you, don't read it - but then you may be the loser.
Remember, it is only an excerpt anyway.
Despite all assurances to the contrary, the AIDS establishment continues
to fund only research on HIV. Peter Duesberg inadvertently proved this
blackout on all alternative research when he recently submitted a grant
proposal to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The Institute's clinical
director of AIDS research had personally invited the proposal, which
outlined a plan to test the long-term effects of nitrite inhalants, or
'poppers,' on the immune systems of mice. The answer came back in December:
the anonymous referees had not only turned it down, but had refused to give
the proposal more than a cursory review.
Why does such a political correctness continue to dominate the War on
AIDS? After all, public health officials cannot yet demonstrate they have
saved any lives from the syndrome, while its death toll rises steadily. The
scientific predictions have also failed miserably.
In contrast to the predicted spread of AIDS in the United States, the
epidemic has remained strictly confined to risk groups; nine of every ten
AIDS cases have been male, and ninety percent of all AIDS victims have been
linked to heavy drug use, whether intravenously or as "fast track"
homosexuals.
Indeed, epidemiologists have yet to establish that any epidemic at all
has struck among blood transfusions recipients. Even individual AIDS
diseases prefer specific risk groups, such as Kaposi's sarcoma among
homosexuals and the near-absence of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among
Africans, whose lungs all contain the microbe.
And some thirty-nine percent of AIDS diseases in America have nothing to
do with immune deficiency - witness Kaposi's sarcoma, various lymphomas,
wasting disease, and dementia, for example. In short, AIDS is not an
infectious disease.
The obsession with an "AIDS virus" has little to do with science or
medicine. Writing in NATURE in 1991 (June 21), British HIV researcher Robin
Weiss and American CDC official Harold Jaffe hinted at the real purpose in
an attack on Peter Duesberg: "But if he and his supporters belittle 'safe
sex,' would have us abandon HIV screening of blood donations, and curtail
research into anti-HIV drugs and vaccines, then their message is perilous."
To whom? If AIDS is not infectious, such recommendations would simply save
the taxpayer money and anxiety.
But perhaps this is the point. A 1989 report by the National Research
Council more explicitly revealed the hidden agenda.
Originally sponsored by the Rockefeller and Russel Sage Foundations and
then funded by the Public Health Service, AIDS: Sexual Behavior and
Intravenous Drug Use laid out a plan for social engineering on a massive
scale-using AIDS as the excuse:
"The devastating effect of an epidemic on a community can evoke strong
political and social responses," the committee duly noted, "An epidemic
necessitates the rapid mobilization of the community to counter the spread
of illness and death" (p. 373).
The power of such a method to force changes in cultural values is based
on careful manipulation of fear:
"Ideally, health promotion messages should heighten an individual's
perceptions of threat and his or her capacity to respond to that threat,
thus modulating the level of fear... What is not yet known is how to
introduce fear in the right way in a particular message intended for a
particular audience. Acquiring that knowledge will require planned
variations of AIDS education programs that are carefully executed and then
carefully evaluated," stated the committee coolly (pp.267-8).
The report then identified one of the major targets of change -
Judeo-Christian moral values:
"Historically, there has been a strong social reluctance in the United
States to speak or write about sexuality in explicit terms. Despite recent
indications of greatly increased tolerance for sexual explicitness in the
media and literature, that reluctance remains strong in much of the
population; it is particularly strong in instances that involve the
education of children and adolescents"(p.379).
The fear of a supposedly infectious AIDS epidemic, however, could be used
to fix such problems. As the report declared:
"The committee believes that, during an epidemic, politeness is a social
virtue that must take second place to the protection of life"(p.379).
Other public health officials have been even more forthright. As an
officer of the Centers for Disease Control, Donald Francis had in 1984
drafted the CDC's proposed AIDS strategy. In his 1992 retirement speech at
the agency's Atlanta, Georgia headquarters, Francis voiced the ambitions
held by many of his fellow officers in describing "the opportunity that the
HIV epidemic provides for public health" (JAMA, 9/16/92). He stated in no
uncertain terms the radical nature of the plan:
"The cloistered caution of the past needs to be discarded. The climate
and culture must be open ones where old ideas are challenged. Those who
desire the status quo should seek employment elsewhere. The American HIV
prevention program should be the place where the best and the brightest
come, where the action is, where history is being made. This is the epidemic
of the century, and every qualified person should want to have a piece of
the action."
The "action" described by Francis was a set of programs that would, as he
fully recognized, need strong political protection from angry taxpayers and
voters. For example, he bitterly attacked public opposition to condom
distribution programs, and called for powerful legal measures to bypass
parental discretion.
"The ongoing controversies involving abstinence and condoms typify the
morass into which schools can fall," Francis complained, "If, in the opinion
of those far more expert than I, schools cannot be expected to provide such
programs, then health departments should take over, using as a justification
their mandate to protect the public's health."
Francis also included proposals for dealing with the AIDS risk of
intravenous drug use - including a call for "prescription of addicting
drugs" with Federal government sponsorship. Even libertarians who advocate
legalizing drugs would balk at such notions, which would ultimately create a
massive bureaucracy encouraging drug use.
"Following a more enlightened model for drug treatment, including
prescribing heroin, would have dramatic effects on HIV and could eliminate
many of the dangerous illegal activities surrounding drugs," he insisted,
knowing that only fear of the AIDS epidemic might make such proposals
tolerable to the public.
Ignoring the toxic, and possibly AIDS inducing, effects of drugs, Francis
emphasized that:
"In addition to treatment, safe injection [!] must be stressed both for
those in treatment programs and those out of treatment. The provision of
sterile injection equipment for drug users should be the standard of public
health practice in the United States."
"Most chillingly of all, Francis saw the possibilities in harnessing
other epidemics to advance similar agendas. As he put it, "if we establish
new mechanisms to handle the HIV epidemic, [these] can serve as models for
other diseases."
The common denominator of these and similar plans is that they originate
with the Federal government's Public Health Service, and especially from its
frontline public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control. Public
perceptions often paint the CDC as a minor office that gathers and publishes
dull statistics on disease. The truth is shockingly different.
A sophisticated $2 billion-per-year operation, the CDC employs a staff of
thousands who see themselves as having an activist mandate. They view
epidemics as opportunities for control and for imposing lifestyle changes on
the population.
The CDC has traditionally specialized in contagious disease. Its
initials, in fact, originally stood for the Communicable Disease Center,
from its formation in 1946 until its name changed in 1970. And therein lies
its bias, for it tends to interpret almost any epidemic as being infectious.
Certainly the CDC has plenty of raw material with which to work; each year
at least one thousand outbreaks, or "clusters," of disease strike in the
United States - one every eight hours.
These can range from flus and pneumonias to closely-occurring cancers,
but most outbreaks involve no more than a handful of people each; since the
polio epidemic, none have posed serious threats to the general public.
However, by falsely labeling any arbitrarily chosen outbreak as infectious
and blaming it on a virus or other microbe, the CDC can quickly generate
public fear and political mobilization behind almost any agenda.
The CDC has actually engineered a number of false alarms or misdirected
campaigns over the past four decades, neutralizing scientific dissent and
calmer voices when necessary. AIDS, though not the first example, has now
become the most successful epidemic by far.
Two powerful weapons in the agency's arsenal, both unknown to the public
at large, have made this possible: a semi-secret wing of the CDC known as
the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), and a quiet "partnership" program
with private organizations.
The Epidemic Intelligence Service
Among epidemiologists, it is often half-jokingly referred to as the
"medical CIA." Founded in 1951 by public health professor Alexander Langmuir,
the EIS was first designed to act as an elite biological-warfare
countermeasures unit of the CDC. Langmuir was hired because he also served
as one of the select advisors to the Defense Department's chemical and
biological warfare program.
The first EIS class of 21 recent medical or biological graduates
underwent several weeks of intense training at the CDC's Atlanta
headquarters, before being dispatched on their two-year assignments on loan
to various state or local health departments around the country. They acted
as the eyes and ears of the CDC, carefully monitoring for any possible
outbreak of war-induced disease. While on their tours of duty, each EIS
officer could be sent elsewhere in the country on a 24 hour-a-day basis. In
case of war, the EIS would operate under any emergency powers granted the
CDC - potentially including quarantines, mass immunizations, or other
drastic measures.
In an article written for the American journal of Public Health (March,
1952), Langmuir made clear that membership in the EIS did not end with the
two year assignment, but was permanent. He wrote that "... as a result of
their experience, many of these officers may well remain in full-time
epidemiology or other public health pursuits at federal, state, or local
levels. Some, no doubt, will return to civilian, academic, or clinical
practice, but in the event of war they could be returned to active duty with
the Public Health Service and assigned to strategic areas to fulfill the
functions for which they were trained."
Every year since 1951 has seen a new crop of EIS recruits, some classes
over one hundred members in size. The nearly 2,000 alumni have gone on to
high positions in society, though rarely advertising their affiliation.
Indeed, the CDC has now made the EIS more secretive than ever, having
suppressed the public availability of the membership directory since last
year.
Members can be found in the Surgeons General's office and elsewhere in
the Federal government, as well as in the World Health Organization, state
and local health departments, universities, pharmaceutical companies,
tax-exempt foundations, hospitals, and even as staff writers, editors, or
news anchormen for major newspapers, scientific journals, and television
news departments. In these positions, EIS alumni act not only as the CDC's
surveillance arm and emergency reserve, but also as seemingly "independent"
advocates for CDC policies.
In time, the fear of artificial disease epidemics faded. But Langmuir and
other top CDC officials had always held bigger plans for the EIS. Langmuir,
for example, an apostle of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger,
involved the EIS in the population control movement by the 1960s. The CDC
has gained most, however, from EIS activities in natural disease epidemics,
to which its "disease detectives" have turned their attention.
The flu, being truly an infectious disease, often proved itself most
valuable to the CDC. Although the winter following the end of World War I
was the last time a flu epidemic caused widespread death, the CDC has pushed
annual flu vaccinations up to the present day. At times, the agency has even
rung the alarm over an impending flu crisis, hoping to use memories of the
1918 epidemic to gain emergency powers and impose mass vaccinations. By
using such tactics in 1957 over the Asian flu, the CDC managed to wrangle
extra money out of Congress to expand the EIS and crash-produce a vaccine.
But the flu season was already winding down by the time the vaccine was
ready, and the flu itself turned out to have been as mild as in any other
year.
By 1976, CDC director David Sencer wanted to try again, though on a
grander scale. After one soldier in Pennsylvania died of a flu-related
pneumonia in January, Sencer predicted that a pig-borne human virus,
nicknamed the "swine flu," would soon devastate the United States.
Panicked with visions of impending doom, Congress moved to authorize the
CDC's immunization plan for every man, woman, and child in the country.
Unexpectedly, the legislation suddenly stalled when the insurance companies
underwriting the vaccine discovered that it had seriously toxic side
effects.
Sencer had to do something fast. He immediately set up a "War Room" in
Auditorium A at the CDC headquarters, and put the EIS network on full alert
to search for any disease outbreak that might resemble the flu. Within
weeks, the War Room received word of a pneumonia cluster among men just
returning home from the Philadelphia convention of the American Legion.
Several Philadelphia-based EIS officers and alumni had detected the
outbreak, and acted as a fifth column that not only helped arrange an
invitation for the CDC to come in, but also took their orders from the
arriving team of CDC and EIS officers. Even the New York Times staff writer
sent to cover the story, Lawrence Altman, was himself an EIS alumnus.
The CDC team allowed media rumors to circulate that this Legionnaires'
disease was the beginning of the swine flu. Within days, Congress decided to
pass the vaccine bill. Only later did the CDC admit that the legionnaires
had not been infected by the flu virus, too late to stop the immunization
program. Some 50 million Americans received the vaccine, leading to more
than a thousand cases of nerve damage and paralysis, dozens of deaths, and
lawsuits awarding almost $100 million in damages. In the ultimate irony, no
swine flu epidemic ever materialized; the only destruction left behind by
the phantom swine flu resulted from the CDC's vaccine.
The agency later blamed Legionnaires' disease on a common soil bacterium,
one that clearly fails Koch's postulates for causing the disease and is
therefore actually harmless. The legionnaires' deaths are not so hard to
understand, since the pneumonias struck elderly men, many of whom had
undergone kidney transplant operations, and who had become particularly
drunk during the Bicentennial celebration - the classic risks for pneumonia.
Thus "Legionnaires' disease" is not an infectious condition, but merely a
new name for old pneumonias.
Using its EIS network, the CDC has applied similar tactics to other
outbreaks of disease. During the 1960s, for example, the EIS helped fuel the
National Institute of Health's growing Virus-Cancer Program by tracking down
every small cluster of leukemia cases, trying to create the impression that
some virus was responsible for the cancer. Robert Gallo was one of the many
scientists so impressed with the CDC investigations that he devoted the rest
of his career to finding a human leukemia virus.
More recently, the CDC managed to have a team of EIS officers invited
into New Mexico to investigate a cluster of pneumonia cases among Navajo
Indians. By June of 1993, the CDC began insisting that the brief and
relatively small outbreak was caused by a rat fecal virus, the Hantavirus.
But as a letter in the January 1 issue of the Lancet pointed out, most of
the affected Navajos actually tested negative for the virus. And unlike a
contagious disease, this pneumonia never spread beyond the first few dozen
victims. Again, the CDC's "disease detectives" used a high-profile
investigation to create media publicity and frighten the general population,
rather than troubling themselves with the scientific method and its more
boring answers.
Of all the epidemics mismanaged by the CDC, AIDS proved the most
spectacular in achieving political success. By 1981, the EIS had so
thoroughly penetrated the medical and public health institutions in the
United States that it could now detect even the smallest and most
loosely-connected "clusters" of diseases, no matter how far apart the
victims were in time and space.
The original AIDS cases were all found in homosexual men in the "fast
track" lifestyle - those having hundreds or thousands of sexual contacts and
using enormous amounts of hard drugs to make such promiscuous activity
possible. For the CDC, the trick was to make the illness seem contagious; a
simple drug-induced epidemic among homosexuals would hardly have frightened
the public, nor have allowed the CDC to accomplish its radical public health
agenda.
The epidemic officially began in 1980 after Michael Gottlieb, a new
immunologist at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, decided to test the
brand new T cell-counting technology. He put out an informal request to
fellow physicians to refer cases of immune deficiency to him. Over the next
several months, colleagues sent him four such cases, all male homosexuals
with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.
Sensing that the CDC might take an interest, Gottlieb called active EIS
officer Wayne Shandera in the Los Angeles health department. Shandera had
heard an isolated report of a fifth homosexual with the same problem, and
compiled a report for the CDC.
Ordinarily, each of the five cases would have been seen by separate
doctors, leaving nothing to suggest the word "epidemic" to anyone. But
having a pre-positioned EIS agent like Shandera certainly helped the CDC
gather such cases together as a potential cluster. Shandera's report fell on
the desk of James Curran, an official in the CDC's venereal diseases
division; the 1987 book And the Band Played On records that Curran wrote
"Hot stuff. Hot stuff." on the report (p. 67). He had the agency publish it
immediately.
By the time the report appeared on June 5, 1981, Curran was already
organizing a special Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (KSOI)
task force to lead an investigation of the five-victim epidemic. EIS members
Harold Jaffe and Mary Guinan, also from the venereal diseases division,
helped run the task force. The first order of business was to find as many
similar patients as possible, thereby causing the epidemic to "grow."
Next was to explain the syndrome; to the CDC, this meant trying to find
an infectious agent. This would be no simple task, since essentially all of
the first fifty cases admitted to heavy use of poppers, a drug preferred by
homosexuals as a means of facilitating anal intercourse. Even if this toxic
drug presented itself as the obvious explanation, the CDC investigators had
no intention of letting the evidence interfere.
According to historian Elizabeth Etheridge, "While many of the patients
were routine users of amyl nitrites or 'poppers,' no one in the KSOI task
force believed the disease was a toxicological problem" (Sentinel for
Health, 1992, p.326).
So the EIS was activated to prove AIDS infectious. EIS officer David
Auerbach and others confirmed that these extremely promiscuous homosexuals
were often linked to one another through long chains of sexual encounters.
To prove that AIDS was "spreading" to other people , other officers scoured
hospitals to find heroin addicts with opportunistic infections, and blamed
their needle-sharing rather than the heroin use, itself a classic risk
factor for pneumonias and other diseases.
Bruce Evatt and Dale Lawrence, both members of the EIS, discovered one
hemophiliac in Colorado with an opportunistic pneumonia as a side effect of
internal bleeding, but rediagnosed the patient as an AIDS case.
Even Haitians in Florida and Haiti were interviewed by EIS officer Harry
Haverkos, who renamed their endemic tuberculosis as AIDS.
Not understanding the loaded nature of such investigations, the outside
world completely bought the CDC line. Soon the race was on for scientific
researchers to find the guilty virus. But this search, too, had been rigged.
Donald Francis, an EIS member himself since 1971, decided just eleven days
after the original Shandera report that the syndrome should be blamed on a
retrovirus - with a latent period, no less. Using his various contacts in
the retrovirus field, Francis spent the next two years pushing Robert Gallo
to isolate a new retrovirus. Eventually Gallo did take a interest, and
claimed credit for finding HIV.
With his April 23, 1984, press conference, Gallo completed the crusade
begun by the CDC and its EIS. As the tapes rolled and the cameras flashed,
Gallo and Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler launched the
nation into a War on AIDS. Few people knew the true story behind the
announcement, or of the political agenda that Don Francis and others were
preparing to foist on the American people.
The Partnership Program
The CDC's second major weapon for mobilizing public support lay in its
assistance programs for private organizations. By funding or otherwise
supporting groups not affiliated with the CDC, the agency could create
apparently spontaneous mass movements. Spokesmen claiming to represent
various communities could all simu... .
