One of Rethinking AIDS’s greatest conceits is that it is a harmoniously functioning market place of ideas where a multiplicity of individual voices is allowed to be heard. President David Crowe decribes it as a forum where scientists can express their opinions and contrasts it with the scientific tyranny the Perth Group wants to impose on all dissidents, although by what means this would be remotely possible is not clear. We maintain that the issue is deceptively framed and that ”harmonious multiplicity of individual voices” is a generous euphemism for cacophony of plagiarism, self-contradiction and substandard scholarship; for example when Prof. deHarven claims to have come up with a new original theory of HIV, or when Prof. Bauer, Christin Fiala MD. and President Crowe argue in one context that HIV is a harmless passenger virus and in another that it has never been proven to exist, or when Prof. Duesberg claims that HIV has been satisfactorily isolated and sequenced, but claims that the many divergent HIV strains are an impossibility.
This generates general confusion, destroys credibility and creates a situation where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. For example, David Crowe has repeatedly been alerted by us, Fabio Franci MD and the Perth Group to the fact that Rethinking AIDS in appointing neo-duesbergian Prof. Marco Ruggiero to its Board is endorsing the claim that HIV causes AIDS, a claim which David Crowe has adopted as a rallying cry for the 2011 Rethinking AIDS convention in Washington. In a mail asking for convention donations, we read the following:
Dear Fellow AIDS Rethinkers:
With your help, a new phase of the struggle against the destructive hypothesis that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS is about to begin.
Dissent is not Denialism!
Why the addition of the word “sole”? It is Prof. Ruggiero’s formulation and it appeared on the Rethinking AIDS website at the time of his appointment to the Board of Directors. On that occasion Crowe wrote:
Dr. Ruggiero stated that in the past three years definitive evidence has accumulated demonstrating that HIV cannot be considered the sole cause of AIDS. For example, a ten year meta-analysis of anti-retroviral therapy published in the Lancet showed that, although the medicines decreased HIV levels, they did not decrease the rates of AIDS or death. Ruggiero concludes that the virus does not cause AIDS, but instead arises as a result of a lowered immune system, thus reversing the cause-effect relationship between HIV and AIDS.
Dr. Ruggiero referred to Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier who stated that someone with a healthy immune system can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected. It is possible for someone infected with HIV to get rid of the infection by naturally building up their immune system, without the use of anti-viral medicines.
As we have seen, the uneasy tension between “cannot be considered the sole cause of AIDS” and “does not cause AIDS” had been resolved in favour of the first formulation by the time Crowe began sending out mails asking for donations. As Fabio Franchi noted in his reply to Crowe, that means the recipients of the mail were asked to donate to a convention premised on the belief that HIV can cause AIDS. In spite of this, Crowe wrote a mail to the Perth Group saying:
I am also concerned about your distortions of the position of Rethinking AIDS which, on detailed scientific issues (such as the existence of HIV), often does not have a position but allows its members to think and speak for themselves. I don’t know where you got your assertion that “According to RA HIV is a cause of AIDS”. (…) I do not understand why you would deliberately distort what we have so clearly written and conclude that, “you accept that HIV is sexually transmitted and is a cause of AIDS”. First of all if “you” means David Crowe you know that this is a false representation of my beliefs. And if “you” means RA, while there are some who believe that HIV can be sexually transmitted, I don’t know of any who believe it is a cause of AIDS, which is by far the most important part of the belief. (Crowe to the Perth Group 17 August 2011)
If this is true, why specifically adopt the formulation “HIV is not the sole cause of AIDS”. Is it merely another awkward attempt at being politically sophisticated or does it represent a real shift? Let us be clear:
1. Like Duesberg, Ruggiero thinks HIV exists as an exogenous virus, and like Duesberg this commits him in principle to the position that the HIV tests are reliable:
Any test, by definition, cannot be 100% accurate. Specificity and sensitivity often are inversely related; therefore un-specific diagnoses of HIV-positivity are likely to occur as with any other test. In general, however, once such problems have been resolved, I would say that in the presence of confirmed antibodies and detection of the so-called viral load (although often over-estimated), I would say that an encounter with the virus has occurred. (Ruggiero to Celia Farber in “Over the Rainbow”)
2. Ruggiero thinks HIV is an effect rather than cause of immune deficiency (just as the Perth Group has argued for decades now), but it is an effect in Montagnier’s sense, an opportunist that is able to take hold when the immune system is already weakened. HIV, in other words, is one of the iconic AIDS pathogens like Pneumocystis jiroveci:
If we adhere to the statements of Prof. Montagnier, as I do, then the persistence of signs of HIV infection could simply be an indicator of immune system malfunction. In this interpretation, immune system malfunction is the cause and chronic HIV infection (along with other opportunistic infection) one of the effects, probably not the worst one. In other words, HIV infection could be the symptom of an existing immunodeficiency. (Ruggiero to Celia Farber in “Over the Rainbow”)
Above, we called HIV an opportunistic pathogen, and the quotation shows why. Ruggiero speculates that HIV is “probably not the worst” effect of immune system malfunction, which implies that it is an undesirable effect. Ruggiero bases himself on Yamamoto and his GcMAF macrophage activator as well as Montagnier’s opportunisic HIV, and Yamamoto’s account of the mechanism by which HIV causes immuno-suppression is that it secretes nagalase which inhibits macrophage activation:
Serum Gc protein (known as vitamin D3-binding protein) is the precursor for the principal macrophage activating factor (MAF). The MAF precursor activity of serum Gc protein of HIV-infected patients was lost or reduced because Gc protein is deglycosylated by alpha-N-acetylgalactosaminidase (Nagalase) secreted from HIV-infected cells. Therefore, macrophages of HIV-infected patients having deglycosylated Gc protein cannot be activated, leading to immunosuppression. Since Nagalase is the intrinsic component of the envelope protein gp120, serum Nagalase activity is the sum of enzyme activities carried by both HIV virions and envelope proteins. These Nagalase carriers were already complexed with anti-HIV immunoglobulin G (IgG) but retained Nagalase activity that is required for infectivity.
HIV, intracellularly, as virions or as “free” gp120, is inherently immuno-suppressive, according to Ruggiero’s adopted position. In other words, it may not be the sole cause but it is certainly a contributing cause of AIDS. And how do we know this is his final position and not another “Trojan horse”? Because we know that Ruggiero thinks HIV is real, that the HIV proteins are real, and that they can be reliably detected. This validates observations such as those made by Yamamoto. In fact, Ruggiero’s soon to be made commercially available GcMAF yoghurt is predicated on the validity of Yamamoto’s observations. Ruggiero’s new lay collaborator explains it admirably in this recent sales pitch, which went unchallenged on Prof. Bauer’s Hivskeptic blog – skeptic no more apparently:
Richard Karpinski said 2011/10/07 at 1:18 pm
DC asked “what is the benefit of taking substances that raise the CD4 count?” As you know, anti-retroviral drugs are themselves life threatening. Thus anything that keeps your CD4 counts high and reduces the pressure to start HAART “therapy” can be considered life preserving. Besides that, indications such as feeling better and having more energy are enough for me to desire to partake of MAF 3 14 on a regular basis, except when I’m pregnant. As a guy, I remain unlikely to become pregnant, but I am aware that fetuses (or possibly placentas) emit nagalase, which somehow prevents formation of GcMAF and thus prevents activation of macrophages, presumably to prevent them from attacking the fetus as cells which are not cells with the same chromosomes as those of the mother. Indeed, if gp120, thought of as an HIV viral coat protein, which also acts like nagalase and inhibits production of GcMAF, is a common component that triggers an HIV+ test result, then HIV+ IS itself an actual cause of partial suppression of the immune system. This would encourage me to take Ruggiero’s MAF 3 14 on general principles. But of course you should think that through on your own. IANAD, I am not a doctor.”
We remark in passing that unless it says on your cup of Ruggiero’s homemade, self-tested yoghurt that an increased level of CD4 cells is not considered a treatment benefit in itself but rather that it is the avoidance of HAART therapy that is the benefit, this could easily be fraud. But note also that a positive HIV test means you’re infected with a virus that can impair your immune system, a Human Immunodeficiency Virus as it were. Karpinski’s logic is flawless; it is the logical extension of Duesberg’s position that HIV is real but harmless. To quote Eugene Semon:
If HIV exists, as Duesberg claims, then one has to test “harmless passenger” by considering cellular proteins within “purified virions” that may lead to autoimmune dysfunction. These cellular proteins (e.g. Hsp 70) are well known inflammatory agents, and the literature is chock full of papers on disorders when they’re over-expressed.
That is exactly what Ruggiero/Yamamoto has done; he has considered but one of the “harmless passenger virus” proteins and identified a mechanism by which “HIV” causes immune suppression. And this is not remarkable if one understands how the “HIVproteins” were discovered. They were chosen because they were found in abnormally high concentrations or expressed and observed under abnormal conditions in already immuno-compromised individuals. That such proteins should have pathogenic effects under these circumstances is analogous to healthy cells becoming cancerous.
The consequence of all this is that Rethinking AIDS is now poised to market cures for HIV, literally, while its president David Crowe vehemently denies that he knows of any dissident who believes that HIV causes AIDS. Is Crowe deliberately lying? Probably not. It is more plausible that in the cacophony of plagiarism and self-contradiction that is Rethinking AIDS nobody is able to hear even their own words, much less understand what they mean.
