Two open letters to Christian Fiala of the RA group/board

August 2010

Dear Christian

In your post on the HIVAIDSPARADIGM forum on 7 August addressed to John Lauritsen, you said the withdrawal of your paper ‘HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with South African AIDS – A new perspective’ by the publisher of Medical Hypotheses ‘reveals a blatant refusal to discuss facts’. And you repudiated any suggestion that the ‘opinions’ expressed in your paper ‘are nonsense or stupid’.

In and among many other surprising things, you and the principal author of the paper Peter Duesberg claimed that ‘HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections’.

Given that you are cited as the co-author of two prior papers by the Perth Group showing that there’s no proof that ‘HIV’ exists, would you agree that your statement is both ‘nonsense’ and extremely ‘stupid’?

Given that it has been known for many decades that ‘antibody’ doesn’t ‘neutralize’ anything, would you agree that your statement in this regard was also both ‘nonsense’ and extremely ‘stupid’?

Given Claus Jensen’s identification of the fact that you and Peter grossly abused statistical data from South Africa to establish a false basis on which to make your ‘arguments’, do you think your paper serves to advance AIDS dissident science? Or do you think it’s best forgotten, like a missed hunting shot that only makes the huntsman look a bumbling dolt? (Jensen’s critique of your paper is at http://bit.ly/d0qZZg

Given that the Perth Group demonstrated in their AZT pharmacology paper in CMRO in mid-1999, more than a decade ago, that AZT is not a DNA chain terminator, would you agree that your statement contradicting this – ‘the DNA chain-terminator AZT’ – is not only both ‘nonsense’ and extremely ‘stupid’, but also disgracefully ignorant?

Given Peter’s ‘blatant refusal’ to ‘discuss facts’ about ‘HIV’, particularly the ‘fact’ that it has never been isolated, would you agree that as a scientist his behaviour is no different from that of conventional scientists you are criticising for their ‘blatant refusal to discuss facts’?

Given that conventional AIDS experts base their HIV-AIDS hypothesis on the existence of ‘HIV’ (the Perth Group have shown there’s no proof for this), and that GlaxoSmithKline justifies the use of AZT against ‘HIV’ on the basis that it terminates DNA (the Perth Group have shown that it doesn’t), would you agree that to the extent that you support the conventional AIDS experts and contradict the Perth Group, your paper is indeed, as the publisher of Medical Hypothoses claimed, ‘damaging to global public health’?

All the best

Anthony

My dear Christian

I refer to your recent interview on Russia Today after your conference in Vienna in July, in which you very correctly stated that intrinsically ‘Science is a free competition of the best arguments and verifiable arguments .... science is not a majority vote ... I would call for an open debate to test the best arguments and not for a majority vote in science which is totally dangerous and will lead us in the wrong direction.’

I understood that you were alluding to the hazards of politics in science and how politics can impede its advancement, and I wondered if I might ask you a couple of questions about this.

Many of us share the Perth Group’s view that the pivotal, decisive scientific question concerning the integrity of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis is whether ‘HIV’ exists.

It’s also the question that divides the AIDS dissidents and prevents us from attacking the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, all our guns aimed together at its root flaw: the fact that, as the Perth Group have demonstrated, there is no evidence for the existence of the virus claimed to be at the centre of it all.

I am aware that you disagree with both of the Perth Group’s positions here, namely their conclusion that ‘HIV’ has not been shown to exist and also their view that it is essential to resolve the disagreement between Peter Duesberg and Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos about this.

I was amazed by your recent conclusion that you’d been extremely mistaken in having initially claimed, as a co-author of the Perth Group’s MTCT monograph (containing their most extensive examination of the isolation question to date), that there is no evidence for the existence of ‘HIV’. Just as you were again extremely mistaken in saying the same thing as a co-author of their ‘Montagnier Evidence’ paper in Medical Hypotheses.

As you have twice announced recently, you are now satisfied that ‘HIV’ exists after all.

Please don’t think I’m criticizing you for changing your mind on this key question. ‘Science is a free competition of the best arguments and verifiable arguments’, as you rightly said, and you are obviously perfectly entitled, indeed, you are to be encouraged and congratulated for publishing your changing scientific opinions based on the ‘best arguments and verifiable arguments’.

But what I was wondering, Christian, is this: In the ‘free competition of the best arguments and verifiable arguments’, which ‘verifiable arguments’ persuaded you that the Perth Group are wrong and that Peter Duesberg is right about the existence of ‘HIV’?

And what were the ‘best arguments and verifiable arguments’ that thereafter persuaded you that actually Peter is wrong, and that in fact ‘HIV’ exists not as a harmless ‘passenger virus’ because it’s been ‘neutralized by antibody’, but as ‘an endogenous virus (i.e. produced naturally in the body)’. Which you know of course are as different as chalk and cheese.

I’m referring to what you said in Peter’s recent paper that you co-authored – ‘HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections’ – and to the first statement you released to announce your Vienna conference, in which you claimed that ‘HIV’ is an ‘endogenous virus … produced naturally in the body’.

What were the ‘best arguments and verifiable arguments’ you came across that caused you to repeatedly alter your scientific opinions so radically?

The other thing I wanted to ask you about concerns your very correct insistence that ‘science is not a majority vote’ and a ‘majority vote in science … is totally dangerous and will lead us in the wrong direction’ – in other words, that what is right in science should not be politically determined by the exercise of power, but rather by the application of reason to the known facts.

For some years now, you’ve been a member of a small but well-financed and therefore disproportionately influential and counter-productive political action group called ‘Rethinking AIDS’, funded by Peter’s research sponsor Bob Leppo (both Bob and Peter are in your group) and led by a businessman and small-time party politician, David Crowe, expelled from the executive committee of his party and revealed subsequently to have been a financially and generally unethical person, contemptuous of democratic and parliamentary procedure where it threatens to dislodge him – all this is closely detailed, with supporting documents, at http://bit.ly/cgMcfq.

From its founding in 2006, your political action group, led and dominated by this egregiously unethical person, has consistently worked to suppress the Perth Group’s science on ‘HIV’. My six-part history of your organization documents many examples (http://bit.ly/9QNFZV); lots more are cited in my posts to the HIVAIDSPARADIGM forum before I left, archived at http://bit.ly/a8rUXm (search on < Let it never be forgotten > and < I mentioned several examples >).

Since upon a careful consideration of the ‘best arguments and verifiable arguments’, you are currently satisfied that the Perth Group are wrong in claiming that no evidence has ever been tabled showing ‘HIV’ exists and also wrong in identifying the ‘HIV’ isolation question as the critical issue requiring debate and resolution for us to move forward effectively in ending ‘HIV-AIDS’, I appreciate that it’s only natural that you should have gone with the apparently unanimous ‘majority’ of your dozen-member group (most of whom are inactive token names decorating the ‘Board of Directors’ list – a board without a company!) in a ‘majority vote’ (a) to publish a statement on your website supporting Crowe’s fatal disruption of the defence strategy in the historic Australian Parenzee case, by prevailing on defence counsel to displace the existence of ‘HIV’ as the pivotal, central issue for trial, as agreed at the outset with the Perth Group and about which they testified, with a contradictory defence in line with Peter’s brand of HIV-AIDS criticism: ‘HIV’ does exist, but it’s harmless, and (b) to toss out the Perth Group’s complaint about Crowe’s abortive interference in the case, even though his interference had specifically been prohibited by your group following debate and a ‘majority vote’ at its inaugural meeting in New York in June 2006.

At the first conference held by your group in November 2009, attended by some of your group’s political supporters and other persons, you urged, along with Neville Hodgkinson, that a dedicated conference be convened to address the basic trouble with the antibody tests: there is no gold standard, because ‘HIV’ hasn’t been purified and thereby proved to exist.

This is to say, you ‘call[ed] for an open debate to test the best arguments’ for and against the existence of ‘HIV’. I can tell you that many of us were tremendously encouraged by this, we really were.

Georg von Witzingerode and Martin Barnes stepped up to support you in the practical implementation of your outstanding proposal – both of them underscoring the critical importance of resolving the disagreement between Peter and Eleni as to whether ‘HIV’ exists or not, as the Perth Group have urged for many years, so that Peter and Eleni do not continue shooting at each other scientifically speaking, like the Stalinist and Independent Left in Barcelona even as Franco was at the gate.

Even though, as you say, ‘Science is a free competition of the best arguments and verifiable arguments ... I would call for an open debate to test the best arguments’, not only did you change your mind about the critical importance of convening a conference focussing on the ‘HIV’ particle problem, which is to say convene a debate between Peter and Eleni to resolve their disagreement in ‘open debate to test the best arguments’, you didn’t even invite Eleni to attend your conference. You invited her collaborator Val Turner instead, but only to give ‘a presentation from your side about testing and the problems with HIV tests’. And when Eleni conveyed her great disappointment to you over this, you responded by inviting her to give a talk on mother to child transmission of ‘HIV’ – not to present her science on the missing virus problem (seemingly because you no longer think it’s missing and are now satisfied that it has indeed been found, and can therefore be transmitted from mother to child, as you and Peter say it is, by ‘perinatal … infections’). In the circumstances Eleni obviously declined to attend.

As a consequence of your reversal of your decision to make the lack of a gold standard for ‘HIV’ antibody tests the focus of your conference, i.e. the particle isolation problem Eleni identified right from the word go, Peter was showcased at your conference as the AIDS dissidents’ leading scientist instead, and accordingly got himself interviewed on Russian TV, like you were, to ignorantly misinform viewers that ‘HIV’ indeed exists but is inactive (the Perth Group have demonstrated that there’s no evidence it exists at all); to ignorantly credit Robert Gallo in 1984 with having discovered ’HIV’ in the US (as well as Montagnier’s 1983 isolation claims, the Perth Group have knocked down Gallo’s similar claims too); to ignorantly describe AZT as a DNA chain terminator (the Perth Group have shown it isn’t); and to ignorantly assert false statistics such as that ‘A third of the African population is estimated to be positive … infected by this virus. Or 25%, whatever you want’ – when no AIDS authority makes this claim, not the WHO, not UNAIDS (see e.g. Wikipedia on ‘AIDS in Africa’); only Duesberg, Rasnick, Bauer, Nicholson and you do – although only in respect of black South Africans, but still incorrectly, as Claus Jensen pointed out in his critique of your appallingly inept paper (http://bit.ly/d0qZZg).

It would seem to me, therefore, that in the view of your small but well-funded and therefore disproportionately influential and counter-productive political action group, very appropriately and very suitably led by David Crowe, truth in science is unimportant, truth in science is negotiable, and the advancement of the truth in science is not the premier objective but subsidiary to personal interests and advantage.

And this is why, for instance, Crowe champions Peter’s false harmless passenger virus science on the ‘About’ page of your group’s website that he wrote, omitting any mention of the Perth Group and their work showing that ‘HIV has not been proved to exist. Like when Buthelezi was being championed by the white liberals of mining capital in the apartheid era, instead of Mandela.

In plain terms, the basic ethos of your political action group seems to be: it’s OK to tell lies if we think it will get us ahead in life. It’s OK to invite the scientist around whom your political action group is organized to a conference to propound his brand of science all AIDS dissidents with any brains know to be fundamentally wrong and to contradict the best science established on the available evidence – without presenting any evidence to contradict it. It’s OK to snub the scientist we know to be incomparably more rigorous, accurate and radical than any other, and leave her sitting at home like Cinderella. It’s OK to invite other low, grasping, opportunistic persons currently and formerly in your political action group who have shamelessly appropriated her original science without crediting her properly or at all (even stupidly calling her a thief), to present it at your conference in a befuddled, corrupted form without her permission and against her wishes (more about this soon).

My main question, Christian, is cui bono when Peter and his supporters bear false scientific witness and corroborate Montagnier’s, Gallo’s, and GlaxoSmithKline’s basic, easily disproved lies? Cui bono when Henry Bauer and Etienne de Harven present an easily refuted, botched version of Eleni’s science on the lack of evidence for the existence of ‘HIV’?

Isn’t this so very obviously taking us in ‘the wrong direction’?

Your friend

Anthony

Christian did not respond to the issues raised.