A DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING!
THE LIST:
1. Anthony Brink
2. Anita Allen
3. President Thabo Mbeki
4. Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang
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A DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING!
RANKING: No. 1
NAME:
Anthony Brink
CURRENT POSITION:
Former practicing advocate and Convener and National Chairman of the Treatment Information Group (TIG) [...]. Author of the [...] book "Debating AZT".
HISTORY:
Anthony Brink and Anita Allen (No. 2) are the leading lights in the Aids dissident cause in South Africa. As a result of their intensive lobbying of President Thabo Mbeki, they are together responsible for the long delay in the adoption of a rational aids policy in South Africa.
According to Allister Sparks: "Mbeki himself confirmed that the first person to draw his attention to these dissident websites was a lawyer and part-time jazz musician named Anthony Brink, then practising in the provincial city of Pietermaritzburg Brink came upon the writings of the Aids dissidents in 1996, and after much surfing and reading became convinced they were right and that the drug AZT was dangerously toxic. 'A Medicine from Hell' he called it in an article in a Johannesburg newspaper in March 1999. This prompted a response defending the drug from Desmond Martin, president of the Southern African HIV/Aids Clinicians' society. After more exchanges, Brink contacted Mbeki and sent him copies of the debate between himself and Martin. 'That was the first time I became aware of this alternative viewpoint,' Mbeki told me." [Allister Sparks, Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa (Jonathan Ball: Cape Town, 2003) pg. 286]
The TIG website opens with the following statement: "On 28 October 1999, after reading an early draft of High Court advocate Anthony Brink's book, Debating AZT: Mbeki and the Aids drug controversy, then subtitled Questions of safety and utility, South African President Thabo Mbeki ordered an enquiry into the safety of the Aids drug AZT."
The Treatment Information Group describes itself as "a public interest initiative to promote research-based debate of antiretroviral drug policy, alternative non-toxic treatment approaches to AIDS, and HIV testing issues in South Africa."
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RANKING: No. 2
NAME:
Anita Allen
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RANKING: No. 3
NAME:
President Thabo Mbeki
CURRENT POSITION:
President of the Republic of South Africa
HISTORY:
President Thabo Mbeki was once willing to ride roughshod over the Medicines Control Council (MCC) to get the toxic industrial solvent Virodene provided to the sick and the dying in South Africa. Yet from the time anti-retroviral treatment first became affordable, he has done his best to block its provision eventually taking the position that there is no evidence that HIV causes Aids.
[...]
His decision to set up a Presidential Aids Advisory Panel, on 28 February 2000, introduced a flood of dissident Aids scientists into South Africa, including Peter Duesberg, Roberto Gilraldo, Matthias Rath and David Rasnick, all of whom have now made South Africa their second home.
To date President Mbeki has yet to publicly state that he believes HIV causes Aids.
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