Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

 

THE HISTORY OF RETHINKING AIDS

Anthony Brink

 

Part Five

The Perth Group dissociates from Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group

On 16 September 2009 the Perth Group responded to Crowe’s insistence on associating them with his Rethinking AIDS group’s scientific ignorance and incompetence – the final straw being their dismal leaflet ‘The AIDS Trap‘ – by formally dissociating from him and his group.

Crowe’s historical achievement had been to rupture the AIDS dissident movement into two fundamentally opposed camps: the Perth Group with their clear scientific and strategic focus on the root scientific problem with the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS, supported by all the world’s scientifically literate AIDS dissidents, versus Crowe’s flyblown rump Rethinking AIDS group selling Duesberg’s harmless passenger virus science that doesn’t stand scrutiny, supported only by a cult of personal hero worshippers.

Plus de Harven’s bumbling, contradictory version of the Perth Group’s science which he’d taken uncredited and then bungled, at the same time going around telling people that they are ‘WRONG’.

Plus Henry Bauer’s attempt to play it both ways by conceding in a published article and in his book that ‘HIV’ has ‘never been properly isolated’ as the Perth Group have demonstrated right from the beginning; next, as Duesberg’s co-author backing his diametrically opposing passenger virus story; and then writing and publishing an article based squarely on the Perth Group’s work, but riddled with errors and contradictions, and reiterating their case that there’s no gold standard for the ‘HIV’ tests, which is to say ‘HIV’ has never been isolated to function as such. Only he doesn’t say it in his paper, because if he did it would be all the more obvious that he was just parroting their original scientific work and insights.

To stay politically onside in Crowe’s group (he wants to succeed him as ‘President’), Bauer supports Crowe’s opposition to the Perth Group’s plea for a debate with Duesberg to resolve the critical issue that has divided and hamstrung the AIDS dissident movement: whether ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist, as Duesberg claims, or hasn’t, as the Perth Group demonstrate and Bauer himself accepts. 

Incredibly, the retired Professor of Science Studies sees no point in discussing this crucial scientific disagreement concerning the core of the AIDS construct, no need to settle it. He thinks it’s a good idea for his Rethinking AIDS group to attack the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS with a gaggle of inconsistent, contradictory theories and claims. So he told Michael Ellner on 20 August 2009:

A fundamental misconception seems to be that RA as such, or the RA Board as such, should strive to take a definite position on a scientific question (the existence or non-existence or lack of proven existence of “HIV”. The organization, originally the Group, was formed to push for THE RETHINKING OF THE HIV CAUSES AIDS HYPOTHESIS. Religious groups may insist on a dogmatic answer to central questions. Scientific organizations don’t. ... Insisting that RA somehow move to settle questions regarding the nature of “HIV”is to wish it to become like a religious sect.

The impotent quality of the old academic huckster’s argumentation hardly warrants comment. On 28 January 2010 he persisted in the HIVAIDSPARADIGM forum:

There is no reason to assume or to believe that the existential question is ripe to be settled.

In a post two days earlier, he put up an explanation of why he claims to think there is no benefit, scientific or otherwise, to resolving the central ‘HIV’ question: 

Media and mainstream would listen to us no better if we were to all agree that HIV is a harmless passenger virus, or if we were all to agree that HIV has never been shown to exist, or if we were to all agree that HIV doesn’t exist. It’s an ACADEMIC argument and issue, in both meanings of “academic”.

In fact it’s a pivotally important issue: depending on where you start, the arguments against the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS are totally different:  once you give them their virus, the debate is quickly lost.

Rethinking AIDS group member Helen Lauer shares Bauer’s thinking. In an email to Duesberg and others, Lauer included, Sadun Kal quoted her on 2 August 2008:

I read through and immediately thought: If “most people don’t even know that such a debate even exists,” why bother them about it?

It was all an echo of Crowe’s email to Kal and others on 27 May 2008, expressing the same ‘thought’:

I don’t believe in an inward strategy which bases so much on an internal debate that the outside world will pay no attention to.

Val Turner mailed Crowe on behalf of the Perth Group on 3 December 2008:

If the dissidents are to gain any credibility the various scientific differences must be resolved. The most important question to address is the existence of HIV.

On this either you agree or disagree. It’s about time you stated your position and acted accordingly.

Concerning ‘the existence of HIV’ Crowe had already ‘stated [his] position’ on it many times: Duesberg’s passenger virus science is completely wrong, ‘HIV’ has never been isolated. But instead of ‘act[ing] accordingly’, Crowe propounds Duesberg’s bad science on his website and in court. As for the Perth Group’s insistence that the ‘various scientific differences must be resolved’ especially ‘the existence of HIV’, Crowe disagrees, he told Kal, because he reckons no one in ‘the outside world’ has any interest in this critical issue. Completely missing the Perth Group’s point.

To Celia Farber and Torsten Engelbrecht the Perth Group wrote on the same day:

We agree with Torsten’s four points.

# We are NOT at all successful in fighting the HIV=AIDS dogma
# The rethinkers on earth are NOT united
# We have practically NO money to finance effective/concerted actions/campaigns
# We do NOT have the power to reach public opinion

To these we would like to add one of our own. The only way for us to become united is to address and resolve the seminal issue. The existence of HIV. As Michael Ellner said in his email July 25th, the existence of HIV “has become the entire movement’s soft spot”. And it’s about time everybody stopped backing every horse in the stable. To extend Michael’s email in regard to Peter D, everyone “has an obligation and responsibility to respond” to the existence question. …

Celia we … agree we are fighting big money and our side has to be of one mind. But we also must remember the basis of the big money is science, as bad as it may be. We have to fight science with science. And, unlike the opposition, we have to be 100% scientifically accurate with every single word we write if we want to be believed. Being right is only 3% of the answer and the remaining 97% is politics. But without the 3% the race doesn’t start.

Crowe, Bauer and Lauer disagree with this analysis, and the rest of the Rethinking AIDS group too, apparently. Certainly Christian Fiala.

At the June 2006 Rethinking AIDS group/board meeting he and Neville Hodgkinson proposed that a dedicated conference be held ‘exploring and highlighting challenges to the HIV/AIDS theory’, focusing on the implications of the conventional ‘HIV’ antibody test kit disclaimer, ‘there is no recognised standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV’ – implying that ‘HIV’ has never been isolated and thereby proved to exist.

In an exchange of email in December 2009/January 2010, Georg von Wintzingerode proposed to Martin Barnes that such a conference be held

in Europe. … Neville Hodgkinson … said so also years ago already. … Concentrating on the “HI”-V-isolation and purification would also help. I asked Peter Duesberg when I met with him last summer in Mannheim, whether he would be available for a panel together with Eleni on that topic and he said he would be available.

The best place for it would be

Vienna, due to the fact, that the next ortho-Event [the 18th International AIDS Conference] is going to take place in Vienna in June/July timeframe.

Crowe told von Wintzingerode and Barnes that

Christian Fiala was thinking of an event in Vienna, somewhere near the time and place of the orthodox event. It would seem like a good focal point.

Barnes informed Fiala that he and von Wintzingerode were

interested in helping you organize the conference in Vienna in June that you have proposed. … Georg has suggested a panel with Eleni and Peter.

Fiala acknowledged the offer of support, and Barnes and von Wintzingerode responded with numerous specific suggestions, most importantly:

Existential Question: We consider it essential that this be resolved. We would like to suggest a process, beginning immediately, of exchange between the Perth Group, Duesberg (maybe de Harven, and Maniotis) with a mandate of information exchange and discussion by internet or in person with the required goal of a unified, understandable position to be presented at the conference.

The suggestion was now to resolve the ‘Existential Question’ before the conference rather than during it so that the dissidents at the conference would speak the best, settled, correct science established by debate. Barnes and von Wintzingerode had evidently grasped the Perth Group’s argument that the AIDS orthodoxy has to be attacked with a clear, consistent, scientifically accurate position on ‘HIV’.

As mentioned in Part Two, Crowe opposed any ‘information exchange and discussion by internet or in person’ between the Perth Group and Duesberg to ‘resolve the essential … Existential Question’. So, in the end, did Fiala. As conference organizer, together with ‘the main contact person … Uta Santos-König … [a] GP in Vienna’ (and neophyte in the AIDS controversy), Fiala did nothing to facilitate a debate between the Perth Group and Duesberg, as von Wintzingerode and Barnes had urged, to ‘resolve the essential … Existential Question’ – notwithstanding, according to von Wintzingerode, Duesberg’s expressed willingness to participate.

Indeed, Fiala sent no invitation to Papadopulos-Eleopulos at all – neither to debate Duesberg nor even to address the conference; the leading scientist of the AIDS dissident movement was snubbed and excluded yet again.

But not the Duesberg club: Duesberg, Bauer, David Rasnick, Claus Köhnlein, Marco Ruggiero, and Celia Farber were all invited. Among them Harry van der Zee too, a homeopath who reckons that with his marvellous

PC1 remedy … for HIV/AIDS … in Africa … the AIDS epidemic can be called to a halt.

Like fellow Rethinking AIDS group members Crowe and Rasnick when organizing their November 2009 conference, Fiala didn’t consider Papadopulos-Eleopulos good enough or suitable enough or desirable enough to present her Copernican scientific insights on the missing virus problem herself. Instead, Fiala invited two physicians, Heinrich Kremer and Juliane Sacher; three journalists, Hodgkinson, Joan Shenton, and Janine Roberts; a mathematician, Rebecca Culshaw; and a health group director, Lluis Botinas – all of whom more or less support her science on the matter, but none of whom actively support her in her strategic focus on Montagnier’s claim to have isolated ‘HIV’ in 1983.

Pulling the same trick that Crowe had done at his Rethinking AIDS conference in 2009 to divert attention from the core problem with the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS, the inconvenient truth that ‘HIV’ has not been proved to exist, the inconvenient truth threatening to collapse his Duesberg club, Fiala sent an invitation to Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s collaborator Turner – but only to give

a presentation from your side about testing and the problems with HIV tests

and not about the ‘essential … Existential Question’.

As with Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS conference in 2009 (his ‘board meeting’ in 2006 too), again Papadopulos-Eleopulos was not invited, and again her collaborator Turner was – but to speak only to the unreliability of the tests, and not the Perth Group’s basic science on the isolation issue, in regard to which everyone knows she’s done all the original work.

After discussion with his colleagues in the Perth Group, Turner asked Fiala who

the other participants are and the topics of their presentation.

They were obviously interested to know whether de Harven would be present at the conference too, even though not mentioned in the list of invitees. Would the cellphone businessman and self-imagined legal expert Crowe be there to tutor the conference on how to lose cases involving alleged transmission of ‘HIV’? Fiala was unwilling to say, for Turner got no reply, not even to a reminder; and he declined to attend accordingly.

On 22 April Papadopulos-Eleopulos wrote to Fiala mentioning that she was ‘disappointed’ that he had not invited her, because when

we heard that Georg and Martin were planning a dissidents’ meeting … to coincide with the next International AIDS conference ... I was very excited and looking forward to participating, especially that they were talking about discussing our disagreement with Peter in regard to the evidence for the existence of “HIV”. Our only worry was that the meeting would be high-jacked by Crowe.

Having not been invited to speak, she asked if she might at least

distribute, at the entrance to the venue, our latest publication?  It deals again with more questions regarding the isolation of HIV by Montagnier. 

In his reply on 2 May, Fiala ignored her implicit plea. Sure she could distribute her paper at the door. She could even

also give a talk, for example on MTCT.

A talk on the virus Duesberg claims is transmitted from mother to child. But not ‘regarding the isolation of HIV by Montagnier’. Fiala certainly didn’t want her to ‘give a talk’ on that, on the fact that Montagnier never isolated any virus, and that Duesberg was flat wrong in uncritically allowing and claiming that he did.

Nor was there any apology for not inviting her; she was invited, he said:

We are trying to bring some critical aspects in the public debate. ... Therefore we have contacted a number of people in the field. Obviously you and Val were among them. In an email 13 April Val informed us that none of you could participate which we accepted with regret.

But Papadopulos-Eleopulos wasn’t ‘among them’, and Turner never ‘informed us that none of you could participate’.

One didn’t have to look far to discover Fiala’s reason for killing Hodgkinson’s proposal that von Wintzingerode and Barnes had taken up and sharpened: that Duesberg and the Perth Group should confer to debate the critical issue of whether ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist. Santos-König, the ‘main contact person’ for the Vienna conference, told Turner that ‘christian fiala [sp. sic] of course will also talk’. About what, Fiala himself announced in his conference press release in March: why, he had a brand new theory of ‘HIV’ to share, a brand new theory all of his own: ‘HIV’ wasn’t a ‘nasty retrovirus’, he told us:

Has the virus become harmless? No, it has always been harmless – an endogenous virus (i.e. produced naturally in the body) such as may occur in any healthy placenta. Faulty interpretations of observations will inevitably lead to flawed conclusions.

That’s for sure. Hadn’t he understood the Perth Group’s point, supported by evidence, made to de Harven and Andrew Maniotis?

At present there is no evidence that proves the existence of endogenous retroviruses. This is at least one point of agreement between the Perth Group and Gallo. During the Parenzee trial, Gallo said a number of times, by definition, a particle can be considered to be a virus if, and only if, evidence exists that it is transmittable. Responding to a question put to him by Kevin Borick he stated: “…endogenous retroviruses aren’t viruses as your first witness [E.P-E] properly said, they are particles, they have never been transmitted. A virus is something that infects, that you prove goes from person. A to B. Short of that they are particles. Where a virus at least has to be transmitted in vitro in the laboratory, it goes from one cell to another, it’s never been demonstrated for endogenous retrovirus”. (T1298).

Even Duesberg rejects Fiala’s new theory, and correctly so for different (wrong) reasons. In an email on 10 November 2009, Barnes’s paraphrased what he told Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS conference a couple of days earlier:

Duesberg said that since the sequence for HIV is not in the human genome, what is being measured as HIV could not be an endogenous retrovirus.

Which Duesberg confirmed the next day:

The information that the sequence of HIV is not part of the human genome is from the Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK.

In his invitation to Turner, Fiala mentioned:

we are expecting a huge interest as the international conference expects 25 000 participants, among them 2 000 media people. And we will most probably be the only critical event during that time.

Any of the ‘2000 media people’ or other ‘25 000 participants’ swinging through Fiala’s circus stand to be treated to a tragi-comic scientific Punch and Judy Show along the following lines:

Duesberg: The HIV theory of AIDS is wrong because rather than being deadly, HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections. By ‘non-perinatal infections’ I mean via sex and blood transfusions. I was wrong to say Montagnier ‘achieved the isolation’ of this virus in 1983; I realize now, having heard the Perth Group on this, that he didn’t prove the existence of HIV by isolation as he claimed he did, and I initially said he did, but it doesn’t matter because the existence of HIV has subsequently been proved genetically. It’s also been proved by crystallography (this is my latest ‘answer‘ to the Perth Group). As you can see, I keep changing my story and coming up with new ones. You say the Perth Group have shot my new stories down too? Well now you know why I’ve been avoiding a debate with them: there’s one thing I can never do and that’s admit I was wrong about HIV; that would suggest the whole of retrovirology is in trouble and I’m not about to make a concession like that. Think what it would mean for the whole of molecular biology! And for me as a professor teaching it for a living! I’ve got far much too much at stake to concede such a thing.

Chorus of Rasnick, Bauer, Köhnlein, Ruggiero, Farber, and van der Zee: That’s right! HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections. Peter Duesberg is a professor of cell and molecular biology and member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He’s got status and he’s got credentials. He’s the man to rely on!  

Rasnick: Just one thing. Peter is completely wrong to say HIV is transmitted ‘readily’ between ‘the most sexually active homosexuals’, but with ‘extremely low efficiency’ between heterosexuals. As I said to Joseph Sonnabend in a letter I posted to the internet forum of Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel, ‘If AIDS is sexually transmitted in the USA then HIV prefers to cause AIDS in men. A very smart virus … I have shown you evidence that HIV is not sexually transmitted.’

And although I agree with Peter that ‘a French virus team … discovered a retrovirus in a homosexual man at risk for AIDS, which a year later became the accepted cause of AIDS (Barré-Sinoussi 1983)’, I also disagree with him about this because actually ‘HIV has never been obtained from a human being.’ I repeat, it’s ‘never been obtained from a human being’ – by which I mean ‘infectious viable virus ... obtained ... directly from the patient ... from a sample of blood [after you] spin it in a centrifuge’. Since I’m only a chemist, and way out of my depth here, I wasn’t aware that one never obtains ‘infectious viable virus’ in this way, but from cultures. I hope nobody points out my ignorance in front of everyone at the Vienna conference. Or that I contradict Peter on the sexual transmission of HIV. Or that I contradict myself on whether HIV has ever been found in a person.

Bauer: I just want to clarify that although I agree with Peter that ‘HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections,’ I also agree with the Perth Group that it isn’t, because as I said on my blog on 19 April 2010:

‘HIV’ has never been isolated or proven to exist.

And this is why I’ve taken to putting ‘HIV’ in inverted commas these days, as the Perth Group do.

Fiala: You are all wrong. HIV is actually part of us. We’re made up of viruses, partly, and HIV is one of them. It’s one of the viruses we’re made of. I don’t have any evidence for this, but I’m sure I’ll find some if I go looking. And when I do, I’ll write a paper about this exciting new theory of mine. Science is going to publish it on its front page!

Yes I know I agreed with the Perth Group in 2001 that HIV has never been isolated by purification and thereby proved to exist. And I know I agreed with them about this again in 2004. Well I was wrong, they’re wrong about that. They are wrong to say HIV has never been isolated by purification and thereby proved to exist. Last year I changed my mind and agreed with Peter that it does exist after all, just as Montagnier, Gallo and all the AIDS experts say, with the small twist that actually HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections. This year I changed my mind once again and decided that not only are the Perth Group wrong about HIV, so is Peter, because HIV is an endogenous retrovirus produced naturally in the body.

To me we’re basically in a political battle against the AIDS orthodoxy, so in disproving the HIV theory of AIDS science is completely unimportant . We have to be political about this. All we have to do is say: The HIV theory of AIDS is wrong! We don’t agree with it! We must fight it! We must all fight AID$ Inc together! It doesn’t matter if we talk scientific rubbish. It doesn’t matter if we contradict ourselves and contradict each other every five minutes. We’re AIDS dissidents.

Chorus of Kremer, Sacher, Hodgkinson, Shenton, Roberts, Culshaw, and Botinas calling across the stage: These clowns are an embarrassment to us!

And so on – one can just imagine, cringing, as the ‘2000 media people’ or other ‘25 000 participants’ visiting Fiala’s AIDS dissident conference all roar with laughter at the ridiculous AIDS dissident movement. Since ‘President’ Crowe and his Rethinking AIDS group think it’s ‘healthy’ for the AIDS dissidents to knock each other about quarrelling, like Punch and Judy, as I said, while everyone watches with amusement. And this is why ‘President’ Crowe and his Rethinking AIDS group do nothing to facilitate a resolution of the crippling internal controversy concerning the existence of ‘HIV’.

(According to the conference website put up in early May, the speaker list, still provisional, had changed a bit; and again towards the end of the month: de Harven was now slated to give a talk on Papadopulos-Eleopuloss work: ‘Questioning the very existence of HIV’. Only he wouldnt be saying it was her work.)

As for Duesberg – like Gallo, unwilling to defend his science – Crowe asked Kal on 27 May 2008:

Do you want me to force him to debate if he doesn’t want to?

He wrote similarly to Turner on 1 May 2008:

I’m not trying to stop anything. I have just stated that I am not going to participate in a ganging up on Peter Duesberg and others who genuinely believe that HIV does exist.

To Crowe, exhibiting the crippled psychology of a bullied school nerd, calling on Duesberg to defend his claims as a scientist, like a scientist, in a debate with the Perth Group is ‘ganging up’ on him.

In fact it’s apparent from his exchange with Michael Nitsche that Duesberg doesn’t ‘genuinely believe’ in his retrovirus at all. And this is why he acts like Gallo, about whom he complained to Celia Farber: he

literally runs away from me. Usually when you challenge a major hypothesis, you get a rebuttal, but here it’s total avoidance. They don’t want to talk, they don’t want to be seen by me.

Thus does Duesberg (to echo Crowe’s language) ‘behave in exactly the same way that the establishment currently does against all of us’ – by refusing to engage with Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her Perth Group and those AIDS dissidents who ‘challenge [his] major hypothesis’ that ‘HIV’ is a harmless passenger virus. Such grossly unscientific behaviour is permissible in Crowe’s view; since Duesberg has made so many ‘sacrifices’, we must excuse his disgraceful scientific misconduct.

Duesberg has suggested that the reason he won’t behave like a scientist should and respond properly to the Perth Group’s challenge to his ‘major hypothesis’, their identification of his defective and false scientific contentions, is because debating the evidence for the existence of ‘HIV’ would be a very sad thing to do:

It seems tragic that over 99% of AIDS researchers study a virus that does not cause AIDS and that the few who don’t are now engaged in a debate over the existence of a virus that doesn’t cause AIDS.

More than ‘tragic’, it’s harmful, he told HEAL founder Michael Ellner in May 1998, ringing him up to demand he cancel Stefan Lanka’s speaking tour of HEAL chapters around the US, at which he was presenting the Perth Group’s science. Contending there’s no proof ‘HIV’ exists would cause the AIDS dissident movement immense damage, Duesberg insisted.

Bauer agrees; the Perth Group’s identification and public assertion of the missing virus problem can

only reinforce the mainstream insistence that we’re cranks.

So reckons the Loch Ness Monster fan.

In the conclusion of their criticism of Crowe’s fatal interference in the Parenzee trial, the Perth Group recorded:

In 20/3/2008, that is, a year ago, we asked you two questions.

“Our questions are:

· Since the “HIV” experts, including Montagnier and Gallo, admit:

o  to prove the existence of a virus, it is necessary to purify the particles and to show that they have unique RNA.

To date, no “HIV” experts including Montagnier and Gallo, have proof of purification and admit that there is no unique RNA.

why should the dissidents give to the “HIV” experts that which they admit they do not have and debate with half-truths?

· It is possible for the dissidents to be proven correct by debating with half-truths?”

After a reminder you responded on 31/3/2008: “I do plan to respond comprehensively to this. Unfortunately this has come at a very busy time for me, and obviously I need to put extensive thought into a response”.

Despite our repeated requests we still await your response. These are straightforward questions of pivotal significance for the dissident movement. Is your tardiness because (i) the answers require much scientific knowledge; (ii) the answers are obvious but run contrary to vested interests; (iii) other reasons? Regardless of any excuses, how can the movement achieve its goal when the leader is either unable or unwilling to answer such crucial questions?

In the more than two years that have passed since the date the Perth Group posed their questions to him, and despite repeated reminders, Crowe has not honoured his undertaking to ‘respond’ – either ‘comprehensively’ or at all. The reason is obvious. He cannot answer honestly without conceding the burden of the Perth Group’s argument. And as is well known, he’s not honest enough to do a thing like that.

On 30 November 2008, in reply to Turner’s charge the day before that

Your interference in the Parenzee case was highly counter productive to say the least.

Crowe blurted stupidly:

Clearly we disagree on many strategic issues related to court cases. …

I would love for someone to develop sure-fire legal tactics which is why I spend a lot of time communicating with lawyers. But so far everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. But still worth the struggle! …

My tactics, yes. Given that none of us have yet been successful in overturning the paradigm one could either assume that none of us have the right tactics, or that it’s impossible, or that it’s very difficult and we have not achieved our goals yet. …

I’m just very committed to trying to organize the rethinking movement into a cohesive force. Some of the things I’ve done I’m very proud of. Some I just hope everyone’s forgotten because they fell flat or in retrospect just seemed dumb. But sometimes you have to do something before you know whether it’s going to be effective.

Crowe’s clear implication was the Perth Group hadn’t employed ‘sure-fire legal tactics’ in demonstrating that ‘HIV’ has never been isolated and thereby proved to exist, but never mind because he was still working with his lawyers on coming up with some, although unsuccessfully so far, but better than the Perth Group’s trial strategy of raising an answerable scientific defence, which was not ‘right’, and the failure of the case that he’d sabotaged by changing the scientific foundation of the defence midstream only proved it. But introducing contradictory science into the case wasn’t among the ‘dumb’ things he’d done, which he ‘hope[s] everyone’s forgotten’ – he thought, and still thinks, it was a very clever thing to do. The thing is to ‘just [be] very committed’ to spiking your best guns.

And the best way to ‘organize the rethinking movement into a cohesive force’ is to criticize the conventional theory of AIDS in a scientifically incoherent way, such as he does, and as Fiala is fixing to do at his dissident conference in Vienna in July 2010.

Crowe responded to the Perth Group’s vote of no confidence in him and his group, to his dismissal notice by the leading scientists of the AIDS dissident movement, by pretending nothing had happened, nothing had changed. Nothing appeared on his Rethinking AIDS website acknowledging the development, and in an email on 8 December 2009 he claimed in the teeth of the facts:

There is no scientific rift between RA and the Perth Group. There are members of the RA board who have sided with the Perth Group on the isolation issue …

In truth – for he was lying again – none of the ‘members of the RA board have sided with the Perth Group on the isolation issue’ in any real sense: none propound the Perth Group’s science on the ‘isolation issue’, none support them on the vital strategic importance of pressing ‘the isolation issue’ in attacking the orthodoxy. On the contrary, the ‘members of the RA board ... sided’ against ‘the Perth Group on the isolation issue’ in supporting Crowe’s disastrous advice to Parenzee’s counsel Kevin Borick to abandon the defence strategy he’d agreed with the Perth Group, centring precisely on ‘the isolation issue’, and to proceed, after they’d testified that ‘HIV’ hasn’t been purified, on the basis that it has been, only it’s harmless as Duesberg claims.

The board is there to run the organization not to define the scientific positions that board members or other members of RA must take. I agree that focusing on AID$ Inc. is more important, which is why I am ignoring most of the messages that are attacking RA and its board members.

As already pointed out, Crowe’s ‘organization’ has no ‘other members’ other than his ‘board’, so the ‘board’ is the ‘organization’. In practice, Crowe and his ‘organization … take … scientific positions’ opposed to the Perth Group’s ‘scientific position’ that Montagnier never isolated any retrovirus, be it ‘endogenous’ although not ‘HIV’ per de Harven or a harmless passenger virus per Duesberg.

On his Rethinking AIDS website and in head-on engagement with the orthodoxy, Crowe himself propounds Duesberg’s ‘scientific position’ that ‘HIV’ exists as a harmless passenger virus – evident from the questions Crowe drew for Borick to put to Gallo in cross-examination (which he falsely denied having drawn), and in the grounds of further appeal he drew for Borick when thanks to him the appeal was lost: nowhere does Crowe challenge Gallo’s isolation claim; rather he supports it by suggesting Gallo stole his virus from Montagnier, and one can’t steal what doesn’t exist. This is how Crowe supports ‘AID$ Inc’. This is how he makes his money.

The entire point of the Perth Group’s critical difference with Crowe goes to ‘focusing on’ the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS in the correct, most effective way possible, with the best, unanswerable science. Crowe prefers Duesberg’s easily refuted science instead. He then portrays the Perth Group’s criticism of him for doing this as an unproductive distraction from ‘focusing on AID$ Inc’.

Crowe’s support for – and in defiance of his ‘board’, his attempt to hijack – Janine Roberts’s worthless letter to Science about Gallo not having found any virus, is a shambles I’ve addressed elsewhere (see further).

In view of Crowe’s refusal to acknowledge the Perth Group’s dissociation from him and his Rethinking AIDS group on his website or in any other manner, they asked him to announce it to his November 2009 conference by way of a simple one line statement. Again Crowe refused. The result was that, apart from those on the Perth Group’s mailing list, people attended the conference under the misapprehension that the Rethinking AIDS group is an ‘umbrella organization’ (per Bauer in the HIVAIDSPARADIGM forum on 25 July 2009) representing the entire AIDS dissident movement, rather than the Duesberg club, excluding the Perth Group as our leading scientists. 

Among the conference attendees misled by Crowe was Bauer himself: many months later, on 10 February 2010, he revealed on Celia Farbers The Truth Barrier blog that he’d been oblivious of the the Perth Group’s move – which only showed, he said, that the Perth Group were not ‘grown-up’ like him, a ‘fact’ they were not able to ‘hide’ by ‘thinking’ before acting. As he does. And clever him.

 

Next: Part Six