It is human to accept as fact that which is often repeated. The power of habit
subverts critical thinking. “If you say something and repeat it often, something
from the meaning of what is being said will remain.” So said Joseph Goebbels,
Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister. Alas, the courage, the vigor and the progress
of a culture is judged by its will and its ability to examine and to re-examine, to
question the status quo. If this approach constitutes the basis of dialogue between
one human being and another, in science--which constitutes the foundation of a
dialogue between man and his existence--such an approach is crucial. Science
itself demands it, providing it takes place within an appropriate ethic.
Unfortunately, the deontology of scientific dialogue is trampled more often than
we imagine. The history of a partly sexual pandemic is a shattering example of
what can result.
When AIDS was introduced to humanity during the decade of the 80’s,
humanity was seized with panic and turned to its vanguard, the scientists, for
answers and for protection. That was the proper thing to do. The problem is that
the justifiable sense of urgency generated a rush within the scientific community
to come up with answers. Money, lots of money was devoted to finding both
culprit and cure. Glory, lots of glory awaited the scientists who could solve the
mystery. AIDS, in some respects, became for researchers an El Dorado, a gold
fever with the added lure of a Nobel Prize. Society demanded a quick fix. But as is
often the case, haste is the mother of all errors. This might well explain in large
part what has occurred in the field of AIDS research. Initially, relying on
questionable data, scientist Dr. Robert Gallo introduced what he termed "his own"
HLTV-1, a virus associated at extremely low frequency, with rare forms of human
leukemia‚ Shortly thereafter, searching in the same field of retrovirology, Gallo
announced that he had found the cause of AIDS.
Once again, Herbert Spencer would be proved right: “Men believe to be
true what they prefer to be true.” And men prefer to believe that science is a tower
of certitude with an air of papal infallibility. And yet, in science the degree of
uncertainty is always larger than that of certainty. A true scientist is one who
identifies with the Socratic proverb: “I know one thing: that I don‘t know
anything.” This is the sine qua non of scientific advancement. Data is collected,
examined and re-examined. It is subjected to a rigorous process of investigation
and reason. According to Karl Popper, disproof is an essential criterion in
determining the validity of a theory. Where is disproof in the case of HIV-AIDS?
Is it a scientific certainty? Or is it pseudo-scientific dogma with almost theological
undertones? Nevertheless, the scientific community has embraced it. And this is a
powerful argument in the eyes of society.
Then again who said that science is democratic--that what has been proven
scientifically is commonly acceptable? In his era, Einstein’s theory was attacked
as wrong. Barry Marshall became a laughing-stock among his colleagues when he
proposed the Helicobacter pylori as a cause of the gastric ulcer. Now Marshal has
a Nobel Prize on his fireplace mantle to help him forget the barren years of
ridicule and humiliation. Even winners of the Nobel Prize are subjected to ridicule
by some in the scientific community. The Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis who
invented PCR, and Walter Gilbert strongly objected to the idea that evidence had
been presented that “HIV” had been shown to cause AIDS.
Science however is not affected by the consensus of the many, as history
has proven time and again. Science cannot be absolute; it is always relative. It is
not theology; it is not a God-given 10 Commandments. It is the product of data
collection and examination by perspicuous minds, to be accepted or rejected by
specialized social mechanisms. If its foundation is flawed, its structure is baseless.
This is what science is all about. In the final analysis science is a social product
created by human beings and like anything else is prone to error. When science
ceases to be self-critical and chooses instead self-selection, it is at a loss to
pinpoint errors. In the interest of self-protection, scientists-barons effectively
drown dissent, sharing only their own conclusions. Like feudal lords of old, they
exile those who question their findings. They lay down the law, dismissing
discussion and denigrating dispute or open discussion.
Today, fellow countryman and distinguished scientist Andrew Maniotis has
dared to dispute the cause and the treatment of an epidemic the mainstream
scientific community has cast in stone. His discipline allows it; the dialectic of
science demands it. Society is obligated to hear it. The possibility that millions of
individuals around the world might be misdiagnosed with AIDS and prescribed
unnecessary and evidently harmful medications is frightening enough. And
precisely because it is frightening, and stigmatizing, the issue must be discussed.
The wax of propaganda must be removed from our ears. We owe it to ourselves to
hear dissenting views of scientists Andrew Maniotis. Peter Duesberg, Kary Mullis,
Walter Gilbert, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, to name a few. They have the
courage to speak out against the status quo. We are obliged to listen to what they
have to say.
LAMBROS PAPANTONIOU
TAPE TRANSCRIPTION
P R O C E E D I N G S
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Dr. Maniotis, first of all, thank you very
much for your time to provide this exclusive interview on the crucial issue
of HIV/AIDS for publication in the Greek and international press.
For the record, can you tell us about your personal
background: who you are, what you do, and how you came to deal with
the issue of HIV/AIDS?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, thank you very much, Lambros, for
allowing me this chance to speak about this important issue. And I would
like to dedicate this interview to all of those that have died of the
syndrome called AIDS since the AIDS era began in the 1980's, and to
those who are still suffering.
I obtained my undergraduate degree in Physical
Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and then had the
good fortune to become trained as a lab technician in several well-known
neurobiology labs at the medical school. During this time, around 1981,
dire warnings were given to us because we handled a lot of human blood.
We were repeatedly warned that there might be a new kind of infectious
agent that was deadly, called prions, or what was characterized as "slow
viruses devoid of nucleic acid," which didn't follow the rules of other
known pathogens, and which could not be killed by heat, or sterilizing
chemicals. One of my bosses there, who was a famous neurobiologist
named Richard Bunge, invited the framer of this hypothesis, D. Carlton
Gajdusek, the Nobelist to give a talk about this work. As a young scientist
looking for a science to master and a role model to emulate, I saw
Gajdusek as a role model, and I perceived that his synthetic contribution
that merged anthropology with medicine as something I would someday
like to emulate, and I met him when he gave his talk.
In that same lab, I also met Viktor Hamburger, a famous
neurobiologist who was given an office there toward the end of his career.
He used to come into the culture room where I would be growing
Schwann cells and neurons to produce myelin in vitro, and he'd come
behind me and say, "Andy. Ya know, there isn't any causality in biology."
Hamburger was the famous embryologist that made it possible for Rita
Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohn to get the Nobel for their discovery of
nerve growth factor, as he made it possible for Montalcini to flee from the
Nazi-occupied Italy and he guided her studies in neurobiology.
After several years as a lab technician, I decided to go to Berkeley,
California, to obtain a Ph.D. in cell biology. During my graduate studies
there, I met Peter Duesberg at a talk that he gave in our department about
his concerns regarding how retroviruses may or may not cause cancer or
AIDS.
And, at the time, he was very concerned about the fact that
everything that he had studied about retroviruses and cancer for some
20 years – for which he had been well rewarded by the medical
establishment- was being ignored by those proposing the “HIV=AIDS”
hypothesis.
When it was pronounced by Margaret Heckler that "HIV" was
a variant of a known cancer virus and that "HIV" causes AIDS" in 1984,
Peter Duesberg spoke up and said that much of what had been learned
about retrovirology could not possibly explain the syndrome that was
beginning to be reported in LA, San Francisco, and New York.
I began studying the issue at that time because I, of course,
was interested in cancer. And, as I believed Duesberg to have a valid
argument against “HIV” causing AIDS because of his scholarship and
because of an enormous, encyclopedic review article that he wrote and
published in Cancer Research, in 1987, called "Viruses as Carcinogens
and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality." It was in this article that
Duesberg debunked the hypothesis that there can be "slow viruses" that
cause cancer years after infection, and also, it seemed clear to me that
the virus-cancer establishment, and perhaps also, the prion hypothesis
both were mistaken regarding how a virus or virus-like agent could cause
disease after years of no symptoms. And in a virus lab that I worked in
after my PhD. I learned that Professor Hamburger's warnings about
causality in general, and with respect to viruses and "multiplicities of
infection" in particular, at least, had merit, and were worth exploring. I felt,
in addition, that Duesberg had a very strong case about the fact that
HTLV-1, HTLV-II, HPV, HBV, or what was then called LAV and HTLV-III
(now called “HIV”) could not cause either cancers or immune suppression
years after infection, because it was not in the nature of or proven that
any known retroviruses cause cancer or immune suppression in healthy
populations of animals or humans, or sit dormant in a cell for years before
transforming them into cancerous cells.
So, I exhaustively studied and eventually accepted
Duesbergs arguments on cancer retroviruses and “HIV” for about six
years, until I arrived at Harvard, where I worked with Donald Ingber,
Judah Folkman, and other people there who were experts in
angiogenesis (the growth of blood vessels) and tumor angiogenesis (the
growth of blood vessels around tumors).
Now, at that time, tumor angiogenesis, and the biology of
endothelial cells, were thought to be at the root of all tumor growth and
consequently, important to understand in the context of one of the first
so-called AIDS-defining illnesses, which was Kaposi's sarcoma. I
became aware that Dr. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of "HIV's
molecular signature, had contacted our lab director, Dr. Judah Folkman,
to ask him to help explain how "HIV" could possibly cause Kaposi's
sarcoma.
It finally was determined later that “HIV” could not possibly
cause what was thought to be one of the first two types of AIDS-defining
illnesses, Kaposis sarcoma, or "the Gay cancer" as it was called at that
time, or other cancers.
The building I worked in at Harvard was called "The John
Enders Building" because the famous John Enders who had been so
instrumental in growing the virus associated with polio in Human cell
cultures made his discoveries there. During the polio era, Bernice Eddy,
Maurice Hilleman of Merck, and others at the Fox Chase Cancer Institute
in Philadelphia had discovered that a putative cancer virus that had
contaminated the polio vaccine from non-human primate cell cultures and
named SV-40, had inadvertently been given to about 300 million human
beings on several continents by accident during the Salk and Sabin polio
vaccine campaigns of the 1950's and early 60's. It was feared that entire
nations would come down with cancers due to the polio vaccine crusades,
jokes were made that the Soviets would lose the 1964 Olympic Games
because they all would come down with cancers, and even Merck decided
to stop its polio vaccine program. John Enders tried to correct this
problem by growing the virus associated with polio in Human cell cultures,
so that future putative contaminating "cancer viruses" or other viruses
from non-human primate cells wouldn't again be injected into hundreds of
millions of children in future vaccine crusades.
I became aware that although it was shown that the
contaminating simian SV-40 cancer virus that came from monkey and
chimp kidney cell cultures could transform hamster and other animal cells
by Bernice Eddy, Maurice Hilleman, and others, I was always impressed
by the fact that in this vast Human experiment in which attenuated or live
poliovirus was injected or administered along with the putative SV-40
cancer-causing virus into hundreds of millions of unsuspecting children
didn't cause cancer epidemics.
Carefully controlled studies conducted for 35 or more years
have failed to show that SV-40 when injected directly into millions of
children, has led to an increase in cancer. I suppose it could be argued that
the 35 year post-polio vaccine mortality studies, initiated because the so called
potent cancer-causing primate virus, SV-40 was inoculated into more than 300
million Human beings, along with the polio virus, has not been long enough to
determine if SV-40 is contributing to escalating cancer rates. However, one
couldn't ask for a more convincing experiment that a virus that can cause cancer
in animals may not be able to do so in Humans, even as potentially devastating
as this mass Human experiment could have turned out if this animal cancer virus
has caused cancer in Humans.
Indeed, the thirty-five year mortality study on people now in middle
age following receipt of SV40 simian (cancer) virus-contaminated polio vaccine
show that out of 1073 newborns that were vaccinated and carefully followed for
35 years (which the authors claim is not really long enough), there has been no
apparent increase in cancer above the expected background incidences in this
carefully followed subgroup, according to Carroll-Pankhurst et al., in the British
Journal of Cancer. Scientists in Australia, however, believe there has
been an increase in brain cancer and mesotheliomas due to the SV-40,
but their studies aren't as long-term as Pankhurst's.
I then stumbled upon writings from a group of scientists from Australia
who were at The Royal Perth Hospital who had formed “The Perth
Group,” particularly the papers of Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a
biophysicist, Valendar Turner, who was a senior consultant in emergency
medicine at that hospital, John Papandimitriou, Professor of Pathology at
the University of Western Australia and others. Their scholarly writings in
Genetica, and other noted peer-reviewed journals were the first to
question whether or not “HIV” had been properly isolated, and they had
accumulated an impressive amount of evidence that the test kits for “HIV”
were flawed, because the molecular probes that are used to detect “HIV”
could only be as good as the purity with which “HIV” had been isolated
free of cellular debris. Also, I began reading papers and listening to the
views of other very well-respected scientists throughout the world about
“HIV/AIDS:” Dr. Heinz Sänger, Professor of Molecular Biology and Virology,
Max-Planck-Institutes for Biochemistry in Munich, who said, “there is no
evidence for the existence of HIV;” Kary Mullis, the Nobel Laureate who
developed PCR which was and is still used against his warnings and
criticisms to test for “HIVs viral load;” Walter Gilbert, another Nobelist,
who invented DNA foot-printing; Dr. Alfred Hässig, a former Professor of
Immunology at the University of Bern, and former director of the Swiss and
European blood banks who believed AIDS was a syndrome caused by profound
physiological stress and not due to a virus; Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, one of the
first New York Physicians that treated AIDS patients, and founder of the
American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) until he quit because of his
reservations about the false “heterosexual AIDS explosion” and the wisdom of
giving his patients AZT, who said, and I believe this is an exact quote: "The
marketing of HIV, through press releases and statements, as a killer virus
causing AIDS without the need for any other factors, has so distorted research
and treatment that it may have caused thousands of people to suffer and die;" Dr.
Donald Abrams, who was a Professor of Medicine at San Francisco General
Hospital, who said, he had a large population of HIV–positive patients who chose
not to take any anti-viral drugs because they saw all of their friends take the antiviral
drugs and die.
There were many other established scientists and physicians, in
addition, that I read or heard speak at that time who expressed doubts that “HIV”
was the cause of AIDS, that anti-retrovirals could delay progression of immune
collapse, or that viruses could cause cancer in Humans.
Instead, many were saying that "HIV" could not possibly be the sole
cause of AIDS, or even a cause of AIDS, and that Duesbergs ideas and
arguments were very important. I became more and more fascinated with the
subject.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, a direct question,
because it is very important: Have you seen the HIV retrovirus in your
laboratory or in any other laboratory across the country? Yes or no?
DR. MANIOTIS: The answer is no. No, I haven't seen it.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Did you try?
DR. MANIOTIS: Have I tried to see it? I have tried to “see it”
in the indirect ways that are usually used to try to detect it.
“A Roman effort of work” was undertaken by Luc Montagnier
when he tried to see it in the early 1980s, and in interviews he has said
that what was then called “HIV” was notoriously difficult to photograph in
the very beginning.
In 1997, a group in Washington, D.C. led by Bess et al., who
were trying to make an “HIV” vaccine and who also tried to see purified
“HIV,” published in the Journal of Virology I believe it was that
microvesicles are a source of contaminating cellular proteins found in purified
“HIV” preparations. And also in 1997, a French-German collaboration,
Gluschankof et al. also published a papers in The Journal of Virology
claiming that cell membrane vesicles are a major contaminant of gradientenriched
human “HIV” preparations.
In the Bess et al. paper, cellular debris was not distinguishable from
any other object in the EM micrographs. These preparations published by both
the Gluschankof et al., and Bess et al. groups, used the best techniques at that
time for the isolation and characterization of “HIV's" molecular components,
including its nucleic acids, but yet nothing that looked like a virus could be
discerned in sucrose gradient-derived electron micrographs of “HIV.” Cellular
actin, exrin, and cytoskeletal proteins (proteins that are made by cells and not
viruses) were also found inside the vesicles or virus-like particles. Non-infected
but activated human immune cells in Petri dishes were also shown to produce
microvesicles or viral-like particles that incorporated cellular proteins.
In addition to containing cellular proteins, the “HIV” microvesicles were
also shown to contain both RNA and DNA, and a huge amount of cellular RNA
and DNA were found in these vesicles that were thought to be retroviral particles.
For example, as much as 10ug of RNA and 4 μg of DNA were found per mg of
protein. I also remember them stating that the major RNA species in
microvesicles were ribosomal 28S and 18S subunits and some low molecular
species, and tRNA. These were cellular nucleic acids. These authors said that
all future experiments that attempted to purify “HIV” “viruses” must be carefully
controlled to account for the effects of contaminating cellular antigens present in
microvesicles or "HIV's" virus-like particles. Numerous other cellular proteins
since these reports also have been identified in purified preparations of “HIV.” It
is not known if these are physically associated with “HIV” virus-like particles and,
if so, whether or not that they have a role in the development of immune
suppression. But it only stands to reason that the proper isolation, identification,
characterization, and most importantly, complete separation of cellular proteins
and cellular nucleic acids that are associated with “HIVs” molecular signature is
a prerequisite to identifying "HIV" as a unique, exogenous virus that causes
Human illness. Only then can "HIV" be said to be "isolated," and then injected in
pure form into an animal model to show that it can cause disease, or be used to
evoke seroconversion and immunity in Human vaccinees.
In other words, when scientists have tried to see “HIV” in
culture dishes or in humans, all anyone has been able to do state of the
art technologies has been to isolate a large amount of cellular debris -- or
what is the "garbage of cells," or their secretions, that is characteristic of
certain diseased states, or bad viral isolation.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Do you think that HIV causes AIDS?
DR. MANIOTIS: No, I don't. I haven't thought so since I
heard Duesberg first give his lecture on the subject 20 years ago, and for
me the evidence is overwhelming now that the virus-like particles thought
at one time to represent “HIV” virus particles cannot possibly cause AIDS.
For instance, there have been more than 30 completed vaccine trials that
were described in the 1995 Congressional Records of “HIV” vaccine
adverse reactions, and in other papers about other failed “HIV” vaccine
trials. The remarkable thing about all of these trials is -- not they have not
protected a single person from acquiring immune suppression, because
they havent, but that they haven't even evoked “HIVs” supposed
molecular signature in vaccinated human beings. This makes no sense at
all if “HIV” or any of "HIV's" components are non-self, and had been
properly isolated, and shown to be the cause of AIDS.
Now, if the components of and "AIDS virus" had been
properly isolated and defined, scientists or physicians should be able to
inoculate these components into a population, and then antibodies
against these components would be generated in most people, just as
though they had a real viral infection. When they inject “HIV's"
components into animals, they do sometimes get antibodies that
correspond to part of “HIVs” molecular signature, but no animal (or
Human) injected by purpose or by accident to date has acquired AIDS
from “HIV," and who has been shown to not have other reasons for
developing profound immune suppression.
In fact Merck just announced last month that its newest and
most promising “HIV” vaccine utterly failed, once again, in Humans.
Indeed, the non-vaccinated group exhibited less “HIV” seroconversions
than did the “HIV-vaccine” group. For me, what is most distressing about
Mercks admission of failure is not that only 24 of the vaccinated group out
of more than 700 vaccinated later showed seroconversion to “HIVs” molecular
signature than the non-vaccinated participants, and that this vaccinated arm
showed more seroconversion than the control non-vaccinated group. What is
disturbing to me and should be to everyone else who is familiar with the
principles and theories of immunization is that the recorded rate of
seroconversion in both groups may simply represent mere “HIV” testing artifacts
or non-specific reactions, because the placebo group in this trial had even a
lower rate of seroconversion than did the vaccinated group. The results of this
trial may have nothing to do with “HIV” at all.
The doctors and scientists who conducted the trial even said, and I
quote it from memory because it was so shocking to me:
“The ultimate fear among researchers is that the whole theory
underlying the Merck vaccine might be flawed, which, if true, could doom an
entire class of experimental vaccines."
In my opinion, it may be more appropriate to say that the whole
theory of "HIV=AIDS" is flawed, because there is no evidence that an exogenous
(coming from outside the body) "AIDS virus" has been isolated or photographed
from a single AIDS patient said to have viremia or even in patients that exhibit a
“viral load” of one million or more, as determined by PCR. And no "HIV isolate"
that I am aware of has been shown to evoke an antibody response in Human
vaccine recipients without the use of adjuvants that non-specifically boost nonspecific
immune responses, or cause disease in either an animal model or a
Human being.
The 2004 VAXGEN trial reported the same failed result that Merck
just reported when they tested their GP120 vaccine, and, as is typical when the
"AIDS establishment" repeatedly fails to deliver anything based on the hypothesis
that “HIV” causes “AIDS,” they are handsomely rewarded for failure. Donald
Francis, the leader of the 2004 GP120 VAXGEN trial and who was a former head
of the CDC's AIDS lab-- his company, VAXGEN, was said to have received more
than $877 millions to scrap their “HIV” vaccine development, and begin making
an anthrax vaccine for the military, at taxpayers expense. Repeated failure in
AIDS research always seems to be rewarded with a perpetual stream of money,
instead of a re-examination of hypotheses and fundamental assumptions.
I think that this kind of tax-payer money would be better spent on
providing support such as a new food called "plumpynut"-a peanut based food
supplement presented by Doctors Without Borders on 60 minutes, who
complained that there were problems finding funding for the plumpynut program
in Africa and elsewhere. Doctors Without Borders vociferously argued that the
plumpynut nutrient mixture was reversing wasting and bringing back countless
children from the jaws of death due to malnutrition, and that it is more important
to provide this cheap and life-saving mixture than even antibiotics. $877 million
dollars worth of plumpynut would go a long way in saving countless African lives,
according to these doctors interviewed on 60 minutes.
Yet Stephen Lewis, UN Secretary-Generals Special Envoy for
HIV/AIDS in Africa, would disagree with these Doctors Without Borders. He said
that other things are more important for Africans than food and water. After
looking into Lewis's impressive credentials, I noticed that in a speech Lewis gave
at the closing session of the XVI International AIDS conference in Toronto, he
presented a list of issues on AIDS in the world and especially in Africa. In his
speech, Lewis spent some time vilifying The South African Minister of Health for
advocating foods that are important for nutrition and health.
He advocated instead that food and clean water are 6th in importance,
preceded by more important practices such as smearing microbicides on the
genitals of Africans, drug-roll-outs, etc. I was surprised that it didnt occur to Mr.
Lewis that these impoverished people at least should be given clean water and
some food to wash down their drugs with, and first establish protein sufficiency,
which they clearly lack.
MR. PAPANTONIOU:
What is the meaning of the molecular signature of “HIV” in a healthy
person who tests “HIV-positive?”
DR. MANIOTIS: Because the components of a retrovirus that
is supposed to cause immune suppression havent been isolated as I
stated before, nor shown to cause immune suppression in humans or
animals, it can be safely stated at this point that the meaning of the
molecular signature of "HIV" has not been found. Similarly, just as with
Hepatitis B where no viremia or cell destruction was seen in the liver of
chimps or mice injected with hepatitis B virus, when they tried injecting
chimpanzees with sera from AIDS patients or what they believed was
purified “HIV,” chimps didn't get sick, nor could viremia be demonstrated
in the so-called organs that the virus was supposed to attack.
In the case of the “HIV” chimp trials, they have built the
chimps retirement homes where they now live comfortably and diseasefree
25 years after being exposed to the blood or “HIV-isolates” of AIDS
patients.
When they did studies on Human sexual couples, one of
which was positive and the other one was negative -- a famous study
known as the Padian study -- they found zero conversions out of
175 pairs of so-called “discordant couples” where one was positive and
one was negative. They all had varying degrees and frequencies of sex,
one assumes, and among many couples, it was not “protected” sex either.
Yet Dr. Padian herself argues that her study does nothing to
belie the official model of “HIV” being sexually transmissible, or even
highly transmissible. This is absurd on the face of it. There were zero
seroconversions in the Padian study, among sexually active serodiscordant
couples, studied over a ten-year period. Many other smaller
studies have shown the same lack of seroconversion among
serodiscordant couples. If Human beings cannot transmit the virus
sexually to one another, how could transmitting “HIVs” molecular
signature to people with a vaccine evoke either seroconversion or
immunity?
There are so many different types of examples why the
“HIV=AIDS” hypothesis fails to explain anything about immune
suppression, and why all these vaccine trials have failed. For instance,
when they launched the anti- breast-feeding programs and they warned
all these African women not to breast-feed because they might pass on
the AIDS virus through their breast milk, they found out -- just this
year -- that the women who were dissuaded from breast-feeding their
infants, had a far higher rate of death among their babies, because the
infants were not achieving the proper protective immunity or nutrition that
goes along with normal breast-feeding in these extremely poverty-stricken
places.
If women cant pass the virus to their offspring through breast
milk, even in populations that are supposed to have high rates of “HIV,”
and have a much higher death rate of their infants if they dont breast
feed, then how could it be even considered a possibility that vaccine
makers could inject some component(s) of “HIV” into a human and induce
protection from immune suppression, or, in the case of the failed Merck
trial mentioned before, evoke “HIVs molecular signature in any significant
number of vaccine recipients? In one arm of the recent Merck trial, for
instance, I believe it was reported that among 778 male volunteers, only 21
of those receiving the vaccine exhibited “HIVs” signature compared with 9 in the
placebo group. Most or all of the vaccinated should have at least shown
seroconversion if “HIVs” components had been isolated and are immunogenic in
Human beings.
What this failure implies to me and many other students of
AIDS, is that the so-called template for the protein molecular signatures of “HIV”
may derive from endogenous DNA sequences (coming from cellular origin
instead of viral origin). These cellular proteins are expressed under certain
conditions by normal uninfected yeast, insects, dogs, rhesus monkeys, chimps,
and humans. “HIV” is said to have 9150 base pairs, but again, this template has
not been purified without contaminating cellular nucleic acids. So, it is likely in my
view that “HIVs” molecular signature could represent a HERV (Human
Endogenous Retrovirus) nucleic acid sequence, or more likely, what is called a
retroid of one kind or another. That these hypothesis are possible has been
shown again and again to be likely from studies on HERVs such as "the Phoenix
viruses," that can be produced by infecting cells with certain sequences of DNA,
which then is packaged by the cells into viral-like particles.
Also, any modern analysis of the Human Genome Database will
reveal more than 120, 000 full-length retroids containing reverse transcriptase
transcripts. Although "HIV=AIDS" proponents are always saying the "HIV virus's"
reverse transcriptase sequence is mutating when patients die on anti-retroviral
drugs that supposedly target this enzyme, genomic analyses show that reverse
transcriptase is among the most stable transcripts that make up these retroids,
and it is the sequence stability rather than the instability or mutability of the
reverse transcriptase sequence itself that make these 120,000 retroids possible
to classify.
What is also remarkable about this is that reverse transcriptase was
once thought by all working in AIDS research to be specific to retroviruses, and
this is the enzyme they first measured, and indeed some labs continue to
measure, as evidence of “HIV infection.” However we are all made up partly of
retroviral components, it is part of us. What they call “HIV” and what they have
successfully branded as the most dangerous and infectious virus known to man,
is (and can be evoked) in many of us, and what we have been mistaking for the
“virus” are the technologies for detecting it, without any of the sober analysis of
what those tests are actually detecting or what “HIVs” molecular signature
means for a Human being. In my mind, the probable "cause of "HIV" are retroids
and/or endogenous HERV sequences, that can be evoked, under stress
conditions, or which may become expressed in healthy persons as part of a
relatively rare genetic polymorphism. Genomics experts such as Australia's
George Miklos of Secure Genetics are in a far better position to describe these
as yet unknown sequence expressions and in papers he has written, for
instance, he raises much doubt regarding the tacit assumption and arrogance
that we know all there is to know about the human genome, or under what
circumstances we may express novel but perhaps steryotypic gene sequences.
There may indeed be a relationship between “HIVs” molecular
signature and immune disorder in some individuals, but the ten million dollar
question science has not been permitted to ask about these individuals is: Like
Viktor Hamburger warned me about once, which comes first? Which is cause and
which is effect, and what is the meaning of the molecular signature of “HIV” in a
healthy person who tests “HIV-positive?”
Now I have to get technical again for a moment: Other so-called
“HIV-specific” sequences, such as those that give rise to the so-called GAG, PR,
RT, ENV molecules are also found in the normal Human genome database. In
gene bank searches, one can find 16 samples of spuma virus transcripts, 6
examples of snakehead virus, 16 samples of FIV (feline immune deficiency
virus), 60 examples of detecting one or more HBV (hepatitis B virus) genes, and
at least 11 cases of “HIV” sequences that are said to be scattered throughout the
normal Human genome, according to the analyses of McClure and other Human
Genome Database analysts.
Although Dr. Gallo and others have claimed that in a stadium full of
"HIV-negative" people, not one molecule of "HIV" will be present, the DAIDS
(Division of AIDS) culturing manual says that if "HIV-infected" cells from human
blood express more than 30 units of “HIV-specific” p24 protein on 2 or 3 separate
tests (30 pg/ml), one is considered “HIV-positive,” and if one sleeps with
somebody without telling them they have these 30 or more units, one can be tried
for attempted murder, one cant obtain health insurance, one might be fired from
his or her job, one might commit suicide, if pregnant one may be frightened into
aborting her baby. If your cells express less than 30 units of this protein 2 or 3
separate times (pg/ml), then one is considered non-"HIV-infected" and is home
free-one can donate blood, sleep with anyone he or she wants, without telling
them his or her “less than 30 status,” etc. How could this be possible if there isn't
one molecule of "HIV" in a stadium full of "HIV-negative" people? Its an arbitrary
measurement of a molecular signature that may have nothing to do with a virus
or immune suppression that is arbitrarily being measured at more than 30 units
for an "infected" person, and less than 30 units for a non-infected person.
P24, by the way, which supposedly is an essential "HIV" protein, is
also found in the thymus gland cells of non-infected “HIV-negative” children.
The confusing thing may be that some of these endogenous cellular
DNA or RNA sequences are only expressed rarely, or in response to
physiological stresses: they arent infectious, and they may represent as much a
17% of the normal human genome according to some scientists.
“HIVs” molecular signature may have nothing to do with a specific virus:
the molecular signature thought to be a virus may in fact be generated also in
response to previously latent real viruses that at some point of physiological
stress provokes a new and complex immune response, which is read as “HIVs
molecular signature. The immune system of a person so infected by multiple or
numerous latent real viral infections could be perpetually generating new
immunogens, which is read by AIDS scientists as an ever changing and mutating
“HIV.” In theory, such an immune chain reaction caused by multiple real viral or
bacterial or fungal infections would be progressively more debilitating for the
stability and effectiveness of immune function, and, a vaccine against any
specific virus or other pathogen would be ineffective against the development of
AIDS. If this hypothesis is correct, then an experimental animal model of AIDS
should be induced in laboratory animals by infecting them at a low multiplicity
with a very large number of diverse viruses, as was suggested one by Nobelist,
and PCR-inventor, Kary Mullis, in a Genetica paper he wrote in 1995.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, what was found
back in 1983 by Dr. Robert Gallo and his French counterpart?
DR. MANIOTIS: Luc Montagnier?
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Yes.
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, actually, Montagnier had a patient come to
him -- to the Pasteur Institute -- with swollen lymph nodes, and he didn't
have all the hallmarks of what we now call "full-blown AIDS." This “Patient
One” had sought medical consultation for swollen lymph nodes, muscle
weakness without fever or weight loss, and for at least two episodes of
gonorrhea. He had had multiple herpes infections. He also tested positive for
cytomegalovirus. The year before, he was treated for syphilis. However, for many
decades, syphilis has been known as “the great imitator” because secondary or
tertiary syphilis patients (and AIDS patients) both exhibit a decline in the
lymphatic system, thymus, and in their entire system of immunity, which includes
a decline in T-helper cells and the ratio with T-suppressor cells is reversed. Other
symptoms of both secondary syphilis and AIDS include such symptoms as fever,
headaches, malaise, vertigo, sweating, insomnia, nausea, weight loss, aching in
the bones and joints, swollen liver, swollen spleen, meningitis, and this stage of
syphilis is often confused with such conditions as infectious mononucleosis,
neuroretinitis, lichen planus, cancer, dementia, and lymphomas. These are the
exact same symptoms said to afflict many AIDS patients.
So it was from this patient that Luc Montagnier isolated
lymphocytes and serum, and tried to infect other healthy lymphocytes in
culture dishes that were derived from human umbilical cords that are now
known to contain virus-like particles such as HERVs (Human Endogenous
Retroviral Particles) as I described before. And when Montagniers group
placed the isolate from Patient One (who had had all these different
diseases prior to his visit to The Pasteur) on healthy Human lymphocyte
cultures, they did detect a very high reverse transcriptase signal (not
“HIV”), and with electron microscopy, they showed the presence of “viruslike
particles,” which in all likelihood, came from the HERVs added from
the healthy cord lymphocytes, or perhaps were contaminants from Patient
One's multiple other viral infections, or perhaps these HERVs were a
stress response from the lymphocytes due to foreign protein stress on the
cells, or due to the chemicals added to "activate" the cells, such as IL-2,
or interferon antibody.
Consequently, the Pasteur group believed and published that
they had found a new retroviral signature they called “LAV” associated
with, but not necessarily causal of, this pre-AIDS condition known as
ARC, in Patient Ones “isolate.” As I mentioned before, one might wonder
how the Pasteur group could separate the reverse transcriptase signal
thought at that time to be specific to retroviruses, from the other 128,000
retroid full-length reverse transcriptase signals now known to exist in the
human genome?
Now, Robert Gallos group, working in Bethesda, had been
working for a long time to try to show that retroviruses cause human
cancer, and a year later (in 1984), Gallo published 4 landmark papers
describing the same magnesium-sensitive reverse-transcriptase-positive
“HIV” signature that Montagniers group detected in Patient Ones sera. In
one of those papers, "HIV's" molecular signature was detected I believe in
48 out of 119 patients, or approximately 1/3. The Bethesda group
believed that when 1/3 of the people they tested showed the same
molecular signature, that the signature was not only associated with
AIDS, but was causal for AIDS.
But in that landmark paper, I believe it was emphasized that HTLVIII
(“HIV”) was detected in only 13 of 43 adult AIDS patients with Kaposi's
sarcoma, and in only 10 of 21 adult AIDS patients with opportunistic infections. In
my mind, these kinds of numbers are insufficient to demonstrate that “HIVs”
molecular signature was the cause of the AIDS symptoms, or immune deficiency.
One would expect most or all of the Kaposis patients (if Kaposis were an AIDSdefining
illness which we now know that its not) to test positive, not 13 out of 43
patients, or expect that most or all of the patients with opportunistic infections
should have tested positive instead of only 10 out of 21 or approximately half. If
anything, the study demonstrated that “HIV's” molecular signature was not
associated with what are considered AIDS patients very often, not to mention a
plausible cause of AIDS. If I drop a ball 100 times, and it falls up two-thirds of the
time, or half the time, and down one third of the time, or only half the time, I
wouldnt feel comfortable saying that gravity causes things to fall down, if you see
what I mean.
The failure to detect “HIVs” molecular signature in sicker patients
while detecting it frequently in patients with no clinical symptoms in the Bethesda
groups studies could have been interpreted differently.
In cancer diagnostics, it is believed that as cancer cells become
more malignant or “disease causing,” it is known that they can lose certain tumorspecific
markers that define what the cells are, such as S-100 if they are highly
invasive melanomas. As melanoma cells become more malignant, they lose this
characteristic melanoma and neural crest marker, but always seem to express it
when the melanoma cells are not so invasive.
Similarly, the Bethesda's group's failure to detect "HIV" in these
"sicker" (Kaposi's, opportunistic infection-presenting) patients may instead have
been due to the fact that "HIV's molecular signature is also the result of a
changing gene expression pattern of cells as patients become sicker, and not
because of some increasing or decreasing "viral load." In other words, because
“HIVs” molecular signature is detected less frequently in sicker patients, “HIVs”
molecular signal may be simply be the result of changes in the cells over time
that produce the signal as patients become sicker, and not because of an
increasing or even decreasing presence of retrovirus particles.
Nevertheless, the Bethesda group published that they
thought that they had found the etiologic agent -- the cause of AIDS -- in a
third to one half of this small group of individuals they tested. This is the
basis of the hypothesis that “HIV” causes AIDS.
But these kinds of data should be compared to others who
have claimed they found a potential and compelling cause of AIDS. For
example, in 1989-1990, a series of articles published by Shyh-Ching Lo of the
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who presented evidence that a microbe
called Mycoplasma incognitus was found in the thymus, liver, spleen, lymph
node, or brain of 22 of 34 persons who had died of AIDS. The patients who were
selected for this autopsy study had all had evidence of organ failures. In another
study, mycoplasma was found in seven of ten persons with AIDS. Also, a much
earlier study had found Mycoplasma incognitus in blood lymphocytes of 12 of 23
living persons with AIDS — but in none of 22 healthy blood donors used as
controls. The mycoplasma was also found in six “HIV-negative” patients with no
sign of AIDS from different parts of the world, who had died in one to seven
weeks of an undiagnosed infection. When four monkeys were injected with
Mycoplasma incognitus, they all died in seven to nine months. The organism was
found in the spleens of all the monkeys, and in some other organs as well. It was
not found in a fifth monkey tested as a control. Electron-microscope
examinations, PCR tests and immunologic tests all showed that the organism
was concentrated in lesions in affected organs, and Mycoplasma incognitus is
unusual in that it often infects and kills tissue without causing an inflammatory
reaction, suggesting that it disables or evades part of the immune system.
Indeed, in a much earlier study, Montagnier's group also reported that
mycoplasma removal agent changed the dynamics of their "LAV" expression,
signifying that this micro-organism may also have been present in "Patient One"
as well as syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, CMV, and perhaps other pathogens.
Michael Gottlieb, the first physician to describe "The AIDS
syndrome" in L.A. in 1981, it should also be mentioned, found cytomegalovirus in
100% of his first two cohorts of patients he reported, but felt that CMV was
opportunistic and not causal for the syndrome his patients had.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Do you think HIV is transmitted
sexually, Professor Maniotis? And what about the use of condoms as a
preventative measure?
DR. MANIOTIS: In theory, condoms can be crucial in
preventing pregnancy and many STD's, and I believe people should be
taught about them at a young age. However, in practice, there is no
evidence that "HIV" is transmitted sexually (or through breast milk as I
discussed earlier). In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it is not,
because -- especially in the condom crusades that have been given
throughout the world, especially in Africa, doctors reported that condoms
and especially microbicides increase the rate of genital ulcers, which
leads to venereal diseases and infections of all kinds, and so condom
crusades and microbicide crusades have not been a success. The
evidence suggests that it has been of no use to push these condoms on
people, as shown by statistics of pregnancies that occur despite the fact
that couples were wearing condoms, or not wearing them, as in the
Padian study I mentioned earlier showed, and which showed zero
seroconversions amongst sero-discordant couples, despite the fact that
as many as a fourth admitted to not using condoms. Circumcision
crusades have been initiated and reported from results obtained largely at
STD clinics according to a conversation I had recently with Dr. Bailey from
my University who led one of the largest circumcision studies, and again,
the numbers don't add up, especially if African statistics are used.
With respect to microbicides, two full- scale microbicide trials
were stopped this year because they found that smearing these noxious
chemicals on the genitals of Africans actually increased the rate of the
appearance of “HIVs molecular signature in these Africans, which was
simply a repeat of past failures. For example, in 2000, a large full-scale trial
showed that another microbicide, nonoxynol-9, was judged to be unsafe when it
had been expected to be effective. Subjects in that trial exhibited a higher
incidence of “HIVs” molecular signature, presumably through ulcers caused by
chemical irritation.
But then again, the AIDS establishment is always rewarded for its
failures, and hundreds of millions keep flowing for these experiments on Africans
and other groups of people in Asia based on a failed hypothesis that has not
produced a single hopeful result in 25 years.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Have you ever had the opportunity to
discuss with Dr. Robert Gallo the crucial issue of the existence of HIV?
DR. MANIOTIS: Yes, I have. As a matter of fact, recently we
had some discussions about it, and I have presented my concerns in a
direct way to him regarding the rules to establish that a virus causes
disease. These rules are known as Kochs postulates. And he and I
agreed that Koch's postulates don't apply to a lot of microorganisms, so
there is no way anyone should think that “HIV” has fulfilled, should fulfill,
or can fulfill any of Kochs or even Hill's postulates. If "HIV" were a real
virus, it could in principle, be extremely difficult to detect, like secondary
syphilis that forms so-called dormant round-bodies, that are observable,
but which are very difficult to isolate according to experts who study
spirochetes like Lynn Margulis and others. However, I believe syphilis
always can be isolated from everyone (and treated most successfully) in
the primary stage.
But simply because other so-called pathogenic
microorganisms havent been definitively isolated or characterized either,
doesnt mean we should go about setting up global health policy
programs as if they were properly isolated and characterized, simply
because one believes its better to do something than nothing. This is not
science. Its a faith-based belief system. Yet Dr. Gallo still believes that
the culprit for AIDS is “HIV,” and he knows that I have serious
reservations regarding the isolation issue, or as he put it, "Andy you have
very unorthodox views about HIV/AIDS."
In another recent phone conversation, I asked him to provide
us with a picture of the virus from his laboratory notebooks that he claims
to have stored away since 1984. And I told him that all he would need to
do is publish that picture, done a special kind of way, which is called a
sucrose density gradient isolation, or even better, from the blood of a
patient who is said to have a "high viral load" as measured by PCR. But
he told me that he doesn't need to do that, or that it would be trivial, and
that nobody in the "AIDS establishment" would accept it anyway because
they don't use direct evidence of viral isolation anymore as proof of viral
isolation, and that amplification of “HIVs” molecular signature in cancer
cell lines as he achieved using interleukin II and lectin stimulation, as his
group achieved in 1984, is sufficient to prove causality. I also politely
suggested to him at some point during this conversation that if you start
with cellular garbage or junk, and amplify that cellular junk, what you will
be left with is simply a lot more cellular junk, not a proper isolate where
the thing itself, the "HIV" virus, has been isolated away from all other
objects in the universe.
What is being amplified, I told him, might simply be poorly
characterized cellular nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids from both
diseased, or healthy individuals or from endogenous retroviruses or
retroids that all exhibit components of "HIV's" molecular signal, and for
reasons that are not yet clear scientifically, but that deserve further study.
But Dr. Gallo and others in the "AIDS establishment" insist
that they trust indirect methods of isolation-a process known as molecular
cloning, but they don't realize -- in my opinion -- that before you can clone
anything, first you have to separate it from the thing that it is infecting.
And they don't believe that isolation to the point of purity or
near purity is necessary. I think it is necessary. And until they do that,
there will be -- in my viewpoint, no evidence that “HIV” either exists or that
it causes AIDS.
If a molecular signature can be used to determine the future
of a persons life or a nations or planet's health, one must be sure that
that signature is not due to complex immunological changes that occur for
instance in many women after multiple pregnancies, or in patients with
autoimmune syndromes such as lupus, and 70 other syndromes that are
known to generate positive "HIV" signatures that aren't AIDS. But “HIVs”
molecular signature is commonly expressed by these people.
Most importantly, the nature and plasticity of potentially
steryotypic signals of especially the immune cells or cancer cells
genomes under various stressful and even normal states are not yet
known. Despite "AIDS establishment" claims that the whole Human
genome has been sequenced and is known, and that “HIVs” molecular
signature isnt found in the normal human genome, or in stadiums full of
"HIV-negative" people, the nature of some immune cells is their unique
ability to re-arrange their genomes to produce antibodies to new agents.
Therefore, all possible or even steryotypic re-arrangements of the
genomes of immune cells is not yet sequenced, because, these rearrangements
have not yet occurred because the antigens that will evoke
them have not yet plagued Mankind yet, or, more likely, such novel
sequences may only be assembled or evoked in immune cells when
certain stresses are placed on the individual, and presumably, the Human
Genome project didn't sequence these individual's genomes, or indeed
the Human genome that is in every subgroup of Human beings. Only
"representative" genomes have been sequenced: not every individual's
who lives in the Human population. And we have no idea regarding what
most of these so-called genes do, or how they function.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: How do you explain the fact that from
1983 to the present, scientists have not been able to find a vaccine to
cure or to prevent this deadly disease?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, to make a vaccine, as Pasteur
successfully did with anthrax, with rabies, and with chicken cholera with
only two lab technicians and without the $800 million dollar support that
VAXGEN received after the failed AIDSVAX vaccine, and without the
dollars that Merck invested in its failed “HIV” vaccine this month, first you
need to isolate the microbe that causes the disease.
The first step is to find and purify a microbe, and then inject it
into non-infected animals to show you can cause the same illness. And
as I mentioned before, when they thought they did that to chimps with
“HIV” -- our closest relatives to man -- they didn't get sick, they didn't even
acquire a cold. Nothing happened.
"HIV" researchers will say that they have animal models
using "SIV," or "Simian Immune Deficiency Viruses," but this is not "HIV,"
and you should ask them why they believe that "SIV" is a better model
than "HIV," and why they can't get "HIV" to cause AIDS in any
experimental animal.
Among Humans, there have been no hospital cases of AIDS
reported in a number of different countries, in which patients who test
“HIV-positive” have been definitively shown not to have other known
reasons for immune-suppression. If “HIV” were infectious, wouldnt you at
least expect a few out of the thousands and thousands of health care
workers who come in contact with AIDS, to contract AIDS and who could
be shown not to have other reasons for acquiring immune suppression?
These are all examples why, since 1983, I believe there has
been no forthcoming evidence that “HIV,” or its molecular signature
represents a public health threat, and why none of the more than 30
vaccine trials have evoked "HIV's" molecular signature in Humans or
protected a single Human being from acquiring immune suppression.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Since we are discussing the virus, do
you think that the HIV virus could have been created by someone. In
other words, could it be synthetic?
DR. MANIOTIS: No, there is no evidence that it is a
synthetic virus or the result of any sort of conspiracy because, first of
all -- as I mentioned before -- if it were, it would be a real virus. You could
isolate it. You could make a vaccine against it. You could photograph it
without cellular debris and you could infect animals with that pure isolate
and produce a disease.
And since you can't do any of these things with “HIV,” there is
no reason to suspect that-- as Boyd Graves and other people have
advanced the idea--it was a manufactured virus.
Nor is there any reason to believe, in my opinion, that it came
from the polio vaccination era in Africa in the 1950s, as has been
proposed by others. Despite the fact that the polio vaccine was first made
in African green monkey kidney cells (and perhaps illegally in the kidneys
of chimps as some claim), and then inoculated into a continent of Africans
during the 1950's and 60's for the so-called preventative polio campaigns,
doesnt mean that “HIV” derived from these early polio preparations.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: There is talk that the U.S. government-
-actually, the Bush Administration— may be pressing for legislation
requiring mandatory HIV testing for Americans between the ages of 3 and
80? What is your opinion on the matter?
DR. MANIOTIS: I think that is the biggest mistake that the
U.S. could make -- the most costly mistake and the most damaging
mistake for the largest amount of people possible because when you test
populations of people that are considered what the "AIDS establishment"
says are “low risk,” you are going to get a huge number of false-positive
test results, which is essentially going to ruin the lives of tens of
thousands or perhaps as many as hundreds of thousands of people.
Let me give you an example. For instance, in 1992, the Russians
reported that out of 20.2 million HIV tests done in Russia, only 112 were
confirmed and about 20,000 were false positives. In 1991 there were some
30,000 false positives out of 29.4 million tests, with only 66 confirmations...in
1991 alone some 8000 false-positive results were reported in pregnant women,
with only 6 confirmations.
112 “confirmed “HIV” molecular signatures out of 20 million
negative ones in one year, or 30,000 or so false positives out of
30,000,000 the year before dont constitute numbers that signal a major
AIDS pandemic. The numbers could arguably constitute statistical artifact,
or, the several who seroconverted may represent the presence of some
kind of auto-immune condition in those who test positive, like psoriasis, or
warts, or physiological stress, a genetic polymorphism, or, testing error.
If a ball falls up 19,999,888 times, and falls down 112 times, I
wouldnt be to confident that gravity causes objects to fall. Moreover,
these kinds of numbers among “low risk” individuals does not constitute a
global AIDS pandemic, nor can it account for the some 15,000 immune
suppression-associated deaths per year in the U.S. which takes up more
of the biomedical budget than cancer, diabetes, and heart disease
combined, although these diseases, such as cancer, kill 500,000 or more
a year in the U.S.
Many other similar studies indicate, in addition, that you are
going to get a number of people who really are not sick in any way, shape
or form, to test positive. And they won't be able to get health insurance.
They may be fired from their jobs. The stigma of having AIDS causes
suicide, as it did with David Acer, the dentist whom the CDC later exonerated
(after his suicide), because the CDC could find no evidence after he committed
suicide that the dentist's 5 “HIV-positive” patients contracted their “HIV”
signatures from him. There is evidence, however, that countless others who
have been given the diagnosis of an “HIV infection,” in addition to Dr.
Acer, have chosen to end their lives upon getting an “HIV-positive” test
result.
Since expanding the AIDS definition in 1993 to include "HIV
positives" with no clinical symptoms of disease, the majority of all new AIDS
cases in America are diagnosed in healthy people with none of the opportunistic
infections or Kaposi's sarcoma previously used to define AIDS. Epidemiology
reports from around the US reveal that for the past 14 years, non-illness is the
leading reason for an AIDS diagnosis in America, and depending on the region,
45% to 75% of all AIDS cases reported since 1981 were counted in clinically
healthy HIV positives. Across the border in Canada where the AIDS definition still
requires actual illness, AIDS cases per capita are 18 times lower than in the US.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Taking into consideration what you
are saying, what would you then advise people to do should the US
government demand of doctors, "You must test all the patients for HIV"?
DR. MANIOTIS: Write to your senators and public health
officials about the fact that universal "HIV" testing is a violation of the
Nuremberg Code, the Helsinki Accord. It is a violation of human rights to
accuse persons of having a so-called communicable or a reportable virus
that has not been isolated or that really has not been shown to cause
illness. It is the world that George Orwell described. I believe this
recommendation is in part due to the 2005 Biodefense and Pandemic and
Vaccine and Drug Development Act —a bill borne of the fear mongering tactics of
big pharma's marriage to the Bush administration to amend the Public Health
Service Act to enhance biodefense dollars and so-called pandemic preparedness
activities, to use untested vaccines, drugs, medical products, or security
countermeasures without any liability for claims for loss of property, personal
injury, or death.
Another principal issue to reconcile before universal testing is
implemented is that the makers of the test kits used to measure “HIV” or
progression to “AIDS” are themselves aware of these issues, because they all
claim their ELISA, Western Blot, and PCR-based kits can't really detect “HIV”
virus.
For example, Abbott Laboratorys ELISA HIV test kit package
insert says that ELISA testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS.
Which other test do you need and why do you need it if they are so
accurate? Perhaps the most important statement on Abbotts insert says that:
“At present, there is no recognized standard for establishing the
presence or absence of HIV antibody in Human blood.”
Epitopes Western Blot test kit insert says, do not use this kit as the
sole basis for diagnosing HIV infection.
Why not?
Roches PCR amplicor HIV monitor test says that it is not intended
to be used as a screening test for HIV, nor as a diagnostic test to confirm HIV
infection.
If it isnt a screening or diagnostic test, then what kind of test is it? A
lie detector to see if youve been sleeping around?
The NucliSens HIV assay says that is not intended to be used as a
screening test for HIV, nor used as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of
HIV-1 infection.
So, you cant screen with it or diagnose anybody with it? Do you
see what I mean?
"COBAS AmpliScreen HIV-1 test says that it is not intended for use
as an aid in diagnosis.”
Whats it intended for then?
The Cambridge Biotechs HIV Western Blot Kit insert says that the
clinical implications of antibodies to HIV in an asymptomatic person are “not
known.” This caveat on the package insert is actually a printed concession that it
is not known whether HIV is the cause of AIDS. It's right there in the HIV test kit
itself.
We are constantly told by the media and government that the
clinical significance of the antibodies meant that you were going to die of AIDS
eventually. How can they give drugs to millions on other continents or to infants,
or to anyone else, without knowing what the clinical significance of testing
positive is?
The OraSure HIV Western Blot kit is not intended for use with
blood, serum, plasma, or urine specimens, or for screening or reinstating
potential blood donors.
Who is left to test then? Why should the molecular signature of
“HIV” vary from fluid to fluid in the body, or why cant you test a blood donor but
you can test a health care worker or someone else? Do you think it matters to
any of the "AIDS establishment" that a single Orasure ELISA without a
confirmatory WESTERN blot was used in 2001 in the Nelson Mandela study in
South Africa to show that 4.8 million people are infected?
These are not typos on the package inserts of these tests: they are
caveats written on the test kits that free the test kit manufacturers from liability.
Rapid tests have been shown to be fraudulent and have even been banned and
confiscated by the FDA. Why? Because none of these test kits has been
validated against the isolation of a virus, “HIV.”
MR. PAPANTONIOU: What do you think about AIDS
medications, Professor Maniotis? How do you explain the fact that the
pharmaceutical companies have produced over 32 drugs to fight the
disease and that the proponents of the paradigm say they “save lives?”
Dr. MANIOTIS: I think it has been shown that at certain
doses, some of the drugs act as powerful antifungals for example, and
therefore may be effective against a syndrome in which yeast overgrowth
is a huge factor. Because it is known that AZT, for instance, and other
drugs are toxic to mitochondria as was found by Marinos Dalakas, it is
possible that these drugs may have potent antibacterial effects on some
patients as well. Having said that, it is always important that one should
carefully read the package insert of any drug you take for your own
assessment of the risks and benefits. I tell that to everybody, no matter
what drug they take. Read the adverse reactions and the post-marketing
experience for the side effects. All of them are available on the internet.
The first AIDS drug, as I mentioned, was AZT, which was
passed in a record four months in an FDA trial that was shown to be
fraudulent. John Lauritsen wrote a devastating account about this trial.
Through obtaining records through the Freedom of Information Act, he
documented how certain arms of the Fischl trial such as the Boston arm
were going to be thrown out because they mixed up the patients, they
gave some patients in the control group the drug, and the study became
unblinded because AZT is so toxic at the doses given in the Fischl trial.
Approval for the drugs use in AIDS patients was passed
because 19 patients died in the so-called non-treated group, and one
patient died in the AZT-treated group. But what was found later -- the
group that had been given the AZT actually needed life-saving
transfusions and other medical interventions during the trial to stay alive.
If they hadn't been given these interventions, there would have been
about 30 people in the AZT-treated group that would have died during
those 4 months compared to the19 in the non-drug-treated group. At four
months, all the patients were placed on AZT because the "AIDS
Establishment" doesnt know how to run a complete experiment with
control groups, and several years later, I believe, most of the patients
were dead. Great drug!
A European collaboration a couple of years later, repeated
the AZT trial at similar dosages in much longer and larger trial called the
Concorde trial, where it was found that AZT did no good, and it had no
benefit.
When the Veterans Administration did an AZT trial, they
actually found that it harmed patients who were healthy more than it
helped patients who were very sick.
And Dr. John Hamilton's (of the Department of Veterans
Affairs) conclusion was that AZT particularly harmed Blacks and
Hispanics and had no significant effect on Caucasians. Now, in recent
years, HAART (Highly Active AntiRetroviral Therapy) has been given with
the protease inhibitors, and you can read it for yourself in The New
England Journal of Medicine and the Journal AIDS, that the leading cause
of death these days from AIDS is liver failure, heart problems, and that the
protease inhibitors can kill normal healthy lymphocytes. Liver failure and
cardiovascular diseases are not AIDS-defining illness. It is an effect of
toxic medications.
And why should these drugs affect “races” differently, despite
the fact that there really is no such thing as race in humans as measured
genetically?
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, do you know of
HIV-diagnosed patients who have refused to take medication and yet are
living today?
DR. MANIOTIS: Yes, I know quite a few of them, actually,
because they have contacted me over the years.
They are very courageous people, and, you know, I give
them complete support for what they are doing because --
MR. PAPANTONIOU: How do they live?
DR. MANIOTIS: I can give you examples. Even opposite
types of examples, where there have been people who never really tested
positive, but they were told by doctors they tested positive, and then they
put them on the medications and they acquired AIDS-defining illnesses.
I know a woman who I have been helping for a number of
years with that scenario. In other words, they failed to tell her she had a
negative HIV test, she got drunk and crashed a car because she was so
upset about the “HIV” death sentence she had received. She then was
arrested, put into prison, and they put her on 4 toxic medications She
developed debilitating persistent diarrhea, weight loss, asthma, persistent
vaginal bleeding, thrombocytopenia, heart problems, fibrosarcomas of the
breasts, she had her uterus removed because of persistent bleeding due
to the drug. Because the Department of Child and Family Services
thought she might somehow infect her daughter, her twelve-year old
daughter was taken away from her by the state and institutionalized,
where the child was sexually assaulted and acquired 2 STDs. Nine years
later, the mother found out after taking 6 consecutive ELISA tests that she
never had had an “HIV-positive” ELISA test. It was a mistake. Over the 9
years of her mistaken “HIV” diagnosis, it may be of some interest that her
T-cells never fell below about 800, despite almost 9 years of continuous
HAART treatment including Bactrim.
Although she stopped the medications on her own, she
continued to exhibit profound thrombocytopenia, and she developed
bruises all over her legs, cardiovascular problems increased, and she has
fought a daily battle to maintain her weight because her intestines dont
work any more to absorb food, and she is still plagued by constant
diarrhea. Persistent diarrhea, anemia, and thrombocytopenia are classic
AIDS-defining illnesses, but they are also the result of DNA chain
terminating drugs like AZT.
Other people are the opposite. They refused to take the
medications from the very beginning. They still test "HIV-positive" 12, 14,
19, 23 years later, and they live perfectly healthy and happy lives.
So, these are two polar opposites, the extremes.
And, you know, there is everything in between. I have been
talking to an “HIV-positive” man recently -- I can't tell you names, but he
stopped the medications on his own in 2000. And this is a heartbreaking,
repeated story. Although stopping the medications on his own in 2000,
he developed liver cancer last year, and died of it a few nights ago. He
will be listed as an AIDS death, but, liver cancer is not an AIDS-defining
illness.
Another woman took AZT and the HAART for about 12 years,
and got to a point where she couldnt write a check, or walk around her
bed or take a shower because of peripheral neuropathy due to the
medications. Now she can dance and swim, and hasnt suffered a single
day since she stopped HAART earlier this year.
All of these stories are fascinating, because, as a cancer
biologist, I am absolutely stunned at the resiliency of the Human body
when it is toxified with cell-division and other life-disrupting poisons, while
the AIDS doctors marvel at the fact that these folks when they take these
toxic drugs stop producing parts of the molecular signature(s) of “HIV”
and they think they have quelled “HIV.”
In all likelihood, these toxic drugs merely block the production
of the protein and nucleic acid debris associated with "HIV's" molecular
signature, because they so severely inhibit the cells of the body from
producing these proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids, as long as the drug is
taken. They can also stimulate T-cell counts for a while, because T-cells
become stimulated, like all cells, when they are given toxins, like growth
factors. Nerve Growth Factor is a good example of a toxin that stimulates
cells. It stimulates peripheral neurons to grow, and, it was originally
derived from snake venom. Cholera toxins are used routinely in the lab to
stimulate all kinds of cells to divide. Why should an immune suppressive
drug like AZT or Saquinavir be any different. They both are toxic to
immune cells, and the body tries to adjust, for awhile, until the drugs
eventually take their toll and render the progenitors of these cells in the
bone marrow and elsewhere too sick to produce immune cells or other
types of cells any more. I have heard these same kinds of stories dozens
and dozens of times from different people.
And I also know of people who did take the medicines that
are living today and claim that they don't have any side effects, like that
champion against Apartheid, Judge Cameron of South Africa, who wrote
a book about his experience called, “Witness to AIDS.” In his book and in
other things he has written, he calls all of those of us who have
reservations about the “HIV/AIDS hypothesis, “Holocaust deniers”
because he believes everybody should have the same response to the
drugs that he did, and anyone who doesnt, or anyone who has scientific
questions about “HIV/AIDS,” he calls irresponsible “Holocaust denialists.”
I resent the term because my direct ancestors did more than
most countries in Europe to protect the Jews for 11 months during the
Nazi occupation, and arguably, because they warded off the Germans for
that long, the Russians were able to prepare for the winter assault, and
then with the combined forces Hitler was defeated! I resent anyone calling
me a “denialist” because it is in insult to the blood that was lost in Greece
to protect the Jews and to resist the Nazis.
Drug responses are complicated. There is no one outcome.
There always are always a spectrum of responses that are impossible to
predict. Either patients stop taking their medications and they do
fine -- depending on how long they have taken the medications. Often,
how long they have taken the medications will determine how well they do
after they stop. I am aware of several “drug holiday” studies that say the
opposite (drug holiday means stopping the AIDS drugs), but these are
short term and flawed studies. If they have taken the ARVs for a short
period of time, chances are they can recover quite well from the drugs
toxic effects after they stop them. Long-term usage of these drugs,
however, is problematic.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, how do you
respond to those who characterize HIV/AIDS as a black and gay disease?
Do you agree?
DR. MANIOTIS: The way I respond to those who
characterize HIV as a black disease is that I remind them of the history,
first, of how Dr. Gallo claimed to have found HTLV-1, and HTLV-II, which
were supposed "cancer viruses," in a population of Japanese and very
poor Caribbean black people, which was the paradigm and technology
upon which the idea that “HIV” could cause AIDS was based.
In a particular region of Japan 175 miles from Nagasaki, Dr.
Gallo believed that HTLV-1s molecular signature was a more likely cause
of leukemia than the atomic bomb dropped on that civilian population by
the United States some 50 years ago.
And somehow, through "the slave trade," as Dr. Gallo
imagined it -- he used the words "slave trade," I believe, if you read his
writings -- he thought "HTLV-1" was a Human "cancer virus" that was
carried from Africa throughout the world along with the Black slaves, until
it arrived also on the Southern region of these Japanese islands. But later
"HTLV-1s" molecular signature was subsequently found in other regions
of the world as well that werent along the routes of the so-called “slave
trade.”
Similarly, “HIV” was supposed to have come from black
Africa, from persons who either played with dead monkeys or who ate
their meat as it was once published in The Lancet, or who, in the white
colonialists mind perhaps, had some kind of close unspeakable contact
with these non-human primates. Somehow, from Africa, “HIV” supposedly
arrived in the Caribbean, where it was advanced in the 1980s that gay
men vacationing from San Francisco supposedly picked it up from black
men there by having sex with them.
Having studied physical anthropology in college, it isnt
difficult for me to see a failure to separate science from racism. Blacks
just cant be responsible for every infectious disease of Mankind: from
“HIV,” to Hepatitis B (its molecular signature was fist found first in the
blood of a Black Australian aboriginal), West Nile virus (supposedly found
first in a Black woman in "the Nile district" in 1937, who had a cold),
"HTLV-1" and "HTLV-II" from the Blacks imported during “the slave trade,”
etc.
The problem with designating "HTLV-I" or HTLV-II" or “HIV”
as "Black diseases," or to say that they came from Black people, is that
there is no evidence that "HTLV-I or II played any role whatsoever during
the “slave-trading” events Dr. Gallo imagined, or in the case of "HIV,"
there isn't a shred of evidence that "HIV" could have been transmitted by
dead monkeys to Black African children "lacking toys" as it was proposed,
or by adults eating of monkeys and chimps. First of all, neither virus has
been shown to cause either cancer or AIDS, and as far as I am aware,
you cant pick up “HIV” through your digestive tract by eating a
McDonalds hamburger that somebody who is supposed "HIV-positive just
took a bite of, or even from uncooked meat. Blacks, after supposedly
killing, eating, or playing with dead monkeys or chimps, as was written
once in The Lancet, couldnt have either. "HIV's" molecular signature isn't
transmissible, as far as I know, through eating food or playing with
objects.
Furthermore, “HIV” cannot be discriminating of race or even
sexuality if it were a transmissible syndrome. No other STD discriminates
between the sexes or races. Another problem of course, is that to
advance the idea, for instance, that "HTLV-1" causes leukemia in 6 out of
10,000 persons who live 175 miles from Nagasaki, or that “HIV” can only
be acquired and cause AIDS on average after thousands of sexual acts
according to "AIDS establishment figures, is like saying (in the case of the
HTLV-1 “cancer virus"):It is human to accept as fact that which is often repeated. The power of habit
subverts critical thinking. “If you say something and repeat it often, something
from the meaning of what is being said will remain.” So said Joseph Goebbels,
Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister. Alas, the courage, the vigor and the progress
of a culture is judged by its will and its ability to examine and to re-examine, to
question the status quo. If this approach constitutes the basis of dialogue between
one human being and another, in science--which constitutes the foundation of a
dialogue between man and his existence--such an approach is crucial. Science
itself demands it, providing it takes place within an appropriate ethic.
Unfortunately, the deontology of scientific dialogue is trampled more often than
we imagine. The history of a partly sexual pandemic is a shattering example of
what can result.
When AIDS was introduced to humanity during the decade of the 80’s,
humanity was seized with panic and turned to its vanguard, the scientists, for
answers and for protection. That was the proper thing to do. The problem is that
the justifiable sense of urgency generated a rush within the scientific community
to come up with answers. Money, lots of money was devoted to finding both
culprit and cure. Glory, lots of glory awaited the scientists who could solve the
mystery. AIDS, in some respects, became for researchers an El Dorado, a gold
fever with the added lure of a Nobel Prize. Society demanded a quick fix. But as is
often the case, haste is the mother of all errors. This might well explain in large
part what has occurred in the field of AIDS research. Initially, relying on
questionable data, scientist Dr. Robert Gallo introduced what he termed "his own"
HLTV-1, a virus associated at extremely low frequency, with rare forms of human
leukemia‚ Shortly thereafter, searching in the same field of retrovirology, Gallo
announced that he had found the cause of AIDS.
Once again, Herbert Spencer would be proved right: “Men believe to be
true what they prefer to be true.” And men prefer to believe that science is a tower
of certitude with an air of papal infallibility. And yet, in science the degree of
uncertainty is always larger than that of certainty. A true scientist is one who
identifies with the Socratic proverb: “I know one thing: that I don‘t know
anything.” This is the sine qua non of scientific advancement. Data is collected,
examined and re-examined. It is subjected to a rigorous process of investigation
and reason. According to Karl Popper, disproof is an essential criterion in
determining the validity of a theory. Where is disproof in the case of HIV-AIDS?
Is it a scientific certainty? Or is it pseudo-scientific dogma with almost theological
undertones? Nevertheless, the scientific community has embraced it. And this is a
powerful argument in the eyes of society.
Then again who said that science is democratic--that what has been proven
scientifically is commonly acceptable? In his era, Einstein’s theory was attacked
as wrong. Barry Marshall became a laughing-stock among his colleagues when he
proposed the Helicobacter pylori as a cause of the gastric ulcer. Now Marshal has
a Nobel Prize on his fireplace mantle to help him forget the barren years of
ridicule and humiliation. Even winners of the Nobel Prize are subjected to ridicule
by some in the scientific community. The Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis who
invented PCR, and Walter Gilbert strongly objected to the idea that evidence had
been presented that “HIV” had been shown to cause AIDS.
Science however is not affected by the consensus of the many, as history
has proven time and again. Science cannot be absolute; it is always relative. It is
not theology; it is not a God-given 10 Commandments. It is the product of data
collection and examination by perspicuous minds, to be accepted or rejected by
specialized social mechanisms. If its foundation is flawed, its structure is baseless.
This is what science is all about. In the final analysis science is a social product
created by human beings and like anything else is prone to error. When science
ceases to be self-critical and chooses instead self-selection, it is at a loss to
pinpoint errors. In the interest of self-protection, scientists-barons effectively
drown dissent, sharing only their own conclusions. Like feudal lords of old, they
exile those who question their findings. They lay down the law, dismissing
discussion and denigrating dispute or open discussion.
Today, fellow countryman and distinguished scientist Andrew Maniotis has
dared to dispute the cause and the treatment of an epidemic the mainstream
scientific community has cast in stone. His discipline allows it; the dialectic of
science demands it. Society is obligated to hear it. The possibility that millions of
individuals around the world might be misdiagnosed with AIDS and prescribed
unnecessary and evidently harmful medications is frightening enough. And
precisely because it is frightening, and stigmatizing, the issue must be discussed.
The wax of propaganda must be removed from our ears. We owe it to ourselves to
hear dissenting views of scientists Andrew Maniotis. Peter Duesberg, Kary Mullis,
Walter Gilbert, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, to name a few. They have the
courage to speak out against the status quo. We are obliged to listen to what they
have to say.
LAMBROS PAPANTONIOU
TAPE TRANSCRIPTION
P R O C E E D I N G S
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Dr. Maniotis, first of all, thank you very
much for your time to provide this exclusive interview on the crucial issue
of HIV/AIDS for publication in the Greek and international press.
For the record, can you tell us about your personal
background: who you are, what you do, and how you came to deal with
the issue of HIV/AIDS?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, thank you very much, Lambros, for
allowing me this chance to speak about this important issue. And I would
like to dedicate this interview to all of those that have died of the
syndrome called AIDS since the AIDS era began in the 1980's, and to
those who are still suffering.
I obtained my undergraduate degree in Physical
Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and then had the
good fortune to become trained as a lab technician in several well-known
neurobiology labs at the medical school. During this time, around 1981,
dire warnings were given to us because we handled a lot of human blood.
We were repeatedly warned that there might be a new kind of infectious
agent that was deadly, called prions, or what was characterized as "slow
viruses devoid of nucleic acid," which didn't follow the rules of other
known pathogens, and which could not be killed by heat, or sterilizing
chemicals. One of my bosses there, who was a famous neurobiologist
named Richard Bunge, invited the framer of this hypothesis, D. Carlton
Gajdusek, the Nobelist to give a talk about this work. As a young scientist
looking for a science to master and a role model to emulate, I saw
Gajdusek as a role model, and I perceived that his synthetic contribution
that merged anthropology with medicine as something I would someday
like to emulate, and I met him when he gave his talk.
In that same lab, I also met Viktor Hamburger, a famous
neurobiologist who was given an office there toward the end of his career.
He used to come into the culture room where I would be growing
Schwann cells and neurons to produce myelin in vitro, and he'd come
behind me and say, "Andy. Ya know, there isn't any causality in biology."
Hamburger was the famous embryologist that made it possible for Rita
Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohn to get the Nobel for their discovery of
nerve growth factor, as he made it possible for Montalcini to flee from the
Nazi-occupied Italy and he guided her studies in neurobiology.
After several years as a lab technician, I decided to go to Berkeley,
California, to obtain a Ph.D. in cell biology. During my graduate studies
there, I met Peter Duesberg at a talk that he gave in our department about
his concerns regarding how retroviruses may or may not cause cancer or
AIDS.
And, at the time, he was very concerned about the fact that
everything that he had studied about retroviruses and cancer for some
20 years – for which he had been well rewarded by the medical
establishment- was being ignored by those proposing the “HIV=AIDS”
hypothesis.
When it was pronounced by Margaret Heckler that "HIV" was
a variant of a known cancer virus and that "HIV" causes AIDS" in 1984,
Peter Duesberg spoke up and said that much of what had been learned
about retrovirology could not possibly explain the syndrome that was
beginning to be reported in LA, San Francisco, and New York.
I began studying the issue at that time because I, of course,
was interested in cancer. And, as I believed Duesberg to have a valid
argument against “HIV” causing AIDS because of his scholarship and
because of an enormous, encyclopedic review article that he wrote and
published in Cancer Research, in 1987, called "Viruses as Carcinogens
and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality." It was in this article that
Duesberg debunked the hypothesis that there can be "slow viruses" that
cause cancer years after infection, and also, it seemed clear to me that
the virus-cancer establishment, and perhaps also, the prion hypothesis
both were mistaken regarding how a virus or virus-like agent could cause
disease after years of no symptoms. And in a virus lab that I worked in
after my PhD. I learned that Professor Hamburger's warnings about
causality in general, and with respect to viruses and "multiplicities of
infection" in particular, at least, had merit, and were worth exploring. I felt,
in addition, that Duesberg had a very strong case about the fact that
HTLV-1, HTLV-II, HPV, HBV, or what was then called LAV and HTLV-III
(now called “HIV”) could not cause either cancers or immune suppression
years after infection, because it was not in the nature of or proven that
any known retroviruses cause cancer or immune suppression in healthy
populations of animals or humans, or sit dormant in a cell for years before
transforming them into cancerous cells.
So, I exhaustively studied and eventually accepted
Duesbergs arguments on cancer retroviruses and “HIV” for about six
years, until I arrived at Harvard, where I worked with Donald Ingber,
Judah Folkman, and other people there who were experts in
angiogenesis (the growth of blood vessels) and tumor angiogenesis (the
growth of blood vessels around tumors).
Now, at that time, tumor angiogenesis, and the biology of
endothelial cells, were thought to be at the root of all tumor growth and
consequently, important to understand in the context of one of the first
so-called AIDS-defining illnesses, which was Kaposi's sarcoma. I
became aware that Dr. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of "HIV's
molecular signature, had contacted our lab director, Dr. Judah Folkman,
to ask him to help explain how "HIV" could possibly cause Kaposi's
sarcoma.
It finally was determined later that “HIV” could not possibly
cause what was thought to be one of the first two types of AIDS-defining
illnesses, Kaposis sarcoma, or "the Gay cancer" as it was called at that
time, or other cancers.
The building I worked in at Harvard was called "The John
Enders Building" because the famous John Enders who had been so
instrumental in growing the virus associated with polio in Human cell
cultures made his discoveries there. During the polio era, Bernice Eddy,
Maurice Hilleman of Merck, and others at the Fox Chase Cancer Institute
in Philadelphia had discovered that a putative cancer virus that had
contaminated the polio vaccine from non-human primate cell cultures and
named SV-40, had inadvertently been given to about 300 million human
beings on several continents by accident during the Salk and Sabin polio
vaccine campaigns of the 1950's and early 60's. It was feared that entire
nations would come down with cancers due to the polio vaccine crusades,
jokes were made that the Soviets would lose the 1964 Olympic Games
because they all would come down with cancers, and even Merck decided
to stop its polio vaccine program. John Enders tried to correct this
problem by growing the virus associated with polio in Human cell cultures,
so that future putative contaminating "cancer viruses" or other viruses
from non-human primate cells wouldn't again be injected into hundreds of
millions of children in future vaccine crusades.
I became aware that although it was shown that the
contaminating simian SV-40 cancer virus that came from monkey and
chimp kidney cell cultures could transform hamster and other animal cells
by Bernice Eddy, Maurice Hilleman, and others, I was always impressed
by the fact that in this vast Human experiment in which attenuated or live
poliovirus was injected or administered along with the putative SV-40
cancer-causing virus into hundreds of millions of unsuspecting children
didn't cause cancer epidemics.
Carefully controlled studies conducted for 35 or more years
have failed to show that SV-40 when injected directly into millions of
children, has led to an increase in cancer. I suppose it could be argued that
the 35 year post-polio vaccine mortality studies, initiated because the so called
potent cancer-causing primate virus, SV-40 was inoculated into more than 300
million Human beings, along with the polio virus, has not been long enough to
determine if SV-40 is contributing to escalating cancer rates. However, one
couldn't ask for a more convincing experiment that a virus that can cause cancer
in animals may not be able to do so in Humans, even as potentially devastating
as this mass Human experiment could have turned out if this animal cancer virus
has caused cancer in Humans.
Indeed, the thirty-five year mortality study on people now in middle
age following receipt of SV40 simian (cancer) virus-contaminated polio vaccine
show that out of 1073 newborns that were vaccinated and carefully followed for
35 years (which the authors claim is not really long enough), there has been no
apparent increase in cancer above the expected background incidences in this
carefully followed subgroup, according to Carroll-Pankhurst et al., in the British
Journal of Cancer. Scientists in Australia, however, believe there has
been an increase in brain cancer and mesotheliomas due to the SV-40,
but their studies aren't as long-term as Pankhurst's.
I then stumbled upon writings from a group of scientists from Australia
who were at The Royal Perth Hospital who had formed “The Perth
Group,” particularly the papers of Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a
biophysicist, Valendar Turner, who was a senior consultant in emergency
medicine at that hospital, John Papandimitriou, Professor of Pathology at
the University of Western Australia and others. Their scholarly writings in
Genetica, and other noted peer-reviewed journals were the first to
question whether or not “HIV” had been properly isolated, and they had
accumulated an impressive amount of evidence that the test kits for “HIV”
were flawed, because the molecular probes that are used to detect “HIV”
could only be as good as the purity with which “HIV” had been isolated
free of cellular debris. Also, I began reading papers and listening to the
views of other very well-respected scientists throughout the world about
“HIV/AIDS:” Dr. Heinz Sänger, Professor of Molecular Biology and Virology,
Max-Planck-Institutes for Biochemistry in Munich, who said, “there is no
evidence for the existence of HIV;” Kary Mullis, the Nobel Laureate who
developed PCR which was and is still used against his warnings and
criticisms to test for “HIVs viral load;” Walter Gilbert, another Nobelist,
who invented DNA foot-printing; Dr. Alfred Hässig, a former Professor of
Immunology at the University of Bern, and former director of the Swiss and
European blood banks who believed AIDS was a syndrome caused by profound
physiological stress and not due to a virus; Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, one of the
first New York Physicians that treated AIDS patients, and founder of the
American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) until he quit because of his
reservations about the false “heterosexual AIDS explosion” and the wisdom of
giving his patients AZT, who said, and I believe this is an exact quote: "The
marketing of HIV, through press releases and statements, as a killer virus
causing AIDS without the need for any other factors, has so distorted research
and treatment that it may have caused thousands of people to suffer and die;" Dr.
Donald Abrams, who was a Professor of Medicine at San Francisco General
Hospital, who said, he had a large population of HIV–positive patients who chose
not to take any anti-viral drugs because they saw all of their friends take the antiviral
drugs and die.
There were many other established scientists and physicians, in
addition, that I read or heard speak at that time who expressed doubts that “HIV”
was the cause of AIDS, that anti-retrovirals could delay progression of immune
collapse, or that viruses could cause cancer in Humans.
Instead, many were saying that "HIV" could not possibly be the sole
cause of AIDS, or even a cause of AIDS, and that Duesbergs ideas and
arguments were very important. I became more and more fascinated with the
subject.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, a direct question,
because it is very important: Have you seen the HIV retrovirus in your
laboratory or in any other laboratory across the country? Yes or no?
DR. MANIOTIS: The answer is no. No, I haven't seen it.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Did you try?
DR. MANIOTIS: Have I tried to see it? I have tried to “see it”
in the indirect ways that are usually used to try to detect it.
“A Roman effort of work” was undertaken by Luc Montagnier
when he tried to see it in the early 1980s, and in interviews he has said
that what was then called “HIV” was notoriously difficult to photograph in
the very beginning.
In 1997, a group in Washington, D.C. led by Bess et al., who
were trying to make an “HIV” vaccine and who also tried to see purified
“HIV,” published in the Journal of Virology I believe it was that
microvesicles are a source of contaminating cellular proteins found in purified
“HIV” preparations. And also in 1997, a French-German collaboration,
Gluschankof et al. also published a papers in The Journal of Virology
claiming that cell membrane vesicles are a major contaminant of gradientenriched
human “HIV” preparations.
In the Bess et al. paper, cellular debris was not distinguishable from
any other object in the EM micrographs. These preparations published by both
the Gluschankof et al., and Bess et al. groups, used the best techniques at that
time for the isolation and characterization of “HIV's" molecular components,
including its nucleic acids, but yet nothing that looked like a virus could be
discerned in sucrose gradient-derived electron micrographs of “HIV.” Cellular
actin, exrin, and cytoskeletal proteins (proteins that are made by cells and not
viruses) were also found inside the vesicles or virus-like particles. Non-infected
but activated human immune cells in Petri dishes were also shown to produce
microvesicles or viral-like particles that incorporated cellular proteins.
In addition to containing cellular proteins, the “HIV” microvesicles were
also shown to contain both RNA and DNA, and a huge amount of cellular RNA
and DNA were found in these vesicles that were thought to be retroviral particles.
For example, as much as 10ug of RNA and 4 μg of DNA were found per mg of
protein. I also remember them stating that the major RNA species in
microvesicles were ribosomal 28S and 18S subunits and some low molecular
species, and tRNA. These were cellular nucleic acids. These authors said that
all future experiments that attempted to purify “HIV” “viruses” must be carefully
controlled to account for the effects of contaminating cellular antigens present in
microvesicles or "HIV's" virus-like particles. Numerous other cellular proteins
since these reports also have been identified in purified preparations of “HIV.” It
is not known if these are physically associated with “HIV” virus-like particles and,
if so, whether or not that they have a role in the development of immune
suppression. But it only stands to reason that the proper isolation, identification,
characterization, and most importantly, complete separation of cellular proteins
and cellular nucleic acids that are associated with “HIVs” molecular signature is
a prerequisite to identifying "HIV" as a unique, exogenous virus that causes
Human illness. Only then can "HIV" be said to be "isolated," and then injected in
pure form into an animal model to show that it can cause disease, or be used to
evoke seroconversion and immunity in Human vaccinees.
In other words, when scientists have tried to see “HIV” in
culture dishes or in humans, all anyone has been able to do state of the
art technologies has been to isolate a large amount of cellular debris -- or
what is the "garbage of cells," or their secretions, that is characteristic of
certain diseased states, or bad viral isolation.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Do you think that HIV causes AIDS?
DR. MANIOTIS: No, I don't. I haven't thought so since I
heard Duesberg first give his lecture on the subject 20 years ago, and for
me the evidence is overwhelming now that the virus-like particles thought
at one time to represent “HIV” virus particles cannot possibly cause AIDS.
For instance, there have been more than 30 completed vaccine trials that
were described in the 1995 Congressional Records of “HIV” vaccine
adverse reactions, and in other papers about other failed “HIV” vaccine
trials. The remarkable thing about all of these trials is -- not they have not
protected a single person from acquiring immune suppression, because
they havent, but that they haven't even evoked “HIVs” supposed
molecular signature in vaccinated human beings. This makes no sense at
all if “HIV” or any of "HIV's" components are non-self, and had been
properly isolated, and shown to be the cause of AIDS.
Now, if the components of and "AIDS virus" had been
properly isolated and defined, scientists or physicians should be able to
inoculate these components into a population, and then antibodies
against these components would be generated in most people, just as
though they had a real viral infection. When they inject “HIV's"
components into animals, they do sometimes get antibodies that
correspond to part of “HIVs” molecular signature, but no animal (or
Human) injected by purpose or by accident to date has acquired AIDS
from “HIV," and who has been shown to not have other reasons for
developing profound immune suppression.
In fact Merck just announced last month that its newest and
most promising “HIV” vaccine utterly failed, once again, in Humans.
Indeed, the non-vaccinated group exhibited less “HIV” seroconversions
than did the “HIV-vaccine” group. For me, what is most distressing about
Mercks admission of failure is not that only 24 of the vaccinated group out
of more than 700 vaccinated later showed seroconversion to “HIVs” molecular
signature than the non-vaccinated participants, and that this vaccinated arm
showed more seroconversion than the control non-vaccinated group. What is
disturbing to me and should be to everyone else who is familiar with the
principles and theories of immunization is that the recorded rate of
seroconversion in both groups may simply represent mere “HIV” testing artifacts
or non-specific reactions, because the placebo group in this trial had even a
lower rate of seroconversion than did the vaccinated group. The results of this
trial may have nothing to do with “HIV” at all.
The doctors and scientists who conducted the trial even said, and I
quote it from memory because it was so shocking to me:
“The ultimate fear among researchers is that the whole theory
underlying the Merck vaccine might be flawed, which, if true, could doom an
entire class of experimental vaccines."
In my opinion, it may be more appropriate to say that the whole
theory of "HIV=AIDS" is flawed, because there is no evidence that an exogenous
(coming from outside the body) "AIDS virus" has been isolated or photographed
from a single AIDS patient said to have viremia or even in patients that exhibit a
“viral load” of one million or more, as determined by PCR. And no "HIV isolate"
that I am aware of has been shown to evoke an antibody response in Human
vaccine recipients without the use of adjuvants that non-specifically boost nonspecific
immune responses, or cause disease in either an animal model or a
Human being.
The 2004 VAXGEN trial reported the same failed result that Merck
just reported when they tested their GP120 vaccine, and, as is typical when the
"AIDS establishment" repeatedly fails to deliver anything based on the hypothesis
that “HIV” causes “AIDS,” they are handsomely rewarded for failure. Donald
Francis, the leader of the 2004 GP120 VAXGEN trial and who was a former head
of the CDC's AIDS lab-- his company, VAXGEN, was said to have received more
than $877 millions to scrap their “HIV” vaccine development, and begin making
an anthrax vaccine for the military, at taxpayers expense. Repeated failure in
AIDS research always seems to be rewarded with a perpetual stream of money,
instead of a re-examination of hypotheses and fundamental assumptions.
I think that this kind of tax-payer money would be better spent on
providing support such as a new food called "plumpynut"-a peanut based food
supplement presented by Doctors Without Borders on 60 minutes, who
complained that there were problems finding funding for the plumpynut program
in Africa and elsewhere. Doctors Without Borders vociferously argued that the
plumpynut nutrient mixture was reversing wasting and bringing back countless
children from the jaws of death due to malnutrition, and that it is more important
to provide this cheap and life-saving mixture than even antibiotics. $877 million
dollars worth of plumpynut would go a long way in saving countless African lives,
according to these doctors interviewed on 60 minutes.
Yet Stephen Lewis, UN Secretary-Generals Special Envoy for
HIV/AIDS in Africa, would disagree with these Doctors Without Borders. He said
that other things are more important for Africans than food and water. After
looking into Lewis's impressive credentials, I noticed that in a speech Lewis gave
at the closing session of the XVI International AIDS conference in Toronto, he
presented a list of issues on AIDS in the world and especially in Africa. In his
speech, Lewis spent some time vilifying The South African Minister of Health for
advocating foods that are important for nutrition and health.
He advocated instead that food and clean water are 6th in importance,
preceded by more important practices such as smearing microbicides on the
genitals of Africans, drug-roll-outs, etc. I was surprised that it didnt occur to Mr.
Lewis that these impoverished people at least should be given clean water and
some food to wash down their drugs with, and first establish protein sufficiency,
which they clearly lack.
MR. PAPANTONIOU:
What is the meaning of the molecular signature of “HIV” in a healthy
person who tests “HIV-positive?”
DR. MANIOTIS: Because the components of a retrovirus that
is supposed to cause immune suppression havent been isolated as I
stated before, nor shown to cause immune suppression in humans or
animals, it can be safely stated at this point that the meaning of the
molecular signature of "HIV" has not been found. Similarly, just as with
Hepatitis B where no viremia or cell destruction was seen in the liver of
chimps or mice injected with hepatitis B virus, when they tried injecting
chimpanzees with sera from AIDS patients or what they believed was
purified “HIV,” chimps didn't get sick, nor could viremia be demonstrated
in the so-called organs that the virus was supposed to attack.
In the case of the “HIV” chimp trials, they have built the
chimps retirement homes where they now live comfortably and diseasefree
25 years after being exposed to the blood or “HIV-isolates” of AIDS
patients.
When they did studies on Human sexual couples, one of
which was positive and the other one was negative -- a famous study
known as the Padian study -- they found zero conversions out of
175 pairs of so-called “discordant couples” where one was positive and
one was negative. They all had varying degrees and frequencies of sex,
one assumes, and among many couples, it was not “protected” sex either.
Yet Dr. Padian herself argues that her study does nothing to
belie the official model of “HIV” being sexually transmissible, or even
highly transmissible. This is absurd on the face of it. There were zero
seroconversions in the Padian study, among sexually active serodiscordant
couples, studied over a ten-year period. Many other smaller
studies have shown the same lack of seroconversion among
serodiscordant couples. If Human beings cannot transmit the virus
sexually to one another, how could transmitting “HIVs” molecular
signature to people with a vaccine evoke either seroconversion or
immunity?
There are so many different types of examples why the
“HIV=AIDS” hypothesis fails to explain anything about immune
suppression, and why all these vaccine trials have failed. For instance,
when they launched the anti- breast-feeding programs and they warned
all these African women not to breast-feed because they might pass on
the AIDS virus through their breast milk, they found out -- just this
year -- that the women who were dissuaded from breast-feeding their
infants, had a far higher rate of death among their babies, because the
infants were not achieving the proper protective immunity or nutrition that
goes along with normal breast-feeding in these extremely poverty-stricken
places.
If women cant pass the virus to their offspring through breast
milk, even in populations that are supposed to have high rates of “HIV,”
and have a much higher death rate of their infants if they dont breast
feed, then how could it be even considered a possibility that vaccine
makers could inject some component(s) of “HIV” into a human and induce
protection from immune suppression, or, in the case of the failed Merck
trial mentioned before, evoke “HIVs molecular signature in any significant
number of vaccine recipients? In one arm of the recent Merck trial, for
instance, I believe it was reported that among 778 male volunteers, only 21
of those receiving the vaccine exhibited “HIVs” signature compared with 9 in the
placebo group. Most or all of the vaccinated should have at least shown
seroconversion if “HIVs” components had been isolated and are immunogenic in
Human beings.
What this failure implies to me and many other students of
AIDS, is that the so-called template for the protein molecular signatures of “HIV”
may derive from endogenous DNA sequences (coming from cellular origin
instead of viral origin). These cellular proteins are expressed under certain
conditions by normal uninfected yeast, insects, dogs, rhesus monkeys, chimps,
and humans. “HIV” is said to have 9150 base pairs, but again, this template has
not been purified without contaminating cellular nucleic acids. So, it is likely in my
view that “HIVs” molecular signature could represent a HERV (Human
Endogenous Retrovirus) nucleic acid sequence, or more likely, what is called a
retroid of one kind or another. That these hypothesis are possible has been
shown again and again to be likely from studies on HERVs such as "the Phoenix
viruses," that can be produced by infecting cells with certain sequences of DNA,
which then is packaged by the cells into viral-like particles.
Also, any modern analysis of the Human Genome Database will
reveal more than 120, 000 full-length retroids containing reverse transcriptase
transcripts. Although "HIV=AIDS" proponents are always saying the "HIV virus's"
reverse transcriptase sequence is mutating when patients die on anti-retroviral
drugs that supposedly target this enzyme, genomic analyses show that reverse
transcriptase is among the most stable transcripts that make up these retroids,
and it is the sequence stability rather than the instability or mutability of the
reverse transcriptase sequence itself that make these 120,000 retroids possible
to classify.
What is also remarkable about this is that reverse transcriptase was
once thought by all working in AIDS research to be specific to retroviruses, and
this is the enzyme they first measured, and indeed some labs continue to
measure, as evidence of “HIV infection.” However we are all made up partly of
retroviral components, it is part of us. What they call “HIV” and what they have
successfully branded as the most dangerous and infectious virus known to man,
is (and can be evoked) in many of us, and what we have been mistaking for the
“virus” are the technologies for detecting it, without any of the sober analysis of
what those tests are actually detecting or what “HIVs” molecular signature
means for a Human being. In my mind, the probable "cause of "HIV" are retroids
and/or endogenous HERV sequences, that can be evoked, under stress
conditions, or which may become expressed in healthy persons as part of a
relatively rare genetic polymorphism. Genomics experts such as Australia's
George Miklos of Secure Genetics are in a far better position to describe these
as yet unknown sequence expressions and in papers he has written, for
instance, he raises much doubt regarding the tacit assumption and arrogance
that we know all there is to know about the human genome, or under what
circumstances we may express novel but perhaps steryotypic gene sequences.
There may indeed be a relationship between “HIVs” molecular
signature and immune disorder in some individuals, but the ten million dollar
question science has not been permitted to ask about these individuals is: Like
Viktor Hamburger warned me about once, which comes first? Which is cause and
which is effect, and what is the meaning of the molecular signature of “HIV” in a
healthy person who tests “HIV-positive?”
Now I have to get technical again for a moment: Other so-called
“HIV-specific” sequences, such as those that give rise to the so-called GAG, PR,
RT, ENV molecules are also found in the normal Human genome database. In
gene bank searches, one can find 16 samples of spuma virus transcripts, 6
examples of snakehead virus, 16 samples of FIV (feline immune deficiency
virus), 60 examples of detecting one or more HBV (hepatitis B virus) genes, and
at least 11 cases of “HIV” sequences that are said to be scattered throughout the
normal Human genome, according to the analyses of McClure and other Human
Genome Database analysts.
Although Dr. Gallo and others have claimed that in a stadium full of
"HIV-negative" people, not one molecule of "HIV" will be present, the DAIDS
(Division of AIDS) culturing manual says that if "HIV-infected" cells from human
blood express more than 30 units of “HIV-specific” p24 protein on 2 or 3 separate
tests (30 pg/ml), one is considered “HIV-positive,” and if one sleeps with
somebody without telling them they have these 30 or more units, one can be tried
for attempted murder, one cant obtain health insurance, one might be fired from
his or her job, one might commit suicide, if pregnant one may be frightened into
aborting her baby. If your cells express less than 30 units of this protein 2 or 3
separate times (pg/ml), then one is considered non-"HIV-infected" and is home
free-one can donate blood, sleep with anyone he or she wants, without telling
them his or her “less than 30 status,” etc. How could this be possible if there isn't
one molecule of "HIV" in a stadium full of "HIV-negative" people? Its an arbitrary
measurement of a molecular signature that may have nothing to do with a virus
or immune suppression that is arbitrarily being measured at more than 30 units
for an "infected" person, and less than 30 units for a non-infected person.
P24, by the way, which supposedly is an essential "HIV" protein, is
also found in the thymus gland cells of non-infected “HIV-negative” children.
The confusing thing may be that some of these endogenous cellular
DNA or RNA sequences are only expressed rarely, or in response to
physiological stresses: they arent infectious, and they may represent as much a
17% of the normal human genome according to some scientists.
“HIVs” molecular signature may have nothing to do with a specific virus:
the molecular signature thought to be a virus may in fact be generated also in
response to previously latent real viruses that at some point of physiological
stress provokes a new and complex immune response, which is read as “HIVs
molecular signature. The immune system of a person so infected by multiple or
numerous latent real viral infections could be perpetually generating new
immunogens, which is read by AIDS scientists as an ever changing and mutating
“HIV.” In theory, such an immune chain reaction caused by multiple real viral or
bacterial or fungal infections would be progressively more debilitating for the
stability and effectiveness of immune function, and, a vaccine against any
specific virus or other pathogen would be ineffective against the development of
AIDS. If this hypothesis is correct, then an experimental animal model of AIDS
should be induced in laboratory animals by infecting them at a low multiplicity
with a very large number of diverse viruses, as was suggested one by Nobelist,
and PCR-inventor, Kary Mullis, in a Genetica paper he wrote in 1995.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, what was found
back in 1983 by Dr. Robert Gallo and his French counterpart?
DR. MANIOTIS: Luc Montagnier?
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Yes.
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, actually, Montagnier had a patient come to
him -- to the Pasteur Institute -- with swollen lymph nodes, and he didn't
have all the hallmarks of what we now call "full-blown AIDS." This “Patient
One” had sought medical consultation for swollen lymph nodes, muscle
weakness without fever or weight loss, and for at least two episodes of
gonorrhea. He had had multiple herpes infections. He also tested positive for
cytomegalovirus. The year before, he was treated for syphilis. However, for many
decades, syphilis has been known as “the great imitator” because secondary or
tertiary syphilis patients (and AIDS patients) both exhibit a decline in the
lymphatic system, thymus, and in their entire system of immunity, which includes
a decline in T-helper cells and the ratio with T-suppressor cells is reversed. Other
symptoms of both secondary syphilis and AIDS include such symptoms as fever,
headaches, malaise, vertigo, sweating, insomnia, nausea, weight loss, aching in
the bones and joints, swollen liver, swollen spleen, meningitis, and this stage of
syphilis is often confused with such conditions as infectious mononucleosis,
neuroretinitis, lichen planus, cancer, dementia, and lymphomas. These are the
exact same symptoms said to afflict many AIDS patients.
So it was from this patient that Luc Montagnier isolated
lymphocytes and serum, and tried to infect other healthy lymphocytes in
culture dishes that were derived from human umbilical cords that are now
known to contain virus-like particles such as HERVs (Human Endogenous
Retroviral Particles) as I described before. And when Montagniers group
placed the isolate from Patient One (who had had all these different
diseases prior to his visit to The Pasteur) on healthy Human lymphocyte
cultures, they did detect a very high reverse transcriptase signal (not
“HIV”), and with electron microscopy, they showed the presence of “viruslike
particles,” which in all likelihood, came from the HERVs added from
the healthy cord lymphocytes, or perhaps were contaminants from Patient
One's multiple other viral infections, or perhaps these HERVs were a
stress response from the lymphocytes due to foreign protein stress on the
cells, or due to the chemicals added to "activate" the cells, such as IL-2,
or interferon antibody.
Consequently, the Pasteur group believed and published that
they had found a new retroviral signature they called “LAV” associated
with, but not necessarily causal of, this pre-AIDS condition known as
ARC, in Patient Ones “isolate.” As I mentioned before, one might wonder
how the Pasteur group could separate the reverse transcriptase signal
thought at that time to be specific to retroviruses, from the other 128,000
retroid full-length reverse transcriptase signals now known to exist in the
human genome?
Now, Robert Gallos group, working in Bethesda, had been
working for a long time to try to show that retroviruses cause human
cancer, and a year later (in 1984), Gallo published 4 landmark papers
describing the same magnesium-sensitive reverse-transcriptase-positive
“HIV” signature that Montagniers group detected in Patient Ones sera. In
one of those papers, "HIV's" molecular signature was detected I believe in
48 out of 119 patients, or approximately 1/3. The Bethesda group
believed that when 1/3 of the people they tested showed the same
molecular signature, that the signature was not only associated with
AIDS, but was causal for AIDS.
But in that landmark paper, I believe it was emphasized that HTLVIII
(“HIV”) was detected in only 13 of 43 adult AIDS patients with Kaposi's
sarcoma, and in only 10 of 21 adult AIDS patients with opportunistic infections. In
my mind, these kinds of numbers are insufficient to demonstrate that “HIVs”
molecular signature was the cause of the AIDS symptoms, or immune deficiency.
One would expect most or all of the Kaposis patients (if Kaposis were an AIDSdefining
illness which we now know that its not) to test positive, not 13 out of 43
patients, or expect that most or all of the patients with opportunistic infections
should have tested positive instead of only 10 out of 21 or approximately half. If
anything, the study demonstrated that “HIV's” molecular signature was not
associated with what are considered AIDS patients very often, not to mention a
plausible cause of AIDS. If I drop a ball 100 times, and it falls up two-thirds of the
time, or half the time, and down one third of the time, or only half the time, I
wouldnt feel comfortable saying that gravity causes things to fall down, if you see
what I mean.
The failure to detect “HIVs” molecular signature in sicker patients
while detecting it frequently in patients with no clinical symptoms in the Bethesda
groups studies could have been interpreted differently.
In cancer diagnostics, it is believed that as cancer cells become
more malignant or “disease causing,” it is known that they can lose certain tumorspecific
markers that define what the cells are, such as S-100 if they are highly
invasive melanomas. As melanoma cells become more malignant, they lose this
characteristic melanoma and neural crest marker, but always seem to express it
when the melanoma cells are not so invasive.
Similarly, the Bethesda's group's failure to detect "HIV" in these
"sicker" (Kaposi's, opportunistic infection-presenting) patients may instead have
been due to the fact that "HIV's molecular signature is also the result of a
changing gene expression pattern of cells as patients become sicker, and not
because of some increasing or decreasing "viral load." In other words, because
“HIVs” molecular signature is detected less frequently in sicker patients, “HIVs”
molecular signal may be simply be the result of changes in the cells over time
that produce the signal as patients become sicker, and not because of an
increasing or even decreasing presence of retrovirus particles.
Nevertheless, the Bethesda group published that they
thought that they had found the etiologic agent -- the cause of AIDS -- in a
third to one half of this small group of individuals they tested. This is the
basis of the hypothesis that “HIV” causes AIDS.
But these kinds of data should be compared to others who
have claimed they found a potential and compelling cause of AIDS. For
example, in 1989-1990, a series of articles published by Shyh-Ching Lo of the
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who presented evidence that a microbe
called Mycoplasma incognitus was found in the thymus, liver, spleen, lymph
node, or brain of 22 of 34 persons who had died of AIDS. The patients who were
selected for this autopsy study had all had evidence of organ failures. In another
study, mycoplasma was found in seven of ten persons with AIDS. Also, a much
earlier study had found Mycoplasma incognitus in blood lymphocytes of 12 of 23
living persons with AIDS — but in none of 22 healthy blood donors used as
controls. The mycoplasma was also found in six “HIV-negative” patients with no
sign of AIDS from different parts of the world, who had died in one to seven
weeks of an undiagnosed infection. When four monkeys were injected with
Mycoplasma incognitus, they all died in seven to nine months. The organism was
found in the spleens of all the monkeys, and in some other organs as well. It was
not found in a fifth monkey tested as a control. Electron-microscope
examinations, PCR tests and immunologic tests all showed that the organism
was concentrated in lesions in affected organs, and Mycoplasma incognitus is
unusual in that it often infects and kills tissue without causing an inflammatory
reaction, suggesting that it disables or evades part of the immune system.
Indeed, in a much earlier study, Montagnier's group also reported that
mycoplasma removal agent changed the dynamics of their "LAV" expression,
signifying that this micro-organism may also have been present in "Patient One"
as well as syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, CMV, and perhaps other pathogens.
Michael Gottlieb, the first physician to describe "The AIDS
syndrome" in L.A. in 1981, it should also be mentioned, found cytomegalovirus in
100% of his first two cohorts of patients he reported, but felt that CMV was
opportunistic and not causal for the syndrome his patients had.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Do you think HIV is transmitted
sexually, Professor Maniotis? And what about the use of condoms as a
preventative measure?
DR. MANIOTIS: In theory, condoms can be crucial in
preventing pregnancy and many STD's, and I believe people should be
taught about them at a young age. However, in practice, there is no
evidence that "HIV" is transmitted sexually (or through breast milk as I
discussed earlier). In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it is not,
because -- especially in the condom crusades that have been given
throughout the world, especially in Africa, doctors reported that condoms
and especially microbicides increase the rate of genital ulcers, which
leads to venereal diseases and infections of all kinds, and so condom
crusades and microbicide crusades have not been a success. The
evidence suggests that it has been of no use to push these condoms on
people, as shown by statistics of pregnancies that occur despite the fact
that couples were wearing condoms, or not wearing them, as in the
Padian study I mentioned earlier showed, and which showed zero
seroconversions amongst sero-discordant couples, despite the fact that
as many as a fourth admitted to not using condoms. Circumcision
crusades have been initiated and reported from results obtained largely at
STD clinics according to a conversation I had recently with Dr. Bailey from
my University who led one of the largest circumcision studies, and again,
the numbers don't add up, especially if African statistics are used.
With respect to microbicides, two full- scale microbicide trials
were stopped this year because they found that smearing these noxious
chemicals on the genitals of Africans actually increased the rate of the
appearance of “HIVs molecular signature in these Africans, which was
simply a repeat of past failures. For example, in 2000, a large full-scale trial
showed that another microbicide, nonoxynol-9, was judged to be unsafe when it
had been expected to be effective. Subjects in that trial exhibited a higher
incidence of “HIVs” molecular signature, presumably through ulcers caused by
chemical irritation.
But then again, the AIDS establishment is always rewarded for its
failures, and hundreds of millions keep flowing for these experiments on Africans
and other groups of people in Asia based on a failed hypothesis that has not
produced a single hopeful result in 25 years.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Have you ever had the opportunity to
discuss with Dr. Robert Gallo the crucial issue of the existence of HIV?
DR. MANIOTIS: Yes, I have. As a matter of fact, recently we
had some discussions about it, and I have presented my concerns in a
direct way to him regarding the rules to establish that a virus causes
disease. These rules are known as Kochs postulates. And he and I
agreed that Koch's postulates don't apply to a lot of microorganisms, so
there is no way anyone should think that “HIV” has fulfilled, should fulfill,
or can fulfill any of Kochs or even Hill's postulates. If "HIV" were a real
virus, it could in principle, be extremely difficult to detect, like secondary
syphilis that forms so-called dormant round-bodies, that are observable,
but which are very difficult to isolate according to experts who study
spirochetes like Lynn Margulis and others. However, I believe syphilis
always can be isolated from everyone (and treated most successfully) in
the primary stage.
But simply because other so-called pathogenic
microorganisms havent been definitively isolated or characterized either,
doesnt mean we should go about setting up global health policy
programs as if they were properly isolated and characterized, simply
because one believes its better to do something than nothing. This is not
science. Its a faith-based belief system. Yet Dr. Gallo still believes that
the culprit for AIDS is “HIV,” and he knows that I have serious
reservations regarding the isolation issue, or as he put it, "Andy you have
very unorthodox views about HIV/AIDS."
In another recent phone conversation, I asked him to provide
us with a picture of the virus from his laboratory notebooks that he claims
to have stored away since 1984. And I told him that all he would need to
do is publish that picture, done a special kind of way, which is called a
sucrose density gradient isolation, or even better, from the blood of a
patient who is said to have a "high viral load" as measured by PCR. But
he told me that he doesn't need to do that, or that it would be trivial, and
that nobody in the "AIDS establishment" would accept it anyway because
they don't use direct evidence of viral isolation anymore as proof of viral
isolation, and that amplification of “HIVs” molecular signature in cancer
cell lines as he achieved using interleukin II and lectin stimulation, as his
group achieved in 1984, is sufficient to prove causality. I also politely
suggested to him at some point during this conversation that if you start
with cellular garbage or junk, and amplify that cellular junk, what you will
be left with is simply a lot more cellular junk, not a proper isolate where
the thing itself, the "HIV" virus, has been isolated away from all other
objects in the universe.
What is being amplified, I told him, might simply be poorly
characterized cellular nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids from both
diseased, or healthy individuals or from endogenous retroviruses or
retroids that all exhibit components of "HIV's" molecular signal, and for
reasons that are not yet clear scientifically, but that deserve further study.
But Dr. Gallo and others in the "AIDS establishment" insist
that they trust indirect methods of isolation-a process known as molecular
cloning, but they don't realize -- in my opinion -- that before you can clone
anything, first you have to separate it from the thing that it is infecting.
And they don't believe that isolation to the point of purity or
near purity is necessary. I think it is necessary. And until they do that,
there will be -- in my viewpoint, no evidence that “HIV” either exists or that
it causes AIDS.
If a molecular signature can be used to determine the future
of a persons life or a nations or planet's health, one must be sure that
that signature is not due to complex immunological changes that occur for
instance in many women after multiple pregnancies, or in patients with
autoimmune syndromes such as lupus, and 70 other syndromes that are
known to generate positive "HIV" signatures that aren't AIDS. But “HIVs”
molecular signature is commonly expressed by these people.
Most importantly, the nature and plasticity of potentially
steryotypic signals of especially the immune cells or cancer cells
genomes under various stressful and even normal states are not yet
known. Despite "AIDS establishment" claims that the whole Human
genome has been sequenced and is known, and that “HIVs” molecular
signature isnt found in the normal human genome, or in stadiums full of
"HIV-negative" people, the nature of some immune cells is their unique
ability to re-arrange their genomes to produce antibodies to new agents.
Therefore, all possible or even steryotypic re-arrangements of the
genomes of immune cells is not yet sequenced, because, these rearrangements
have not yet occurred because the antigens that will evoke
them have not yet plagued Mankind yet, or, more likely, such novel
sequences may only be assembled or evoked in immune cells when
certain stresses are placed on the individual, and presumably, the Human
Genome project didn't sequence these individual's genomes, or indeed
the Human genome that is in every subgroup of Human beings. Only
"representative" genomes have been sequenced: not every individual's
who lives in the Human population. And we have no idea regarding what
most of these so-called genes do, or how they function.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: How do you explain the fact that from
1983 to the present, scientists have not been able to find a vaccine to
cure or to prevent this deadly disease?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, to make a vaccine, as Pasteur
successfully did with anthrax, with rabies, and with chicken cholera with
only two lab technicians and without the $800 million dollar support that
VAXGEN received after the failed AIDSVAX vaccine, and without the
dollars that Merck invested in its failed “HIV” vaccine this month, first you
need to isolate the microbe that causes the disease.
The first step is to find and purify a microbe, and then inject it
into non-infected animals to show you can cause the same illness. And
as I mentioned before, when they thought they did that to chimps with
“HIV” -- our closest relatives to man -- they didn't get sick, they didn't even
acquire a cold. Nothing happened.
"HIV" researchers will say that they have animal models
using "SIV," or "Simian Immune Deficiency Viruses," but this is not "HIV,"
and you should ask them why they believe that "SIV" is a better model
than "HIV," and why they can't get "HIV" to cause AIDS in any
experimental animal.
Among Humans, there have been no hospital cases of AIDS
reported in a number of different countries, in which patients who test
“HIV-positive” have been definitively shown not to have other known
reasons for immune-suppression. If “HIV” were infectious, wouldnt you at
least expect a few out of the thousands and thousands of health care
workers who come in contact with AIDS, to contract AIDS and who could
be shown not to have other reasons for acquiring immune suppression?
These are all examples why, since 1983, I believe there has
been no forthcoming evidence that “HIV,” or its molecular signature
represents a public health threat, and why none of the more than 30
vaccine trials have evoked "HIV's" molecular signature in Humans or
protected a single Human being from acquiring immune suppression.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Since we are discussing the virus, do
you think that the HIV virus could have been created by someone. In
other words, could it be synthetic?
DR. MANIOTIS: No, there is no evidence that it is a
synthetic virus or the result of any sort of conspiracy because, first of
all -- as I mentioned before -- if it were, it would be a real virus. You could
isolate it. You could make a vaccine against it. You could photograph it
without cellular debris and you could infect animals with that pure isolate
and produce a disease.
And since you can't do any of these things with “HIV,” there is
no reason to suspect that-- as Boyd Graves and other people have
advanced the idea--it was a manufactured virus.
Nor is there any reason to believe, in my opinion, that it came
from the polio vaccination era in Africa in the 1950s, as has been
proposed by others. Despite the fact that the polio vaccine was first made
in African green monkey kidney cells (and perhaps illegally in the kidneys
of chimps as some claim), and then inoculated into a continent of Africans
during the 1950's and 60's for the so-called preventative polio campaigns,
doesnt mean that “HIV” derived from these early polio preparations.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: There is talk that the U.S. government-
-actually, the Bush Administration— may be pressing for legislation
requiring mandatory HIV testing for Americans between the ages of 3 and
80? What is your opinion on the matter?
DR. MANIOTIS: I think that is the biggest mistake that the
U.S. could make -- the most costly mistake and the most damaging
mistake for the largest amount of people possible because when you test
populations of people that are considered what the "AIDS establishment"
says are “low risk,” you are going to get a huge number of false-positive
test results, which is essentially going to ruin the lives of tens of
thousands or perhaps as many as hundreds of thousands of people.
Let me give you an example. For instance, in 1992, the Russians
reported that out of 20.2 million HIV tests done in Russia, only 112 were
confirmed and about 20,000 were false positives. In 1991 there were some
30,000 false positives out of 29.4 million tests, with only 66 confirmations...in
1991 alone some 8000 false-positive results were reported in pregnant women,
with only 6 confirmations.
112 “confirmed “HIV” molecular signatures out of 20 million
negative ones in one year, or 30,000 or so false positives out of
30,000,000 the year before dont constitute numbers that signal a major
AIDS pandemic. The numbers could arguably constitute statistical artifact,
or, the several who seroconverted may represent the presence of some
kind of auto-immune condition in those who test positive, like psoriasis, or
warts, or physiological stress, a genetic polymorphism, or, testing error.
If a ball falls up 19,999,888 times, and falls down 112 times, I
wouldnt be to confident that gravity causes objects to fall. Moreover,
these kinds of numbers among “low risk” individuals does not constitute a
global AIDS pandemic, nor can it account for the some 15,000 immune
suppression-associated deaths per year in the U.S. which takes up more
of the biomedical budget than cancer, diabetes, and heart disease
combined, although these diseases, such as cancer, kill 500,000 or more
a year in the U.S.
Many other similar studies indicate, in addition, that you are
going to get a number of people who really are not sick in any way, shape
or form, to test positive. And they won't be able to get health insurance.
They may be fired from their jobs. The stigma of having AIDS causes
suicide, as it did with David Acer, the dentist whom the CDC later exonerated
(after his suicide), because the CDC could find no evidence after he committed
suicide that the dentist's 5 “HIV-positive” patients contracted their “HIV”
signatures from him. There is evidence, however, that countless others who
have been given the diagnosis of an “HIV infection,” in addition to Dr.
Acer, have chosen to end their lives upon getting an “HIV-positive” test
result.
Since expanding the AIDS definition in 1993 to include "HIV
positives" with no clinical symptoms of disease, the majority of all new AIDS
cases in America are diagnosed in healthy people with none of the opportunistic
infections or Kaposi's sarcoma previously used to define AIDS. Epidemiology
reports from around the US reveal that for the past 14 years, non-illness is the
leading reason for an AIDS diagnosis in America, and depending on the region,
45% to 75% of all AIDS cases reported since 1981 were counted in clinically
healthy HIV positives. Across the border in Canada where the AIDS definition still
requires actual illness, AIDS cases per capita are 18 times lower than in the US.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Taking into consideration what you
are saying, what would you then advise people to do should the US
government demand of doctors, "You must test all the patients for HIV"?
DR. MANIOTIS: Write to your senators and public health
officials about the fact that universal "HIV" testing is a violation of the
Nuremberg Code, the Helsinki Accord. It is a violation of human rights to
accuse persons of having a so-called communicable or a reportable virus
that has not been isolated or that really has not been shown to cause
illness. It is the world that George Orwell described. I believe this
recommendation is in part due to the 2005 Biodefense and Pandemic and
Vaccine and Drug Development Act —a bill borne of the fear mongering tactics of
big pharma's marriage to the Bush administration to amend the Public Health
Service Act to enhance biodefense dollars and so-called pandemic preparedness
activities, to use untested vaccines, drugs, medical products, or security
countermeasures without any liability for claims for loss of property, personal
injury, or death.
Another principal issue to reconcile before universal testing is
implemented is that the makers of the test kits used to measure “HIV” or
progression to “AIDS” are themselves aware of these issues, because they all
claim their ELISA, Western Blot, and PCR-based kits can't really detect “HIV”
virus.
For example, Abbott Laboratorys ELISA HIV test kit package
insert says that ELISA testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS.
Which other test do you need and why do you need it if they are so
accurate? Perhaps the most important statement on Abbotts insert says that:
“At present, there is no recognized standard for establishing the
presence or absence of HIV antibody in Human blood.”
Epitopes Western Blot test kit insert says, do not use this kit as the
sole basis for diagnosing HIV infection.
Why not?
Roches PCR amplicor HIV monitor test says that it is not intended
to be used as a screening test for HIV, nor as a diagnostic test to confirm HIV
infection.
If it isnt a screening or diagnostic test, then what kind of test is it? A
lie detector to see if youve been sleeping around?
The NucliSens HIV assay says that is not intended to be used as a
screening test for HIV, nor used as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of
HIV-1 infection.
So, you cant screen with it or diagnose anybody with it? Do you
see what I mean?
"COBAS AmpliScreen HIV-1 test says that it is not intended for use
as an aid in diagnosis.”
Whats it intended for then?
The Cambridge Biotechs HIV Western Blot Kit insert says that the
clinical implications of antibodies to HIV in an asymptomatic person are “not
known.” This caveat on the package insert is actually a printed concession that it
is not known whether HIV is the cause of AIDS. It's right there in the HIV test kit
itself.
We are constantly told by the media and government that the
clinical significance of the antibodies meant that you were going to die of AIDS
eventually. How can they give drugs to millions on other continents or to infants,
or to anyone else, without knowing what the clinical significance of testing
positive is?
The OraSure HIV Western Blot kit is not intended for use with
blood, serum, plasma, or urine specimens, or for screening or reinstating
potential blood donors.
Who is left to test then? Why should the molecular signature of
“HIV” vary from fluid to fluid in the body, or why cant you test a blood donor but
you can test a health care worker or someone else? Do you think it matters to
any of the "AIDS establishment" that a single Orasure ELISA without a
confirmatory WESTERN blot was used in 2001 in the Nelson Mandela study in
South Africa to show that 4.8 million people are infected?
These are not typos on the package inserts of these tests: they are
caveats written on the test kits that free the test kit manufacturers from liability.
Rapid tests have been shown to be fraudulent and have even been banned and
confiscated by the FDA. Why? Because none of these test kits has been
validated against the isolation of a virus, “HIV.”
MR. PAPANTONIOU: What do you think about AIDS
medications, Professor Maniotis? How do you explain the fact that the
pharmaceutical companies have produced over 32 drugs to fight the
disease and that the proponents of the paradigm say they “save lives?”
Dr. MANIOTIS: I think it has been shown that at certain
doses, some of the drugs act as powerful antifungals for example, and
therefore may be effective against a syndrome in which yeast overgrowth
is a huge factor. Because it is known that AZT, for instance, and other
drugs are toxic to mitochondria as was found by Marinos Dalakas, it is
possible that these drugs may have potent antibacterial effects on some
patients as well. Having said that, it is always important that one should
carefully read the package insert of any drug you take for your own
assessment of the risks and benefits. I tell that to everybody, no matter
what drug they take. Read the adverse reactions and the post-marketing
experience for the side effects. All of them are available on the internet.
The first AIDS drug, as I mentioned, was AZT, which was
passed in a record four months in an FDA trial that was shown to be
fraudulent. John Lauritsen wrote a devastating account about this trial.
Through obtaining records through the Freedom of Information Act, he
documented how certain arms of the Fischl trial such as the Boston arm
were going to be thrown out because they mixed up the patients, they
gave some patients in the control group the drug, and the study became
unblinded because AZT is so toxic at the doses given in the Fischl trial.
Approval for the drugs use in AIDS patients was passed
because 19 patients died in the so-called non-treated group, and one
patient died in the AZT-treated group. But what was found later -- the
group that had been given the AZT actually needed life-saving
transfusions and other medical interventions during the trial to stay alive.
If they hadn't been given these interventions, there would have been
about 30 people in the AZT-treated group that would have died during
those 4 months compared to the19 in the non-drug-treated group. At four
months, all the patients were placed on AZT because the "AIDS
Establishment" doesnt know how to run a complete experiment with
control groups, and several years later, I believe, most of the patients
were dead. Great drug!
A European collaboration a couple of years later, repeated
the AZT trial at similar dosages in much longer and larger trial called the
Concorde trial, where it was found that AZT did no good, and it had no
benefit.
When the Veterans Administration did an AZT trial, they
actually found that it harmed patients who were healthy more than it
helped patients who were very sick.
And Dr. John Hamilton's (of the Department of Veterans
Affairs) conclusion was that AZT particularly harmed Blacks and
Hispanics and had no significant effect on Caucasians. Now, in recent
years, HAART (Highly Active AntiRetroviral Therapy) has been given with
the protease inhibitors, and you can read it for yourself in The New
England Journal of Medicine and the Journal AIDS, that the leading cause
of death these days from AIDS is liver failure, heart problems, and that the
protease inhibitors can kill normal healthy lymphocytes. Liver failure and
cardiovascular diseases are not AIDS-defining illness. It is an effect of
toxic medications.
And why should these drugs affect “races” differently, despite
the fact that there really is no such thing as race in humans as measured
genetically?
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, do you know of
HIV-diagnosed patients who have refused to take medication and yet are
living today?
DR. MANIOTIS: Yes, I know quite a few of them, actually,
because they have contacted me over the years.
They are very courageous people, and, you know, I give
them complete support for what they are doing because --
MR. PAPANTONIOU: How do they live?
DR. MANIOTIS: I can give you examples. Even opposite
types of examples, where there have been people who never really tested
positive, but they were told by doctors they tested positive, and then they
put them on the medications and they acquired AIDS-defining illnesses.
I know a woman who I have been helping for a number of
years with that scenario. In other words, they failed to tell her she had a
negative HIV test, she got drunk and crashed a car because she was so
upset about the “HIV” death sentence she had received. She then was
arrested, put into prison, and they put her on 4 toxic medications She
developed debilitating persistent diarrhea, weight loss, asthma, persistent
vaginal bleeding, thrombocytopenia, heart problems, fibrosarcomas of the
breasts, she had her uterus removed because of persistent bleeding due
to the drug. Because the Department of Child and Family Services
thought she might somehow infect her daughter, her twelve-year old
daughter was taken away from her by the state and institutionalized,
where the child was sexually assaulted and acquired 2 STDs. Nine years
later, the mother found out after taking 6 consecutive ELISA tests that she
never had had an “HIV-positive” ELISA test. It was a mistake. Over the 9
years of her mistaken “HIV” diagnosis, it may be of some interest that her
T-cells never fell below about 800, despite almost 9 years of continuous
HAART treatment including Bactrim.
Although she stopped the medications on her own, she
continued to exhibit profound thrombocytopenia, and she developed
bruises all over her legs, cardiovascular problems increased, and she has
fought a daily battle to maintain her weight because her intestines dont
work any more to absorb food, and she is still plagued by constant
diarrhea. Persistent diarrhea, anemia, and thrombocytopenia are classic
AIDS-defining illnesses, but they are also the result of DNA chain
terminating drugs like AZT.
Other people are the opposite. They refused to take the
medications from the very beginning. They still test "HIV-positive" 12, 14,
19, 23 years later, and they live perfectly healthy and happy lives.
So, these are two polar opposites, the extremes.
And, you know, there is everything in between. I have been
talking to an “HIV-positive” man recently -- I can't tell you names, but he
stopped the medications on his own in 2000. And this is a heartbreaking,
repeated story. Although stopping the medications on his own in 2000,
he developed liver cancer last year, and died of it a few nights ago. He
will be listed as an AIDS death, but, liver cancer is not an AIDS-defining
illness.
Another woman took AZT and the HAART for about 12 years,
and got to a point where she couldnt write a check, or walk around her
bed or take a shower because of peripheral neuropathy due to the
medications. Now she can dance and swim, and hasnt suffered a single
day since she stopped HAART earlier this year.
All of these stories are fascinating, because, as a cancer
biologist, I am absolutely stunned at the resiliency of the Human body
when it is toxified with cell-division and other life-disrupting poisons, while
the AIDS doctors marvel at the fact that these folks when they take these
toxic drugs stop producing parts of the molecular signature(s) of “HIV”
and they think they have quelled “HIV.”
In all likelihood, these toxic drugs merely block the production
of the protein and nucleic acid debris associated with "HIV's" molecular
signature, because they so severely inhibit the cells of the body from
producing these proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids, as long as the drug is
taken. They can also stimulate T-cell counts for a while, because T-cells
become stimulated, like all cells, when they are given toxins, like growth
factors. Nerve Growth Factor is a good example of a toxin that stimulates
cells. It stimulates peripheral neurons to grow, and, it was originally
derived from snake venom. Cholera toxins are used routinely in the lab to
stimulate all kinds of cells to divide. Why should an immune suppressive
drug like AZT or Saquinavir be any different. They both are toxic to
immune cells, and the body tries to adjust, for awhile, until the drugs
eventually take their toll and render the progenitors of these cells in the
bone marrow and elsewhere too sick to produce immune cells or other
types of cells any more. I have heard these same kinds of stories dozens
and dozens of times from different people.
And I also know of people who did take the medicines that
are living today and claim that they don't have any side effects, like that
champion against Apartheid, Judge Cameron of South Africa, who wrote
a book about his experience called, “Witness to AIDS.” In his book and in
other things he has written, he calls all of those of us who have
reservations about the “HIV/AIDS hypothesis, “Holocaust deniers”
because he believes everybody should have the same response to the
drugs that he did, and anyone who doesnt, or anyone who has scientific
questions about “HIV/AIDS,” he calls irresponsible “Holocaust denialists.”
I resent the term because my direct ancestors did more than
most countries in Europe to protect the Jews for 11 months during the
Nazi occupation, and arguably, because they warded off the Germans for
that long, the Russians were able to prepare for the winter assault, and
then with the combined forces Hitler was defeated! I resent anyone calling
me a “denialist” because it is in insult to the blood that was lost in Greece
to protect the Jews and to resist the Nazis.
Drug responses are complicated. There is no one outcome.
There always are always a spectrum of responses that are impossible to
predict. Either patients stop taking their medications and they do
fine -- depending on how long they have taken the medications. Often,
how long they have taken the medications will determine how well they do
after they stop. I am aware of several “drug holiday” studies that say the
opposite (drug holiday means stopping the AIDS drugs), but these are
short term and flawed studies. If they have taken the ARVs for a short
period of time, chances are they can recover quite well from the drugs
toxic effects after they stop them. Long-term usage of these drugs,
however, is problematic.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, how do you
respond to those who characterize HIV/AIDS as a black and gay disease?
Do you agree?
DR. MANIOTIS: The way I respond to those who
characterize HIV as a black disease is that I remind them of the history,
first, of how Dr. Gallo claimed to have found HTLV-1, and HTLV-II, which
were supposed "cancer viruses," in a population of Japanese and very
poor Caribbean black people, which was the paradigm and technology
upon which the idea that “HIV” could cause AIDS was based.
In a particular region of Japan 175 miles from Nagasaki, Dr.
Gallo believed that HTLV-1s molecular signature was a more likely cause
of leukemia than the atomic bomb dropped on that civilian population by
the United States some 50 years ago.
And somehow, through "the slave trade," as Dr. Gallo
imagined it -- he used the words "slave trade," I believe, if you read his
writings -- he thought "HTLV-1" was a Human "cancer virus" that was
carried from Africa throughout the world along with the Black slaves, until
it arrived also on the Southern region of these Japanese islands. But later
"HTLV-1s" molecular signature was subsequently found in other regions
of the world as well that werent along the routes of the so-called “slave
trade.”
Similarly, “HIV” was supposed to have come from black
Africa, from persons who either played with dead monkeys or who ate
their meat as it was once published in The Lancet, or who, in the white
colonialists mind perhaps, had some kind of close unspeakable contact
with these non-human primates. Somehow, from Africa, “HIV” supposedly
arrived in the Caribbean, where it was advanced in the 1980s that gay
men vacationing from San Francisco supposedly picked it up from black
men there by having sex with them.
Having studied physical anthropology in college, it isnt
difficult for me to see a failure to separate science from racism. Blacks
just cant be responsible for every infectious disease of Mankind: from
“HIV,” to Hepatitis B (its molecular signature was fist found first in the
blood of a Black Australian aboriginal), West Nile virus (supposedly found
first in a Black woman in "the Nile district" in 1937, who had a cold),
"HTLV-1" and "HTLV-II" from the Blacks imported during “the slave trade,”
etc.
The problem with designating "HTLV-I" or HTLV-II" or “HIV”
as "Black diseases," or to say that they came from Black people, is that
there is no evidence that "HTLV-I or II played any role whatsoever during
the “slave-trading” events Dr. Gallo imagined, or in the case of "HIV,"
there isn't a shred of evidence that "HIV" could have been transmitted by
dead monkeys to Black African children "lacking toys" as it was proposed,
or by adults eating of monkeys and chimps. First of all, neither virus has
been shown to cause either cancer or AIDS, and as far as I am aware,
you cant pick up “HIV” through your digestive tract by eating a
McDonalds hamburger that somebody who is supposed "HIV-positive just
took a bite of, or even from uncooked meat. Blacks, after supposedly
killing, eating, or playing with dead monkeys or chimps, as was written
once in The Lancet, couldnt have either. "HIV's" molecular signature isn't
transmissible, as far as I know, through eating food or playing with
objects.
Furthermore, “HIV” cannot be discriminating of race or even
sexuality if it were a transmissible syndrome. No other STD discriminates
between the sexes or races. Another problem of course, is that to
advance the idea, for instance, that "HTLV-1" causes leukemia in 6 out of
10,000 persons who live 175 miles from Nagasaki, or that “HIV” can only
be acquired and cause AIDS on average after thousands of sexual acts
according to "AIDS establishment figures, is like saying (in the case of the
HTLV-1 “cancer virus"):
"I have 20,000 birds. 10,000 of these birds molt once a year. The other 10,000
molt 3 times a year. Now, none of the 10,000 birds that molt once a year died by
hitting their head into utility poles.
However, 6 of the 10,000 birds that molt 3 times a year died by hitting their head
into utility poles. Therefore, among these birds, their molting 3 times a year
CAUSED them to hit utility poles and die. Molting 3 times annually --> hitting
utility poles --> death." "HTLV-1" causes cancer. "HIV" causes AIDS. The
statistics work out much the same.
If you believe the rate of "HTLV-1" 'infection" to be 5%
instead of 0.06% as some claim, the same argument applies, only the number of
birds changes. It would mean that 95 birds that molt 3 times a year dont die from
hitting utility poles because they molt 3 times/year, while none of another group
of 100 birds that molt once a year hit utility poles.
Therefore, molting 3 times a year causes 5 out of 100 birds
to crash into utility poles. These are mere associations without a basis in
biological fact, and the whole "HTLV-1" causes cancer and "HIV" causes AIDS
arguments are purely hypothetical, because there arent any controlled studies
on HTLV-I or HTLV-II that demonstrate experimental transformation into
metastatic cancer that I am aware of, using purified HTLV-I or HTLV-II. Similar
arguments can be made with “HIVs molecular signature(s) causing
seroconversion in minute numbers of persons out of millions, and for the exact
same reasons.
Therefore, “HIV/AIDS” is not a Black disease. It is
largely a statistical disease, that doesnt have a biological basis, like the
birds and the molting and the hitting utility poles I described before. It is a
statistical argument that has been targeted, or selectively biased against
Blacks. But with respect to the biology of it, real immune suppression has
no more affinity for Africans, African Americans, Caucasians, or Asian
people. Profound immune suppression appears in those with defined and
well-known risk factors, such as malnutrition, autoimmune diseases, or
excessive toxic drug use. Immune suppression is especially and quite
frequently caused by doctors when they give transfusions, cancer
chemotherapy, corticosteroids, and many other drugs.
Now, with gays, it is a little bit more confusing because it was
at first noted by Gottlieb in L.A., when he first described the first men that
had so-called AIDS when he reported them to CDC, that 100% of them
had cytomegalovirus, as I mentioned before, and other opportunistic
infections to varying degrees-- and this was before “HIV” was even a
thought on somebodys blackboard.
But what was not realized, and what is still overlooked is that
it's not the sexuality of a person that determines if they acquire immune
suppression. It's the overall toxic load these individuals experience, in
addition to factors like: drug use, malnutrition, sleep habits, numbers and
frequency of sexual partners, medical interventions, and foreign proteins
from transfusions.
There is nothing biologically unnatural or unhealthy about
homosexuality. What I am saying is that it is the frequency with which
these things I mentioned above occur which can -- in some few
individuals -- perhaps lead to immune suppression, but it is decisively not
a gay disease either. Its just that gays, like Blacks, have been selectively
biased by "HIV" testing.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, in the 1980s when
the mortality rate was so high, AIDS doctors viewed it as evidence that
they died from HIV infection. Do you believe that?
DR. MANIOTIS: I don't believe that because the doctors who
were there on the front lines have told us so. In San Francisco, for
example, a whole horde of -- some of the first AIDS patients that were
found, the ones that did not participate in “the fast track” party-never stops
life-style, or who refused to take AZT after it came on the scene are still
alive, and these individuals have been documented in films such as "The
Other Side of AIDS," describing this era, as well as in books by other
noted gay authors who described this phenomenon that was ignited by
the gay liberation movement, and the post-Vietnam drug era. In these
accounts, it is clear that the men who engaged in constant heavy drug
use, prophylactic use of antibiotics, methamphetamines, ecstasy, heroin,
crack, amyl nitrate (which is a mutagen at high doses), or who in addition
followed the AZT protocol at a gram .6 per day died, as witnessed by Dr.
Abrams from San Francisco, and by others who were on the front lines.
Also, it should be emphasized that If a person struggles with
drug abuse, chronic heroin or crack addiction, alcoholism, and syndromes
like these, profound malnourishment is almost inevitable, and malnutrition
itself is the quickest, most reliable, universal, hundred-percent perfect
way, of inverting the helper T-cell ratio and to lead to an immune system
collapse. Needle programs have not been a success not because a
transmissible viral agent continues to travel down the injection needles,
but because the drugs that are self-administered, especially the opiate
derivatives, are among the most immune suppressive drugs known, when
given long-term or chronically.
If people also have, on top of this, multiple STDs, which many
of the first groups did (as indicated by Gottliebs first reports and
Montagniers Patient One), incompletely-treated syphilis, gonorrhea,
herpes, all kinds of viruses concomitantly and concurrently, then it is very
likely that the immune system could crash. And once that happens, it is
very difficult to reconstitute their immune systems.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Dr. Maniotis, you are saying -- and you
told us earlier -- that the HIV virus does not exist. Do you mean that it
doesnt exist in any segment of our society, including blacks, gays,
straights or bisexuals?
DR. MANIOTIS: It has not been shown to be an exogenous,
immune suppressive retrovirus, and as such, it hasn't been shown to exist
as an exogenous retrovirus that causes immune suppression anywhere
on the planet, okay? It has been shown by the standards of science to
exist as an exogenous virus no more than ghosts have been shown to
exist, in my opinion, okay? It was a mistake. There are complex
molecular signatures called "HIV" that are associated with certain disease
states, but these signatures are also found in healthy people, and in
people who are normal and will never acquire immune suppression.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Mm-hmm.
It wasn't a conspiracy. It was a mistake, and there have been
many other similar mistakes in medicine because it is so difficult to tie
causality to a single agent in any disease. Pellagra was such a mistake,
again blamed on poor Blacks in the South and which was shown to be
caused by nutritional deficiency of vitamin B. SMON was such a mistake
in Japan caused by a toxic drug. Polio may be such a mistake.
There are many other assumed virally-induced or pseudovirally-
induced diseases, such as “hepatitis B” and “hepatitis C,” as well
as the so-called prion diseases that are supposedly caused by an
“infectious protein” devoid of a nucleic acid template that also constitute
molecular signatures that dont necessarily correspond to or predict a
disease state, but which may be merely signatures associated with
disease, or not associated with disease in healthy animals or humans.
The slaughtering of the cattle industry because of “Mad Cow”
disease is the result of believing that a "slow viral-like agent" called a
prion, causes disease years after incubation in an organism. Scrapie in
sheep, Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease are thought to require years of
prion incubation before illness appears, and this idea served as a
precedent for the "slow-cancer virus" and the slow “HIV virus-AIDS"
hypotheses. All of them derive from the idea that assumed infectious
agents cause these illnesses years after infection, when in fact underlying
genetic, autoimmune mechanisms, or still unknown factors such as toxic
chemicals in the environment, may be largely responsible in each of these
diseases. Prions ingested by the Fore Papua New Guinea tribesmen
were thought to generate a Parkinsonian-like encephalopathy 20-40 years
after these indigenous, highly genetically-inbred aboriginals ate prions
from the brains of their dead relatives in ceremonies that Gajdusek first
witnessed. Similarly, "HTLV-I" and "HTLV-II" are molecular signatures
thought to cause cancer as many as 40 years of incubation in a human as
Gallo first proposed, although SV-40, shown to cause true cancers in
animals (along with polyomavirus "factor" and perhaps Rous sarcoma
extracts in chickens and papilloma in rabbits harboring warts), when
injected into hundreds of millions of humans, SV-40 has not yielded an
increase in Human cancer in 35 years as mentioned before, which is
really not long enough to make that claim according to the authors. The
hepatitis B virus signature (HBsAG), is also said to affect 300 million
people worldwide, and is said to cause liver cancer 40-60 years after
infection. Human Papilloma virus is said to cause cervical cancer 20-40
years after it is first acquired in about 1 in 10,000 women who express the
ill-defined and non-validated HPV 16 or 18 DNA sequences, etc. It still
baffles me how the "AIDS establishment" or slow-virus "cancer
establishment," or "prion disease establishment," or hepatitis B
"establishment," or HPV "establishment" can accept this idea that an
infectious agent can cause disease years after exposure. It makes no
sense biochemically: a virus or viral-like agent doesn't "KNOW" that it's
lipids, proteins, or nucleic acids are not supposed to interact
biochemically with the host that it infects for 20 or 40 years, and then
suddenly become pathogenic. In June of this year, if fact, the "HIVinfection"
theory itself was challenged by scientists because a
mathematical model of the process by which T cells are supposedly
produced and eliminated can't account for the slow pace of depletion that
occurs in immune suppressed patients said to have AIDS.
But misplaced causality has always been a huge problem in
medicine, and is a major problem in every type of infectious disease
model that fails to take into consideration the fact that any communicable
illness is the result of the interplay between a suspected pathogen, and
the resistance of the host population to disease. How else could you
explain the fact that thousands of humans or animals could test positive
for some molecular signature, such as the HBsAG antigen, while only a
few of those humans or animals will ever develop a certain disease
thought to be caused by that agent?
MR. PAPANTONIOU: What is your advice to someone who
has tested HIV-positive?
If you do believe in the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, then I would
recommend that you get at least three confirmatory tests of different kinds
to assure yourself that you are carrying the molecular signature that
people associate with immune suppression in about 1/3 of “AIDS”
patients.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor, would you advise using
today's medication as therapy for the HIV virus? And are those drugs
beneficial to the immune system?
DR. MANIOTIS: That is a complicated question. I would
have to answer it in two different ways.
To say that a drug helps somebody -- and when we devise
and develop new treatments for cancer-- you have to have a hypothesis
as to how the body works. Now, there are some ways of thinking about
the body which are not typically taught in medical schools, but yet,
anybody who has used a vaccine, for example, is giving a little bit of
poison to the body. Vaccinations derive from homeopathic “law of
similars,” and they indirectly induce the organism to mount an attack
against an invading pathogen by providing in advance, something or
some components or reagents that are "similar" to that invading organism
or pathogen.
Anti-retrovirals, penicillin, and cancer drugs are based on an
allopathic theory borne during the German dye making era of Virchow's
and Koch's era called the “law of contraries,” in that drugs or reagents are
supposed to attack or neutralize the disease agent directly, by binding to
it somehow as a dye does to a fabric, or interfering with it directly.
Now, when you give a poison to the body similar to that
presented to the body by a real poison or virus, the body is then alarmed
or alerted to the fact, and then it overcomes the poison whenever that
poison is encountered in the future. This is the principle of vaccination.
There are some studies with the antiretrovirals that show that due their
toxic nature, they somehow wake up the immune system for a short while,
and then you can defeat opportunistic infections and this sort of thing.
However, to my knowledge, there is no evidence that any
antiretroviral drugs attack or interfere with any virus directly. In all
likelihood, antiretrovirals modulate the immune system into either waking
up, producing more antibodies or, in some cases -- in high-dose
regimens, they actually kill bacteria, mycoplasmas, and fungi, that may be
present in a immune suppressed patient. At higher doses or during longterm
usage, these drugs also modulate your cells, and eventually, kill the
cells of the immune system and other organs.
It makes no sense at all to use these highly toxic
drugs -- owing to their chemical nature -- for life, because, for example, if
you use them for life, then you have to explain to the cancer patient -- who
uses the same or similar drug -- why he or she has to be taken off the
drug after two weeks or four weeks. Because if they are not, their bone
marrow goes away, their intestines don't work -- they slough off. Their
skin falls off. They develop all types of blood and immune disorders.
That is what a cancer patient would do if given the same drug at the same
dosage that it has been given to AIDS patients with immune suppression.
AZT was originally designed as a leukemia drug.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: My question is simple: Are you
against using those drugs for HIV/AIDS?
DR. MANIOTIS: Yes. The largest study of HAART contradicts
claims that these drugs extend life. Some 22,000 previously treatment-free HIV
positives that began medications between 1995 and 2003, and the authors of
that study discovered that ”viral response” improved (“HIVs molecular signature
became more difficult to read), but such “improvement” has not translated into a
decrease in mortality. The "AIDS establishment, however, will again be rewarded
for this failure.
Scientists and physicians from Pittsburg recently reported that in a
study of 5,700 “HIV positives,” it was determined that since the advent of HAART,
the most common current cause of death among people with HIV is liver failure.
Authors warned that monitoring of liver enzymes is needed to save lives, an
economic impossibility for people in Africa and other developing areas of the
world taking toxic anti-HIV drugs. I think that this failure will also be rewarded.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, since you are
opposed to the use of AIDS drugs, is it your opinion as a scientist that an
individual with HIV/AIDS will be harmed or will develop the symptoms you
mentioned earlier by their use? What should such an individual do in
order to be safe?
DR. MANIOTIS: The Fawzi study in Africa published in the
New England Journal of Medicine has shown that vitamin regimens, a
clean, healthy diet, with plenty of nutritional supplements and support and
exercise will reverse immune suppressions of various sorts. There are
now other clinical trials of nutrient supplementation that appear to be able
to reverse an immunosuppressive crash, non-toxically. In another study,
40 AIDS patients said to have full-blown AIDS were given food supplements,
together with oligouronic acid.
In all cases, it was reported that diarrhea resolved and the
bodyweight normalized. Although some of the profoundly immune-suppressed
patients died, 8 patients improved in both their health status, as well as CD4+
and "viral load" signatures. Six months after the start of the trial, 19 patients were
well enough to return to normal work.
If immune suppression is due to foreign protein damage and
an autoimmune disease develops, that can be more difficult to reverse,
but long-term nutritional therapies, exercise, vitamin supplements, and
regimens that treat opportunistic infections directly -- without giving
people toxic medications -- are probably the best way to pull someone out
of an immune-suppressive crash. At this point, we really dont know how
to reverse profound immune system collapse any more effectively than
we know how to reverse a malignant melanoma, and anybody who says
they do know is arrogant about the little knowledge we do have about
these disorders.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Dr. Maniotis, if an individual is on
medication, what should he do to protect himself from the chemicals,
which, in some cases, are taken on a daily basis, and often total as much
as a quarter of a pound?
DR. MANIOTIS: The best thing, I believe, is to stop all
immune-suppressive acts first of all, if at all possible.
Next thing is to, at the same time, take food and supplements
that make the immune system stronger, live a life that it not
immunosuppressive in any way, and exercise.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: How do you explain the fact that most
AIDS doctors and pharmaceutical companies nowadays are focusing on
the African continent?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, I will give you a good example, and
that's Nevirapine. Nevirapine was discontinued in its use in the United
States because it was too toxic. Another failure that went rewarded.
And so, when a manufacturer makes a drug like that, what
are they going to do? Well, they are going to dump it on countries that
don't have our legal regulations, and that is exactly what Max Essexs
group from Harvard did in Africa. According to Lockman et al. who was
the lead author of this study, 875,000 mother-infant pairs were given the
black-box label drug, and the results of this vast human experiment on
African mothers and their infants was published in 2007.
When they gave them a single dose of Nevirapine that they
didn't want to give to white people in the United States anymore because
the manufacturer thought it may be too toxic, the so-called "mutation
rate" of “HIV” went up 41.7 percent in those people that were given one
dose of the drug. In other words, according to "HIV=AIDS" advocates,
41.7% more people who took one dose of Nevirapine should now go on to
develop untreatable drug-resistant “HIV infections” that they wouldnt have
developed, had they not taken the drug.
But this kind of result isn't unusual in AIDS science: whenever
an AIDS patient develops AIDS or dies while on AIDS medications, the
"AIDS establishment" blames it on “the viruss ability to mutate,” which
breaks all the rules of genetics and genetic invariance established over
the past 100 years. Is chickenpox different than it was 200 years ago or is
it mutating in every patient? Does it mutate every time it infects a child?
In my view, this is damning evidence that a distinctive pathogenic virus,
“HIV,” hasnt been isolated, especially if its molecular sequences are said
to change over time in nearly every person it infects, especially after a
single dose of even a black box label drug.
Even high dose radiation doesn't mutate things that quickly.
And of course there is no evidence that mutations of a virus are occurringthey
are reading changes in the molecular sequences kicked out of
people's cells in the presence of a black-box label drug. These kinds of
studies simply suggest that, in these vast Human experiments with either
Nevirapine or "HIV" vaccines, microbicides, condom crusades, and other
antiretroviral combos such as HAART, that in each case, as many or
frequently even more people are showing molecular signatures called
"HIV" or are showing morbidity precisely because they were experimented
on with these ill-defined drugs, vaccines, or microbicides, than people
who are left alone.
I think it is the worst kind of ethical violation, especially
against Africans, African Americans, people who are gay, or anyone else
who becomes entrapped in the "HIV=AIDS" hypnotic trance, without being
provided alternative hypotheses if they do test positive, or exhibit immune
suppression, or any of the 48 so-called "AIDS-defining diseases."
Also, what is worrisome about Nevirapine is that Edmond
Tremont, a program leader in the NIHs AIDS program, admitted that he
changed the safety reports on Nevirapine, for which he was rewarded by
keeping his directorship at the NIH.
Some of the safety data were said to have been washed
away in a flood, and upon learning that Joyce Ann Hafford, a Black
Nevirapine-treated woman in the U.S. had died because of Nevirapine,
Tremont said “oops, nothing we can do about dumb docs” or something to
that effect. Of course her death was not the fault of the drug, or his fault,
that he rewrote the safety data, because only “he knew of the real issues
regarding African AIDS.”
But there is a long history of this kind of deception when socalled
infectious diseases are involved because of unfounded fears of
contagion, unbridled faith in vaccines, and the imagined and highly
publicized threat to public health policies, and pharmaceutical profits
should there be a breakdown in fear of germs, or "gay plagues," or "gay
cancers," such as Kaposi's, which was among the first "AIDS-defining
illness." There may be other darker and politically motivated and
deceptive reasons why these infectious disease paradigms arent
questioned and exposed for what they are in the mainstream press, and
then changed.
For instance, it is well known that the originator of the prion
hypothesis, a Nobelist, my early role model as a anthropologist-scientistphysician,
and a program head at the NIH, D. Carlton Gajdusek, plead
guilty of child sexual abuse a few years ago, because he was caught
importing and sexually abusing those young boys and men from Papua
New Guinea to his home in Maryland. His "animal model" to prove his
hypothesis consisted of placing a 10% brain homogenate from diseased
persons into the craniums of primates, and a few of them became illprobably
due to the foreign protein antigens placed directly into the brains
of these animals. During the 1980's Laura Manuelidis of Yale
vociferously contested Gajdusek's hypothesis and attributed the illness in
the animals to foreign protein reactions, especially because there was no
evidence that prions contained any nucleic acid template. Others
attributed the syndrome to genetic inheritance because the syndrome
appeared to run in families in England and elsewhere where they didn't
eat the brains of their dead relatives, or smear blood over their cuts, as
did the New Guinea tribesman, or their children, that Gajdusek became so
enamored of.
But instead of his Nobel Prize-winning prion hypothesis being
questioned or challenged, or instead of the reservations of Laura
Manuelidis being tested and explored by others, whole herds of cattle
have been destroyed based on a molecular signature that may or may
have nothing to do with the development of spongiform encephalopathy, a
brain syndrome characterized by a lack of inflammation, and another
Nobel was given out to Stanley Prusiner for discovering the molecular
signature(s) of prions in healthy and a few sick hamsters, and for
proposing a new twist on the prion hypothesis.
But critics of these "emerging infectious diseases" and "global
health threats" aren't rewarded with Nobel prizes or even a tolerant
audience. For example, a gifted journalist, Celia Farber wrote a huge
investigative article about the Nevirapine scandal I described, for
Harpers. For her excellent work, she was viciously attacked by the "AIDS
establishment." A pharmaceutical activist named Nathan Geffen working
for the ARV promoting, incredibly well funded TAC (Treatment Action
Campaign) in South Africa, wrote and disseminated a document claiming
she had made at least 56 errors in her article, which was totally untrue.
The article was fact checked for over three months and every line and
word was corroborated by Harpers fact-checkers through original
documents. A total line-by-line refutation of the TAC attack is online at the
Rethinking AIDS website. Harpers understandably, did not yield to the
baying AIDS activists who were demanding resignations of Harpers staff,
and a 15 page article written and fact checked by their operatives in the
following issue. When they failed to intimidate Harpers, they set up a
smear campaign against Ms. Farber with a website called
AIDSTRUTH.com, where Farber is attacked in hysterical terms, likening
her to Ku Klux Klan. This "AIDS establishment" cabal has lost all touch
with reality. But the worst thing is, these pharmaceutical industry funded
attackers of journalism were assisted by mainstream media, outlets like
The Nation, The Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and
others, who are invested through 20 years of poor reportage, in the
"HIV=AIDS" paradigm as infallible. A reporter for the New York Times
assigned to address the “outcry” over the article, even admitted she never
read Ms. Farber's article before placing her calls to Harpers. The
mainstream media is like a programmed robot. Like The Manchurian
Candidate—ordered to kill.
Another example of this phenomenon is John Moore, an
“HIV” researcher in New York Medical College, and a creator of this
AIDSTRUTH website used to smear Ms. Farber, me, and many others
who ask questions about the "HIV=AIDS" paradigm. He works on the
development of "HIV" microbicides to smear on the genitals of Africans.
Just last month, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the rate of the detection
of “HIVs molecular signatures in Africans whose genitals were smeared
with his microbicide were more frequently discovered than in those not
given the microbicide, so there seems to be strong motives for these
attacks on Ms. Farber, myself, and others who are critical of the
“HIV=AIDS” paradigm. For several years now, Moore's AIDSTRUTH
website associates have launched letter writing campaigns to my deans
and chairman and University President to get me fired, withhold
promotions or tenure, and they have done this to others who have dared
ask scientific questions, or who have been critical in any way of the
“HIV=AIDS” hypothesis, because their science isnt working, they are
continuously awarded for the most horrific failures and dangerous medical
programs that have even been foisted on Human beings, and we keep
reminding them of that fact.
For instance, in that same news release last month about the
failure of John Moore's microbicides, it was announced that according to
the AIDS establishment, the Merck Vaccine actually also has been a
source of increased rates of “HIV positive" tests in South Africans who
received the vaccine compared to controls who didnt. But this so-called
increase is always seen in vaccines dating back to the last century. I have
written a lot about this phenomenon and the piece I wrote is used by the
Doctors for Emergency Preparedness, and the piece is available on line
and it is called, “How to predict epidemics.” Essentially it is a timeline
showing how vaccine trials throughout history are always associated with
an increase, not a decrease in the infectious diseases the vaccines are
made to prevent.
So, it is essentially what I call the "Constant Gardener"
syndrome. I mean, the pharmaceutical industry and these "infectious
disease scientists think that Third World countries are often the best
experimental laboratories to test new things out on human experimental
“rats” or “guinea pigs” because they believe that the lives and futures of
these people really dont matter, compared to the importance of a
discovery they might make, that will put their picture in the medical
dictionary next to some new infectious agent.
A good example of this phenomenon is the polio vaccine.
The most vaccinated countries to date in the world are Nigeria -- and
India. And precisely as Salk testified before Congress in 1972 that the
only source of polio in the U.S. was the vaccine, Nigeria and India are the
countries with the most polio following the 15-year vaccine campaigns
there.
It is a way of making money, and at the same time, you can
look like a humanitarian because you can lower the prices and say you
are giving some drug or intervention to hundreds of thousands of people
at a reduced cost.
In those situations where there are patent rights still in place,
you don't give it to them at lowered costs. Instead, you just make the
taxpayers pay for these programs through one type of government and
pharmaceutical company sponsored experimental program or another.
I think it is the height of human ethics violations, myself.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Dr. Maniotis, do you believe that
throughout medical history blacks in this country and blacks in Africa were
subjects of experiments on viral diseases, including HIV/AIDS?
DR. MANIOTIS: Yes, I do, but it's not my belief. It is quite
well documented.
Now, if you recall, in the beginning of the AIDS era, Haiti was
targeted -- the blacks of Haiti -- the poorest nation in this hemisphere.
And these people are suffering from a number of endemic diseases of
poverty, and they were accused of having the first AIDS cases.
Of course, in the inner cities, there have been numbers of
programs that have been set up to specifically bias Blacks.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Including Chicago?
DR. MANIOTIS: Including Chicago. -- They specifically bias
people who live nearby inner-city hospitals and who are on public
assistance. They specifically bias gay persons. They mandate them to
automatically undergo HIV testing. They automatically put these children
into foster care, just like they did at The Incarnation Children's Center in
New York -- where they actually took children away from their parents or
their guardians and put them in the care of the state -- without proper
representation, mind you, which is illegal -- and then they inserted
G-tubes if the children refused the medications, so they could actually
dump as many as 7 black box label drugs directly in their stomachs.
This crime was called to the attention of the world through the
investigative reporting of Liam Scheff, and a documentary was made by it
by the BBC. The "AIDS" establishment consisting of people like John
Moore, Marc Wainberg, and others then protested to the BBC that they
should remove the film from their archives. Other “HIV/AIDS” question
askers and I then wrote letters to the BBC urging them to maintain the
movie they made in their archives, which was then aggressively
countered by the "AIDS establishment." Now the BBC is being threatened
by the "AIDS establishment" to remove the documentary and apologize
for showing it, even though the film exposed this crime against Black
orphaned children. The BBC has even apologized to, once again,
pharmaceutical funded AIDS “activists” like Jeanne Bergman, for allowing
sources to say AIDS medications would have made those orphans very
“unhappy” without splicing in commentary from a doctor who thinks the
drugs are great. These squads of pharma-funded “activists” and
“researchers” are like the Stasi of AIDS drugs. They never rest. They are
everywhere, rooting out and attempting to punish deviance from party line
of HIV/AIDS. It is McCarthyism, pure and simple. Countless careers have
been destroyed and the culprits are never brought to justice. Failure is
repeatedly rewarded. It is never even noted that they are directly and
generously funded by not one but several of the drug companies
producing the drugs they so ardently defend. Its insane. Scientific critics
like me are labeled “denialists” to destroy all sense that we can decipher
objective truth. But the paid shills, they are considered “activists” and
“researchers.”
In this Orwellian world of AIDS, of inverted morality and
values, it is still an open question whether is was good or bad to force
orphans to take black box label drugs through surgically-implanted Gtubes.
According to Institutional Review Board Rules that all biomedical
scientists must follow, even children need to give their assent for a
medical procedure-- not just have consent from the parents (or legal
guardians), but assent -- that means the child has to nod his head in favor
of taking the medication, especially when the medications are so toxic
that they make the child have constant diarrhea, stomach problems,
cramps, headaches, nausea, vomiting, stunted growth, death, et cetera.
In the case of ICC, we know that the children pleaded not to have to take
the drugs. We know that they ran, jumped, scrambled, hid, cajoled, and
begged some more, even to be allowed to miss a single dose. We know
this from the nurses whose job it was to administer the drugs. We know
that some of the children died as a result of the drugs.
This is illegal. It is immoral. And these people who are
doing it or like Moore and Bergman and others who defend these
Goebbels-like experiments, we have warned them and we are going to
make sure that this crime doesn't go unanswered, like every other crime
and gross error in the history of AIDS.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: What is your opinion of the AZT drug?
Is it safe?
DR. MANIOTIS: AZT is a failed cancer drug that was
deemed too toxic for human use because it caused too many tumors in
rats.
It should not have ever have been taken back off the shelf
and given to human beings. Never.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: You talked with Dr. Robert Gallo, who
studied the whole issue. Since you had the opportunity to discuss the
matter with him on a number of occasions and recently, how do you
explain the fact that Dr. Gallo has thus far avoided explaining how he and
his counterpart in France isolated the HIV virus?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, that issue was extensively discussed
by Dr. Gallo and me recently, and my opinion of the whole affair, despite
what a lot of my colleagues think, is that there was no wrong-doing.
There was no cover up. There was no collusion, and there was a sincere
attempt by both groups to understand and isolate the molecular signature
associated with immune-suppressive illness, ARC, and then AIDS.
And John Crewdson, the Dingell Commission, and the Health
and Human Services, which came after them for fraud, did the world a
disservice. The Dingell Investigation and the investigation by the
Department of Heath and Human Services that focused quite severely on
a contaminant that impeded defining "HIV's" molecular signature-a
mistake which can happen in any lab, but which was rectified by Gallo
and Montagnier years later in 1991 with PCR, served to confuse the issue
for at least 5 years, because they took the issue away from the biology of
immune suppression and made it, instead, an issue for Chirac and
Reagan and the patent officers, and the state, the moral majority, the
Christian Right, the haters of homosexuals, and Blacks, and others.
Contaminations of cancer cells and viruses happen frequently in all kinds
of biological labs, and they are caught by quality control tests periodically,
but when the future health and patent rights of nations is based on a
molecular signature thought to cause infectious and fatal disease in
everyone it infects, then the stakes are quite a bit higher, and politics,
rather than science, rules.
Instead of focusing on the biology of the illness or illnesses,
the focus was placed on protecting the blood supply in order to continue
to give immune-suppressive transfusions, and the attention instead was
placed on who was getting money for the test kits, who was going to
benefit from an AIDS test kit, and who would get the patent rights, and -- if
so, then, whose intellectual property was the first “HIV” test kit.
These kinds of issues, rather than science, made it possible
to launch a 5-year investigation to determine if one lab may be stealing
the ideas or the materials, such as the virus, from another, when in fact,
that did not occur.
Gallo shepherded through the paper that Montagnier wrote
the year before. And when a scientist shepherds a paper through it
means he helps them to get it published. He is not trying to foil them from
getting it published. So, I don't believe that there was any wrong doing
among either the Pasteur or the Bethesda groups. Their association of
"HIV" with immune suppressed patients, and their belief that it was causal
of immune suppression was just a simple mistake that should have been
discovered and which would have probably been, had the Reagan
administration, and the greed of patent possibilities, not been involved.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Professor Maniotis, is there any
correlation between CD-4 cell counts and viral load?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, the two most recent studies regarding
this issue claim that there is no correlation. Long-term studies now show
that more and more AIDS researchers are seeing that there really is not a
reliable indicator between the so-called viral load, which is a test given
through a technology called PCR, whose inventor, Kary Mullis, warned cannot
detect HIV, as I mentioned earlier, and the levels of CD4+ T-cells in a patient.
I know of one little girl, for instance, who tragically died from a rare
amoxicillin late adverse reaction but which the "AIDS establishment" claims died
of AIDS-related PC pneumonia, and AIDS-related encephalopathy, although no
"HIV" test was ever performed on her, no inflammation was detected in her lungs
that was consistent with PC pneumonia, and although her mother never
consistently tested "HIV" positive, had never consumed AIDS or illegal drugs, and
had been healthy for more than 12 years. At the time of her death, the little girl's
total T-cell count was measured at 10,800 cells/microliter, which is nearly twice
the normal number of lymphocytes in a normal healthy child, according to
surveys done by the WHO on total lymphocyte counts. So no, T-cell counts have
nothing to do with AIDS if you seriously consider this case.
Nevertheless, the "AIDS establishment," attempted to cause
incarceration of the little girl's occasionally "HIV-positive" mother, and her seronegative
and thus serodiscordant father, through a concerted mainstream media
smear campaign that was launched because the parents had publicly expressed
alternative views about HIV/AIDS and had refused to test or drug their children
prior to the amoxicillin tragedy. The L.A. Times, ABC primetime, and other "AIDS
establishment" backed media outlets wrote that in the little girl's case, despite her
gaining weight at the end of her life, and despite complete health throughout her
3 years of life, and her good progress at pre-school, that the little girl died of
AIDS.
Therefore, to answer your question, in her case, the "AIDS
establishment" feels that AIDS can present as a disease of not only too few
lymphocytes, but also a disease of too many lymphocytes. In the tragic aftermath
of losing a small child, the parents ultimately avoided incarceration by DCFS and
the police for criminal negligence, and were able to keep their other "HIVnegative"
child without him being removed by The State, and so the "AIDS
establishment" lost this one, even though the couple had challenged their
paradigm publicly prior to the little girl's tragic death, so there is hope.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: As a scientist, how do you explain the
fact that almost all of the AIDS doctors today have seen the HIV virus only
in pictures, and yet are still prescribing those strong and deadly
medications?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, as I described earlier, they are not
seeing it in pictures, either. What they are "seeing" are HERVs, retroids,
virus like particles, other viruses, membrane-bound vesicles, or cellular
garbage. Nobody has shown that this debris causes AIDS, as I said
before.
A positive “HIV” test should only be regarded as a molecular
signature that may have nothing to do with a virus, with infection, or with
disease. It's signature is found in the placentas of healthy pregnant
women, for example -- and even more frequently in women who have had
more than two children. The signature is found in alcoholics -- late-stage
alcoholics tend to test positive. Not all of them, not a majority of them, but
a few of them. Heroin abusers tend to test positive. Harry Haverkos of the
CDC said that long-term heroin addicts should not be considered AIDS
patients because long-term heroin use causes immune suppression. The
list goes on and on. Hemophilia. People who have had transfusions will
test positive because they have been given foreign proteins in the form of
factor concentrates, not because they are sexually promiscuous or
obtained the "HIV virus" through factor concentrates. There are about
70 reasons that people have been found to test positive that have nothing
to do with HIV and have nothing to do with AIDS.
So, until you differentially diagnose somebody by excluding
70 other reasons that are known to be associated with low T-cell numbers
or inverted T-cell ratios, you cannot assume that they have a virus called
“HIV” or a syndrome called “AIDS.”
MR. PAPANTONIOU: How do you evaluate the decision in
2000 by President Mbeki of South Africa not to allow the use of AIDS
drugs in his country, choosing instead to defer to the Hippocrates dogma,
"Let the food be the medicine, and the medicine the food?”
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, the Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS
Hypothesis Group advised Mbeki to hold an open debate to hear the
views of the "AIDS establishment" and our side with our reservations.
And President Mbeki is a very, very intelligent man, and he heard all the
evidence and he concluded that it was not a good idea to dump
experimental toxic cancer drugs, or liver-failure-causing drugs, or other
unproven drugs on his people.
Instead, he thought -- and he appointed an also very
forward-thinking woman to be his health minister -- to instead provide the
infrastructure in his society, especially after a long Apartheid movement
that took place in South Africa where people were placed into abject
poverty and extreme social strife.
It all came down to a very humane decision to nutritionally
support people. You know, "the food to be the medicine, and the
medicine the food," as you mentioned. But also --
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Hippocrates, not me.
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, the Hippocratic Oath taught to medical
students is to "first, do no harm," and these medicines and these
medications have not been around too long, and their long-term side
effects are not known, just like the effects of Thalidomide weren't known,
although the "AIDS establishment" has even given Thalidomide to orphan
children at Incarnation Childrens Center in New York, as mentioned
earlier. It was given to a generation of women and then their children had
little fins for arms, all kinds of birth defects. Is Thalidomide good for
growing infants and children?
We don't know all of the side effects of these drugs yet, but
we do know that they do cause some horrible side effects in babies, in
infants.
And Mbeki was simply protecting the people of his country,
the proud women of South Africa, and their families by not allowing the
big interests of the pharmaceutical companies and the Bush
Administration to come in there and test their drugs on them as if they
were rats. The pharmaceutical companies supported by The Bush
Administration, working through pharma shill organizations like TAC
(Treatment Action Campaign) and others are now putting extreme
amounts of pressure on Mbeki and others to do the drug roll-outs, as they
are called, which are nothing more than mass human experiments without
a scientific basis, without an ethical basis, without a rational basis, without
a medical basis, or a basis in simple common sense.
So, Mbeki made his decision in 2000 based on the most
humane and, I believe, well-studied, well-considered decisions that a
president could make for his people.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: What do you think about the case of
the five Bulgarian nurses and an Israeli doctor of Palestinian origin who
allegedly infected 426 children in the Children's Hospital in Benghazi,
Libya with the HIV virus? They were liberated most recently after the
involvement of the new president of France, Nicolas Sarkosy and his wife.
Many of those children died apparently from the use of AIDS medications.
DR. MANIOTIS: Again, that is a good example of a question
you asked earlier about, "Is HIV a Black disease or an African disease,”
because it wasn't only the President of France and his wife who helped in
freeing these health care workers, but it was the recommendations of Luc
Montagnier and other people in the "AIDS establishment" to release these
people and not have them shot by Qaddafi.
First of all, it is impossible to get a cluster of that many
nosocomial “HIV” infections -- that is to say hospital-induced
infections -- in a single place over such a short period of time.
So, the AIDS establishment did what they always do, and that
is they pinned it on the presence of Black people in the hospital.
In a statement that Montagnier made -- and if I am not
mistaken -- he said, when asked the same question, "How do you explain
those 426 cases," Montagnier said, "Well, it probably has to do with the
infusion of health care workers from Sub-Saharan Africa" -- were the
exact words, I believe, that you can find he said. A euphemistic way of
saying,
"It's the fault of the Black people from South Africa who
worked in the hospital. They gave the 426 children AIDS somehow."
Which makes no sense medically. It makes no sense
scientifically. And certainly, it's a racist thing to say, and at best it
impugns the Sub-Saharan health care workers who have come to Libya
and elsewhere to try and find jobs, and it also punishes the Africans and
African-Americans -- Africans wherever they live in the world because it is
assumed that because of their skin color and culture, that they have a
higher incidence of AIDS.
I wrote an article recently with an African scholar who had
spend 35 years of his career studying and going to Africa, named Charles
Geshekter, where we presented documentation showing that the
populations of Africa have been increasing during the last 20 years, not
decreasing because of some killer viral epidemic, despite the fraudulent
and downright politically motivated and economically motivated
statements to the contrary by the World Health Organization, the Bush
Administration, and others. African statistics for AIDS in all forms come to
an astonishing 2.3 percent of the population will typically test positive.
It has been reported, in addition, that prison populations in
South Africa, have a “HIV-positive” testing rate of about 2.3 percent, and
one prison official I quoted in this article said hed only seen one or two
cases of full blown “AIDS” in 7 years in his prison.
In this context, “HIV's” molecular signature may represent
merely a low frequency molecular signature amongst people living in
Africa and elsewhere in the world. If this is the case, at least some “HIVpositive"
tests could be similar to those first described for Hepatitis-B, that
was found first in the blood of an Australian aboriginal, it's claimed, but
through further testing, they found it in Micronesians and Asians at a low
frequency, and in about 1/3 of Down children and 10% of leukemia
patients.
What do these groups have in common? A communicable
virus? A genetic polymorphism? Stress-induced immune cell gene
recombination and expression in stereotypic ways? We understand little
about the causes of the frequency distributions of these molecular
signatures in the Human population, other than the fact that they can
occur in both healthy and “sick” or diseased individuals. But if you are
found to have such a molecular signature without clinical symptoms, you
are presumed to be "infected"-“a healthy sick person” as I call it.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Dr. Maniotis, in conclusion, and
keeping in mind what you said in this interview, what do you plan to do to
terminate this highly deadly protocol prescribed by AIDS doctors?
DR. MANIOTIS: Well, the only thing we can do is to continue
to educate people as to the biology of immune-suppressive illnesses, and
cancers, and try to understand the link between immune modulation and
cancer, since "HIV's" molecular signature is said to be associated with six
different cancers.
We can continue to have discussions, although "AIDS
establishment" researchers-either privately or publicly refuse to discuss
anything with us "denialists." I frequently am interviewed by medical
documentary journalists and people like that, as I was recently in a series
of hour-long interviews on INTIMETV, where I present the kind of
information I have presented here in 6 hour-long segments entitled, "On
The Edge," and which was created by one of my students. In one of the
segments, I presented at least 15 hypotheses that could account for the
immune suppression seen in “AIDS patients” that have nothing to do with
“HIV,” and that actually have more promise in some cases, for explaining
these immune-suppressive illnesses, than the molecular signature of
“HIV.”
How do you convince the medical establishment of anything?
I mean, it took many years after the polio era to actually get the
information disseminated that the polio vaccine caused polio in California,
Idaho, the South, in Chicago, and elsewhere, because doctors are
hemmed in by protocols, and failure to treat a patient according to
protocol results and disciplinary action, loss of license, et cetera. It took
nearly five years to convince vaccine makers to discontinue the lots
because of the discovery that SV40 had contaminated the vaccine given
to hundreds of millions of people, and that it caused cancer in animals.
These issues need to discussed openly, and all of the
different arguments should be presented without presuming anything is
correct, before public health policies are set in stone. Now that we have
so much more negative data than we had in the 1980s –and science
fundamentally is a way of asking questions and disproving hypotheses,
we known more surely than ever, that Marc Wainberg who is supported
by GlaxoSmithKline for his toxic AIDS drug 3TC, and his cabal of drug
promoters, were wrong when they said the constitution should be
amended to put people like Duesberg, or “denialists” like me, in jail.
Every aspect of AIDS prevention and treatment, from
breast-feeding to microbicides, to antiretrovirals, AZT, Nevirapine, 3TC,
protease inhibitors, HAART, to the vaccine failures of just a week ago,
announced by Merck, have all been utterly devastating examples of a
false and failed hypothesis, that "HIV=AIDS."
This problematic mind-set can best be recognized through a
comparison of how hypotheses about diseases other than AIDS are regarded by
us, in the Biomedical Establishment. If someone has cardiovascular disease, and
one group believes that it is likely caused by old age, and another group believes
it is because of the accumulation of "bad" cholesterol deposits, it is quite absurd
for the pro-age group to call the cholesterol group "age-denialists." Cancer is the
same way...you have your garden variety oncogene advocates. You also have
your run-of-the-mill extracellular matrix deregulation proponents like me. It would
have little meaning and accomplish nothing if the advocates of the oncogene
hypothesis should call those that believe in an extracellular matrix hypothesis,
oncogene “denialists,” don't you agree? Calling people names does nobody any
good, and one should not categorize persons anyway, because humans are so
complex and often have conflicting viewpoints that are subject to revision. This is
especially true in science.
To emphasize this point, in metastasizing cancer (neoplasia), there are
many hypotheses regarding the origin, progression, and pathogenesis of the
disease. If you are a cancer biologist, and you don't believe, for example, that the
deregulation of oncogenes completely, or even partially explains cancer, you are
not called a "Holocaust denier," or worse perhaps, a "flat-earther," "irresponsible,"
or "criminal."
If you think I am critical of the "AIDS Establishment," I think it would pale in
comparison to my criticisms the "cancer establishment," and as a scientist, I feel
it my responsibility to point out weaknesses or flaws in these hypotheses in order
to help improve the science, and eventually, improve the treatment of both
people with immune suppression and cancer.
For instance, our findings about a decade ago challenged the
underlying premise of the tumor angiogenesis hypothesis by demonstrating that
malignant solid tumors can generate their own blood vessels. Dr. Folkman's
entire paradigm has not translated into the meaningful improvement of cancer
patients, despite numerous attempts with various toxic and non-toxic
approaches. Nevertheless, the testing and playing out of the tumor angiogenesis
hypothesis laid the foundation(s) for better hypotheses and opened up new
directions that would not have been possible had the hypothesis not been
rigorously tested, and honestly evaluated. In the vasculogenic mimicry and tumor
biofilm hypotheses now being promoted by my group and which was advanced to
explain how tumor cells can generate their own vascular channels, genes only
play a secondary role to the glycoproteins and the extracellular matrix in the
environment of the tumor. But the extracellular matrix was also a key element of
the tumor angiogenesis hypothesis that I have borrowed and elaborated upon.
Because Dr. Folkman and other pioneers were investigating these
important molecules, we were then able to observe them in new contexts, and
perhaps, like the Wright Brothers, as Folkman used to tell me, someday extend
the flight distance from those recorded at Kitty Hawk, toward the distance and
speed now traversed by modern jets. Medicine and science are much the same
in this regard, as Dr. Folkman used to teach.
For instance, we know now, that despite the cancer establishment's love
affair with genes and "genetic causes of cancer," it appears more certain than
ever that genes or genetic mutation may play little if any role at all. When cancer
cells are placed into embryos, where these molecules are made in abundance,
all kinds of genetically mutated and deadly cancer cells that would kill an adult
are transformed into normal tissues, and their DNA is changed by the
environment, as we showed recently in one example that was on the cover of
The American Journal of Pathology with breast cancer cell reversion into normal
cells. No genetic mutation is required: genetics arent required. Cancer cells don't
cause cancer, under certain conditions. "HIV" doesn't cause AIDS under any
conditions that have been convincingly demonstrated. Genes appear to be
controlled in the case of cancers, by the extracellular environment, as Dr.
Folkman and others suspected, but could not fully realize. No irresponsibility
here, no "Holocaust denying," no "flat-earthing," or "criminal behavior." All of
these various hypotheses and many others are actively being researched and
funded in order to understand the pathogenesis of cancer, and to advance the
biology and understanding of cancer and the non-toxic and rational treatment of
cancer patients.
"AIDS" is different. We have been pelted by the non-productive
monotheistic hypothesis that “HIV” causes “AIDS,“ except of course in idiopathic
AIDS (ICL-AIDS as it is called)-a disease in which "HIV" cannot be detected
although AIDS-indicator diseases are present, or in “Long-Term Non-
Progressors” or “Elite Controllers,” as they are called, and of course as
mentioned earlier, “HIV” doesnt cause one of its first two AIDS-defining
diseases: Kaposis sarcoma. Nobody knows about the link between the immune
system and cancer. If they say they do, they are arrogant about what they think
they know.
So, time will probably rectify this colossal mistake, although,
you know, it's been going on for a century or more in different guises:
The idea that you can have healthy sick people.
Another direction that we are pursuing is continued work on
viruses and cancer: not how viruses cause cancer in Humans because
there is no evidence since the SV40 fiasco that they do, but how they
might cure it. We reported recently experiments that explored how herpes
viruses might cure melanomas, but also how three-dimensional
melanoma tissues resist viral infections. In doing these experiments, we
realized, and published, for example, that we know very little regarding
how viruses behave in the context of real tissues, or pseudo-tissues we
make in the lab. They act quite differently than one would expect they
would given results in flat Petri dishes. We soon hope to use these
viruses to test if we can cure naturally occurring cancers in peoples pets
who develop cancer, before we try or even suggest trying it out on a
human being.
MR. PAPANTONIOU: Dr. Maniotis, once again, thank you for
giving of your time and expertise to discuss so important a health issue.
DR. MANIOTIS: My pleasure, Lambros. Thank you very
much too.
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