Has nothing to do with Science

"The HIV hypothesis ranks with the 'bad air' theory for malaria and the 'bacterial infection' theory of beriberi and pellagra [caused by nutritional deficiencies]. It is a hoax that became a scam." (Sunday Times (London) 3 April 1994)

Dr. Bernard Forscher, former editor of the U.S. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences

The first casualty of the 'war on AIDS' was the integrity of science. The exact moment of the crime can be pinpointed: it was the April 1984 press conference where the then Health Secretary Margaret Heckler declared that government scientist Robert C. Gallo had discovered the viral cause of AIDS. [...] Heckler hailed the discovery as 'yet another miracle for American medicine and science' and a 'victory over a dreaded disease'. If smoke and mirror tricks are miracles, then miracle it was. [...] Neither Gallo nor the [Pasteur] Institute proved that the virus was pathogenic. Indeed, they did not even isolate it, as the Pasteur Institute chief later admitted. But the spin-doctors at the National Institutes of Health had organized leading journals to endorse Secretary Heckler's 'miracle' with the seal of Science. From that moment, all AIDS research and policy were based on a speculation converted to dogma by bureaucratic power.

This initial public execution of scientific integrity unleashed a propaganda machine that expands Heckler's initial obvious whopper ('victory over a dreaded disease') into a never-ending sickness saga that extorts money and grinds millions into the muck of bad medicine.

Scientific integrity was murdered by a brutal health fascism. The next victim was the gold standard of clinical evaluation, the double blind trial. With a perversity that spin doctors must admire, the methodology was abandoned in the name of ethics! In reality, the double blind trial had to be murdered because it placed the treatment and causality dogmas of AIDS science at grave risk of falsification. The next victim was the integrity of independent clinical judgment. Any doctor who bucked the official line placed himself at risk of retaliation. And [...] the fundamental right of informed consent and right to refuse treatment were also murdered.

[...] 'AIDS science' is 90% mindless repetition and 10% deeply inconsistent findings of no clinical value.

Hiram Caton, Coming to Grips with Health Fascism, VirusMyth.net, April 1999
Hiram Caton, PhD, is a Fellow at the National Institute of Law, Ethics, and Public Affairs at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

With Robert Gallo at her side, Margaret Heckler stood behind a podium in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington, D.C. Lights flooded her face, cameras rolled, reporters clutched their notebooks expectantly.

"Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science" announce Heckler, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. "Today's discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease. Those who have disparaged this scientific search - those who have said we weren't doing enough - have not understood how sound, solid, significant medical research proceeds."