Inventing the AIDS Virus

Rating:
Summary: Please Research Who The Publisher is.
Review: A great expose of the biggest scientific/medical blunder in human history. And I'm NOT exaggerating.

This is one of the most important books ever written. Don't be fooled by the hysterical critiques by people who have probably never read the book. Apparently they lost their critical thinking faculties years ago and just prefer to parrot the establishment view on everything in life. I used to believe that HIV caused AIDS, because like most people THAT'S ALL I WAS TOLD! Then I found an article about this book in a magazine, read the book, delved into the AIDS dissident movement at virusmyth.net, and the whole thing took off from there. Yes, people are dying of something the establishment decided to call "AIDS". But it isn't caused by HIV! You've heard the word "AIDS" so many times that you have a fear response conditioned into you. You can't even think about it without being disturbed. Just give up your hysteria and use your brain.

If you think that HIV causes AIDS, and that it's been "proven", you don't know ANYTHING about it.

Just read this book, put aside all of the [stuff] you were taught by the media and your high-school health teacher, and think for yourself. In fact, people NOT thinking for themselves is what propels the insane "HIV causes AIDS" nonsense in the first place. The establishment theory is just plain stupid, as anyone with sense can see after reading this book or the others like it.

Duesberg is a genius, and anyone who actually has a freethinking brain left in his/her head will realize that upon reading this book. Yes, it will blow your mind. After you read it, you'll feel like you're living in the Matrix or something. But Duesberg's argument is EXCELLENT, perfectly explained, and heavily notated. Be brave; dare to read something that challenges the lies we were all taught!

Another great site with information that contests the "HIV causes AIDS" nonsense theory is virusmyth.net. It contains hundreds and hundreds of articles from all over the place that can fill out the picture for you. You should visit that website, because while this book is excellent, it's only the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of eminent scientists from all over the world, including Nobel Prize winners, disagree with the b.s. that HIV causes AIDS. But you never hear about them, do you?

The notion that HIV causes AIDS is the biggest scientific blunder in human history. You owe it to yourself and the world to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Ilogical Minds won't like this book...
Review: Duesberg has courage. He has nothing to gain by raising the questions he does, and in fact has paid a high price for his questions. Let's not call them his 'views' because in fact, this book shows that he is a true scientist. While others throw scientific method out the window in the name of their reputations and in the name of money, Duesberg hasn't sold his soul to the drug companies. Someday, this wonderful book will be required reading in every medical school. And how many healthy people will have to be killed by toxic AZT before the ringleaders admit their folly?

Read this book with an open, logical mind, and it will change the way you feel about the press, doctors, and medical researchers forever.

Rating:
Summary: Whose Burden of Proof?
Review: First: Don't be put off by the shrill reactions of other "reviewers" here who don't show any evidence that they have actually read the book. It is not clear to me what could be proven by Duesberg or anyone else injecting themselves with the virus, other than they believe that what they say is true. I don't suppose anyone in the scientific community has sacrificed more to maintain his challenge than has Duesberg. Even a cursory comparison of his career history before and after he became a "heretic" will demonstrate this. I don't think injecting himself with HIV would enhance the already clear and overwhelming evidence of his integrity. (Incidentally, while comparing credentials, check out Robert Gallo's. He started all this, after all. He holds the patent on the stuff their testing our blood with. Evaluate HIS integrity.)

Second: Don't be scared by the size of the book. It is well written, accessible, and engaging. The science is patiently explained for the general reader without being patronizing or condescending. This is coming from someone who has a paralyzing fear of scientific writing. I read the first hundred pages the day I got it. Plus, the last 300 pages are appendices which ought, in any case, to add credibility to the argument, since they present the actual evidence upon which the argument is based.

Third: Keep an open mind. Duesberg is no quack. He is a member of the elite National Academy of Sciences, and before he became a heretic, was on the Nobel prize fast-track for his discovery of the first cancer gene. Moreover, long before AIDS appeared, Duesberg was an eminently respected retro-virologist. Since the reputed source of "AIDS" is supposed to be precisely one of these strange and rare critters (actually not a critter, since viruses are not living things), who better than someone who has devoted his career to studying them to explain what they do, and what they cannot do? Maybe he's obsessed; maybe that doesn't really matter. This book makes a case that should be answered, not vilified by his peers (if they can; I've searched and searched and found nothing more enlightening by way of counter-argument than the reviewer who immediately precedes me here).

Fourth: This book is especially important if you are a person who has tested positive with HIV. The story told here will answer many of your questions, and may lead to some degree of independence. If Duesberg is right (and I think, at least as far as HIV is concerned, he is), then this is very GOOD news for thousands of people who have been infected with what would appear to be a very old and not terribly interesting passenger virus. This is especially true for HIV positive people who have never been sick (except from side effects of the toxic medicines that are currently the protocol of choice among mainstream physicians).

Finally: No great scientific innovation in history has resulted from those who were at the mainstream. From Aristotle to Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, and forward: all were rejected by their peers, vilified, called quacks and condemned as heretics. Admittedly, that doesn't prove anything about the current debate, but it ought to give one pause before raising the argument that usually goes: "How could so many eminent scientists be wrong?" How indeed. This book probably sheds more light on that mystery than it does on AIDS itself.

I gave the book 4 instead of 5 stars because I don't think everything argued here is of equal value. Duesberg's alternative theory what DOES cause AIDS is not as well proven as his case as to what does NOT cause AIDS. Which is not to say that he's not right. But interested readers should also look at the work of Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopolus and her colleagues of the Perth Group in Australia. Search her name on any search engine and you'll get more than enough. These scientists go farther than Duesberg, suggesting that HIV may not even exist.

I respectfully encourage anyone who has come to visit this page to read the first few chapters of this book, starting with the forward by 1993 Nobel Prize winner (chemistry; developer of the polyemerase chain reaction [PCR] protocol, currently the "gold standard" in virus hunting) Kary Mullis. See if you can put it down.

Rating:
Summary: Can science err? Yes--and sometimes with dire consequences.
Review: I picked up this book shortly after it hit the shelves in 1997. I wasn't on the lookout for anything like this; I just happened to be strolling through a bookstore when I ran across it and skimmed through the foreword by Kary Mullis. I devoured the book in a few days. The conclusions--that AIDS is not infectious, that HIV is harmless, and that AIDS drugs do more harm than good--were certainly shocking, but not all that shocking to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of science, in particular medical science. Mistakes get made all the time in medicine. But could a mistake of this scale have been made and then perpetuated by thousands of well-meaning scientists? That's really the question one must answer when considering this book, and one that I set out to answer myself.

It's interesting that many of the negative reviews below argue that anyone who spends time hunting down Duesberg's references will see through his charade. It's interesting because when I first encountered this book, I was in graduate school pursuing my philosophy PhD, and upon reading the book, I did exactly what these reviewers suggest everyone should do (it's what any good graduate student does): I buried myself in the stacks at the basement of the UCSD medical school library. For three weeks. And I read. And read. And I found something quite interesting: With a few minor exceptions for misinterpreted evidence, Duesberg was right. The caliber of logic used to establish HIV's connection to AIDS was abysmal. I read countless papers in internationally-respected journals that, had they been submitted to me by one of my undergraduate philosophy students, would have been returned bathed in red ink. The reasoning really was that sloppy. With potentially millions of lives at stake, logic and skepticism had been thrown out the window.

But it wasn't the numerous journal articles I soaked in that ultimately convinced me that Duesberg was correct. Rather, it was an old PDR (Physician's Desk Reference--the drug bible for doctors) that I had on my shelf. I looked up the listing for Retrovir, also known as AZT, the antiretroviral drug implicated by Duesberg as a major cause of the health problems associated with AIDS. Right there in my PDR was the warning, from the drug's manufacturer, that the effects of AZT are "indistinguishable" from the symptoms of AIDS. "Indistinguishable". If you have an old PDR, go look it up. This admission was of monumental importance, because it was the drug's own maker confirming what Duesberg has been vilified for arguing in his book: AZT causes the symptoms of AIDS.

My only beef with Inventing the Aids Virus is that Duesberg obviously has such a huge chip on his shoulder, but upon reading that listing in the PDR, I wrote him a note. In response, he called me at home to chat, and was remarkably self-effacing, articulate, and accommodating. Who knows--maybe the guy is a bulldog in scientific conferences and other settings, but in my extended interaction with him, he couldn't have been nicer, even in the face of some of my challenges to his work.

My subsequent investigations have only confirmed what was first suggested to me by Duesberg's book. And so, it's worth clarifying some points made in some of the 1-star reviews below. First, several reviewers mention the multitude of studies showing the health benefits of AIDS drugs. No such studies exist. If you don't believe me, go find the ads for these drugs in any magazine sold here on Amazon (large-format magazines like Rolling Stone are usually the best). Behind the pages of tanned, muscular, athletic people living life to the fullest, you'll inevitably find admissions similar to this one found in Merck's ad for Crixivan: "It is not yet known whether taking Crixivan will extend your life or reduce your chances of getting other illnesses associated with HIV". I doubt the reviewers here know something the drug companies don't. Sure, lots of studies have been undertaken, but no completed, properly-controlled studies show any health benefits for any drug combinations. Hence Merck's admission that even they don't know if the drugs work.

And although there are many further arguments to add to this discussion, Amazon's review page is not the place to debate the countless flaws in the HIV hypothesis. So, I'll just address one more theme in all those 1-star reviews below, the notion that if Duesberg really believed in the harmlessness of HIV, he'd inject himself with it. First, this response is totally unscientific. With a sample size of one and absolutely no control population, such an experiment would be meaningless, and would prove nothing. Duesberg knows this, as do the reviewers. Second, this suggestion is patently dishonest. If these reviewers really believed that the harmlessness of a suspected agent could be tested by consumption, then to prove their point, they would all agree to go on life-long regimens of AIDS chemotherapy, the documented effects of which include bone marrow depletion, muscle wasting, lymphoma, immune dysfunction, pancreatitis, and other debilitating conditions too numerous to mention. Needless to say, no reviewer here has offered to do this.

So read this book. I'd like to say you'll be glad you did, but you'll probably find your initial reaction is one of anger. And once you've read this, read Christing Maggiore's book. And Robert Root-Bernstein's. And Steven Epstein's. And Elinor Burkitt's. And Duesberg's other books. And when you read about healthy children being taken from their parents and force-fed chemotherapy in the name of the HIV hypothesis, you'll be even more angry--hopefully angry enough to do something about it.

Rating:
Summary: Duesberg's position on infecting himself
Review: I thought I'd counter the critics out here who ponder why he doesn't infect himself. This is what he says (by the way, I have no idea how right he is in de-linking HIV from AIDs, but it is certainly interesting).

Q: The best way I know to prove the HIV hypothesis wrong is to infect otherwise perfectly healthy people with HIV, don't give them any treatment, and see what happens. I know this type of research has been done with animals. Since you can't experiment on other people, why don't you infect yourself? Maybe you can recruit some followers and have a "population" for a real experiment.

A: I have considered, even offered, this directly. Here are the problems:

1) In the US, it is not possible to work with HIV without the approval of the National Institutes of Health and the university. Thus I would need an NIH peer-approved grant to do this. Without such a contract I would risk my lab and job.

2) In addition, if 10 years after injecting myself I would still be without symptoms, the HIV-AIDS orthodoxy would call me a bluff unless I had had a grant that allowed for appropriate controls. I have submitted 9 grant applications to study AIDS, including doing the study you mention, but none was approved.

3) In the US there are 1 million HIV-positive persons without any symptoms, and in the world there are an estimated 34 million. Monitoring a few hundred of these for AIDS and non-viral AIDS risks would be a statistically much more relevant experiment than if one person injected himself. But surprisingly such studies are not done. Why not? Guess!

Rating:
Summary: Duesberg's position on infecting himself
Review: I thought I'd counter the critics out here who ponder why he doesn't infect himself. This is what he says (by the way, I have no idea how right he is in de-linking HIV from AIDs, but it is certainly interesting).

Q: The best way I know to prove the HIV hypothesis wrong is to infect otherwise perfectly healthy people with HIV, don't give them any treatment, and see what happens. I know this type of research has been done with animals. Since you can't experiment on other people, why don't you infect yourself? Maybe you can recruit some followers and have a "population" for a real experiment.

A: I have considered, even offered, this directly. Here are the problems:

1) In the US, it is not possible to work with HIV without the approval of the National Institutes of Health and the university. Thus I would need an NIH peer-approved grant to do this. Without such a contract I would risk my lab and job.

2) In addition, if 10 years after injecting myself I would still be without symptoms, the HIV-AIDS orthodoxy would call me a bluff unless I had had a grant that allowed for appropriate controls. I have submitted 9 grant applications to study AIDS, including doing the study you mention, but none was approved.

3) In the US there are 1 million HIV-positive persons without any symptoms, and in the world there are an estimated 34 million. Monitoring a few hundred of these for AIDS and non-viral AIDS risks would be a statistically much more relevant experiment than if one person injected himself. But surprisingly such studies are not done. Why not? Guess!

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly irresponsible. Let's take a look at why.
Review: No matter what you might think, believe or have heard, this book is must reading. After reading Micheal Fumento's article in Reason Magazine, I found this book able to fill in the missing pieces of the AIDS puzzle.

The whole thing in a tragedy. I knew a man that tested HIV positive, and reacted by swallowing a .38 slug, thinking that preferable to dying a long hard wasting death. I wish he had read this book. He was at very low risk for AIDS and probably would never have contracted the disease. The AIDS industry drove him to suicide by pronouncing HIV to be a death sentence.

The thing I found the most interesting about the "pro-HIV" side of the debate and the centerpiece of the HIV=AIDS theory is that the so-called evidence is all by definition. The "proven" cases of AIDS are HIV caused merely by the definition of AIDS. AIDS is defined as such and such disease (30 or so at last count) in the presence of HIV. In other words, cancer in an HIV positive patient is AIDS, the same cancer in an HIV negative patient is just plain old cancer.

That is the extent of the "evidence". Thats it, thats all, nothing else.

How about all the HIV negative AIDS patients. NO problem, change the name of the disease to ARC (aids related complex) and your "evidence" is once again solid. Read this book. Read this book. Read this book.

Update*****

I first read and reviewed this book 5 years ago, and have lost track of my copy so I just ordered another. I feel compelled to update this review after reading some of the more recents ones.

The burning question I had was in the face of all the evidence against the HIV=AIDS hypothesis, why are people still assuming HIV causes AIDS? The answer was revealed to me in two subsequent reviews.

The first is from a lady who "reviews" the book without the advantage of ever having read it. The reason the books message is wrong is because the publisher is "right wing". Since the publisher had been so labeled we are to believe that any questions raised are invalid for that reason. Never mond that Dr Duesburg is a professor at Berkely arguably one of the most liberal universities in the country if not the world.

This reviewer does a far better job than I ever could of illustrating the dangers of mixing politics and science.

Back when I was in school - back when schools actually taught academic subjects - we used to ridicule the Soviet Union for their vetting of science with politics. Hitler did the same rejecting "Jewish physics" and driving scientists like Albert Einstein into exile.

The AIDS "debate" is so hopelessly polluted with politics that it is unlikely the truth will ever come out in this country. Science is dead - politically correct thought is the only thought that will be accepted.

The other review was also startling. It was written by a pharmacist who claims to know several heterosexual males infected with HIV and dying of AIDS.

Here is another obvious case of a reviewer with the advantage of not being overly burdened by reading the book they are reviewing. How would this pharmacist know about the HIV infection? Could it be the AZT prescriptions? Lets see now, we are force feeding someone one of the most toxic chemicals known to man. AZT makes dioxin look like orange juice in comparison. Yet is must be the HIV making the person sick. Hey, don't bother me with the evidence I have a government brochure that says it is is HIV killing him and the AZT saving his life so it must be so.

There are a few scattered negative reviews none really worthy of note but they do seem to have the common thread of either attacking Duesburg personally or the folks who get their scientific information from Tom Hanks, Oprah or Barbra Streisand.

The point is that these negative Amazon reviews are very important and I thank the reviewers for taking their time to review a book they have never read. It underscores the importance of the book and helps the reader understand why the message is so hard to get out and why the message is suppressed in the mainstream media.

Rating:
Summary: Yes or no?
Review: Peter Duesberg makes a pretty good case that AIDS is not caused by HIV. I would think that would be a welcomed possibility for the many people now suffering from AIDS, but apparently not. I remember seeing the author interviewed on Ted Koppels "Nightline" where he was treated like Hitler at a bar mitzvah. Now I don't claim to know if he's right, but it seems to me that if there's even a possibility that he is, then his claim should be seriously examined. Has HIV been PROVEN to be the cause of AIDS? Yes or no?

Rating:
Summary: Valid questions to whether HIV causes AIDS
Review: Professor Duesberg raises valid questions to whether HIV causes AIDS. By standard rules of virology, HIV could not even cause AIDS. What is important to note is that he seems is pushing for research into arenas other than just the virus theory. Even the CDC and NIAID recently admitted that there must be a cofactor. It was on the cover of the New York Times in Mid May 1996!!! He explains the politics of research very well. He makes two mistakes, however. First, he is somewhat repetitive which did not bother me in particular. Second, he does not show the other side's argument sufficiently. In other words, his argument would be even stronger if he showed in more detail how the establishment came to claim (from a virological standpoint) that HIV causes AIDS and how it does it. Nonetheless, I think that this book has not only some valid points, but also raises some issues that must not be ignored

Rating:
Summary: If you are interetested in the topic, this book is a MUST
Review: This is one of the most important books ever written.

First let's ask why Duesberg would throw his whole career down the tubes for this? He had far more to loose than to gain.

My big question is this: Why won't anybody debate him? Why won't anybody go on TV and debate him on this? Why squash every interview he lined up previously? If he is such a quack, why not show everybody what a fool he really is? It should be so easy since he has no idea of what he's talking about, right?

From a personal perspective, this book matches up very well. All my acquaintances (who were gay) who died of AIDS (at least a dozen I knew) were on AIDS drugs. Most had used hard drugs before/and after discovering their HIV status. The only heterosexual I knew who died of AIDS was a drug addict who then went on to use AIDS drugs. In addition, my friend (gay) informed me of his HIV positive status in 1990. He never went to a specialist, never took any AIDS drugs, and is perfectly healthy living in NY right now. He has had it 13 yrs that he knows of. He's also never smoked, drank, or used drugs.

I asked all my friends one night to name all the heterosexuals they knew personally that had died of AIDS. There was nothing but silence. I asked everybody I knew after reading this book. Nobody seems to know anybody who is heterosexual who died of AIDS. Where is the epidemic?

Another thing that is amazing is that you do not need an HIV test to determine if somebody has AIDS in Africa, just an AIDS defining illness.

Why won't anybody debate this guy? All I read here (from the negative reviews) is that he has been proven wrong already. When? Where? And by whom? Moreover, where is the paper that PROVES that HIV does indeed cause AIDS?

Even if he's not 100% correct, I can't believe the CDC is either, no way.