But is it? From the beginning there were disturbing questions raised regarding the shoddy scientific methods involved in identifying HIV and the unreliable testing parameters required for a definitive diagnosis. These questions were never fully answered by mainstream science and what we're left with is a morass of confusion, contradiction and of course, suffering and death. On this episode we dip our toes into heresy and denialism and ask the question: What if the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is just that -- a hypothesis?
Running Time: 01:23:31
Download: MP3
Here's the transcript of the show:
Erica: Hello and welcome to the Health and Wellness Show. Today is September 15, 2017. Joining us in our virtual studio from all across the planet is Tiffany, Doug, Elliot, Gaby and I am Erica, your host today.
Tiffany: Yay!
All: Hellos.
Tiffany: Jonathan's not here.
Erica: So I'm the host. I'm going to attempt to fill Jonathan's role. So today we're going to talk about what's the deal with AIDS. The disease we now call AIDS burst onto the scene in 1981 after a group of gay males in New York City and Orange County were stricken with a rare type of pneumonia and sarcoma. A year later GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) morphed into AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) and in 1984, ironically, the 'probable' cause of AIDS was named. It was called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and the entire world recoiled in fear whilst subjected to a publicity campaign the likes of which had never been seen.
According to HIV/AIDS researchers, everyone -- not just gay men and IV drug users -- were susceptible. The science was clear and to be diagnosed was a death sentence.
So today in our discussion we're going to talk about that. Is it a death sentence? From the beginning there were disturbing questions raised regarding the shoddy scientific methods involved in identifying HIV and the unreliable testing parameters required for a definitive diagnosis. These questions were never fully answered by mainstream science and what we're left with is a morass of confusion, contradiction and of course, suffering and death. So join us as we ask this question: What if the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is just that -- a hypothesis?
We do encourage our listeners to call in if you'd like.
Tiffany: Please do.
Erica: Or join us in the chat because we're just having a discussion about this today. We know that it is a hot topic - well not so much anymore, but it was for several years and people get very emotionally worked up by it on both sides...
Tiffany: And very fearful.
Erica: ...and afraid. So we're just going to have a discussion about it. Maybe the first question to ask is why now. Why do we choose this topic?
Tiffany: I don't know. Doug, why did you choose this topic? {laughter}
Doug: It actually just came up in conversation over the course of the week. We were talking about it and the movie House of Numbers was mentioned and I thought "Oh yeah, I've actually never seen that." I didn't know a lot about the topic and one of the people I was talking with was a little bit more familiar with the idea that there isn't really anything behind the whole AIDS thing and it is really more or less publicity and money-making schemes, all piled on top of each other. I thought it was interesting and this is something that we haven't actually covered on the show, much. So, I just thought we should do a show on it.
Tiffany: We talked about it very briefly with the very first guest that we had on our show, Dr. Claus Köhnlein. He is one of the authors of Virus Mania. We talked about HIV and AIDS a little bit but that wasn't the entire focus of the show. But it's a touchy subject for people. If you talk to people who came up during that era and lived in New York and the Los Angeles area and perhaps mingled in certain scenes, had a lot of gay friends and they started seeing all of their friends start getting sick and dying and they maybe were at their deathbeds holding their hands, it's a very emotional topic for a lot of people and a lot of people were hurt by it and loads and loads and loads of people died.
So we don't want to make light of this and poo-poo the whole subject because people have died. Now whether they died from "AIDS" - and I use air quotes here - or there were other factors involved doesn't negate the suffering that they went through. But still, like with everything else, we have to get out the microscope and look at it closely and we might not be politically correct in some of the things we might say and it definitely will go against the mainstream view but we want to find out the truth.
Gaby: People get triggered.
Tiffany: Yes.
Doug: Yeah! And I think that's because it's become so politicized. Because the "disease" was affecting mainly the gay population in the beginning and despite the fact that it morphed into being something that affects everybody, it ended up getting really politically charged. It seems to go along these political lines now.
If anybody questions the mainstream AIDS hypothesis, they're lumped into this conservative-type group and they're denialists and they're homophobic and all these sorts of things, when it should be divorced from all that kind of stuff. If you're looking at what a disease is and what causes it, whether or not it exists, I really think you need to put all that stuff aside and take a look just at the evidence and keep the politics out of it because it really isn't a political subject. It's about digging down and really getting into the truth of the matter.
Erica: And that might help with just a little bit of a timeline. So as it says in our description, in 1981 it was called the gay plague.
Tiffany: Gay-related immune deficiency.
Erica: Then in 1981 the CDC alerted the medical world to this outbreak of this rare kind of pneumonia and sarcoma. In that year 160 young gay men died. As Tiffany said it was New York City, it was Orange County, it was also San Francisco. I grew up in San Francisco in the '80s and I watched a lot of gay men die; people that my mother worked with, friends' fathers, and I have seen the devastation that it causes. I have watched people waste away. When you're that young and that impressionable you are implanted with that idea, that it was a gay disease. I didn't see any straight people dying from it. Then this whole lifestyle also was kind of in there as well.
Tiffany: People get uncomfortable when you bring lifestyle into it because that strikes fear that all the Christians are going to come out of the woodwork and say "They caused it themselves. They deserved it because of their sick lifestyles" and all of that. But it's really not saying that.
There are certain practices that one can engage in that can adversely affect your health, just like with diet or drinking a lot of diet soda or sniffing poppers at a club all night. Those are all lifestyle things and I don't think that it's disparaging gay people to point those things out because some of them themselves have talked about that. The things that they get up to in the clubs directly contributes to their states of health.So I guess we can get into that.
Erica: Also the amount of sexual partners that a lot of them admitted to having. I think one man was sharing a thousand in a year. Also in that realm of all the STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) that they had gone through as well. So that would fall under that lifestyle as well.
Tiffany: One of the things they found was something called pneumocystis pneumonia carinii. I'm sure I'm not pronouncing that right, but this is one of the things that they found in these men that came down with GRID-gay-related immune disorder. So that's tied directly to sniffing amyl nitrate or poppers in clubs or wherever.
I guess it increases blood flow to give you kind of a rush and it's an aphrodisiac and it also damages your lungs and can cause this pneumocystis pneumonia. Another thing that it can cause is these lesions on your skin called Kaposi's sarcoma which is another thing that they found in these groups of young men who were dying.
Erica: It was interesting that in 1981 the CDC published their first list of 12 AIDS sicknesses and both of those were listed. You were going to say something Gaby?
Gaby: The impression that I have is that nobody talks about HIV anymore. That's my impression. In mainstream medicine. Nobody talks about it anymore. It's not an issue anymore. And if you think about it - this might not be directly related - but if you see the addiction in the population nowadays it has shifted also to opioids like fentanyl, the illegal type of fentanyl. I don't hear anybody doing these poppers anymore. I've never seen anything like it, even remotely like it in the emergency room. So I wonder if that is related.
Erica: They were talking about how back in the 1980s that the drugs of choice were the poppers but also ecstasy and DMT and ketamine, super-K they called it, so really knocking your immune system down.
Tiffany: When you combine the poppers and the various drugs and the multiple STDs and just the act of physically having anal sex and how that alters your gut biome because there's enemas and lubricants involved in that, and the multiple, multiple rounds of antibiotics that people who have multiple STDs take, then it's no wonder that your immune system after a number of years of doing those things, is compromised.
Elliot: There's also the fecal matter which inevitably gets into the penis and I guess would spread through to the tissues. I can't imagine that that wouldn't play a role as well, having unprotected anal sex and having fecal matter enter into the body, potentially into the bloodstream. You don't know what sort of pathogenic bacteria is in that substance. So you are potentially exposing yourself to a wide range of pathogens and disease-causing agents that wouldn't normally be so common to come across.
Tiffany: And that being said, if you stop engaging in certain lifestyle practices then you would probably get better with good nutrition, rest and all the things that make people more healthy. But you add on top of that the treatment.
Erica: Before we go there we've got to stick to our timeline.
Tiffany: Go ahead.
Erica: In 1984 Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler announced that a virus is the probable cause of AIDS.
Tiffany: Probable.
Erica: Yes. And a retrovirus came to be named HIV and announced the germ cause of AIDS before any studied had ever been published. So they just came out and said it. Virologist Dr. Robert Gallo, some call him the father of science, submitted a patent for his HIV antibody blood test and millions of dollars were made in royalties. So now we see our famous/infamous big pharma stepping in.
Tiffany: Bob Gallo sounds like the Ancel Keys of the AIDS world to me. {laughter}
Doug: Yeah, seriously. It was interesting too because in the movie House of Numbers there was a guy who was talking about how the CDC apparently was looking for a plague at this time. I don't know how actively they were looking for it. Polio was not really an issue anymore and they were getting their funding cut. The CDC's days were numbered basically. So they were wanting some kind of major epidemic/plague type of thing to really hype up and reignite their purpose and lo and behold, something comes along.
Erica: That goes back to our timeline because in 1987 the CDC reversed its first list of 12 diseases and then changed it to 25. So they were trying to pull more stuff into it as people were researching it. And a lot of people were researching it. In one of the videos we watched they were saying that over the 25 years that it was researched they spent more money than they did on cancer and heart disease research, to the tune of $150 billion or something.
Gaby: That's big pharma interests for you.
Tiffany: Robert Gallo and another French scientist named Luc Montagnier were both trying to identify what the cause for this GRID disease was. They hadn't even named it HIV yet. So they were both working on it and Robert Gallo said that he found what it is but it turns out that whatever virus particle that he had was the same one that Montagnier had and Montagnier accused him of stealing it. First Robert Gallo said that wasn't true and then he said "Oh yeah, they actually are the same but it was probably due to lab contamination."
There was this whole big back-and-forth argument so the governments of both the US and France got involved and they said "Okay, let's just stop this. We're going to call this HIV, the one virus that we found and we can take out a patent and both countries will benefit from the patent for the HIV test." Then they had that press conference before Robert Gallo even published any of his papers and that was same day that he filed a patent for the HIV test.
Erica: Dr. Montagnier is actually a Nobel Prize winning virologist. He had some experience with viruses.
Tiffany: He said some interesting things about it. We have a clip planned for it. But all we seem to get from listening to Robert Gallo being interviewed is just him being a jerk. {laughter}
Doug: Yeah. I was going to say it's interesting, the different approaches of the two scientists because Gallo is fully behind pushing the HIV hypothesis of AIDS whereas Montagnier seems like a scientist actually and is willing to say that there's nothing really conclusive. He doesn't push the mainstream perspective. He's a little bit more cautious.
Tiffany: There's this other group of scientists - I guess you can call them AIDS denialists. They're called the Perth Group and they have a lot of problems with the HIV virus itself. They say that it was never purified, there's just fragments and debris that they're looking at and that Robert Gallo didn't follow the usual scientific methods of isolating a retrovirus and that the pictures that he produced were sub-par and question whether they even indicate that this is HIV virus that he took a picture of. So there are a lot of questions on their part about HIV itself; does it exist or does it not. And they can never get anybody to answer that question fully because no one ever says "Okay, this is HIV. We isolated it. Here it is. Here's an electron microscopy photograph of it. No one's ever produced it.
Erica: Anybody who came out with research like UC Berkeley - I don't know if you guys remember the name of the doctor who was doing that. It'll come back to me in a moment. They just started wanting to publish information questioning that in the top five journals like Nature and Science and few others and their research wouldn't get published. And then comes the whole campaign that they're denialists and they lose their funding so they can't continue to research and then they're relegated to teaching lab to undergrads.
Tiffany: What happened to Peter Duesberg.
Erica:. Yes, Duesberg. That's his name. We'll put the links up for some of the documentaries that we watched. When you see him speak he's really clear cut. Just what you were saying Tiffany. With a virus you would get sick within days and they're saying it could be latent for 10 years!
Tiffany: He also said he believes the HIV, if it is what it purports to be, is a dormant human retrovirus and there's nothing about it that says that it is spread widely over the population.
Elliot: The interesting thing about retroviruses is apparently they make up roughly 10% of the human genome. So they're located on the chromosomes in regulatory sites. They're theorized to be useful for the human species to adapt to different environments. They're purported to have many functions other than this idea that you catch a virus and you get sick. There are many scientists who are saying that viruses are what helped all species on earth evolve, almost like information carriers whereby they detect what's going on in the environment and allow the DNA to be expressed in a way that is beneficial for that organism's survival.
So if we take that idea into consideration, that maybe retroviruses are not necessarily the bad guys and we just think okay, maybe there are some conditions in which the body expresses these retroviruses or it allows them to express themselves for whatever purpose. I'm not sure if we want to go into this yet, but this could help to explain for instance, why the term AIDS is really not very well defined whatsoever as we've sort of said. Scientists have had trouble isolating the specific HIV but what they also have trouble with is finding a proper definition for the term AIDS. It mimics multiple other conditions at the same time.
One of the articles said you have an individual with tuberculosis and they've HIV negative; they get their blood tested, they don't have HIV, then they are just diagnosed with tuberculosis. But if they get symptoms that mimic tuberculosis and they test for HIV and it comes up that they are HIV positive, then they are no longer defined as tuberculosis patients, they're actually AIDS patients. So the term AIDS is kind of like a blanket statement that can encompass anything, any sort of pathological condition as long as HIV is present. That doesn't really make sense.
Tiffany: And sometimes not, surprisingly! We can get into that later.
Elliot: As well.
Tiffany: So do we want to play this clip since we're just talking about Montagnier. He is talking about HIV here and hopefully the sound comes out okay. Parts of this documentary were filmed in a high traffic area. So here we go.
Narrator: In 1992 something extraordinary happened. A conference was organized in Amsterdam called AIDS, A Different View, and many members of the orthodoxy signed up to attend. Joanne Sawicki at Sky News agreed to broadcast a news report from there. It was here that the now Nobel laureate Dr. Luc Montagnier, told the world that you don't necessarily die if you have HIV.Tiffany: Yeah, exactly. What do we have? We don't know. Nobody knows.
Dr. Montagnier: We are seeing people which have been infected for 9, 10 years or more, 10-12 years and they are still in good shape. Their immune system is still good. It is unlikely those people will come down with AIDS fatal.
Narrator: Two years before in 1990 when we'd interviewed Luc Montagnier for The AIDS Catch, he'd had doubt about HIV being able to do the whole job. He said HIV needed co-factors to do any damage.
Dr. Montagnier: At first yes, we thought we had the best candidate for this virus to be the cause of AIDS but after a while, even from the beginning actually, we thought maybe for the activation of that virus in cells we need some co-factors. So I would agree that HIV by itself, or some strains of HIV are not sufficient to induce AIDS.
Narrator: In 1997 in an interview with filmmaker Djamel Tahi published in Continuum Magazine Montagnier said that HIV had never been purified.
Dr. Montagnier: Well of course we looked for it. We saw some particles but they didn't have the morphology of retroviruses.
Narrator: He later said:
Dr. Montagnier: I repeat, we did not purify.
It was startling that Professor Montagnier decided to acknowledge in his interview with Djamel Tahi and continue, that as far back as 1983 his team were not able to purify anything that you might call HIV despite what he termed a Roman effort. So who should be surprised that when the same thing was attempted by expert laboratories in Germany and United States who published their results in the journal Virology, what they found was proteins and cellular debris.
Narrator: And in Pretoria Hugh tackled Luc Montagnier on the purification question.
Hugh: Was the first genome taken from purified virus? Identified with purified virus?
Dr. Montagnier: It was not made from purified virus it doesn't matter because once it's cloned it's pure.
Hugh: So you think it's not necessary to begin with a purified compound.
Dr. Montagnier: No, not at all. It's very fast technique. We are now in the world of body and molecular biology and everything has changed.
Hugh: I can only offer you one thing which is, then it's easy to make these people be quiet. Just go back and do the simple purification business as what was done and then they'll have to agree.
Dr. Montagnier: Well this has been done by pharmaceutical companies. The first AIDS tests, the first HIV test, was done with purified virus. So what they did is to not produce the virus and purify it by similar what she calls ultracentrifugation, and you can look at it on a microscope and you see a lot of particles. No biological material is 100 percent pure.
Hugh: Oh, very close to pure then.
Dr. Montagnier: Very close to pure.
Hugh: But no one has ever seen those photographs. They've seen and they've seen .
Dr. Montagnier: Well we have pictures. We didn't publish them because we published the first picture. When we send other pictures to journalists they said "We have seen that before. We don't care."
Hugh: With your arguments you just show them the photographs and then you will win your argument.
Dr. Montagnier: I don't have them with me.
Hugh: But you consulted with them.
Dr. Montagnier: This is very old science which has been sold for many years. It's not very unarguable.
Narrator: If we don't need to purify anymore and we don't need to isolate according to the previous conventions of virology and we don't have a real picture of the retrovirus HIV, then what do we have?
Doug: In the House of Numbers documentary he actually went to a number of experts on electron microscopy stuff and none of them seemed overly impressed with the photos that had come out of HIV. They were looking at it saying "Well that could actually be anything. It could just be cellular debris. It could be proteins." So the fact that there are pictures out there floating around of it I don't think is an open and shut case because there seems to be a lot of controversy around these as well.
Tiffany: And why is it that with viruses that you catch - usually - like colds, HPV, chickenpox, measles, maybe herpes, they clear up on their own? They go away. What makes HIV so special?
Doug: I guess there are some viruses that stick around, like you said herpes and shingles.
Tiffany: Even shingles and herpes have periods of dormancy.
Doug: That's true.
Tiffany: And don't fester inside of you and all of a sudden you're dead.
Doug: No, that's true.
Tiffany: Can we get into the AIDS testing? Because this is one thing that really, really ticked me off.
Erica: I was looking at my timeline and I lost the year. {laughter}
Tiffany: I had a job where we had to have certain vaccinations. I had chickenpox as a child.
Erica: Naturally.
Tiffany: Naturally acquired chickenpox, which was fabulous. I remember it as being a very fun time in my life. So I wasn't going to get a chickenpox vaccine. There was no way. So they said "You can get a titer." So I went to the lab and got my blood drawn and it showed that I had a very high antibody response to chickenpox, which essentially means that I'm immune to getting the chickenpox. So when you get tested for HIV, you have an antibody response, that means that you have HIV and you're going to die of AIDS. How does that make sense? {laughter} Any time you have an antibody response isn't that a good thing? That your immune system is strong and it can fight AIDS? That's one thing in my non-scientific view that is wrong with the test, but there's many others.
Doug: I think one of the major problems with the tests is that they are so wildly inaccurate, to put it mildly. It seems to depend on who made the test whether or not you're going to come up with a positive or a negative or even how to interpret the test. I remember again, going back to House of Numbers, the narrator was standing right at the US/Canadian border and he stood on the American side and he said "Here I have AIDS."
Then he walks across the border and he says "Here I don't have AIDS." It depends on who made the test, who's reading the results and what is the standard for reading the results.
So all these different things come into play. When you consider the fact that somebody gets a test and if it comes out positive, their life is basically ruined. There shouldn't be this much ambiguity.
Tiffany: And the thing about the tests is they don't have the HIV virus as the control to test to see if you make antibodies against that virus. I don't know what the heck is in that test. They're just checking for an antibody response. So it's not a direct test even to say "Yes you have HIV virus in your blood." They're just testing an antibody response and pregnant women, people with candidiasis, people with TB, people with STDs...
Erica: Hepatitis.
Tiffany: ...people with rheumatoid arthritis or autoimmune disorders can trigger a positive result.
Doug: Yeah, there's 70, 70 different conditions that can give you a positive on an HIV test without actually having HIV.
Elliot: I thought that was the most crazy aspect of all this. It shines light on how inaccurate it could be. There's accounts of people going for an HIV test and then testing positive and committing suicide. But when you look at all of these other conditions, even something like you just mentioned Tiff, a pregnant woman could test positive for HIV. How could they get it so wrong? It just baffles the mind! How could they get it so wrong? I'm lost for words.
Tiffany: Yeah. And it even says on the inserts for the testing kits "May cause false positives" or "This test is not a definitive diagnosis. Further testing is needed." So then they go to a western blot test and you have to look at all these bands of whatever it is and interpret the bands. So it can depend on the manufacturer of the test, the interpreter of the test and then they have the viral load test after that, but none of them are really definitive for saying "This person has HIV".
Doug: And then as soon as you get a diagnosis, they're going to stick you on all those drugs, especially if you're a pregnant woman, then you get put on the drugs that are supposed to stop you from passing the virus onto your infant. And of course those all come with a host of side-effects. I guess we'll get into that later on.
Elliot: It's been shown in animals, that animals that were previously tested for HIV came up negative but then when they were put on anti-parasitic protocols because they had round worm or something, it showed that they developed antibodies to these kinds of retroviruses. If HIV is this retrovirus and you have got antibodies against that, it's just your body fighting off or attacking something that doesn't necessarily need to be there. How you can jump from that natural immune response to this devastating condition, this terminal illness, is such a large leap, it's like a complete leap of faith. How that connection was made kind of defies logic. It doesn't make any sense and there's not really much evidence to back it up.
Doug: Yeah.
Elliot: Because you can have people who are HIV positive but as Luc Montagnier said, they can live the rest of their lives perfectly healthily. Similarly, you can have people who display all of the symptoms of AIDS yet don't have these antibodies for this so-called HIV retrovirus. As we know there's a lot of money involved here.
Erica: $150 billion.
Elliot: And there were people who were trying to explain the rapid onset of this terrible set of symptoms among a certain population, namely the homosexuals, and I guess it's kind of like a scapegoat in a sense. If you can come up with some fancy idea then you can get people to believe this, but what that does is stops people from looking any further into the possible genuine causes of why so many of those people were suffering from this terrible disease.
Erica: You really see that with the whole Africa AIDS thing.
Tiffany: Yes.
Doug: Yeah.
Erica: That's what was just so heartbreaking about the documentaries. We all heard it. It's Africa and people are dying...
Tiffany: Because they're so sexually promiscuous.
Erica: Yes. And like you said Elliott, the underlying cause is extreme poverty and malnutrition.
Tiffany: And lack of sanitation, dirty water, and all these vaccine campaigns that just so happen to be going around in the poorest parts of Africa. Maybe I just pulled that one out of the air but it does happen.
Doug: I don't think so (pulled it out of the air).
Tiffany: All this money that they're throwing at AIDS and...
Erica: "Find the cure. Find the cure."
Tiffany: ... "Oh, we need to get AIDS drugs into Africa and help these people. They're suffering. They need more AIDS drugs." All that money they could pour into infrastructure, trying to help people raise themselves out of poverty, just cleaning up the water and you would see all that stuff go away. There's already rampant malaria and tuberculosis.
Erica: Cholera, leprosy.
Tiffany: Yeah, all those diseases are related to poor sanitation and dirty water and your immune system gets degraded over time and then all of a sudden they come along with some dodgy test and you have AIDS.
Doug: Well the crazy thing about it is that these symptoms were in Africa long before AIDS came around but suddenly they had a label for it. I think really all it comes down to is money. They're not interested in fixing the infrastructure and actually getting these people into a humane existence. They want to just pump drugs into them.
Erica: And it's a perfect opportunity to have guinea pigs.
Tiffany: Yes.
Erica: That aren't going to have scientists at universities publishing research. It's a huge experiment.
Tiffany: And one thing about AIDS in Africa is that it infected men, women and children, unlike the beginnings of AIDS in America which was mostly seen in homosexual males and heavy drug users.
Doug: It's almost like they put in this disease.
Tiffany: Yes.
Elliot: This brings us to the question what is AIDS. It's a set of symptoms and it can encompass any kind of pathological autoimmune disease. If you look at an AIDS patient and then you look at a final stage cancer patient, if the person didn't test HIV positive, the symptoms are practically the same. You can't define AIDS. It can encompass so many things and this is the problem. Okay, so you see that all of these people in Africa suffer from this particular thing. You see the homosexual population suffering from this particular thing and so you have to look at what are they being exposed to in their lifestyles that is potentially at the root of it, if it is not the HIV virus.
A lot of the time AIDS patients will also suffer from things like rheumatoid arthritis. They are way more susceptible to all sorts of autoimmune conditions. That doesn't really make sense because supposedly AIDS is the deficiency of the immune system, a lowered immune system but then at the same time they say that autoimmune conditions are an overactive immune system. So one of those things doesn't add up. Either the immune system is working too hard or the immune system is not working. I tend toward looking at it in the latter way in that all kinds of conditions are not necessarily an over-reactive immune response. They seem to be an under-reactive immune response.
To understand this a little bit more in-depth you have to look at the regulator of the immune system as a whole. You have a gland called the thymus gland which is where a lot of your immune cells are controlled and they're produced. If you look at the African lifestyle in a poverty-stricken area, those guys are going to be subjected to a lot of stress, which can be nutritional deficiencies, struggling to get clean water, feeding the family. I dread to think how many stresses those guys actually come across.
Erica: Civil war.
Elliot: Yes, civil war. Those guys have had a hell of a time in recent years and I'm sure that's gone on for quite a long time as well. But to think of the average lifestyle of someone in poverty over in those countries, it is going to have a significant effect on their levels of stress. So stress has an interesting impact on the thymus gland. It actually turns out that with chronic stress, one of the first tissues to be targeted to break down for glucose by cortisol, is the thymus gland. They've found that when someone is subjected to chronic stress the thymus gland rapidly shrinks, it's broken down really, really quickly. It's actually preferentially attacked.
So if you think, you've got someone who's chronically stressed, their thymus gland begins to be broken down by all these stress hormones and what can happen then is when the thymus gland shrinks it no longer works. The B-cells, a kind of immune cells produce antibodies, but at the same time the cortisol also damages many of the other tissues. This can be a ligament. This can be your joints. This can be your organs. These antibodies are let loose and they're there to pick up the debris of decaying tissue. But they can also lose their sensitivity to your own tissues. So autoimmunity can actually be caused by stress. Maybe I'm getting a bit off-topic. I'm kind of losing myself a bit here.
Erica: No, I think you're doing good because you can even see that in America with the diagnosis. This is the implication of being told you're HIV positive. Just think of the stress of that.
Tiffany: And the stigma associated with it is additional stress.
Erica: In first world conditions where you have access to all the things that you could use to get better.
Elliot: And if you look at the onset of AIDS it came at the same time as all of these other conditions. It's not like it just randomly appeared. It came at the same time as cancer started rising, autoimmune conditions started rising, cardiovascular disease started rising. The only thing to differentiate this from anything else is the HIV positive. But we know that HIV positive can be HIV positive from one lab and HIV negative from another lab. So it just seems like this HIV stuff is used to explain all of these other conditions when it doesn't really work out.
Tiffany: And there's even parts of Africa where the testing is too cumbersome or too expensive and they have something called the bongee rule where back in 1985 they needed a way to figure out how to diagnose people as HIV positive without the test so they got together and they decided that if they have a persistent cough or they're losing a lot of weight or teeth or something like that, you don't even necessarily have to test them for HIV. You can just say that they have it.
Doug: Brings a new light to the numbers you see coming out of Africa, how many AIDS cases, how many HIV cases. The press would have you believe that you don't set foot in Africa or you're going to get AIDS. Basically everybody's got it.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Doug: But how they're getting those numbers just seems like a complete scam.
Tiffany: I don't trust any of it, ANY of it. I'm to the point right now if somebody tells me that the sky is blue I've got to look up and see for myself. {laughter} I don't trust scientific research anymore and I blame it all on Gaby because she's the one who started publishing all of these articles about how there was so much fraud in scientific research.
Erica: Thanks Gaby.
Gaby: Yeah. Well, it is I think the lesson to keep because when you read anything, it could be any topic, you constantly ask questions. Am I going to accept this? Why is this? Who says so? It opens a whole new adventure I think. And in medicine we have seen how it applies for so many current topics and how much suffering mainstream medicine has caused. Even with alternative medicine and the new agey types I'm like BS, BS, BS. My red alert is saying "Check everything!"
Tiffany: Well speaking of western medicine and medical treatments, when we talk about AIDS patients I think we should differentiate between people who take the medications as a treatment and the people who don't.
Erica: That's where the test significance comes in because if people start questioning the whole testing system, whether it's accurate or not, if it's scientifically bankrupt and the whole certainty around it...
Tiffany: The whole thing will collapse.
Erica: ...it all collapses.
Tiffany: Yeah, but people today, if they don't know any better, they get a test and they might get it confirmed or they might not with the western blot or viral load. They might look on the CDC's website and follow their advice; if you're a pregnant woman you should start treatment immediately. If you just found out that you are HIV positive, that's when your viral load is the highest, allegedly so you should start treatment immediately. And the treatment that they offer, as Claus Köhnlein said in our interview that we had with him, the treatment is way worse than the disease. This AZT, I think it was a cancer drug.
Erica: The chemotherapy-based drug.
Doug: Yeah it was.
Tiffany: It suppresses DNA replication. It suppresses bone marrow formation. It basically just destroys you from the inside out and at the very beginning of this AIDS epidemic when it was called GRID the men were taking very, very, very high doses of AZT and it's no wonder that they died within a month or so, very short time after starting treatment. Nobody can live on that stuff.
Erica: They made a point to say that if you were using the chemotherapy-based drugs for cancer you would use it for a month, maybe at the most, but this was a lifelong application and they didn't live very long.
Tiffany: And they made one concession. They said "Oh okay, maybe the doses are too high. Let's lower the dose." But even still, if you lower the dose you cannot live on AZT. It's just impossible.
Doug: Well the crazy thing about it too is that the symptoms, the side-effects of the AZT are the same as AIDS!
Erica: Yeah!
Doug: All the different symptoms. So when all of these people who are having these massive side effects, it gets blamed on the disease. One of the things that the drug leads to is that it completely destroys your liver. It decimates your liver and they would look at that and say "Your liver's not doing too well. That's the disease. That's AIDS. That's what's happening there." In how many of these situations if they just got off the drugs and started making some lifestyle changes, altered their diet, all those kinds of things, would actually recover.
And there are examples of that. There was the one girl in the House of Numbers video who was Romanian. She was adopted by an American couple and they tested her for HIV in Romania and she was negative so everything was all good. Then she was tested again once she got to the US and lo and behold, she's positive. So they put her on this AZT drug...
Erica: At nine months old.
Doug: At nine months old and they kept her on it for 22 months and she was having leg cramps, she was losing weight, she wasn't interested in food, had all the symptoms that also fall under the umbrella of AIDS. So they were very concerned about this and they wrote to that German doctor...
Tiffany: Duesberg.
Doug: Yes, Duesberg. He advised them to take her off the medication which they did and she has fully recovered. They showed her in that movie, which I think was out in 2010 and she was 19 years old then and she was fine. And then in the other movie Positively False which came out more recently, 2015 or 2016 I think, she was 20-something and she's totally fine and she's going around speaking at different AIDS conferences and things like that, talking about how shitty these drugs are.
Tiffany: And all the while that she was growing up the doctors were saying "Well maybe she might live another year" and then she'd get a little older and "Oh maybe she might live another couple of years". It is just disgusting!
Doug: Unbelievable.
Elliot: Apparently for the people who take this AZT drug, if you take it for three years, you have a 46.4% probability of developing lymphoma. So that's a good fact.
Erica: So you won't die of AIDS?
Elliot: Well apparently not. But then again, there's also a good correlation between people who get AIDS and people who get cancer. So I'm not sure how they differ. There's an interesting statistic. It was in the period of 1988 through to 1996, there were 235,000 recorded AIDS death. The author of this article says that AZT caused more than 96% of these deaths with 140,000 deaths occurring in HIV positive young gay men. So pretty tragic.
Doug: It says a lot that the chemotherapy people said "We're not going to use this anymore. It's really bad. This is a failure. Let's not do this." And then the AIDS people are like "Oh, we'll try that. Yeah! Let's give it a go."
Tiffany: So why don't we hear much about AIDS these days? I don't hear much about it.
Gaby: They don't care anymore. It's like something came in instead.
Tiffany: Are they preparing for a new disease that they want to push?
Doug: I think it's also because it's come up bust. The thing that got everybody scared about AIDS was the idea that HIV was sexually transmissible and therefore it was possible within heterosexual couples as well. So suddenly it was something that could affect anybody and I think that scared the crap out of everybody and there was constant propaganda, magazine covers, ads on the subway, everywhere it was constantly pumped. But that never actually materialized. A heterosexual epidemic of AIDS never came to be.
Tiffany: It never happened.
Doug: So I think that was part of the issue. It's like "Well you've been telling us this for 20 years and I'm not seeing this."
Gaby: It didn't happen.
Tiffany: You never hear about Magic Johnson. I keep having to bring up Magic Johnson. {laughter}
Gaby: I heard of him.
Tiffany: The dude is gigantic! He looks very healthy to me.
Erica: That was part of the whole PR campaign and they addressed that in the documentary. Hollywood stars were coming out and, like you said Doug, it was massive. It's almost like a brainwashing thing. I was telling Tiffany before the show, when I was 10 or 12 I went to an AIDS benefit in San Francisco and all these musicians were donating their time to raise money and in the background between the sets, in a very low woman's voice, they repeated the same thing over and over. It said "Never share needles. Always wear a condom. Get tested." Over and over. It's psychological warfare essentially.
Doug: Yeah.
Erica: You grew up as a kid thinking if somebody has HIV I can catch it if I drink out of the same drinking fountain. It was this fear-mongering that spread way worse than the disease. And a lot of people still believe that.
Doug: The first time I ever heard about AIDS it was when I was probably 8 or 9 years old and a friend of mine told me you could get it from a toilet seat.
Erica: And I think that that was left to run rampant because they wanted the money. It just sounded like there was always unlimited amounts of money for research and yet here are all these researchers that are shown in this movie saying essentially the same thing, and they're silenced. They don't get funded because we don't really want the research to come out. We've said so many times on this show, it's the big pharma model.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Elliot: It's the same thing - problem, reaction, solution. They create a problem or identify a problem and push it and push it and push it. That's psychological manipulation and then they come up with the solution and identify some BS HIV virus thing and then say "Ah, okay. We've got the drug. We can sort it now so we're going to beat this!" And they say this about every single thing, but they don't beat anything! It just gets worse. When are people going to realize? How long have we been fighting cancer?! Seriously! People still go for runs on that stuff. "Yeah, we're going to beat it this year!" {laughter} They donate money to it.
Tiffany: The war on cancer, the war on AIDS.
Erica: The war on drugs.
Tiffany: Why don't they just call it the war on people? The war on people's' health. That's what it is.
Doug: And the funniest is too is it's so revealing when they try to do the same thing again with any little thing that comes up. Whatever happened to zika?
Tiffany: Yeah, and Ebola. Where's Ebola?
Doug: And Ebola, yeah. Where is it?
Tiffany: I like that one. Where is it? I want it back. {laughter}
Erica: And all the while we're seeing a huge rise in syphilis diseases but nobody talks about that! Back to the safe sex, the STDs.
Tiffany: Shows how much people are practicing safe sex. Either condoms don't work or nobody's using condoms.
Gaby: We can have an idea of how the sexual behaviour these days from seeing the news but also there is a severe problem with resistant gonorrhea, the two antibiotics are not working anymore, in the UK for example.
Doug: Well, we clearly need a vaccine for that.
Tiffany: They're actually working on an AIDS vaccine, so I hear every now and again. I don't hear much about it but I've heard a couple of stories here and there, about how they're trying to work on an AIDS vaccine. I'm actually surprised that they haven't come up with one yet, not that I think that it would be effective in the least considering everything that we just talked about, but why would they not? Do they want to keep making money on all the drugs that they're selling or do they know that if they introduce the vaccine it might just blow the whole lid off this thing? I don't understand. I was trying to figure it out.
Doug: Well they can't do a vaccine if they haven't isolated the virus. They can't do it so despite the fact that they're saying...
Tiffany: I know but the average person doesn't know that they haven't isolated the virus so they can just say whatever. "This is our vaccine."
Doug: I think there needs to be some level of...
Tiffany: Why did they not do that?
Doug: Well, yeah. {laughter} Say what you will about vaccines, I think they need to have at least the dead virus to put in there. I think maybe complete and total fraud might be a step too far.
Tiffany: I question that with regular vaccines too. I don't give them credit for anything.
Doug: So you don't think there's any virus in the vaccines that are out there?
Tiffany: I don't know.
Doug: I'm not saying that that's necessarily wrong. Maybe the level of fraud is to that level, it really is that you're getting...
Tiffany: I think that it is. I don't trust anything at all. But again, I'm not a scientist.
Doug: So all they need to do is mix up a vial of...
Tiffany: I don't have my own lab. I don't have my own microscope even. I don't have electroscope or whatever it's called. {laughter} There's no way for me to have firsthand knowledge of this and whether what they are doing is actually scientifically sound but I do know, according to a person or an entity's history, that they are capable of some whopping lies, so why should I believe this.
Doug: Well I don't necessarily disagree with you. I guess they could technically just get a vial, throw in some egg yolks, some aluminium, some mercury and say "Hey! Here's the new HIV vaccine. We've got it!" And just start selling that across the country.
Tiffany: They were talking about that I one of the videos that we watched and they said that if they did finally come out with an AIDS vaccine they would have to include a letter to every patient who received it and say that if you ever take an HIV test after getting this vaccine, know that it might come up positive because of the antibody response due to getting the vaccine. But if you have an antibody response and you haven't got the vaccine that means you have AIDS. {laughter} It's so ridiculous!!
Elliot: What's the difference? I don't get it.
Tiffany: I don't know!!
Elliot: You have your own antibodies or you're given antibodies. That doesn't make sense.
Tiffany: Just believe it, it's the truth Elliot! {laughter} Stop being a heretic.
Doug: Denier. You're a denier, aren't you!
Elliot: Again, when you look at it from this perspective it's really not too difficult to see what's gone on. As we said, it's the same thing, the same modus operandi that they use for every single other kind of disease and problem that they come up with. I think generally what's so mind boggling is that they just constantly do anything that they can to avoid the idea of increasing someone's immune system naturally. Anyone would think that if there is some sort of infectious disease that you'd want to have a good immune system.
It's like these vaccine-pushers and these scientists do all that they can just to - again, like I said - avoid any way of increasing your immune system. It's always "We have to provide you with this outside source of this magic pill that's going to somehow boost your immune system". But they never really look at what a good immune system is and how you could foster that naturally as any normal human being or normal human body should be able to do.
Tiffany: Well they consider the human body just this defenceless sac that is just open to all kinds of assaults and it needs big pharma to protect it.
Erica: And there's no money to be made in any of that. Education is not a big payout for big pharma.
Gaby: We're strengthening the terrain. Like Pasteur said, "It is the terrain of the microbe". What's wrong with not stressing the terrain? Nobody will get sick anymore.
Erica: And just what Elliot shared too about the stress response and the destruction of the thalamus so it's a perfect cocktail.
Tiffany: Some years ago I showed the House of Numbers documentary to my mother and she's not really into all the stuff that I'm into as far as bad things going on in medicine. She's healthily sceptical, more so than the average person, but she watched it and all she could say was "Those sons of bitches!" {laughter} And that's exactly how I feel. Think of all the millions of people who have suffered and died, who watched their loved ones die over some myth, basically, over the severe side effects of these disastrous drugs, and all the money that's been poured into it and all the publicity and all the fear that people have about it and all the stigma and discrimination against people who allegedly have it. It's just mind-boggling. Those bastards!
Erica: Well does anyone else have anything they want to share? Any personal testimony? Are AIDS tests or HIV tests still a thing in the medical world Gaby? Is it something that's done if you're in an accident or you're in an emergency room situation?
Gaby: It is done for surgical protocols, anybody who's going to have surgery. So the staff will know if they they're working with somebody with one of these markers being positive. I haven't seen any positive...
Tiffany: But they would take the same precautions anyway, for everything!
Gaby: Yeah.
Tiffany: If they thought that they were clean or not. There's always the possibility that somebody has something that you don't know. You always take standard precautions.
Gaby: Yeah.
Erica: And is it something that's required before, for example, you donate blood?
Tiffany: They don't test you for HIV before you donate blood. They ask you these questionnaires, which is another weird thing about the HIV tests. They use it in certain parts of Africa where they have these rapid tests. You can just go into a mall and get an HIV test. They ask you all these questions about your sex life and history and all that stuff, and taken in conjunction with whatever your answers are on those tests, they look at your HIV tests and they make a determination of positive or negative.
Doug: Yeah. They take the lifestyle factors into account.
Tiffany: That is just bizarro world.
Doug: It just shows how inaccurate the tests are. "Well, you tested positive but you're not sexually promiscuous, you have never been an IV drug user, you never had a blood transfusion so you're probably fine.
Tiffany: Yeah, "Why don't you go next door and take one of their tests."
Gaby: In mainstream medicine, nobody talks about HIV anymore. People are more concerned about hepatitis C, not even the B one. The C one, that it's so destructive and people are more concerned about that one.
Tiffany: It never comes up where I work either.
Doug: Interesting. With all the hype around it in the '80s you'd think it would be still big news but it's crashing and burning.
Erica: When I was pregnant and I was on Medicaid so essentially a welfare type of insurance, it was required to have an HIV test. I'll share this, it's really disturbing and when I think back I can't even believe I sat through this situation with this doctor, but I was there with the father and he looked at him and said "Well she won't kill you with AIDS. That was how he said I had a negative test. So again, back to the fear-mongering. You're waiting to get the results and it's psychologically very stressful because then you think "Oh I have a baby". Like you said Tiffany, all your partners and now when you call people and "Oh, I'm HIV positive".
Tiffany: I had an AIDS scare once but I've never taken an HIV test. This was maybe in the early-to-mid '90s. I had a yeast infection so I was reading through there on the packet for the medicine for the yeast infection that if you have chronic yeast infections - and so far I'd only had the one and so far I'd only had sex once and he used a condom so this is my history going into it. {laughter} I read the package and it said if you have recurrent yeast infections it could be a sign of AIDS. {laughter} "Oh my god!! I've got AIDS!!" I was totally freaked out for a couple of weeks at least and then of course the yeast infection goes away and I just calm down. It's like "Are you stupid? You don't have AIDS. What are you talking about?" But that just attests to the level of fear-mongering that was rampant at the time.
Gaby: I got tested for HIV. I had an accident once in the operating room for somebody who was positive for hepatitis C. So the protocol is that you have to take the test, make sure that you're negative and then repeat it some months afterwards to make sure it stays negative. Because the patient was positive the protocol called for anti-viral medication and the doctor just told me point blank, "If I were you I would not take it because all these drugs they have more side-effects than the chances that you will get this infection." I said okay, that's fine and that's it. But it takes it seriously.
Elliot: Sounds like a good doctor Gaby.
Erica: Yeah, and it says a lot that doctors know that and that they would tell you that.
Gaby: And it was direct. I pricked my finger with an infected needle and still the doctor said, "Don't worry. I would not take the drugs if I were you." Okay, I was not planning to. But yeah, that's it.
Erica: Even one of the drugs that they were prescribing was called Hart, which relates back to this whole idea of words and what they choose to call these things. It's the highly active retroviral therapy but they call it Hart.
Tiffany: Is that the one also, like AZT fits in that category...
Erica: Yeah.
Tiffany: ...but it causes the buffalo humps where they have these fat deposits on the back of their necks and they look like hunchbacks. And they have this wasting syndrome where all the fat on their face disappears and they look totally cachectic I think the term is.
Erica: Cachectic.
Tiffany: Yeah, you know what I mean. All the fat on them disappears and they just look a wreck and it's not because of the disease. It's not because of AIDS. It's because they're taking these medications.
Gaby: In the end cancer patients get cachexia too. Your body wastes away.
Erica: So where's the research going to go where they will put all that together? Would it ever happen?
Doug: No.
Tiffany: They're never going to go back and say, "We were wrong."
Erica: The institute for side effects of drugs.
Tiffany: They'll never say, "Okay guys! We were wrong!!"
Doug: Can you imagine the lawsuits? If they do anything, they would just quietly back off and in a couple of generations they'll say, "Oh yeah, that was all wrong." And then there's nobody left to sue them.
Erica: Well maybe that's what we're seeing because we're not seeing this hype over it anymore.
Doug: Yeah, it's true.
Tiffany: This is something that falls down the memory hole like smallpox or something like that.
Elliot: It's kind of similar to what I think the FDA or the American Heart Association who recently lowered the restriction of cholesterol in the diet. I'm not sure which agency it was but one of the big ones came out on the quiet, a small press release or something, it wasn't massively known, but they said "Okay, we're going to release the restrictions on cholesterol because there's not really much evidence to say that limiting dietary cholesterol has any benefit to cardiovascular disease. But that wasn't a massive thing from what I can remember.
And that's a couple of years on, that's a few decades. So maybe that's a similar sort of thing they're doing with AIDS. Maybe one day in the next couple of years they may just come out and say, "Hey you know! This isn't something you necessarily need to worry about," without actually taking a stand and saying "We were wrong!" They don't tend to do that, as we know, but they might just say, "Oh yeah, so the evidence suggests that something is not what we thought. That doesn't mean that we were wrong. It just means that it's not what we thought it was." {laughter}
Erica: I think they're going to wait until all those researchers die, that came out (with the information).
Doug: It's like the American Dental Association too. They still absolutely refuse to say there's anything wrong with mercury in amalgams. "Totally fine, no problem", but then they just say, "Well, we're not going to use it anymore." Well why not? If there's nothing wrong with it then why are you stopping using it? {laughter}
Erica: And fluoride. Fluoride too.
Doug: It's kind of like eventually they will probably come out and say "Yeah, we were wrong but all the people have mercury in their mouth are dead now so there's nothing to worry about so we can actually admit it now." If they ever do.
Elliot: "We don't have to pay anyone off." Exactly, what it means, "So we don't have to pay any lawsuits".
Tiffany: Another sad saga in the history of the Health and Wellness Show. {laughter}
Gaby: We're the most objective health and wellness show.
Erica: And we're willing to be proven wrong.
Doug: How come Madonna never got AIDS? She was talking about it all the time and she was surrounded by people and talking about how she was losing people to this disease and she was raising awareness for it and stuff like that, but she also happened to be - by reputation anyway - super promiscuous.
Tiffany: She is the one who offered fellatio to everybody who voted for Hillary Clinton.
Doug: That's right! So she's clearly not conservative, I guess you would say, in her sexual behaviour. So if it is actually spread amongst heterosexuals and is sexually transmissible, how come she never came down with it?
Tiffany: How come a lot of people that I know didn't come down with it?! {laughter}
Doug: There you go.
Erica: Well I guess we will wrap it up here. We do not have a pet health segment today.
Tiffany: I wonder if cats and dogs get AIDS. Oh! There's feline AIDS.
Doug: Is there?
Tiffany: So I've read. That could be totally bogus too.
Erica: So we're all left shaking our head wondering, so for our listeners and chatters who may be interested in looking more into this topic, we do recommend House of Numbers. What's the other one?
Tiffany: Positively False: Birth of a Heresy.
Erica: That's the newest one. When did you say it came out Doug? In 2015?
Doug: I don't remember but it was more recent than House of Numbers.
Erica: I also put up a link for a documentary that was made by Gary Null called AIDS Incorporated. They all have very similar information and they all ask the questions that a lot of people haven't asked and have a lot of interviews of people with their experiences.
Tiffany: You can also look up Peter Duesberg. Just type his name in Google and you'll get a lot of stuff and also the Perth Group. They're a group of scientists who question the mainstream HIV/AIDS hypothesis.
Doug: And John Rappaport as well. He's done some good articles. He actually wrote a book. I think it was also called AIDS Inc.
Erica: Yeah it was. And he has a lot of citations and interviews. So there's a lot out there that really questions it. I hope today we were able to at least scratch the surface on it.
Elliot: I just want to add as well that if you yourself or anyone that you know tests HIV positive, don't freak out because it probably doesn't even mean anything. There's a very high probability that what the test is testing for is not really known about, and that even if you do have antibodies towards some sort of retrovirus, if it does exist, then the chances are it's not much of a problem because people live for years and years and years with HIV with no symptoms and just live long and healthy lives.
Tiffany: And they don't transfer it to their partners either.
Elliot: Yeah. If you know anyone who's diagnosed with AIDS or you yourself have been diagnosed with AIDS, the likelihood of that happening, a listener of this show being diagnosed with AIDS is pretty slim, but if it does happen, then don't take the drugs. That's pretty obvious. Secondly, work on building your immune system. Vitamin C is an amazing one for the immune system. There's been so much research done on vitamin C for all kinds of conditions, as most people here probably already know about. Linus Pauling did some amazing work on vitamin C. Eating a healthy diet, living stress-free really. Try to be chilled out. Try not to get stressed and do all the other things that we talk about on this show and you'll probably not die from AIDS. The AIDS won't be a bad thing for you, honestly.
Doug: Although I should say, don't take that as medical advice.
Erica: Exactly.
Elliot: Yeah, I'm not a doctor.
Doug: If you've had an HIV test, don't just ignore it with, "Some guy on a radio show told me I can ignore this and it would be fine." Take it seriously.
Elliot: Good disclaimer.
Doug: Maybe get a second opinion.
Erica: And get lots of sleep.
Doug: Indeed.
Erica: Alright. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you to our chatters and we would like some time in the future to have somebody call in. So stay tuned to Sunday's show, Behind the Headlines and we'll see you all again.
All: Good-byes.
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