Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series, written exclusively for TCW, he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here. You can read Part 1 of this series here and Part 2 here.
WHEN Covid was first perceived as a threat to public health in 2020, many governments rejected advice that protection should focus on those most at risk. They jeopardised the health and lives of millions through repeated lockdowns and the reckless rollout of experimental mRNA injections. In the panic surrounding the arrival of the genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2, unnecessary deaths occurred as a result of inappropriate forced ventilation, neglect of antibiotic treatment of associated bacterial infections, and the banning of effective medical therapy such as ivermectin.
Awareness of the scientific hubris that brought Covid into being, and of the corruption and abuse of power that turned the virus’s escape into a mega-crisis, has become widespread. The internet made it possible for critics to air data countering the official narratives, despite persistent attempts at censoring so-called ‘misinformation’.
Far fewer people know that a similar medical madness came into being nearly 40 years ago, before the internet was with us.
In the Aids era, a new, lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV was said to be putting us all at risk. ‘Aids does not discriminate’, we were told. A warning leaflet, heralded by a television advertisement featuring a giant tombstone, was delivered to every household in Britain.
It took nearly a quarter of a century before a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official admitted (in 2008) that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, there would be no global heterosexual pandemic.
Despite that admission, an HIV industry continues to thrive. It has proved an endless bonanza for drug companies, special interest groups and the medical research community. At least 100 journals are dedicated to HIV/Aids medicine, including Lancet HIV, and scores of major conferences are held every year.AIDS 2024, the 25th International AIDS Conference, will take place in Munich next July and is expected to bring together some 18,000 participants from around the world.
The band plays on, but has given no time or space for acknowledgement or examination of decades of painstaking work by a small but dedicated group of scientists who maintain that ‘HIV’ is a mythological entity.
As described here yesterday, the group was led by the late Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a biophysicist based at the Royal Perth Hospital, Western Australia, who critically analysed all aspects of the theory that Aids is caused by a deadly virus. She suffered endless rebuffs and abuse from the mainstream scientific community before her death in March 2022.
In 2017 the group posted on their website a highly referenced 80-page paper setting out their case that despite thousands of claims to the contrary, there is still no proof that such a virus has been isolated from the tissues of Aids patients.
They argue that because the true causes of Aids are not being adequately addressed, millions globally, and especially in poor countries, are being burdened with a false diagnosis of ‘HIV’ infection. Many of those who have tested ‘HIV’-positive, and even who are thought to be at risk of doing so, are being advised to take drugs whose claimed benefits come at the cost of serious toxicities. In Africa, while millions are malnourished, scarce resources are being diverted into fighting an illusory ‘HIV’ epidemic.
The Perth Group presents a case that the real cause of Aids, common to the various groups at risk of the syndrome, is prolonged breach of a chemical homeostatic process (called redox) that enables our body cells to balance energy expenditure with energy replenishment. Oxidising substances bring about the former, and antioxidants the latter. When cells are over-oxidised, this ‘oxidative stress’ depletes energy potential and can damage cell structures. The theory says Aids has this mechanism at its heart, and that the virus theory was questionable from the start because it was already known that over-oxidation leads to the appearance of ‘opportunistic’ infections seen in Aids. It maintains that Aids can be prevented and treated both by reducing exposure to oxidants, and through greater exposure to antioxidants.
The different groups of patients at risk of Aids had in common powerful oxidising stimuli in their lives. These included injected and ingested recreationaldrugs; nitrite inhalants used for sexual enhancement; repeated infections and many of the medicines used to treat them; blood-clotting agents given to haemophiliacs, previously made from the pooled blood of thousands of donors; and semen from unprotected anal sex.
Antioxidants include vitamins A, C and E and are available naturally in many types of vegetables, fruits, and grains. It was a tragedy for South Africa when President Thabo Mbeki was derided for suggesting more than 20 years ago that there could be dietary solutions to the immune deficiencies widely experienced on the continent.
The roots of the HIV theory, the Perth scientists say, lay in the feverish atmosphere of fear and anxiety that arose in the early years of Aids, when signals arising from disordered cells became misinterpreted as evidence of a new virus. An unvalidated test led to the mistaken belief that millions were infected. Once the global alert was sounded, it became almost impossible for contrary views to be heard.
The group emailed their 2017 deconstruction of ‘HIV’, the fruit of some 40 years of work, to seven top scientific and medical journals. They offered to prepare a concise version if the critique was thought ‘worthy of being brought to the attention of the scientific community’. Three of the journals failed to reply, despite repeated requests. None took up the offer.
I reported aspects of the group’s work myself in the 1990s while employed as science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, and subsequently in The Business and The European.
In recent years I have tried many times to draw their magnum opus to the attention of leading scientists. To help make it more accessible, I wrote a summary of the arguments, now also posted on the Perth Group’s website. This identifies six key pillars of the HIV/Aids paradigm which, according to their analysis, all involved a misinterpretation of what was actually going on biologically.
At the suggestion of a former president of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, I wrote to three senior biologists asking for guidance as to how the group’s theory could at least be examined. None replied.
Recently, two experts in the field whom I greatly respect did have the courtesy to respond. One regretted that he was too busy to enter into discussion. The other, a UK pioneer of the search for an HIV vaccine, assured me he had worked with concentrated virus. When I asked him for a reference demonstrating proof that his concentrate was HIV, however, the publications to which he referred me came nowhere near doing that.
Part of the problem lies in the very nature of retroviruses, the family of microbes to which HIV is said to belong. When scientists were developing the HIV theory, it was not realised that the human genome is full of mobile genetic elements, called retrotransposons, that amplify themselves by first being transcribed from DNA to RNA, and then transcribed back into DNA. The second part of this process requires an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT), which plays a big role in gene expression.
Detection of RT was wrongly interpreted by the HIV pioneers as meaning a retrovirus was present.
In a 1988 Scientific American article describing the history of the purported discovery of HIV, Robert Gallo and the late Luc Montagnier, the two scientists most identified with the theory, wrote: ‘The specimen [tissue from the swollen lymph node of a gay man at risk of Aids] was minced, put into tissue culture and analysed for reverse transcriptase. After two weeks of culture, reverse-transcriptase activity was detected by the culture medium. A retrovirus was present.’
The mistaken belief that RT activity ‘is truly specific to retroviruses’, as Montagnier still maintained several years later, was central to the case that he was the first to discover HIV, a discovery for which in 2008 he and his co-worker Françoise Barré-Sinoussi received a Nobel prize. Yet it is now known that at least two-fifths of the human genome is made up of retrotransposons. Reverse transcriptase is ubiquitous in cells.
The Perth Group declare: ‘We wish it to be understood that the claim, “The evidence that Aids is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous, meeting the highest standards of science”, cannot be substantiated.’
Even today, the group say, despite thousands of claims to the contrary, there is still no proof that ‘HIV’ has been isolated from the tissues of Aids patients.
Might this be why HIV/Aids protagonists become abusive in response to challenges to their beliefs, and how the illusions have been sustained for so long? You can build endless castles in the air on top of a fundamentally flawed idea.
Next: The missing particles
