Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS

By Celia Farber and Mark Crispin Miller

“Farber [is] a lucid and courageous witness to the power-play behind the first ‘scamdemic,’ . . . [Her] work is journalism at its best—solid, lucid, and humane, attacking wrongs that few dare touch, and thereby helping right them.”

—Mark Crispin Miller, bestselling author and professor of media studies at NYU

On April 23, 1984, in a packed press conference room in Washington, DC, the secretary of health and human services declared, “The probable cause of AIDS has been found.” By the next day, “probable” had fallen away, and the novel retrovirus later named HIV became forever lodged in global consciousness as “the AIDS virus.”

Celia Farber, then an intrepid young reporter for SPIN magazine, was the only journalist to question the official narrative and dig into the science of AIDS. She reported on the “evidence” that was being continually cited and repeated by health officials and the press, the deadliness of AZT, and Dr. Fauci’s trials on children, infants, and pregnant mothers. Throughout, Faber’s reportage was largely ignored. She was maligned, maliciously attacked, and ultimately canceled.

Now, forty years after her original reporting, Farber’s Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS is reissued with a new foreword by Mark Crispin Miller, shining much-needed light on her groundbreaking work once again. More relevant than ever, this book serves as an essential foundation to understanding its catastrophic sequel: COVID-19. Serious Adverse Events makes clear that the tactics employed at the height of HIV/AIDS—the fearmongering, cancel culture, and “woke” takeover of science, medicine, and journalism—persist today. The response to COVID-19 isn’t new: it is a well-trod and dangerous path in the social landscape.

 “Groundbreaking work.”—Bob Guccione, Jr., founder of SPIN magazine

"Farber’s research give context to the Covid catastrophe which she all but predicted. Despite the medical cartel’s brutal crusade to silence and vilify her, Farber never compromised. . . I’m happy she has lived to experience her own utter vindication. I also love her writing style."—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781645022084

Celia Farber

Celia Farber is a native New Yorker who grew up in Sweden and returned to the US to attend college. She now divides her time between Spain and New York City. Best known for her writings against pandemic propaganda, from AIDS to Covid, she was also an early critic of the emerging thought forms that would become "woke." From 1987 to 1997, Celia Farber wrote and edited SPIN magazine's AIDS column, "Words from the Front." You can follow her work at celiafarber.substack.com.

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Cover: Serious Adverse Events, An Uncensored History of AIDS by Celia Farber

Praise for Serious Adverse Events

I was astonished to discover Celia Farber’s work on the lost history of AIDS, including her extraordinarily troubling investigation of Dr. Fauci’s murderous experiments on children. Farber’s research gives context to the Covid catastrophe, which she all but predicted. Despite the medical cartel’s brutal crusade to silence and vilify her, Farber never compromised. I have found no missteps in her analysis, and I’m happy she has lived to experience her own utter vindication. I also love her writing style.

—ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Celia Farber gives us journalism as it was before its untimely demise, digging deep, bravely taking on the most glorified sacred cows of our time. Remember when there were at least two sides to every story? Celia lives that truth and takes us along on her journey.

—GAVIN DE BECKER, author of The Gift of Fear; security specialist

If you want to understand the real history of AIDS and why it mattered, Celia Farber is the main journalist who bore witness to it all, and took the blows accordingly. Her book is essential reading.

—VERA SHARAV, Holocaust survivor, founder of AHRP (Association of Human Research Protections)

Celia Farber is the most insightful and authoritative investigative journalist on the subject of AIDS. No one has better documented the real story behind this phenomenon: the tragic human toll and the collateral damage exacted by a greedy, unethical, and vengeful medical and activist mafia cartel. Until they came after me, under Anthony Fauci’s silent order, I would never have believed it. The global AIDS apparatus is driven by lies, violence, and a perversion of the good.

—JONATHAN FISHBEIN, MD, NIAID and DAIDS federal whistleblower

"When you read this book—and you must—you venture into the world of a major writer, Celia Farber, and you meet mysteries you’ve never encountered before. The facts themselves are clear and undeniable, but what Celia does with them brings you to another planet, which is Earth as it should be. Where the truth is not only seen but felt. That’s the mystery. That’s what a great writer can do. You’re there. You’re walking beside her, and you wonder how you could have avoided this place for so long. When this is the place you’ve wanted to be."

—JON RAPPOPORT, author of The Matrix Revealed; editor, NoMoreFakeNews.com

"Celia Farber isn’t just any journalist. Farber is unique, one who is, I believe, gifted by God with an entirely novel mettle.

I first contacted her in 1997 as an untenured nurse academic starting my doctoral research on HIV/AIDS. As an openly gay man I’d also worked in self-help services and seen first-hand the destructive imposition of AIDS ideology on the human psyche. After reading her Words from the Front" columns published in SPIN magazine I was naturally drawn to Farber, both personally and professionally. Farber’s investigative journalism consistently revealed what many of us across the health sciences and community services already sensed was highly sinister about HIV/AIDS ‘science’ but lacked Farber’s keen instinct to articulate. Farber uniquely exposed the disabling psychological impacts and the corrupt essence of the HIV/AIDS medical-industrial complex via her total immersion in both its science and politics.

"We now see how Farber’s HIV/AIDS work, originally brought together in 2006 in the first publication of Serious Adverse Events, taught us something crucial to the Covid Plandemic: HIV/AIDS was not an isolated case of science ‘gone wrong.’ It laid the foundation for the totalitarian mindset emanating like a Biblical evil from the allopathic industrial complex. Its perverse ideology has corrupted compassionate health care while continuing to fatally misdirect many well-intentioned clinicians.

"I highly recommend this republication of Serious Adverse Events to a new generation of readers so they too can become familiar with the important work of Celia Farber."

—KEVIN CORBETT, PhD

SERIOUS ADVERSE EVENTS: An Uncensored History of AIDS by CELIA FARBER, Foreword by MARK CRISPIN MILLER; Chelsea Green Publishing; White River Junction, Vermont; London, UK

Copyright © 2006, 2023 by Celia Farber.

Foreword copyright © 2023 by Mark Crispin Miller

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Originally published in 2006 by Melville House Press.

This edition published by Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023.

Project Manager: Rebecca Springer

Project Editor: Brianne Goodspeed

Proofreader: Angela Boyle

Indexer: Linda Hallinger

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Page Layout: Abrah Griggs

v1.202303

ISBN 978-1-64502-207-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64502-208-4 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-64502-209-1 (audiobook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931044

Chelsea Green Publishing

P.O. Box 4529

White River Junction, VT 05001

Somerset House

London, UK

www.chelseagreen.com

I dedicate this book to my son, Jeremy Bannister, who came into my life as the only light during a dark time. I promised him things would one day turn around and the war would be over. I hope he one day reads this, as part of his process of forgiving me for the stability I was unable to provide. I want him to be proud, of me, but also of himself, for surviving on the small, storm-tossed ship all those years. We made it.

Contents

Foreword by Mark Crispin Miller

Author’s Note

Introduction: The Truth Barrier

1: The Passion of Peter Duesberg

2: Never Before in the History of Disease

3: A Multifactorial Syndrome?

4: Sins of Omission

5: The Grey Zone

6: What About Africa?

7: Out of Africa

8: The Rebel Genius

9: Only Different in Degree

10: Science Fiction

11: An Era of Openness

12: Out of Control

Epilogue

Afterword (2023)

APPENDIX I: World Bank Timeline of Global AIDS Events

APPENDIX II: The Birth of Antibodies Equal Infection

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Foreword

When Celia Farber wrote the articles comprising this uncensored history of AIDS, she did not know, nor could she have imagined, that she was also writing an essential prehistory of the catastrophic sequel yet to come. There are, of course, already many books about the Covid crisis, and there will certainly be many more, but any thorough bibliography on the coronavirus and its myriad disastrous consequences must include this peerless book about HIV/AIDS—a dress rehearsal for the notional pandemic that premiered in January 2020 and that’s still simmering (with no end in sight).

Although it came as a big shock to We the Viewers—believing, as so many did, the propaganda line that SARS-CoV-2 had leapt scarily from bats to humans—COVID-19 was a movie that we’d seen before, as this book should make clear to those who weren’t around when it first played back in the eighties, or who were but couldn’t see its flaws (because the media would not report them or talk to anyone who grasped them).

Back then, as an intrepid young reporter for SPIN, Farber was the only journalist, aside from some few allies in the gay press, to dig into the science (or science) of AIDS and to discuss it with those fighting on both sides of the fierce struggle over its direction. While the majority of journalists (or journalists) sat reverently at Dr. Fauci’s feet and parroted his terroristic line on HIV (which made his agency the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a fortune and him the very God of public health), Farber noted that the HIV/AIDS thesis was, in the United States, wholly based on the bombastic say-so of Dr. Robert Gallo. Well-informed by searching conversations with (real) scientists like Dr. Peter Duesberg, Farber realized, and reported, that there was apparently no evidence that HIV causes AIDS, whereas there was much evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS: evidence that was ferociously suppressed, while those seeking to pursue it—Dr. Duesberg above all—were maliciously attacked and (as we now say) cancelled.

Thus Farber was a lucid and courageous witness of the power-play behind the first scamdemic, which in many ways foretold the one that has now largely wrecked the world. That terrifying fabrication of the sure lethality of HIV, despite the evidence disproving it, foretold the terrifying exaggeration of the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2, despite the evidence that it was no more lethal than the flu, a mortal danger only to the old and very sick—evidence that was also dangerous to mention (although Dr. Fauci early on affirmed, confusingly, that SARS-CoV-2 was no more lethal than the flu).

Moreover, what made HIV so very frightening was its devilish invisibility, since it spread asymptomatically, so you couldn’t know you had it unless a PCR test found you positive, in which case you were doomed. As Farber learned from an infuriated Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR technology (for which he won a Nobel Prize), that test should not be used for diagnostic purposes, yet Fauci was now using it, strategically, to pump up the numbers of the doomed. Thus Fauci’s HIV/AIDS myth anticipated the mythology of Covid, whose rapid spread was also undetectable except by PCR, the test itself creating Covid cases by the millions out of thin air.

The terrifying spread of HIV was also (seemingly) affirmed by a certain diagnostic promiscuity, as all the millions allegedly living with HIV/AIDS worldwide included many who just maybe had it, or looked like they did. On the harrowing UNAIDS statistics released in 1987, Farber notes that they "represent the organization’s estimate of the number of people presumed to be infected with HIV—a clear precursor to the millions stricken (presumably) with presumed COVID-19. HIV’s ever-spiking toll, or relentless spread, was inflated further by the frequent misdiagnosis of deaths from other illnesses as AIDS deaths, as Farber found in Africa, where she went in search of evidence that AIDS was wiping out the continent as asserted, with neo-colonial zeal, by the AIDS industrial complex. In a Ugandan village overrun by heavily funded Western AIDS-fighters, Farber learned that the people there now called all deaths—from malaria or any other illness—AIDS deaths. (AIDS is a formula for everything here, one villager said wearily.) That African phenomenon foretold the global plague of bogus diagnoses, whereby deaths caused by flu, pneumonia, heart attack, and even motorcycle accidents were written up as COVID deaths—as were countless others who had tested positive" but clearly died of other comorbidities.

So much for the terroristic fakery (some might say wizardry) behind the two scamdemics.

What of the social, cultural, and medical effects of all that fear? Back then, Fauci brought the fear to a high boil by inventing what he called the heterosexual spread of AIDS—a myth without a shred of evidence behind it. Yet it was, at once, hysterically affirmed as scientific truth by the relentless fear-pornographers of our free press, who thereby helped make sexual union seem as dangerous as chain-smoking or Russian roulette, so that people now refrained from passionate encounters, eyeing potential partners warily, and refusing to embrace without the latex armor of safe sex. That new fear in the sexual realm foretold the universal madness of mask mandates and social distancing, whereby millions now avoided not just casual sex but one another, on the crackpot premise that society itself is dangerous.

And yet there was—and is—a consequence of Fauci’s devilry far graver than that misanthropic creed of staying safe. As Farber tried to tell the world back then, the purpose of the HIV/AIDS propaganda drive was not to save gay lives, or any lives: on the contrary. The purpose of arousing, and maintaining, all that panic over HIV was to make people desperate to take AZT—a cure far deadlier than that virus, and one that slowly killed some 300,000 gay men, including Rudolf Nureyev, Keith Haring, Freddie Mercury, and others whose death-agonies were misreported mawkishly as caused by AIDS. If Farber’s reportage had gotten the hearing it deserved and moved other journalists to dig into that crime against humanity, Fauci and his pharmaceutical colossus would have fallen, and he couldn’t have moved on to help kill millions (if not more) with those vaccines that are themselves far deadlier than any virus ever was, and that will go on killing and/or crippling people in unprecedented numbers, all throughout the world, long after Fauci and his cohorts have gone on to their reward.

And why was Farber’s reportage ignored—and she herself maligned for writing it? That punishment of an extraordinary journalist, and long blackout on her lifesaving work, was due to yet another feature of the HIV/AIDS cult that persisted through the Covid cult and that defines this era overall. The dismal Fauci’s rise to prominence and reputation as a great humanitarian; the marginalization of the brilliant Peter Duesberg (He is a proponent of AIDS denialism, the debunked claim that HIV does not cause AIDS, barks Wikipedia); the traumatic battering of Celia Farber; and—to jump ahead, again, to Covid—the epic slandering (and worse) of Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, Robert Malone, Tess Lawrie, Zev Zelenko, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Harvey Risch, Meryl Nass, Scott Atlas, Mike Yeadon, John Ioannidis, Knut Wittkowski, Paul Alexander, Delores Cahill, Judy Mikovits, Sucharit Bhakdi, and Ryan Cole, and the many other honest doctors, scientists, and activists who have worked to tell the truth about the virus or that vaccination drive: all such gross injustices, and the weird persistence of the Covid cult, are due to the woke takeover of science, medicine, and journalism—a conquest that began with HIV/AIDS, as Farber shows us here.

Celia Farber’s work is journalism at its best—solid, lucid, and humane, attacking wrongs that few dare touch, and thereby helping right them, and doing so with uncommon literary grace (and flashes of a devastating humor). For this she should have won professional rewards and been exalted as a journalistic luminary. And yet, so mighty are the figures whose wrongdoing she exposed, and so corrupt is journalism in their world, that Farber was not hailed but trashed for her accomplishment, while Fauci is a multimillionaire, and widely deemed a saint, despite the evil he has done. With Serious Adverse Events now back in print, it should be possible, at last, to remedy that dual injustice.

—MARK CRISPIN MILLER,

New York City, December 2022

Author’s Note

On any given story, a dominant narrative takes shape, and journalists form a herd around it. Stories that pertain to government, as AIDS does, are strictly controlled and censored. That’s a given. Journalists who don’t follow the herd are swiftly cut off from access to what they call sources. This book is thus subtitled an uncensored history because it depends almost entirely on sources that have been censored—most especially by their own fear to speak out—and almost none on sources in government.

Much of what appears in this volume was first published elsewhere, and it retains its contemporaneous tone here. Where possible, material has been updated to reflect new information, but many of the stories included here are reprinted as they were originally published.

For facts that fall outside the scope of this book, a rough guide to the accepted history of global AIDS events, including epidemiological estimates of the AIDS epidemic, is provided in Appendix I; the timeline was composed for the World Bank report Committing to Results: Improving the Effectiveness of HIV/AIDS Assistance. A more controversial history of the way in which antibodies to HIV began signaling HIV infection is reprinted as Appendix II; this timeline was composed by Rodney Richards, a former employee of Amgen, now the world’s largest biotech company, who worked with Abbott Laboratories on the development of the ELISA HIV test.

Chapter Two, Never Before in the History of Disease, was originally published in SPIN (August 1988).

The research and quotations that comprise Chapter Three, A Multifactorial Syndrome?, was also first published in SPIN. I first explored the topic of co-factors in the April 1988 issue; I wrote about and interviewed Michael Callen for the June 1988, April 1991, and April 1994 issues. I reported about the question of mycoplasma in the September 1990 issue.

Much of Chapter Four, Sins of Omission, was researched, written, and published in SPIN in 1989 at the very peak of pro-AZT hysteria, during a time in which the drug was credited with being the only drug that could save people’s lives. At the time of its publication, SPIN took out a full-page ad in the New York Times noting: "Before you take AZT again, read the November issue of SPIN." My coverage of the ACTG 076 trial was originally published in Mothering (September/October 1998).

Chapter Five, The Grey Zone, is drawn from a number of pieces I wrote about HIV-negative AIDS, including features first published in SPIN in October 1992 and April 1996.

My reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Africa, which is considerably updated here, is accompanied by the long piece, Out of Africa, which was first published in SPIN in March and April of 1993. Chapter Six draws on much of the research I did about the predicted heterosexual AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and first published as Fatal Distractions in the June 1992 issue of SPIN.

My profile of Kary Mullis, The Rebel Genius, is drawn from conversations that were first published in the June 1992 and July 1994 issues of SPIN.

My writing about protease inhibitors was first seen in SPIN as a short feature, The End of The End?, in April 1997. In March 2000, I published Science Fiction in Gear; it has been significantly updated here.

I first reported on the scandal at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City for the online magazine Red Flags. Chapter Eleven, An Era of Openness, also includes the research and writing I did about AIDS activist organizations in Money Changes Everything, which was published in SPIN, September 1992.

Chapter Twelve, Out of Control, was first published, in a slightly different form, in Harper’s Magazine (March 2006).

— INTRODUCTION —

The Truth Barrier

The threat of death hangs over all men and, however disguised it may be, and even if it is sometimes forgotten, it affects them all the time and creates in them a need to deflect death on to others. The formation of baiting crowds answers this need.

ELIAS CANETTI, Crowds and Power

Winston Churchill famously said: The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. This was during his spell of enthusiasm for the implementation of a lingua franca used by the Allies called Basic English, a language of only 850 words. George Orwell, during his years at the BBC, was himself interested in Basic, and scholars say it formed the basis of the totalitarian language Newspeak in 1984.

Since April 23, 1984, an empire of the mind has been expanding around our world. It is a simple, terrifying idea, and each mind in which it implants becomes incorporated, as territory, into the empire. It was not really an idea but more of a dictum. Colossally powerful, the dictum was that there was a single sexually transmissible virus that would bring imminent death upon millions of Americans. It was declared during a packed press conference held in Washington, DC—on April 23, 1984—wherein the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, declared, The probable cause of AIDS has been found. She introduced National Cancer Institute (NCI) virologist Robert Gallo, chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology, who explained that he had discovered a collection of retroviral particles to be the probable cause of AIDS. Heckler added that an AIDS vaccine could be expected in two years, and that the announcement marked a watershed moment in the honor roll of American science.

By the next day probable had fallen away, and the novel retrovirus, later named HIV—the human immunodeficiency virus—became forever lodged in global consciousness as the AIDS virus. (The word probable was dropped when Lawrence Altman, writing in the New York Times, definitively referred to the retrovirus as the AIDS virus. Altman, the Times chief medical reporter, was at that time a member of a subdivision of the Centers for Disease Control [CDC] called the Epidemic Intelligence Service [EIS], known as the medical CIA. He was recruited into the EIS in 1963, six years before he started at the Times. Established in 1951, the chief purpose of the EIS was to fan out in various fields, including media, and act as public-health activists, promoting the agenda of the CDC, and acting as its eyes and ears.)

The now famous press conference drop-kicked the world into a new era and marks the beginning of official AIDS history—an event the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put on par with NASA’s first moon landing.

But others saw it differently. As one AIDS researcher put it to me, the cause of AIDS was declared by government fiat. Some of the scientists in the audience that day were astonished to the point of speechlessness at Gallo’s claims. His viral sample, for a start, was identical to one that had been isolated in Dr. Luc Montagnier’s lab at the Pasteur Institute in Paris during the previous year and sent to Gallo for comment. Scientists recognized it—yet nobody said anything. This point has been more rigorously analyzed and proven than any single moment in all of virology, by several investigating committees, journalists—one in particular, John Crewdson, has written hundreds of pages about the sample’s appropriation—and, finally, conceded by the U.S. government itself, which, in 1994, quietly settled a long running legal battle with the Pasteur scientists, admitting that they had discovered the virus and that the U.S. therefore owed them millions in HIV test royalties. Montagnier never suggested the virus was the cause of AIDS, but Gallo and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) did.

There have been many accounts of the iconic press conference. (I have written the easy, movie version of it myself several times, complete with flashing bulbs and global media hysteria.) But studying the press conference now through all the threads of history, all the weather systems that led up to this perfect storm, one can see clearly that it was not only a moment of scientific disgrace but a theater of the absurd. If we remove the starchy coverings of the Ambitious Scientist and His Jealous Rivals, the Brave AIDS Activists, the Politicians in Denial, the CDC Official twisted into knots of worry because Nobody Was Listening and look at the 1984 press conference starkly, without its casing, we can at last see the strange and disjointed wiring that lay beneath the surface.

Fewer than half (36 percent) of the group of gay male patients on whom Gallo was basing his findings had any sign of the retrovirus at the time. We also know that until that moment in time, retroviruses were considered nonpathogenic, non–cell killing, though of great interest to a generation of retrovirologists who had had emerged after the discovery of reverse transcriptase in the 1970s.

Gallo claimed strong evidence of a causative involvement of the virus in AIDS, but it was not a proven scientific fact. Gallo had, at best, identified the retrovirus’s presence. He had not shown a causal relationship. Gallo later published four papers in Science in the spring of 1984 that form the bedrock of the HIV theory, but looking there, one does not find the fine threads that would explain how he and his colleagues knew HIV caused AIDS. This is where the story becomes truly strange. One must wind back to the very first cases of AIDS, in 1981, to understand it.

In 1980, the CDC was trying to recover from the fiasco of what was supposed to have been its shining triumph—the vaccination program against Legionnaires’ disease, termed the beginning of a swine flu epidemic. A few American Legion members had come down with pneumonia at a convention in Philadelphia, and the CDC went into overdrive, insisting that the cause was a microbe found in soil. After mass panic about swine flu was spread in the media—reported, as well, by the Times’ Altman—the CDC developed a research branch devoted to the disease and even a quick vaccine, which was given to fifty million Americans. The vaccine resulted in at least six hundred cases of paralysis and seventy-four deaths. A cascade of lawsuits ensued, and the CDC’s chief, who had tried to obscure the vaccine deaths, lost his job. The CDC continued its pursuit of infectious disease causes because its mission was to stop the spread of a disease, ideally through public health measures. Swine flu was, for the CDC, the one that got away. The failure did not cause them to change course but rather heightened their drive for what they called a suitable epidemic.

It is assumed that AIDS broke out, among gay men, but in fact, it was searched out. In 1980, Michael Gottlieb, a researcher at the University of California medical center, wanted to study the immune system and began scouring the hospital for patients with immune deficiency diseases. He found a case—a man in his early thirties with a yeast infection in his throat and a case of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Using a new technology that counted T-cells, a subset of white cells of the immune system, Gottlieb found that his patient had very few. Gottlieb kept searching and eventually found four more similar cases. Gottlieb excitedly rang up the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and said: I’ve got something that’s bigger than Legionnaires’. What’s the shortest time between submission and publication? When the NEJM refused to rush it into print, Gottlieb turned to the CDC. James Curran, from the agency’s Venereal Disease Program, got the announcement on his desk first and famously wrote Hot stuff. Hot stuff, across it, rushing it into the CDC’s weekly newsletter. Soon more cases were reported to the CDC, now with a new symptom: a rare blood vessel tumor called Kaposi’s sarcoma that mostly manifested as purple lesions on the surface of the skin but could also manifest in the internal organs.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, were burdened by the weight of the utter failure of Nixon’s War on Cancer, which relied on bankrupt theories that included retroviruses as the cause of most cancers. What this meant was that there was a generation of retrovirologists, trained and ready for glory, with no disease to focus on. In the years preceding the first cases of AIDS, federal institutions were filled with frustrated researchers and scientists determined to find viral causes for whatever they could. Chief among them was the National Cancer Institute’s Robert Gallo.

Gallo, in an almost comical fashion, spent years trying to find a disease to fit one of his viruses. The model for HIV was established years before it was isolated, as though it had been wished or dreamed into existence. In 1980, Gallo identified his first contender, which he dubbed Human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV), the first-known human retrovirus (subsequently called HTLV-1). Gallo found his virus concentrated among residents of the Japanese island of Kyushu, as well as in parts of the Caribbean and Africa. Some of them had a type of leukemia called adult T-cell leukemia, and that was all Gallo needed to hear. He pushed his theory right into the textbooks, where it remains to this day, despite the total lack of evidence linking HTLV to the illness as a cause.

But here is where the foundations of the new retroviral faith were laid out, preparing the ground for the big one: HTLV was said to cause disease after a several-year latency period. The latency period would eventually grow all the way up to an absurd fifty-five years, when it was found that the virus is transmitted from mother to child at birth.

In 1982, Gallo added a second virus to his HTLV family, calling it HTLV-2. Again, he tried to pin it on an obscure form of leukemia, but this time it did not fly. When Gallo, in 1983, appropriated Luc Montagnier’s Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus (LAV), later the AIDS virus, he predictably named it HTLV-3. Prior to that, he first tried to push HTLV-1 as the cause of AIDS—in other words, the first virus he claimed was connected to AIDS was a leukemia virus. Leukemia is a disease of abundant white cells, while AIDS is a deficiency of white cells.

Decades later, after looking anew at the data, at the reality beneath the roaring fires of the war on AIDS, serious questions about HIV’s ability to cause AIDS have sparked an international science war. It is a war of data, authority, and perception. It is marked by fury, condemnation, and extreme emotion. To this day, the AIDS industry—now a multibillion-dollar operation that has expanded far beyond the CDC and NIH—assails anyone who questions HIV’s role in AIDS. This establishment has labeled any critic an HIV denialist—a freighted term, of course, meant to slander critics by equating them, in a truly shameless misappropriation, with those who deny the Holocaust. And yet the critics only seem to grow in numbers, cropping up on innumerable websites and in escalating numbers of organizations around the world, from the U.S. to South Africa, to South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, India, Russia, and countless other nations.

This is a book about this larger AIDS war, what was and is, most simply, an informational war, in the information age, about how and why we think we know what we think we know.

Early on, the government’s theory about HIV was clearly in crisis: By the late 1980s it was clear that testing positive for HIV was not an immediate death sentence, that living HIV-positive was not only possible but probable. The initial hysteria, however, continued unabated, even after many of the claims of the theory began to give way one after another: that HIV would spread rampantly along lines of heterosexual sex; that the drug AZT would save lives; that Africa would be decimated; that cocktail therapies would eradicate HIV, thus eradicating the problem. And yet all these notions about the epidemic have been largely relegated to obscurity. Or better to say, have been—until now.

The HIV-AIDS hypothesis has entrapped millions of minds since 1984, who were told, in countless languages, the same terrifying message: Those with HIV would, without a doubt, die. They were entrapped by a scientific hypothesis and left no method of escape. HIV-Causes-AIDS-and-Eventual-Death-in-All-PersonsWho-Test-Positive-for-Antibodies was a new type of code unleashed upon the world. It was a code that would fulfill what Elias Canetti calls the need to deflect death on to others. It did so under the guise of modernity—a new cosmic order brought about by the emerging biotechnologies, chief among which was the HIV test itself. Prior to 1984, there were innumerable ways of classifying humans, of drawing lines of race, class, sexuality, or whatever else, to