What Causes AIDS?

The debate continues

From the December 1994 issue

In the June issue of Reason, Charles A. Thomas Jr., Kary B. Mullis, and Phillip E. Johnson argued that the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS has been falsified and that it is important to reopen scientific debate on the question. Reason takes no stand on the former conclusion-though the editors believe the article made a strong case-but it strongly supports the latter.

To further that debate, Reason solicited letters from scientists pursuing AIDS research and others with a strong interest in the subject, some of whom responded. We also received numerous letters from readers. A selection is printed here, along with the authors' reply.

"What Causes AIDS? It's An Open Question" provided a lucid explanation for skepticism over the role of HIV in AIDS. As an African historian, I am appalled by the unscientific diagnoses of AIDS in Africa and the persistence of Western racist myths about sexual promiscuity on that continent. "What Causes AIDS?" gives my students a valuable introductory source to begin rethinking AIDS in Africa.

As chairman of the History and Philosophy of Science Section for the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), I included Thomas, Mullis, and Johnson at a symposium on "The Role of HIV in AIDS: Why There is Still a Controversy," which I organized for our June 1994 conference in San Francisco. Even though the symposium was approved by the executive committee of the Pacific Division in January and publicized in division newsletters sent to 30,000 members, the AIDS establishment mounted a behind-the-scenes effort in May to either cancel the symposium or seriously reconfigure it.

The increased desperation of the HIV=AIDS orthodoxy among journalists and within the biomedical research establishment will prompt more attempts to stifle debate. Their efforts to mislead the public through scientific censorship are doomed to failure as long as we can count on courageous publications like REASON.

Charles L. Geshekter
Professor of History
California State University, Chico
Chico, CA

I was glad to see REASON entering the HIV/AIDS fray. My own experience in writing about this subject has convinced me that Thomas, Mullis, and Johnson are right.

Often cited as evidence that HIV, and not drug use, is the real cause of AIDS, is a paper published in Nature, written by Ascher, Sheppard, and Winkelstein. I was surprised to read, in a March 11, 1993, story by Gina Kolata in The New York Times that this Nature article had been written specifically in response to an op-ed piece I had written for the San Francisco Chronicle six months earlier. "Dr. Ascher and his colleagues wrote their paper in response to a challenge by Tom Bethell," Kolata wrote, quoting Ascher as saying that "Tom Bethell threw down the gauntlet," forcing them to do the study. I can only say that this must be the first medical study ever written specifically in response to an op-ed piece by a journalist, and then published by Nature. Any doubts that I may have had about the political character of AIDS vanished when I read Kolata's weird article. The fact is, I am now convinced, AIDS is not a disease at all-it is a government program.

At the June AAAS meeting in San Francisco, Bryan Ellison, a graduate student in Molecular and Cell Biology at U.C. Berkeley, presented a reappraisal of the Ascher study, having obtained the raw data on which it was based. Ascher et al. had examined a cohort of about 1,000 men in San Francisco and had found that, surprise, surprise, all of those who developed AIDS were HIV positive! Once again, however, the definition of AIDS included HIV positivity. The real question was: How many AIDS-defining diseases were to be found in the HIV-negative cohort? Ascher et al. had failed to report this key information. But the raw data from the original survey showed at least 45, and possibly as many as 200, AIDS-related diseases among the HIV-negative men, Ellison told the AAAS gathering.

Tom Bethell
Hoover Institution
Stanford, CA

"What Causes AIDS?" exaggerated some facts out of context to reach outrageous and misleading conclusions.

HIV is a silent, fatal, contagious disease that is in fact spreading now into the heterosexual population, especially adolescents, and the usual public-health strategies that have been employed for decades to halt the spread of the virus have not been applied to this illness due to certain political lobbies. These same groups love to utilize "AIDS" data rather than HIV prevalence since, with a silent 10-year latency, AIDS data tells you what was happening 10 years ago.

Recently, the Centers for Disease Control released data from 22 of the 24 states reporting HIV cases (not including California, New York, etc. where rates are highest). For male teenagers, the ratio of HIV to AIDS cases is eight to one. For female teenagers, the ratio is 22 to 1. When you analyze AIDS data, you don't see the epidemic coming because you're looking backward, the wrong direction. For Thomas et al. to claim that the virus "remains almost entirely confined to the original risk groups" is untrue and dangerously lackadaisical. Summarizing the recently released CDC data, AIDS Alert, October 1993, concludes, "the fastest growing mode of infection is through heterosexual contact while intravenous drug use has leveled and homosexual transmission has declined."

Thomas et al. present "evidence" that HIV does not lead to AIDS because many people have HIV without these diseases. This is entirely consistent with the long latency period. And the vast majority of those dying of AIDS have HIV.

The authors wrongly contend that the HIV antibody test is plagued by false positives. The test is extremely sensitive, and final reporting is made specific by the confirmatory Western Blot and other back-up tests. Col. Donald Burke, a research virologist at Walter Reed Hospital, has personally supervised several million HIV blood tests for the routine Army testing of recruits. His statistics demonstrated that HIV testing resulted in less than one false-positive in one million blood tests.