The Myth of HIV

 Mon 1:30 pm +00:00, 4 May 2026  1

posted by pete fairhurst 2

Source: https://www.unz.com/article/the-myth-of-hiv/

The Unz Review documents so much foolishness, if not insanity, in current human affairs that it can feel churlish to draw attention to yet another illusion, one with which I have become familiar over the past 40 years: the belief that a sexually transmitted virus, HIV, is the cause of the immune system disorder called Aids. Much evidence contradicts this hypothesis, but as in other important areas of our lives, unremitting dogma and censorship by powerful and often state-funded bureaucracies continue to keep an unproven theory alive.

In the UK, we have just received a fresh reminder of the suffering that accompanies this belief, a microcosm of intense misery indicative of a global burden of harmful misinformation.

Adam Hall, aged 43, was sentenced to life imprisonment on April 23 at Newcastle Crown Court for infecting seven young men with HIV, giving them what the judge called a “permanent and irreversible illness” with a “lifelong dependence on medical treatment”.

Hall’s criminality is not in question. He raped four of the men, and took a “sexual interest” in inflicting pain and harm on all of them, the court was told.

But it is also clear that the determination of the medical and legal authorities to make an example of him added to the anguish of the victims, because of the stigma attached to the virus theory and the lifelong medications that accompany an HIV diagnosis.

In a statement made to the court, one described how a sexual health nurse called him as he was getting off the school bus, to tell him he had been given HIV. He was 15 at the time. “There is a massive hole in my heart for the life I might have lived,” he said.

Another said the diagnosis was like a death sentence, adding: “The first medication I took made my hair fall out. I switched medications, but the side effects continued. Right now, day to day living can be exhausting. I have been exposed to so many medical procedures and hospital stays.”

A third said: “When I was first diagnosed with HIV, I just couldn’t believe it…All I can say is it ruined me. In that moment my life as I knew it was gone. I face so much stigma at work, including homophobic comments.”

Another recalled that when he explained to his mother that he had been infected and was now living with the virus, she told him not to hug her as she was worried she might catch it. “I have been judged so many times. It’s something I’ve had to get used to. I’ve recently had to change HIV medication again, so even after having the virus for nearly 10 years there are still issues with medication, still regular health appointments and blood tests. That will be part of my life forever.”

The case was brought by the Crown Prosecution Service, who said working with victims had played a crucial part in getting the evidence needed to ensure Hall was prosecuted, and a sentence to reflect the severity of his crimes. “We needed to demonstrate that it was Hall’s intention to transmit the disease [he denied this] and to rule out any other potential sources of the disease,” senior prosecutor Amy Dixon said.

On scientific advice, the UK Government, in common with many others, publicised HIV/Aids in a massive way from the mid-1980s onwards. Its agencies continue to try to maintain the story, even though there are fewer deaths from Aids in the UK than from falling down stairs, in contrast to the millions originally said to be at risk.

Not surprisingly, the court heard nothing of the evidence challenging the HIV theory. Also, none of the newspaper reports I have seen on this case made any direct mention of anal sex, although it was of course implied. It may have been avoided out of consideration for a general readership, but I believe it is significant for another reason.

This is that the most thorough critique of the HIV theory has come from a group of scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, who as part of an 80-page deconstruction of the HIV theory present evidence that promiscuous or violent anal sex can damage the immune system in such a way as to lead to an “HIV” diagnosis, with all its lifelong consequences, and with no need for the presence of a deadly virus. The back passage has only a thin protective wall, through which semen easily enters the bloodstream. When this happens, the semen promotes cell breakdown, raising blood levels of proteins that cause a false positive reaction with the “HIV” test.

Astonishingly, the test has never been validated as demonstrating the presence of “HIV”, because scientists have to this day never been able to isolate and purify “HIV” from any Aids patient.

An expert WHO meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, as far back April 1986 heard that this failing made it “inappropriate” to use the tests as a screen for Aids or for members of groups at increased risk for Aids. “Interpretation is as much a part of the test as are the physical reagents one uses for it”, Dr Thomas F. Zuck, an FDA representative, told the 100 participants present, from 34 countries. “So we have difficulties at this point deciding what is going to be required to validate a claim a manufacturer may make that a test is confirmatory.” Yet it was “simply not practical” to stop their broad application, he said.

All additional testing regimens introduced over the years since then suffer from the same lack of validation.

The fact that “interpretation” plays such a key part in diagnosis may help to explain why African Americans are eight times more likely to be told they have HIV infection than their white counterparts; and why three-fifths of purported new infections are said by the WHO to be in the African region.

The Perth group was led by the late Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, of the Royal Perth Hospital, a biophysicist who worked tirelessly for four decades trying to convince the scientific world that declaring “HIV” the cause of Aids was an immensely damaging mistake. She died on 19 March, 2022, aged 85.

Her original work was in researching and improving radiation treatments for cancer patients. This led her into a deep examination of how the body’s cells maintain healthy function, and how this can go wrong. In 1982 the high-prestige Journal of Theoretical Biology published a 21-page paper in which she explored how oxidation causes cell activation and energy expenditure, while a counterpart process known as reduction enables the cell to absorb and store energy. Changes in the factors regulating these cycles beyond the point where homoeostatic safety mechanisms are breached can lead to a variety of disorders, including cancer.

When Aids was first reported in 1981, “it wasn’t too big a jump to see that oxidative mechanisms had the power to explain much about Aids and perhaps even ‘HIV’ itself,” says emergency physician Valendar Turner, one of a small band of doctors and scientists who tried to help Papadopulos’s work become more widely known.

They faced many obstacles. Once the “deadly new virus” theory took hold, and all sexually active people were said to be at risk, it was a huge relief to leaders of the Gay Lib movement, still struggling at the time to overcome deeply prejudiced attitudes towards same-sex relationships. Aids had been dismissively termed a gay plague at first, because of its association with the “fast track” gay lifestyle involving heavy drug use and multiple partners, and doctors caring for the early victims were angered by what they saw as government indifference.

The virus hypothesis democratised the risks, leading to more compassion being shown towards Aids patients. But thereafter any contrary theories became politically incorrect, carrying the risk of being labelled homophobic; or worse, of “putting lives at risk” by discouraging not just Aids patients but all those who tested HIV-positive from taking antiviral drugs.

Even when a handful of gay men themselves challenged the virus theory, they met fierce resistance. One such was Michael Callen, diagnosed as suffering full-blown Aids in 1982 in New York City. He spent the following 12 years struggling to persuade the scientific community, as well as fellow homosexuals, not to stop asking questions about the cause or causes of Aids.

I met him in London in 1992, while working as science correspondent of The Sunday Times. This was soon after I had begun to examine the HIV critique, having reported Aids conventionally for several years previously. I asked him what had caused the breakdown in his own system – from which he told me he was dying – if it wasn’t HIV.

“You try having 3,000 men up your butt by the age of 26 and NOT get sick”, he said. “And I was a baby! I knew the first wave of people with Aids: they were founders of what we called the 10,000 club; they had had 10,000 or more different sexual partners.” Only a small minority of homosexual men had “pigged out” in this way, but it was within this “brotherhood of lust” that most of the homosexual Aids cases were found.

The Gay Lib years of the seventies had brought unprecedented opportunities for gay men to have sex with each other, he said, and he and others had subscribed to the notion that the more sex a gay man had, the more liberated he became. It was fun, but there was a price to pay biologically. Unprotected rectal sex put the immune systems of passive partners at risk. On top of that, those involved had concentrated among themselves just about every sexually transmitted microbe available, so they suffered one infection after another, often despite continuously taking antibiotics.

Callen co-authored an article published in the New York Native newspaper in November 1982 called “We Know Who We Are: Two Gay Men Declare War on Promiscuity”. There was overwhelming evidence, it said, that the health crisis was a direct result of unprecedented promiscuity on the urban gay sex circuit. Denial of this fact “is killing us”, and would continue to do so “until we begin the difficult task of changing the ways in which we have sex.”

The authors said that in their review of medical literature, and in conversations with Aids victims and their doctors, they had encountered no evidence that non-promiscuous gay men were contracting Aids, although an individual with few sexual partners could be at risk if those partners were themselves highly diseased. As for Aids cases reported in drug abusers, haemophiliacs and other risk groups, there were different logical explanations for risk of immune deficiency in each of these, and no need to postulate a single virus as the common cause. On the basis of this analysis, gay men should not expect the arrival of a vaccine or drug treatment for Aids. The need of the hour was for someone to connect the new syndrome to behaviour and lifestyle, especially as these were factors that could be susceptible to change.

The article produced a firestorm of protest, especially within the gay community. Not long afterwards, rapid acceptance by the scientific and medical communities that a killer virus, HIV, was the cause brought an end to any further public or mainstream professional discussion on the issue.

The virus theory opened the door to hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars for Aids research and treatment. This jackpot continues to support the pharmaceutical industry, medical and science journals, molecular biologists, health educators, and multiple NGOs and activist groups. Most of those involved see themselves as engaged in a noble fight to end the scourge of HIV/Aids, which according to the World Health Organisation has taken more than 44 million lives.

Yet more than 40 years on, with papers predicated on the HIV/Aids belief running well into six figures, there is no cure. A failed cancer drug called AZT, pulled off the shelf by American government researchers because of an apparent anti-HIV effect, killed and injured thousands. Later generations of drugs can help support a failing immune system, but do more harm than good when taken for life in people who have tested HIV-positive but are otherwise well. Current drug regimens are also claimed to minimise infectivity, and part of the case against the Newcastle rapist was that he was not adhering to his medication, making him infectious to others. But according to the Perth group, this claim too is based on a misunderstanding about the true meaning of “HIV”.

The lack of a successful treatment is highlighted by news that researchers are even performing autopsies on the bodies of “people with HIV” within hours of their death, “to pinpoint the nooks and crannies where the virus hides itself from antiretroviral therapies”, as the journal Nature put it. “HIV” infections are said to be rising globally, with around 1.3 million people newly infected globally each year.

The search for a vaccine has been equally unsuccessful. Bob Gallo, the American government scientist who initiated the HIV story in 1984 and marketed the first HIV test, predicted at the time that a vaccine would be available within two years. Forty years on, there have been more than 250 failed trials, and still more are under way, mostly in Africa where the World Health Organisation says millions are living with the virus. In the early 1980s, USA and UK scientists predicted Africa’s population was set to be decimated on the basis of widespread purported HIV infection. It has since almost trebled.

The Perth scientists have persisted in researching every aspect of the claims made by HIV protagonists, and tried for years to have their arguments examined, but faced unrelenting censorship. When the editor of a minor but respected journal accepted two of their papers and had one of them in the in the pipeline for publication, the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, told him that they must be withdrawn. When he refused, he was fired. His successor dutifully rejected them.

Other scientists who questioned the HIV story, even Nobel laureates, have suffered similar ostracism and even abuse. The late Professor Peter Duesberg, an eminent virologist with a $350,000 “outstanding investigator” award from the National Institutes of Health for his work on retroviruses, of which HIV was said to be one, was defunded and reduced to being the chair of his university’s annual picnic committee after he spoke out against the HIV theory, and warned publicly of the damage being done by AZT.

Having followed this story myself for several decades, I am convinced that the scientific community’s stubborn defence of “HIV” has long passed the point of being defensible, and now comprises a chronic assault on human dignity and wellbeing. What will it take to stop it?