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HIV is not the cause of AIDS. In fact, HIV may not even exist. If it does, it’s just a harmless passenger virus brought along by other ailments. The HIV antibodies have never been adequately isolated, and testing for the virus is highly inaccurate. AIDS itself is caused by a variety of factors, such as recreational drug use, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and the side effects of the anti-retroviral medication used to "treat" HIV.
Sound insane? It is!
But these views are being promoted in a new film on Apple Trailers called House of Numbers. The tag line for the film states that "a world without HIV/AIDS may be closer than you think."
In a review for the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis writes:
Couched as a “personal journey” through the history of H.I.V. and AIDS, “House of Numbers” is actually a weaselly support pamphlet for AIDS denialists. Trafficking in irresponsible inferences and unsupported conclusions, the filmmaker Brent Leung offers himself as suave docent through a globe-trotting pseudo-investigation that should raise the hackles of anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the basic rules of reasoning.
Seeing this on Apple Trailers, I immediately wrote the following very short e-mail to Apple. I am thinking about writing another e-mail since I suspect trailers [at] mac [dot] com will ignore this one.
Dear Apple,
As a frequent visitor of Apple Trailers and iPhone owner, I am offended that you are promoting the film House of Numbers by featuring its trailer on your website. This film promotes a conspiracy theory known as AIDS denialism that portrays AIDS as not being a real disease. This is deeply hurtful to the relatives of the more than 25 million people who have died as a result of AIDS in the past few decades.
Please remove this trailer from your website.
This film is hardly limited to promotion by Apple, however. It’s also being pushed by The Spectator in the UK, where political editor Fraser Nelson wants to "discuss the strength of the link between HIV and AIDS."
In the US we have charlatans like Gary Null, who is a prominent member of the AIDS denialist community, and who keeps being allowed to push his quackery on National Public Radio and other major media outlets. While I don’t know if he is aware of this specific film, Null promotes other AIDS denialist films on his website. Null is notable for having a PhD, ostensibly in a scientific field, from a university not accredited to award scientific degrees. Thankfully, Pacifica’s WBAI New York station had the sense to kick him off, but he retains a large fan base.
These views are dangerous. Writing in the Guardian, Ben Goldacre notes:
Despite international outcry, from 2000 to 2005 South Africa implemented policies based on the belief that HIV does not cause Aids, and declined to roll out adequate antiretroviral therapy. It has been estimated in two separate studies that around 350,000 people died unnecessarily in South African during this period.
We need to get people like this off the airwaves.
I’m going to write a letter to NPR right now calling on them to pull Null’s show.
29 Comments
The proof that HIV causes Aids is?
http://www.avert.org/evidence.htm
View the new documentary “House of Numbers” to see why questions about this must be raised and deeper issues about HIV and AIDS need to be discussed. Lives are at risk, and this is the first documentary with the worlds foremost authorities highlights the scientific problems with HIV testing, science, statistics, and why there is no cure. It sheds new light on a misunderstood phenomena. GO to http://houseofnumbers.com/ to see the trailer.
Truth about AIDS as told by Dr. Luc Montagnier. AIDS can be reversed. Nutrition is the answer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQoNW7lOnT4
I see that you’re on Huffington Post, so I assume you’re a real person, but please, this is absurd.
Wow. Look what I found.
This person is a spammer.
No, nutrition is not anything that will reverse AIDS. Proper nutrition can help prop up your immune system, but it will neither prevent infection nor eliminate it.
Can you catch HIV from having sex with your cousin?
The science regarding the causative effect of HIV to AIDS is complete and unassailable, but I must react strongly to the “these views are dangerous” approach being promoted here. Views are not dangerous, only people acting on mistaken views are dangerous,and liberal censorship is as heinous as conservative censorship. When progressives, in the name of protecting the science behind AIDS or evolution or climate change, or the rights of gays, or lesbians, or AIDS victims, or any of the othe causes near to our heart, go to the extreme of trying to remove even the most twisted views from the public discourse, we do ourselves and our causes a disservice and open oursleves up for debacles like the “climategate” email catastrophe. Idiotic, unsupported views will debunk themselves, or be debunked by better ideas , more clearly expressed, not by being forced out of the discourse. That way lies prior restraint of free speech, and I’ll have none of it.
I don’t agree. This is not even a question of liberal, neoliberal, or conservative. Rather, it’s a question of someone who is comparable to a Holocaust denier being regularly allowed a public forum on NPR. We don’t have to stand for that. He should be removed, and the airtime should be used to host more rational viewpoints. And idiotic, unsupported views will most certainly not debunk themselves, as we can see from the brimming-over stew of idiotic, unsupported views in the media. The process of debunking necessitates replacing views that are without merit with views that have merit. You can’t get away from judging the facts in journalism.
What’s possibly true in your comment, I think, is that we should be devoting as much (probably more) effort yelling about the media censoring good views as opposed to promoting crazy ones. But crazy views are still dangerous even so.
So who is the arbiter of which views are idiotic and unsupported? You? Who determines which views have merit and which don’t? Only the marketplace of ideas does that…that’s the fundamental point of free speech as our founders understood, and it’s on the question of deciding which views have merit that your position falls apart…the view we abhor, from Holocaust denial to AIDS delusionism, is exactly the idea that free speech is designed to protect, and if you can’t grasp that then the conecpt of freedom of speech is beyond your comprehension. Yes, idiotic and unsupported views proliferate in the media, from Palin and Beck to Limbaugh and, yes, this no-HIV knucklehead, but the answer is a stronger, more compelling argument that’s clear and understandable (a olace where progressives often fail), not restraint of views that YOU determine to be idiotic and unsupported.
So, as a practical matter, how should the “marketplace of ideas” regulate who should and should not have access to a scarce resource like mass media coverage? Which people should make these decisions, and on what criteria?
Someone who is promoting a film they think is important for people to view and discuss is not a spammer. Meet the doctor in the video clip. He just might know a little bit more about the subject than we do.
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“Luc Antoine Montagnier (born 18 August 1932 in Chabris, Indre) is a French virologist and joint recipient with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for his discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
Montagnier is the co-founder of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention and co-directs the Program for International Viral Collaboration. He is President of the Houston-based World Foundation for Medical Research and Prevention. He has received more than 20 major awards, including the Légion d’honneur (Commandeur in 1994; Grand Officier in 2009, the Lasker Award (1986), the Gairdner Award (1987), King Faisal Foundation International Prize (1993) (known as the Arab Nobel Prize), the Prince of Asturias Award (2000) and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2008). The latter was awarded to him for the discovery of HIV.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier
Not Cool
Nuts who have experiments that can be replicated and that directly address the issue should be heard from. But no science to back you up then no you should not be on NPR? Khin who let that joker on air a Bush appointee?
If Gary Null is right in his contention then I would reasonably expect that you can’t get AIDS from a blood transfusion.
I’m sure we can set up an experiment to prove this idea all we need to do is find an AIDS victim to donate some blood if Gary Null is willing.
Khin if you can find out who makes programing choices at NPR and if it does turn out to be a Bushy then I think you have another Diary and maybe a conspiracy to investigate.
The GOP war on science is getting dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Luc_Montagnier
Wiki discussion section has some questions.
If you weaken your immune system, lots of things can get you.
Turns out a too-vigilant immune system isn’t good either.
I’m not gay or anti-gay. I say live and let live.
But I’ve never liked the politics of aids. Too many people on the bandwagon getting too much taxpayer money. Not enough good, hard science.
In our commercial capitalist system access to the media is allocated based on those things that drive commercial interests, like viewership and advertisers; that’s why balloon boy and charred Playboy bodies get top play. Not my list of news priorities, but I have The Economist, the Nation, and The Atlantic (and FDL etc.) to feed MY news cycle. One of the whole points of the blog movement, in my view, is to make “scarce mass media” access less scarce, and to provide an outlet for all ideas, no matter how wacky and wrong. If I were king of all media I wouldn’t allocate time to this AIDS delusionist except as a curiosity, but then I wouldn’t allocate time to interviews with Michael Jackson’s gardener either. When you ask “which people should” make these determinations, it’s not really a practical question in my mind, because no matter who “should”, in our system he who holds the printing press (or the network bandwidth) DOES make these decisions. We can switch it on or off, or change the channel, but lobbying to remove those views we abhor still strikes me as an illiberal response to deviant viewpoints.
I visitd my parents (now deceased) in Pietermaritzburg, SOuth Africa in 1988, after my father had colon cancer removed.
There was an interesting article in the local paper about AIDS. AT that time the incidence of AIDS in South Africa was about 5 or 6%, and doubling every 6 months. The forecast, correctly, predicted the iincidence of AIDS would rise to 50 to 60% of the population by 1995.
There was also the claim, possibly wrong becuase I’ve never seen any confirmation, that AIDS was a human produced disease, caused by poor procedures in the production of Malaria Innoculation vaccines.
Ha! And if you tell everyone to go to the emergency room when they get sick, they have health care, too! The solution to the uninsured in America is closer than you think…just redefine the problem out of existence!
Did you view the links I posted? This person posts the same message over and over again on various message boards. It’s all the same message since three months ago. Unless they’ve posted more substantive work too, the ops here should ban them.
Perhaps to make my question more specific, why should people lobbying to remove unsupported views not help make decisions in the “marketplace of ideas,” thereby becoming part of it? You argue that:
This seems to deny the possibility of any kind of involvement for the general public in making media decisions, except via their individual choice to either consume advertising or not consume it. Was that your intention?
1) because when you do that you take away my ability to judge for myself. counter the unsupported views with your own pov and leave my judgement to me.
2) because if we accept the notion of removing unsupported views, rather than countering them, we make it harder — much harder — for out of the mainstream views to be heard at all. thinking back to a diary of yours that generated a lot of negative feedback (totally without intellectual or ethical merit imo), i’m surprised that you don’t see the value in that.
I don’t know who let him on NPR. He’s not actually a GOP type, he claims to be “progressive,” a word which he uses in the sense of the following sentence that I heard on his show once:
“It’s not right, it’s not left. It’s progressive.”
But anyway, regardless of what he is exactly, he’s often promoted unsupported viewpoints.
Saying AIDS is not a real disease, when AIDS has in fact killed over 25 million people, is comparable to saying the Holocaust was not a real event. Since politics is not his show’s main focus, I also think he should be booted no matter what his politics are.
marcos, that was out of line, unfunny and mean.
I think that what you’re saying above is true in many cases, but because radio airtime is a scarce resource, we do have to make decisions that involve booting some people off and replacing them with others.
In other words, perhaps the question is not whether Null should be booted off, but whether another show should have the right to be placed on the NPR stations instead.
I’m not trying to censor anyone’s views here: I’m just saying that I think his views are sufficiently without any kind of merit or basis that we would be better served if someone else had the airtime.
Even on Apple Trailers, the amount of space on the page is quite limited, and that page is viewed by millions of people. As a mainly entertainment website, there’s also a sharp limit to how many documentaries they can post. Why should it be this documentary and not, say, Garbage Dreams, which seems to have far more merit?
I don’t really think so. The corporate media isn’t so much interested in keeping views that aren’t mainstream, in the sense of being accepted by the general population, from being heard as it is in just keeping views that are anti-corporate from being heard. They’re quite willing to promote any kind of craziness as long as it serves their profit motive. There has to be a distinction between anti-corporate views and pure sensationalism. Helping one doesn’t necessarily help the other.
Lots of Progressive Dems out there Khin the thing is they don’t vote that way. Claiming to be Progressive give you Credibility. Claiming to be a Science denying GOPer only gets people to change the channel.
Nobody who wants to see a science program wants to listen to global change deniers, evolution denying man rode dinosaurs, AIDs deniers on tv.
Stop whining and just die already. The problem is that people in this country have become soft and weak and lazy in ways that have our forefathers spinning in their graves. As soon as we toughen up so that we can accept a life of working our asses off until we die quickly and quietly in our sleep (because though we are all perfectly fine with just emergency room health care, it is a very bad thing to make use of it if we can’t pay for it which none of us can), we can begin once again to call ourselves proud Americans. Those who get AIDS should whine loudly but only long enough to get government funding for pharmaceutical research and then stop whining when they actually want reasonably affordable access to any resulting pharmaceuticals. This message brought to you by those who are only interested in your life and health for as long as they can profit from either.
Excellent post!
These people who are the leaders of the AIDS Denialist movement are extremely militant and will stoop to any low to promote their agenda. Brent Leung, the director of House of Numbers, will not even release the names of the people who produced HoN and paid for him to fly all over the world to make this expensive, slick propaganda “film”. He promotes himself merely as “a film student asking questions”.
There are many other “leaders” who are just as deceptive and subversive as Leung and who display their extreme lack of integrity and humanity on a daily basis. For a good look at many of these so called leaders, check out:
dissidents4dumbees.blogspot.com
JTD
Most all of the scientists interviewed for House of Numbers released a statement which emphatically claims that their answers were edited so that their answers directly contradicte what they actually said.
This statement can be found here:
http://www.aidstruth.org/news/2009/scientists-distance-themselves-aids-denialist-film
JTD